I’m a software engineer with a decade of experience, and I’m frustrated by the experience so far. Bad UX is bad UX.

I think it’s a mix of the way journalism works in the age of overstimulation (everything is the best/worst anyone has ever witnessed) and old(er) people being unfathomably tech-illiterate.

And I don’t even mean that negatively. I often really am unable to fathom how disorienting even the slightest change in a software they’re used to is to them.

If my mother were to use the birdsite, and they’d change their theme from blue to red one day, she would literally be unable to use it, because “it’s all different now”

Also, mastodon does have some usability problems, though they are not that big imo.

I flirted with journalism before getting my degree in CS.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the faculty and many of the students were almost proudly “bad at math” and basically bad with tech too, other than learning the basics of a Macbook.

Doesn’t have to be that way and many journalists are smart, great people, but there’s a weird self fulfilling culture when it comes to tech. Not totally sure about how tech focused writers would be similar or different.

Edit: Just googling “journalists bad at math” and got this from the Columbia Journalism Review:

“In many cases, they got into journalism to stay away from math.” Journalists love to joke about how we suck at math.

Edit 2: I guess I was bringing up my experience to be an example of how many journalists do not have a strong grasp of technical concepts and sometimes are almost proud of that. So it doesn’t surprise me that many may have struggled with Mastodon.

That being said, that attitude is far closer to the average user than, say, the user base of this platform, which is likely far more tech savvy. Streamlined user experience is not a bad thing if you desire mainstream use and is something that could be improved, though Mastodon has been making strides in that regard.

It’s pretty obvious 99% of users bounce off the signup page. People who think otherwise simply are too disconnected from normie reality

Here is what happens

Let’s join this thing

I have to choose a server ? Ok which one ?

Wow that’s so many, is this important or cani pick at random ?

If you pick wrong, everything you write could be deleted or never seen by anyone.

Ok, well I better choose properly

Read server rules pages for 2-3 minutes

There’s a distraction

Later, joins threads

Let’s walk though the flow a typical user would experience:

1. Search “join mastodon”, find joinmastodon.org
2. Click “create account”…

SERVERS: Mastodon is not a single website. To use it, you need to make an account with a provider—we call them servers—that lets you connect with other people across Mastodon.

3. 95% of users will bail at this point.
4. Scroll down to the instance search UX.
5. Too many options. Do I want “all regions” or should I pick my own region? Do I want “all topics” or “general”? 95% of remaining users will bail.
6. Pick mastodon.social, sign up.
7. Confirmation email takes 12 minutes to arrive. 95% of remaining users will bail.
8. Confirm email, log in. Click search.

Search or paste URL

9. Wtf does that even mean? Try entering “William Shatner”. No results. Try “Taylor Swift”. Top result is @taylorswift13@hello.2heng.xin wtf?
10. Go back, click “see what’s trending”, brings me back to “Taylor Swift”
11. Go back, click “find people to follow”, brings me back to “Taylor Swift”
12. Close site, 95% of users will who get here will never return.

They tend to portray everything new, different and/or popular with geeks as bad or complicated, I see this as a rite of passage for the fediverse. Remember when they were shitting on computer gaming in the early days of the hobby because of who it was initially popular among?

They should try navigating Facebook

I still don’t even know what the servers on lemmy are, each “subreddit” is a different server?

Its easy to signup & get started, just have to be awake…

Is this a troll post? There are multiple shortfalls that make Mastodon harder to use than twitter for the average user. Here’s a great Op-ed explaining them: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/op-ed-why-the-great-twittermigration-didnt-quite-pan-out/

The tl;dr is that decentralization is no selling point for the average user and if the experience using Mastodon is any worse than using Twitter, people simply won’t switch. And there are numerous big issues with Mastodon’s usability that make it inferior to Twitter: That there is no proper way of exploring creators, that following creators is a hot mess, that Mastodon instances can block each other and thus make it impossible for their users to interact with each other. All those drawbacks come from being decentralized, while the only positive, not being ruled by a billionaire man-child, clearly doesn’t bother people as much.

I just don’t use Mastodon because I never cared for Twitter.

Right? It was significantly easier than usual for me, because there’s no giant wall of legalese to read.

I disagree, it’s not as easy and normal as Twitter and Threads. Stop lying to yourselves. It’s Dev’s requirement to make it user friendly for the audience and they haven’t. Otherwise this wouldn’t be a thing people are saying lol. Devs and fanboys are so in their own bubble it’s why nothing thrives

i also love the “oh noes there are nerds on there!” concern trolling, motherfucker read the wikipedia page on who first adopted and built the communities on twitter and reddit

One thing I don’t get. Among the gazilion “Oh, it is sooo easy to do this better” complainers are countless developers and designers. This whole Mastodon thing is Free Software, where countless people spent some of their free time and energy to give you what there is today. Complainer devs and UX folks, are your PR’s getting rejected?