A lot of info about the company who made it, a lot of info about how bad other actors are, and a lot about requesting funding, but not a single video, neither how to explore the platform or download anything.
I guess this is not made for users...
Social networks that focus on people and user experience have a shot. My hunch is those -- like PeerTube -- that focus on technical, political, or philosophical motivations will always be niche at best.
(Which is not to discourage experimentation! This seems to be a fantastic moment to experiment with social media design.)
I tried signing up for Mastodon a couple years back, and failed somehow. Thankfully Threads and Bluesky are easier to use. Hopefully Mastodon has improved, but I'm already using two other competing micro-blogging platforms now.
First page is a bunch of rules. I don't mind moderation and decorum, but leading with that sends a signal to me that the moderation is going to be even more capricious than Reddit.
That's actually where mastodon (and other fedi-platforms) different from a mainstream social media, because you have a choice:
- you can choose an instance with very strict moderation to be in an echo chamber with like-minded individuals.
- or if you choose instance with little to no moderation - you'll find yourself on a platform where everyone speaks what's really on their mind, even if it's socially unacceptable.
Choosing instance is hard, because popular ones are blocking a lot of small instances (mostly because of spam). But simply choose a server close to your interests, you can transfer your account between instances later.
I'm out
But even if it was dominant my hunch is it was unlikely the only factor: Bluesky also rapidly outgrew Mastodon, without a Meta-like advantage.
But its true that mastodon did not have a major breakthrough as of late and bluesky will likely surpass it in the near future as some important "high information quality" communities (journalists, scientists etc.) seem to migrate there in preference.
Orientation towards general (mainstream, non-tech) users, easy usability etc is indeed a problem for the fediverse. The reasons are mostly an anti-commercial ideological stance which on the one hand makes funding scarce. Hence brilliant open source products - there are many more than peertube - remain unpolished, not marketed at all etc.). On the other hand this hostile culture keeps mainstream actors from joining the revolution.
But make no mistake this is a revolution. The hyper-concentration in social media is an aberration that does not fit any other pattern in society and the economy. Some more pragmatism from the decentralization pioneers will accelerate the inevitable.
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2024-year-in-review-intern...
To sum up my entirely unoriginal opinions:
1. Mastodon has far better usability than any other Fediverse software I'm aware of
2. Despite this, usability is still a material coefficient of drag on Mastodon's growth
To be clear, I don't believe Mastodon has to or even should aspire to match the growth of other more centralized networks; only that usability is a drag on what would otherwise be natural growth for Mastodon itself.
I know you and your team spend a considerable amount of time and energy on usability, so I hope I'm not saying anything you don't already know infinitely better than I.
What are the implications of choosing one server over the other? Does this affect search and discoverability in between servers? If I really like Baking and really like Fencing as well, should I join the "Matodon Baking" server, the "Fencing fans" server of a neutral one? If I choose the Fencing server, will the people on the Baking server start seeing me as some sort of outsider since I'm not originally from the Baking server? Will they even be able to organically find me? How does the algorithm evaluate these choices? Can I restrict/split my posts between Baking, Fencing and general? And so on...
Unless you choose a political or spam-friendly server - it doesn't matter.
> Does this affect search and discoverability in between servers?
A little.
> If I really like Baking and really like Fencing as well, should I join the "Mastodon Baking" server, the "Fencing fans" server of a neutral one?
Shouldn't matter.
> Will the people on the Baking server start seeing me as some sort of outsider.
Never seen anything like this, but I can imagine if you choose a server associated with 'A' and leave a comment in a server where people hate 'A', they might have a prejudice against you, so it's better to choose a very neutral, general server.
> Can I restrict/split my posts between Baking, Fencing and general?
Use tags.
> How does the algorithm evaluate these choices?
There's no algorithm, you follow people you like and block people you don't like.
> A little.
Can you please elaborate on that?
Thanks for the answers!
Local is for posts local to your instance. Federated is local + posts from other instances, from people that are followed by somebody on your instance. Global is for any posts from anyone.
For example: if you join art instance your local feed will be very artsy and federated feed will be slightly artsy.
It matters little, because most people use and subscribe to hashtags to discover posts. Federated feed is too random, especially in big instances.
Relevant blogpost:
- https://blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2022-11-03_what-i-know-abou...
Maybe I'll join.... (but still: which server!?)
And the homepage says in bold letters “The PeerTube mobile app for Android & iOS is out!” but it’s not a link! There’s a link further down but it goes to this article where you then have to scroll.
Not every site has to be super conversion optimized but it’s just common sense to put a CTA at the head of an announcement. joinmastodon.org gets it!
PeerTube is a good way to host videos, but nobody will discover them from PeerTube. I put technical videos there, which are referenced in other forums. They play fine. Here's one.[1] I get maybe a hundred plays. I just view PeerTube as something like imgBB, a place to host content that you can't store on a forum that doesn't handle images. Like HN.
PeerTube should be used more like WordPress - something lots of sites run for their own videos. What PeerTube does is offload playout to the browsers of others watching the same video at the same time. This allows modest streaming servers to, at least in theory, serve large numbers of users. I don't think any PeerTube video has gone viral enough to test that scaling.
Note that this is not like BitTorrent. It's just caching and streaming, not copy distribution. There's one master copy, and peers only host copies while playing.
[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/349011f0-4029-4818-bc41-40fab2...
On Mastodon, the fragmented network of servers and the need to grasp federation mechanics mirrors the intricate web of European policies, where navigating localized laws and cross-border harmonization can feel like wading through red tape.
Both present an ostensibly open and decentralized structure, promising freedom and community-led participation, yet are riddled with complexities that bewilder newcomers.
