It is simple: nowadays security awareness is drilled in for most of the online population. If presented with a choice people can't oversee, the default safest option is not to chose. I mean, how many new Mastodon users know any of these servers?

So, as couter-intuitive or even ironic it may seem, the "problem" is choice. People need to learn that social media is no longer a single entity, but more like email or choosing a bank.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The email analogy just goes so far, because of mental models.

Yeah, those of us who have opinions on sudo vs doas will get it. Email is a protocol standard that allows different servers to exchange compatible data. Most people don't conceptualize it like that; they conceptualize it like the postal service. The USPS, Royal Mail and others are one entity that most end users just handwave away as "in the mail" and their only concern is where do I go to send and receive my mail? Your mailbox is at the post office on the corner of Road st. and Boulevard ave. Your email inbox is at gmail.com. Gmail, or hotmail, or whatever, is your local post office for putting things "in the mail."

Nobody conceptualizes social media like that. Social media is a place you go to be among other people. Back in my day we called them "Sites." Myspace and Facebook were "sites." Places you went. Now they call them "apps" but they're still conceptualized as where the people participating in this culture are. Get it through the average Tiktokker's head that you get the Loops app, and then you have to pick a server to connect that app to. "Just get me to Loops."

Some servers are full, some you have to apply for, some are perfectly open to join. They all connect to each other, except they can choose not to, and choosing not to connect to each other is why some servers exist in the first place. We're going to present you with a list of instances to join, you'll be presented with the instance's logo, which half of them left blank so you get a boilerplate image, a blue checkmark on every single one which carries no meaning it just looks social media-y, and the top sentence and a half of a description which is either default text or a description of the platform as a whole because it wasn't explained to the instance admins what this description field was for.

So, new user who probably still isn't sure how this works, make a decision about something that feels kind of abstract that we've done a really bad job of explaining.

[–] fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

I'm thinking we should try and sell people on a particular community first, and let them figure out it interoperates with others on their own time.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 hour ago

Unfortunately I think that bed has been shat, because everyone wants to be a general purpose instance. Nobody wants to be sportslemmy or musiclemmy or movielemmy where they only host communities that match their theme, which is why we have linux@lemmy.world, linux@lemmy.ml, linux@sh.itjust.works, linux@feddit.org...

So "Join an instance for a community you're interested in"...not sure if that's tenable on Mastodon but it sure ain't on Lemmy.

[–] leagman1@feddit.org 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I've just "joined" the Fediverse a few days ago. I'm somewhat tech-savy I'd say. I still find a lot of it confusing.

"Most people don't conceptualize it like that; they conceptualize it like the postal service. " I think this was and still is in part true for me.

There's the term "Fediverse", which suggests that there's one continuous "universe" of things. But actually - and please correct me if I got this wrong - there's just servers connected/interlinked with other servers, which (strictly must, due to how it works) form bubbles/webs or islands of all sizes.

There are practically no postal service bubbles, because I can send mail to anyone I'd realistically wish. There are different postal service providers, but a "-verse" term would be better applied to postal service (-> "Postalverse") than to federated servers, imo.

So ideally as a noob coming from reddit or twitter, I'd like to know what the biggest bubble of connected servers is and where I can enter.

A thing I haven't figured out yet is why I can't find a decent feed feature on Mastodon. On Lemmy there are local/all filters for communities a server is federated with, if I understood this correctly. My mastodon home instance (mastodon.social) doesn't seem to have a feed, really. There's a "trending" filter, but it has very few posts - afaik just the ones I specifically subscribed to - and it doesn't differentiate between local and all federated servers.

Am I doing it wrong? :P

I'm expecting to have filters like in Lemmy, where I can just consume anything new, trending or controversial.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 hours ago

I think this was and still is in part true for me.

The distinction is one large company that has a monopoly on this specific kind of thing, versus a bunch of individual companies that all use the same industry standards to interoperate with each other.

The USPS (and probably other countries' mail services, too) is one gigantic corporation with a legal monopoly on letter carrying. The USPS uses the common highway, railway and airway systems that are also used for other passengers and freight to carry letters to their various offices to do businesses with customers across the nation. We have one The Mail Company. We used to have one The Phone Company too, but they broke up Bell Telephone.

There has never been a The Email Company. Email from the very beginning was meant to be an industry standard so that different organizations could host the service and interchange traffic between them. There are hundreds of them, a few big ones, a bunch of little ones, all sending standardized messages across the common internet.

Reddit or Twitter or Tiktok or Instagram or however many others are individual businesses. You sign up with an account with, say, Twitter, and that gets you access to Twitter, their backend software, their front-end user apps, their community, their content...one monolithic stack.

Mastodon is software you can use to make your own little Twitter. The folks that make that software operate a server running that software. So do other people; there's a whole bunch of them. You can use it to make your own little Twitter all by yourself, which is how Truth Social works. But those of us who aren't in a white supremacy retardation cult prefer to voltron all our little Twitters together into one big if nebulous network.

Lemmy does the same thing but with a Reddit-like form factor. So does Mbin and Piefed. Different software that speak the same protocol. I'm a member of sh.itjust.works, posting a comment to a community hosted on lemmy.world, replying to a member of feddit.org, each of these are Lemmy instances. Users on instances of Mbin and Piefed can also read and reply to this thread. So can Mastodon users, in fact. And Peertube, Loops and Pixelfed, which are Youtube, Tiktok and Instagram-alikes. They all use the ActivityPub protocol and can interoperate...within their own UI limits at least. Imagine being able to Tweet from Youtube. Not embed a Youtube video in a Tweet...Tweet from Youtube. Well you can Toot from Peertube. You just...Can; abstract as it is it's a thing this collection of software can do.

I'm not sure you can define "the biggest bubble" in objective terms; defederation is a thing, it exists to be able to cut off spammers, scammers, anyone acting in bad faith. More often it's used to separate servers that disagree politically, which in some ways isn't ideal but I'm pretty sure that's an unsolvable problem. A mainstream instance will get you the sumtotal; it's a bit like living in the milky way galaxy; there's some of it we can't see because the middle is in the way, and there's nowhere in it where that isn't true.

As for a feed algorithm on Mastodon...I don't know, I don't actually use Mastodon. It is my understanding that the lack of a feed algorithm is considered a feature, not a bug; how exactly to discover content I'll leave to someone else to answer.

[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

I don't think so. way too many people approve sensitive permissions and cookie tracking without a thought, and even more just go for a gmail account no matter what