Comment by aranelsurion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aranelsurion | Hacker News Reader

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> But you can mostly ignore that most of the time, and 99% of users do so. (in much the same way that iPhones are decentralized across cell carriers, but that mostly doesn't matter to regular folks).

That wasn't the case at least for me.

I couldn't ignore the decentralized part of the deal, because I couldn't register at mastodon.social like how I could with twitter.com. Registrations were disabled (still the same as of today) and I was told to find a server.

I guess most people would give up at that point, though I still gave their server browser a try, and couldn't find anything that looks remotely official on the first page. It seems every Mastodon instance is its own kingdom managed by people I don't know running on arbitrary rules they've set. I could build my kingdom, but of course I won't, since I wasn't interested in the decentralized bit anyway.

tl;dr for now mastodon doesn't offer an easy path to just use the service w/o thinking about its details.

> It seems every Mastodon instance is its own kingdom managed by people I don't know running on arbitrary rules they've set.

Yep! This is also exactly how e-mail works, and yet everyone manages to get an e-mail account (or ten) with no problems.

> I still gave their server browser a try, and couldn't find anything that looks remotely official on the first page.

"Hello, helpdesk? I can't find the official email server. No, not Hotmail, not Yahoo, not G-mail, not Apple Me. I only want the official email server. Hello?"

> tl;dr for now mastodon doesn't offer an easy path to just use the service w/o thinking about its details.

Sure it does? Pick a free+open provider to register yourself (or ask any of your friends for an invite to their server).

It's no more effort than say, signing up for a cellphone telephone number, and everyone figured out how to do that. Children manage to handle "you have to pick a server first" when they load up Minecraft (each of which has it's own moderators and their own unique rules! -- some are even invite-only!), and the kids seem to get along just fine.

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I get your point. Being a free, open, decentralized network means there's one extra step to registration -- I agree with your complaint.

But it's literally just one extra step, and it's not even a difficult one. The idea that this makes Mastodon difficult to use because of that, seems completely farfetched -- every other popular network has had a similar step and managed to overcome it with zero issues.

> Yep! This is also exactly how e-mail works, and yet everyone manages to get an e-mail account (or ten) with no problems.

The vast majority of people have their primary address in one of the following ways:

1) Their ISP gave them an email when they signed up (with handhold support) 2) Their work gave them an email when they started (with handhold support) 3) They asked a tech savvy friend who told them to use GMail instead of 1 or 2 (with some support from said tech friend) 4) They signed up for a hotmail account 20 years ago and are still using the same password

You can't just handwave away that picking a server is _hard_ for non tech people, as they don't understand the significance of their choice. Twitter for comparison, is one site with a big "sign up here" button.

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