Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I did it today and… sigh. Just once I want FOSS to not feel like FOSS when it comes to UX.

A lot of people have done a lot of hard work and free is free. That’s all wonderful and credit is deserved. But that’s not an aegis against criticism. Here’s some of what I experienced in the first hour:

- the app lists a bunch of servers and I tried five before I found one that’s accepting new accounts.

- I get a broken English note about the server not accepting new accounts

- two servers kept timing out when I tried to make an account

- I had to “request desktop site” to see a modal explaining why the “create account” button was redirecting me to a list of servers and not the one I was looking at.

- That list was not searchable. I began googling “popular mastodon servers”

- finally made an account but nothing would load. I couldn’t subscribe to a friend.

- deleted account (made me log in again, then complained that I can’t log in without enabling cookies, which are enabled, then on refresh showed me as logged in)

- made a new account on what I hoped was a better server, creation seemed fine. Email confirm went to spam (haven’t had that in forever, it gave me some nostalgia)

- am not able to see the followers of my friends on different servers, so I guess it does matter to pick a popular one

- posting was easy

- a server admin is the first person to interact with my toot, re-tooting it. That felt cozy and early Web.

- I like that the feed seems to be a literal timeline of everything in my sphere. No junk added in by algorithm.

- I kinda like not having 5000 followers anymore. This is more chill. I plan on keeping it chill.

- I don’t see any American politics being fed to my timeline. Thank the Maker.

I think Mastodon is okay. It suffers from the classic FOSS issue where the first half of dev is fun and technically challenging, but nobody wants to do the second half because it’s tedious and unsexy. Kinda makes me better appreciate why QA and Product are so tedious at the companies I’ve worked at.

I’m patient and motivated and am likely to work through all this just like I do with Ubuntu and QGIS and GIMP, etc. But I no-longer feel I can ever suggest Mastodon to anyone who is non-technical.

I think finding a server is the biggest flaw with the fediverse migration currently.

It IS important what server you choose, due to the local community / timeline and having to trust the server operator. Normally people link instances.social [0] but there are just so many to choose from. I dislike that this blogpost just skips this entirely and says to join the vivaldi one.

I think we need more of a curated list of servers with open registration that are active, sorted by what community / hobby is being targeted.

0: https://instances.social/

> am not able to see the followers of my friends on different servers, so I guess it does matter to pick a popular one

If you go to their profile page, you can — it's just your view of them on your server that doesn't show the list of followers. Yes, that's clunky, but at least there's a workaround.

I'm pleasantly surprised so far, although I haven't gone all in yet. The web interface and general experience isn't significantly different from twitter, and the decentralised concept seems really nice once you 'get' it. I'm planning on switching server at some point, to a more 'focussed' one, so that will be the next big test.

Thanks for the tip but I can’t make it work. In the iOS app, I tap their profile photo to get a profile screen that looks a lot like Twitter. If I click on Following or Followers, it says “followers from other servers are not displayed.” Is there a different profile page I have to find my way to? I don’t see any way to from the app.

Yeah, I think this is a mobile/desktop thing. On the web app, below that message, I get a link to view that person's profile on their server, and I can then see the info you're looking for.

You might be able to do the same on mobile by copying their sever address, which you might have to reassemble from their username — all sounds much fiddlier, though!

> In the iOS app,

I have seen several people saying that the experience in the "official" phone client (both the iOS one and the Android one) is not very good. I have also seen someone recommending opening the web site directly in the phone browser and installing it as a PWA, though I haven't tried that yet.

> If you go to their profile page, you can — it's just your view of them on your server that doesn't show the list of followers. Yes, that's clunky, but at least there's a workaround.

But why does it have to be this way? Isn't the entire point of federation that different servers can interact seamlessly?

No idea. I suppose if I had to guess, maybe it's more efficient that way? I suppose looking at someone else's follower list isn't the most common use case.

This could be fixed on the client: when the user opens an account’s follower list, ask the account’s server for the list.

Registration is closed on some instances and servers are choking because a quarter of a million people fled to Mastodon in less than 48 hours, around 10k/day prior to that. The servers and communities have never been under this kind of load before, not even close. Neither issue has anything to do with FOSS. Also, the "Mastodon" mobile app is known to be incomplete; this should be mentioned in guides. Use the web or another app and you'll be fine.

Ahhh so maybe some of these rough edges aren’t standard experience. Good to know about the app. I assumed it would have been the best way to begin.

> Neither issue has anything to do with FOSS

I think part of the complaint is that the app should not be showing those servers front and center - or rather, it should be made obvious when an option is not going to work or if unavailable, and functional servers/choices should be front and center in the UI.

It's the kind of polish that does matter for the common non-technical user, and the kind that is typically missing from FOSS apps in many ways because there's just so much of it to do. It's never-ending and there usually isn't enough development resources on an open source project to handle everything.

Sure but Mastodon the app isn't Mastodon. It didn't even exist until recently and has nothing to do with the website which has been the main thing. It would be a lot better if that mobile app wasn't released until it was ready, since the other ones, most people agree, are fine. Remember how Reddit existed long before its app? And how there were plenty of working non-official apps? This is like if Reddit had released their app in beta.

I highly recommend the Toot! iOS app for Mastodon. It fixes pretty much all of the UI issues on iOS. I do not use the web interface unless I have to.

Great tip! I’m going to try that one out.

also check out Metatext on iOS. seems to have solved the strange quirks i had with the default app.

disclaimer tho, 99% of my mastodoning hasn’t been on phone app. mostly desktop on the advanced web page.

after finding about 2/3rds of the people i followed on twitter i just rebuilt my lists again—using the advanced web and creating multiple columns from lists i had on twitter it’s pretty close—maybe better considering conversations are happening without all of the confrontational/contradictory weirdos inserting themselves.

There are multiple web interfaces (having just looked at the Pleroma install docs). A server admin would have to switch them though. I'm considering tossing up a Pleroma instance somewhere

If you want to be defederated quickly from any decent instance that's the way to go. To quote

"neither GS nor Pleroma itself was born out of malice. It’s just where the people who’ve always been stirring up shit go."

That's app-ist. The app doesn't care and has no morals; stereotyping based purely on the app implementation name is just as stupid, and frankly, the people that do that, I wouldn't want any part of, anyway, because they are idiots. This is no different than avoiding a race because it is the one believed to be predominantly associated with crime.

The technology can literally handle 10-100x the amount of traffic on the same hardware; to exclude it based on a few bad actors is absolutely moronic.

And frankly, shit NEEDS to be stirred up; everyone is fleeing to their comfy non-intellectually-challenging non-emotionally-challenging echo-chamber bullshit-echoing hidey-holes, and I don't want a world with people believing 2 completely different realities, because that's exactly where we're currently headed. In my experience, 90% of so-called "shit-stirring" is someone who can't tolerate a slightly different viewpoint that they could probably learn from, if they made the effort.

https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/10/01/how-to-understand-g...

It's open source.

Put your code where your comment is.

My mother says no thanks, she'll stick with corporate social media.

Okay. She's probably not on HN either.

You might be surprised. She loves tech.

Then mastodon isn't really that difficult.

Follow the comment thread up until you see what I replied to, and note that your most recent reply is a non-sequitur.

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