For 90% of non-tech folks, email is gmail or whatever their ISP gave them, or came along with their phone, or their employer gave them. It's not something they put any thought into or understand as a "federated" system.

They understand you can send e-mails without needing to have an account with the same provider. They may not know it under the name federation, but they do understand the relevant part, for them.

Right because the UX is so good, thus the conversation

People don't understand how e-mail works because the UX is so good. They understand it because it is ubiquitous and they are used to it. They don't expect anything else to work like that, because nothing else on the internet they use works like that. There is no UX to fix this. People just have to be taught that this is an option.

Can vouch for that, after having run first an ISP in the 90's and then a webmail provider a few years later.

The number of people I had to teach about the "@" symbol alone. And then a few years later the pain was gone. Enough people had learned that most people asked their friends and family rather than need tech support.

The tipping point comes quicker than people expect. E.g. many of the discussions on Mastodon on Twitter is already full of neophytes who had never heard about federation a week ago who are now explaining it to others.

I have no illusion this wave here and now will be the watershed for Mastodon, even with 10x-20x as many daily signups as a couple of weeks ago (currently the hourly signups are above the daily signups two weeks ago), but every wave makes the next one easier.

I would disagree, most people know that they can write to both [email protected] and to [email protected], and that they are people using different services.

Phone numbers with area codes are still a thing?

@[email protected] shouldn't be too hard to wrap their head around.

I think the parallel is that people don't click on a link to send an email to someone for the first time. They copy and paste an email address into the "To" field of their email client. Same thing with getting someone's number to send them a text. And they know that people use different-looking email programs to read their email. Many people use the iPhone mail app on their phone and web mail on their computer. They don't know the word "federated," but the differences aren't alien to them.

I think it helps mastadon writes it's users as @<username>@instance.example which looks very similar to email with a twitter handle slapped on front.

Most people choose Gmail as their email provider specifically because understanding federation is too much mental overhead. There is no gmail equivalent in the Mastodon space, instead there’s many small instances that are difficult to compare.

But those that do use Gmail are well aware that they can use their Gmail account to write to @anywhere.com, not just other @gmail.com addresses. They already have that mental image in their head.

This is "just" extending that concept to @[email protected], @[email protected], whatever. This user on this site, same as this email address on this domain.

People who use Gmail still have to know how to send e-mail to [email protected] and when asked what their e-mail address is know to tell people [email protected] instead of [email protected]. You don't get to not understand how e-mail addresses work just because you are using Gmail. There is clearly something else broken about how Mastadon tries to do federation if people are having a hard time with this, but you can't blame federated addresses.

The addresses aren’t the problem, most people see an email address as just a unique identifier for the other person. The problem is choosing an instance to sign up on.

I think part of the issue is just... habit. We know how email works because email has always worked like that. But twitter is not that environment currently works like that so people getting confused is sort of understandable.

Honestly which instance is hard because instances can be small. Which means that an instance runner can get petty with federation. One instance I looked at clearly had the owner in some sort of drama with the owner of another instance.

Sure while it may be possible to avoid now, imagine that drama had happened after I'd been on the instance for a year. I wouldn't likely know until I suddenly stopped seeing my friends posts in my feed. Or what if my previous one had shut down with no warning instead of giving me months to migrate. Should a normal person have to back up their data weekly from the site in case it's owner does something stupid?

In reality Federation is cool and all but most people are going to end up on Mastadon.social

> People just have lost the ability to comprehend the concept of federation because everything in the current internet is walled gardens.

Non-technical users have never understood these things. They browse the web by accident and sending e-mail is incomprehensible magic. Most people don't care at all how such things work, they only care when they don't work.

Yes that type of person exists but they are not the ones looking for a twitter alternative because of Elon Musk right now.

There are shades of gray between the people who understand the technical definition of federation, and people who, as you put it "browse the web by accident". The people who are looking for an alternative right now understand e-mail well enough (from an end-user perspective) to make the comparison.

