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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

I went to the Mastodon website and clicked "Get Started" and was brought to a menu where I needed to choose a server. Many of them focus on niche interests, and it was not very clear what to do if I wanted to be a member of more than one of them.

I'm a techie; I could figure it out. But it is too much to ask of the general public to wade through many niche servers they won't understand, e.g. the one for BSD fans and multiple furry-themed servers. And there seem to be several overlapping Chinese-language servers -- which one should a Chinese newbie choose? And what prevents each server from devolving into a petty little fiefdom where the moderators abuse their power?

Compare that to getting started on Twitter: pick a username and password, boom, done!

The Mastodon project is clearly designed for a technical audience, whether or not that is what they actually intended. Outside of the techie bubble the usability is just not there.

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Yeah, I agree that this is the biggest usability hurdle, and its actively being worked on.

That said, there are plenty of good general-purpose instances and it's not that different from picking an email host. Sure, you can spend hours figuring out which email host to use, but most people go with a name they've heard before (e.g., Gmail) and don't need to think much about it at all. I could see Mastodon getting to a similar point once it gets more established.

Except that the established big-name corps probably don't have an interest in running a Mastodon instance. (And if they do, they'll do it in the similar way that Google Talk and Slack used to support XMPP: Once they have a significant-enough userbase, they burn down the bridges ^W federation.)

> But it is too much to ask of the general public to wade through many niche servers they won't understand, e.g. the one for BSD fans

What is the general public though ?

Most people have niche interests. Grand parents can go fishing, and registering to a fishing centric server could be great for them.

The network I like the most is a place for people to show their drawings. It’s as niche as you can get, I don’t know if these people fit your “general public” label, but they’re not “techies”, they just like to draw.

In that sense I think it doesn’t need to be an ocean of content, small ponds are fine as long as they are discoverable, and most niche communities are good at sharing these kind of technical resources.

> Most people have niche interests. Grand parents can go fishing, and registering to a fishing centric server could be great for them.

That sounds great in theory, but (1) I have a dozen different niche interests, and there's not going to be one instance with even half of them, and (2) AFAICT there is no "fishing centric server", and even the "Mastodon instances wizard" doesn't provide a way to search for them -- it's only about whether I want to allow porn/spam/ads.

Are my grandparents supposed to start their own Mastodon instance, just so they can hang with their fishing buddies online? Am I supposed to get accounts on 10 different instances, one for each of my interests?

I just don't see how this is supposed to work. Everything I read about Mastodon in the abstract is great, and then as soon as it gets into any specifics it falls down.

There’s actualy a fishing centered mastodon: https://hebinuma.com/2017/05/08/basstdnjp/

In japanese though, and I have the feeling mastodon is working better in japan than some other places.

About the lack of aggregation...well, it’s sure easier to be on facebook or twitter to get info from a lot of places.

The other side of the coin is it’s a PITA to manage, there is “contamination” between the groups and anonimity is pretty hard.

A way to strike the balance can be to have a dedicated network for things one really cares about, and twitter/facebook for the rest.

You make a good point (and one that's being worked on being overcome, better onboarding and whatever).

But consider twitter:

>Compare that to getting started on Twitter: pick a username and password, boom, done!

And then what? follow some celebs? Figure out if you know anyone? On mastodon you can use the local feed to find people interested in the same subjects (or same culture), and then you start talking. I've seen many people be surprised that within an hour or two on mastodon they've had more and better interactions than years on twitter. The experience once you're there tends to be quite good (from my completely unbiased and scientific viewpoint, of course)

> On mastodon you can use the local feed to find people interested in the same subjects (or same culture), and then you start talking.

People have no problem doing the same thing on Twitter.

Wait, so once you've overcome the off-putting insanely technical (who in their right mind thinks about "servers" outside of tech circles?) onboarding, mastodon is a lot better?

It does not make an iota of difference.

>who in their right mind thinks about "servers" outside of tech circles?

the way a lot of subreddits are used, for example, is intuitive enough to people who get used to the concept. 'servers' or 'instances' as a word might be too technical, but the concept of different groups you join, while still being able to talk to others? Of course my experience is 99% people who have persisted and joined, but they seem to enjoy it.

Mostly because you join, you think "this is confusing but I've arrived" and there's a few hundred people on the same instance who are interested in similar things, who know people from other instances who have similar interests, etc. I think it might help build a network quicker (or at least, that's what I've heard from a lot of newer people that have joined since I've been there!)

But you can only create your account on one server. It feels limiting compared to subreddits, which you use a centralized account to subscribe to several.

You can follow anyone on any other Mastodon server with that one account, so it's basically the same. That's what the federation is for.

I had to stop using Reddit with the recent redesign. There's no way to get at a community you like without being stuck on the platform. The growing ActivityPub ecosystem is different. I can hop over to another instance and still talk to the same people.

I can't do that with /r/DaystromInstitute. It's lost to me because I don't want to deal with Reddit. Maybe it's less intuitive--and I think nerds give average users way too little credit--but I prefer it to losing access to a community over platform decisions.

To combine what two sister comments said: you can create multiple, but you can follow people anywhere. So you don't _need_ to create multiple, but you could. Like subreddits. Some people have their "meme/funny stuff" account for reddit, and a nsfw one, and a 'news/serious stuff' account. Likewise you _could_ do that all from one account, but you don't need to.

You can have multiple accounts on multiple servers.

The general public already understands that one can have multiple email providers. Maybe just word this better, but I don't think the concept itself is that hard to understand.

To be fair, it's very similar to email, you select a provider like Gmail or Yahoo and go, it's not like you can't talk about music on a car-oriented instance.

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