Honestly I think Mastodon needs a third party app that makes it feel more like Twitter, similar to how reddit apps are switching to lemmy. Unfortunately, I don’t know if there were any third party Twitter apps that had the name recognition of the reddit ones.
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UnD3Rgr0uNDCL0wN@lemmy.world 9 months agoHard to convince people. The twittersphere has fractured into about 4 different places, and masto is fractured even further with different servers arguing in places (a bit like here tbh) over federation.
Theharpyeagle@lemmy.world 9 months ago
geosoco@kbin.social 9 months ago
THere were a few but they got bought (eg. tweetdeck).
There are also 3rd party apps for mastodon that a lot of people like, and they try. But for many people, mimicking the parts of Twitter they value is difficult to do without proper backend support for supporting algorithms, and even then the way activitypub works it still makes it difficult to support for most developers.
Two of the key features are discovering new or related content, which is hard to do in mastodon as it needs to calculate similarity across all of the profiles and their content in order to make recommendations -- or collect data like your cell contacts to help you connect with people you already know. Most people don't want contact sharing, and indexing all of the recommended profiles, especially across federated servers is challenging.
The second is engagement based recommendations. Many social media users aren't incredibly active. They want to open the app in specific moments to quickly catch up with everything since they last opened the app. To do this well, you need to know what they've engaged with and look back at content since they last logged on and rank it based on that. People may follow 1000 people, but really care about maybe 30-40 accounts the most. Friends, family, specific journalists or famous people. Mastodon just gives you like a sample of the last 50 or so items. If you follow anyone super active, you may just get a lot of noise in those updates.
Obviously, there are times when everyone wants a linear timeline, but it depends upon their daily use.
uis@lemmy.world 9 months ago
And? Servers are inter-operable.
IMALlama@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Until your home instance defederates from another instance. Sure, you can always make another account, but your average user wants a lower friction experience.
I’m reasonably active in the fediverse, but I recognize that the more explaining it takes to the average user the less likely they’re going to want to join in.
The old old top gear cool wall tried to hit on this concept. You could have a very technically excellent car classified as uncool because if you had to explain why it was cool to a normie you had already lost them.
It will be hard for the fediverse to get over this hump, which is probably why you see so many Linux users here and so few say woodworkers or other (somewhat) more niche communities.
Eldritch@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Most average people would never notice defederation unless you told them. It’s pretty frictionless and drama free.
The niche communities are always the last to come. It’s why they’re niche. That techie people are the first is nothing damming. It’s always been that way for every service.
kambusha@feddit.ch 9 months ago
That’s a good point. Branding is done for a reason. When I buy a car, I don’t need to know which companies made each and every component, it’s enough for me to know that “Audi” made it.
I guess if someone made an easy entry-point for users to sign up, that became the defacto way to start with Lemmy, then it would have a lower barrier to entry. Maybe it asks them some likes/dislikes, and then it would route them to the most appropriate instance to sign up.
IHaveTwoCows@lemm.ee 9 months ago
That the normie can’t just sign up and figure it out by using it is the problem. We have too many stupid and lazy people