If we ever get to the point where enough people use mastodon that the latter category would also be interested in participating in it, it would be so ubiquitous that they would ask someone with a minimum of understanding to et it up for them. Just the way it works now with other things.

The "federation" of e-mail and Mastodon are only superficially similar. It's non-intuitive to follow a user from a different instance. It's also non-intuitive to find those users to follow. Most of the time Mastodon users are found via some side channel where they advertise their presence.

Every point of friction you add for a user of a new thing is a reason for them to abandon it. Even if Mastodon isn't trying to necessarily replace Twitter, catering only to the most dedicated users is not a way to grow a healthy community.

It's much worse now, partially due to the fact that young people's first computing device is a phone, instead of a family computer.

Here's a story about an engineering professor lamenting that their first-year students do not understand folder structures, because they have been using Google Docs for a decade, and don't use use anything besides the search bar.

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...

Let's be real though, nested directories aren't necessarily the best way to organize or find documents. In an era where systems support tagging, full text search, and other graph connections between files nested folder structures aren't necessary for everyone. They're a conceptual holdover from a different time with much more limited means to persist data.

That's not to say they're obsolete but it's not necessary for whole classes of users to use and understand them.

For me, folder structures in Windows and MS-DOS helped me grasp the basics of information architecture. That is still how most website URLs work. Even if websites are now database-driven CMSes, and not actual folders on a web server, URLs are still written in that way to give both humans and search engines an idea of the structure of the site.

I would posit that it's easier to understand things like objects, arrays and API endpoints if you have that basic familiarity with folders.

You're not wrong. At least not for yourself. At the same time a lot of web-based apps and even local apps don't necessarily work on directory hierarchies.

In many cases hierarchies are just ceremony or boilerplate that slow down a user. Say a note taking application. It can store the actual notes in a database that can sync between machines and the web. Using search to find notes, especially if it supports some sort of inline tagging like hashtags, is faster for the user than trying to come up with some folder hierarchy. Hierarchies also are inconvenient when documents straddle multiple categories. Grouping by tags let a note/document exist in multiple categories without reorganizing everything.

Thirty years ago the only "view" into storage was directories and files. File systems were relatively sparse in terms of metadata support. Directory hierarchies were the only tool for organization. Information Retrieval systems were all about adding an over the top database and document indexing system on shitty sparse file systems.

Today a lot of those Information Retrieval concepts are rolled into online storage systems (Google Docs etc). So hierarchies aren't the primary organization unit since they're not the only mechanism the backing store has for organization.

People keep using email as the prime example of federation, but email is pretty terrible!

I can't communicate with anyone whose address I don't already know. There's no real "discoverability." Many people have multiple email addresses, and I don't know whether I'm communicating with the correct one, or even whether more exist that I don't know about. If an email address stops working, it just... stops working. Emails bounce back (if I'm lucky!) with no easy or standard way to say why, or what address to use instead. I could go on.

Email is great for point-to-point communication, modulo some of the issues listed above, but that's a very limited use case, not at all comparable to most social media. It's a poor replacement for Twitter, for example.

Browsing the federated timeline, searching by hashtag and looking at who other people you know are following is the discoveability mechanism.

Unlike Twitter, ActivityPub sites generally don't beat you over the head with follow recommendations. The goal is not to get you mentally addicted to spending hours a day on Social Media.

That doesn't help at all for following a particular person. (For example, consider finding the account of a band that you already know.)

A Google search is probably the most common discovery mechanism. Once people start putting their Mastodon addresses on their web pages, it will start getting easier.

Google has terrible indexing of Fediverse posts. Your better off just using a large instance to search from.

I was actually describing issues with email, but yes, many of the same issues apply to mastodon as well.

The whole point of federation is that you don't need a central authorization to do what you want. Discoverability is only easy with centralization. Of course it won't work as well.

