Re:Exploring Mastodon
by cyborgx7 on Monday November 07, 2022 @11:55AM
(#33508451)
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.
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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.