Maybe the mobile client is a step in the right direction? I can hope! But the fact that I have to tell people "okay, so sepiasearch is kind of like the youtube front page...ish?" is already just infinitely dumb. Make a damn client whose name indicates, in some way, that it's a video website. And then shows some damn videos on the front page. Randomize them if you really can't stand "algorithms", but honestly, just put some videos on a page with "videos" in the url (or something similar), and you can cut down on most of the confusion I've seen.
Engineers get so lost up their own asses about this stuff because they can't see that UX is entirely divorced from functional processes. The user needs to do thing X, and the computers can only provide processes Y, Z, etc; forcing the user to reconcile with Y and Z just because they want X is the definition of "programmer design". It's refusing to engage with the very real ways in which users understand and interact with services, for whatever sake the engineers want to make up ("I don't like to obfuscate what is happening", "this is not complicated. users should be able to understand", "it would waste resources to provide a more streamlined experience", etc. These are all terrible reasons to not bridge the interaction gap between developers and users). Bluesky is my favorite example of people abstracting away the complications of this stuff. Yes, they had to centralize some parts to start with, yes they had to compromise on features - but the damn thing is instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with microblog social media. That's all peertube has had to do for years now, and they have just staunchly refused to do it.
Like I said, hopefully the mobile app is their first steps in the right direction with this stuff. They've been doing the dev stuff - made it work, made it fast, made it good! Now they just need to do the user stuff - make it simple, make it familiar, make it accessible.
This is one of the main reasons that open source has never penetrated beyond engineers, IT people, and computer hobbyists.
The problem is that when you are good at using computers it's not easy to see how unbelievably confusing they are to people who are not good at using them.
The other is that there's no funding system to pay people to do the not-fun parts of programming or to maintain the more user-facing aspects of projects.
> This is one of the main reasons that open source has never penetrated beyond engineers, IT people, and computer hobbyists.
> The other is that there's no funding system to pay people to do the not-fun parts of programming or to maintain the more user-facing aspects of projects.
I see a lot of sentiment (including around these parts) that one should not care about those groups because they are a small percentage, but you could say that about any group. These groups definitely give your stuff a lot more value. I mean what is a smart phone with no apps? That's the real reason they took off. Arguably the same reason computers did too. Unless you really think you can do everything in house, then you need devs and power users (besides that it helps with finding bugs). You don't need to make the platforms geared towards them, but I think there is a difference when you start acting hostile. I mean isn't the reason Silicon Valley is full of macbooks in the first place is because mac felt more nix like and we could program on them more easily than windows? Seems short sighted.
Edit: fatal is too strong of a word. Google is doing it too and its monopoly behavior
Many of the comments here on hacker News are talking about how like difficult it is to find a linked download to get the video so that you can watch the video so that you can go lull and share meme videos about cats playing pianos and what not. Dopamine junkies talk like this.
So perhaps there's a need for a dopamine specialist, or a dopamine hit specialty in software development and product management?
Certainly marketing exists but marketing has become such a fuzzy wuzzy taboo subject and I think you know we'd like to just inject it all straight into our veins ..
.. so how about making a role in open source projects called the Dopamine Optimizer?
That way we could celebrate the intention, making a delicious physically resonant software tool? Functionality is a joy, for sure, there's an intellectual Joy to programming, yes, but social acceptance and the delight that comes from having our brain glands squirt out dopamine is an underappreciated aspect of I think the work that a lot of us may do.
Granted, they can and should do a bit better here by giving people who searched "PeerTube" some directions to go in (including, clearly, adding app downloads.) That said, it's somewhat understandable that it's not a focus: I reckon 9 times out of 10 when someone finds PeerTube in the wild, it's from a PeerTube instance itself. Besides that, having a specific place to go defeats the purpose of federation somewhat.
I also think a big CTA for "Download App" would be a good addition to the credit of the root comment of this thread.
I mean, it could be a bit more visible, I guess, but it's not exactly invisible.
I get the point that maybe have browse content as the main page ... but given that the point of peertube is the network not the videoclient, the current page also makes sense to me.
The app is just a client.
For some things, this actually is okay. Like for example, market-wise, Discord has dominated online chat. Does anyone still using XMPP or IRC care? Nope, because as long as there are networks to chat on and more than one person the network works. At worst, the main pain felt by market dominance is that the rooms may be smaller than they could be since people are less wont to join. But in practice, the quantity often isn't that big of a problem. I had some of my best conversations and met people I still know today in an IRC chat that never had more than 50 users online at any time and was inactive most hours of most days.
The market can do whatever it wants as far as I am concerned.
Open Source was coined to contrast with this, and this term was endorsed by a lot of people working on open source software at that time, including Linus Torvalds.
So, the goal of open source software is not to change the world. The goal of open source software is to produce software that is open source. (The goals of "free software" are out of scope.)
edit: This is not a very good response, it leaves too much unsaid. I'm basically just trying to conclude that most open source developers out there, at the very least, the long tail of them, are just writing code and working on things chiefly because they want to do so, with no particular expectations of anything in return. That doesn't mean they have zero goals or aspirations, but they are not the primary reason to do the work. And even without starting with such a goal, it doesn't mean nothing can be achieved, as one can see from projects like Linux, Krita, OBS and so forth. Clearly people don't write software in a vacuum for literally no reason at all, but OTOH whereas commercial software almost certainly has the explicit goal of "succeeding in the marketplace", there is no real inherent goal for open source software, and many people work on it without a stronger reason than "Because I want to."
The finesse of HN. If you don't do marketing like we preach, you hate users.