The fediverse is young. Don't expect a finished product when there has been so few man-hours and so little funidng put into it.

Mastodon has been around for six years, which is young but not infant-young, and what I'm getting at is pretty central to the entire concept. If it is still this poor of an experience six years in, one might wonder what is going to change in the next six.

No, it's not central. Discoverability of the entire universe is not a goal of any fediverse tool; the goal is to put back communities in the hands of users. Diackverability happens by talking to people, asking your way around, following interesting accounts from afar, being part of the discussion and organically grow your network.

If you search for Twitter2, the fediverse is not it.

Every IRC server or Discord server I ever joined, I joined because there was something there to which I wanted access, or an existing community I discovered another way, and was directed there to fill things out.

If either of those things exist for mastodon, I'm not seeing them, and half the people on here are saying, "this isn't twitter go away" while the other half is raving about how exciting it is to be the recipient of "#twittermigration"

Which is all very cute, but it does tend to give commenters whiplash, not knowing whether the responses they're going to get are going to be from one side or the other, or both!

Maybe the things you are interested in do not exist on the fediverse; it's not a problem in itself. It's better to be there than on Twitter, but so be it.

Both replies absolutely coexist because of something simple: the fediverse is not Twitter. If you're looking for Twitter2, that's not it. If you're looking to build the fediverse by being a member and contributing to the discussion. You're going in a different universe, learn the rules :)

It's not a goal of any current fediverse tool. More advanced discoverability will come. It's not hard to e.g. ask instances to opt in to relays or crawl for profiles. It can happen the easy way (cooperation on a non-commercial solution) or someone will build some ad-supported hellhole to do it once they think the traffic would be worth it.

>I can't communicate with anyone whose address I don't already know. There's no real "discoverability." Many people have multiple email addresses, and I don't know whether I'm communicating with the correct one, or even whether more exist that I don't know about. If an email address stops working, it just... stops working. Emails bounce back (if I'm lucky!) with no easy or standard way to say why, or what address to use instead. I could go on.

These all sound like features to me. If I want you to contact me, I will give you my e-mail address. Otherwise, leave me alone.

Of course it can work on smoothing it out. Most instances do upgrades and use the same software. Short term interface changes and long term they can work on protocol changes.

It's not conceptual, it's UI. The easy way to is copy the address and paste it into the search box on your home instance. Then hit the subscribe button.

This isn't very discoverable at all, though. Hitting the follow button is worse and doesn't tell you the easy way.

> But people understand how federation works. They see it happen everyday with e-mail. You just need to tell them it works like that and they'll get it.

I think you misunderstood what I wrote. The problem is the Mastodon software is incredibly hard to use, and flaky.

This has nothing to do with "understanding federation"!

In fact, a few people have said, "Someone said it was just like email, but wow, it's not at all like email!".

That explanation does not work for non-nerds. At all. It does not help.

It doesn't work like email. Email for people is setting up an account on Gmail. "It just works", so to speak.

Even Hotmail was able to sign up millions of users with 1996 levels of tech-savviness.

It's only 'like email' if the people you're talking to have set up their own IMAP and POP servers.

What are you talking about? You don't need to host your own Mastodon server. You can sign up with one of the many open instances, just like gmail and hotmail let you do for e-mail.

The problem isn't that people need the right analogy. It's that they never really learned email. Right from the beginning, the commercial Internet has been trying to blackbox technology and present the "just works" button. So when email breaks because of federation issues, people shrug and say "well it worked for me (using the most centralized email systems)".

The amount of conceptual learning needed to understand the federation model is roughly similar to a complicated strategy game that needs a 15-minute tutorial. A motivated child can work it out; a stressed and distracted thirty-something will try to avoid it, or maybe mock it so as not to normalize its use.

I totally think it's possible to normalize federation since there are tons of conceptually difficult systems in daily life. Some of the burden of that rests on UX and onboarding. But far more of it is a case of, are people desperate enough to bother?