 This week, I went over to Bluesky and asked people who'd left Mastodon why they left, and lots of people told me. I grabbed the replies and crunched them and wrote up a summary. I think it's really interesting and often kind of wrenching. https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt The tl;dr (because TL! it's TL) is that, for this group: - people feel stressed and anxious when they get yelled at for breaking rules and norms they didn't know about - it's hard to find people and conversations, and specifically hard to follow people across instances - people want better organic and algorithmic ways to connect with each other - instance-picking stresses people out, and a lot of the sign-up and settling-in processes are confusing and/or too much work for unknown returns something I didn't have room for in the post itself is that a non-tiny group of people have had instances blow up on them over the years, leaving them starting over again and again—this is especially destructive for newer folks, who don't always understand what's happening Lastly! I squeaked this post in under a rapidly dropping door—I'm going to be really busy for a day or so and then offline for awhile. If you ask questions after today and don't hear back, that's probably why! Please be cool with each other and don't make me come back to screaming fights in my replies. <3  @kissane this would never happen with one of the established big players like say twitter @kissane Yeah, this. Over the years I have had a couple of instances just disappear, and it has taken a few tries to find an appropriate instance. At this stage I think it works better for me than twitter ever did, but I can see why folks find getting established and sticking round a non straightforward experience. @kissane yep, and this is why I tell friends to avoid servers where the admin is also the sole moderator. Amusingly, I've been accused of being "against" small servers for this stance - thus demonstrating your first point about being yelled at. Anyhow, thanks for putting the work into this. Hopefully seeing it all gathered in one place will result in some self-reflection in certain quarters.  Really appreciated this info. A thought I've been having recently is that perhaps part of what makes people so burned out on politics is the media's tendency to accompany stories with "authoritarian strict father (in the Lakoff sense)" images. As someone who consumes a lot of politics content, since about 2016 my feed has been filled with these images. A feature like Slack's of option to suppressing link previews, and a norm of using it, could help. 1/2 My personal and professional reasons for being on social media are such that CW for politics did almost drive me away. I believe this political *information* needs to be more widely known. But I've recently had the realization that the supporting visuals are a different thing. We don't need to be spreading those. 2/2 @JMMaok This is extremely interesting and something I've literally NEVER seen anyone raise, which is one of the reasons I really value this place. @kissane I really think the whole instance thing is needlessly stressful. Masto makes a big deal about it, but honestly it doesn’t really matter. You can follow people across instances just fine. The only thing that matters from a new user perspective is number of characters per toot and bespoke emojis. Instance picking felt like I had define my identity by one thing. Then it turned out, it doesnt seem to matter, which is exactly what you’d wonder if the instance was well run  @robotmonkeys @kissane yeah, I suspect the most important factor in picking an instance is what they block - pick one that will be safe for you. But they tend to make themselves after communities, giving the impression that's what matters. Who actually checks their instance feed and so on? @kitten_tech @kissane even then, you don’t know, and you certainly don’t know who anyone is when you sign up.  @kitten_tech @robotmonkeys @kissane I’m new to the fediverse. And the 1 thing that is confusing to me is, you say you can follow others and read posts across instances. But how do you find those people? Where do you go to see them or to follow them or to read posts. Something like Instagram or Twitter has an algorithm that shows you things that it thinks you might like. here you have to go looking. @Tekk @kissane same way you find them anywhere else. Look at who gets boosted and people you know and who they follow. My experience is that you need only one or two seeds to create a decent follow list. I say that as someone that managed to import a partial list from Twitter before it was shut down, but honestly I try not to look back, and instead find all new people. @robotmonkeys @kissane that reminds me. By the way, thank you for the info. But that reminds me what does boost and favorite do I’m using the Ice Cubes app. @Tekk @robotmonkeys @kissane I use Icecubes too. Boosting is sharing the toot with everyone who follows you, giving it wider exposure. Favouriting is just letting the toot author know that you liked it. Your followers won’t see it.  @robotmonkeys I think instance-picking doesn't matter until it does. You've had no problem with the instance you chose (and TBH, Hachyderm looks like a solid choice!), I've had no problem with mine, either, but I've heard stories of plenty of other people who ended up with awkward mods, or on the wrong end of defed drama or whatever. Smaller instances miss more messages, etc. In short, I'd be wary of saying "instance choice doesn't matter" in general, just because it didn't matter for you! :)  @kissane So much of this just feels like folks who would have otherwise gravitated to AOL and never leave AOL discovering the actual internet for the first time 30 years ago. @kissane While being yelled at is not fun and likely needs to be cut down, a lot of these other things subtly point towards key differences in what people want from a social network. I'm noting two big divides. Number 1: a lot of people want to be tracked. They don't say it explicitly, but they're asking for features that only work if the network is doing tracking. Number 2: people want the "right to post", but they really don't want to be partake of the governance required... @kissane Some examples for Number 1. > ...the way it could throw things in front of me that I never would have even thought to go look for on my own That's tracking. > Discoverability/self promo is limited Tracking > Quote-replies ... is how I decide are important follows. Tracking Likewise, Number 2 pops up a variety of places. But note how not a single quote includes lines like "I helped fund my instance but disagreed with the board of governors" ... @kissane ... sadly, some instances of Number 2 were actually just misrepresented. > I was told picking a server didn’t matter... migrating is easy Of course it matters. > I’ve set up 4 accounts, each on a different server, and don’t know how to amalgamate all the people As above. Like why would you want to amalgamate all of the people? Unless you had some misinformation at the start that made this seem like a good idea. > the federation model is a mess and it’s impossible to use ...   @kissane Maybe try speaking more for yourself, as I find NONE of the things you mention stressful about this place, and definitely DON'T want an algorithm showing me posts it calculates are in my interest, since 99% of the time, it will be wrong. Instance picking is a literal 5-minute issue that disappears as soon as you pick an instance, which is not difficult to do. And since most of the rules AREN'T RULES, they're opinions, you can ignore those just as easily as anything else.   @kissane Thank you for collecting and sharing so much of this information and keeping a sense of humor about it all! It’s a detailed and fascinating perspective I wouldn’t even faintly have otherwise.  @kissane This is such a thoughtful summary of that super interesting thread. Thank you for mapping it all out so clearly and reflexively. @kissane If you have a moment, I have a question. I noticed replies that referenced the reputation of the fediverse—people who had heard or read something that put them off. How much of a factor was that overall? @kate Great question! I saw only a few of those, about half of which (IIRC) were in replies to my replies, which I classified as meta and didn't count (unless they also said they'd actually tried masto and left and explained why). All the replies I crunched (about 350 of 500ish replies) were from people reporting direct experience.  @kissane This article is fantastic, Erin! And what a cool experiment to do. I actually almost bounced off of Mastodon originally because of the two highest frequency feedback points here. I'm really glad I pushed through it but I really, really get why most people don't. Tagging @Gargron , since you basically did a bunch of free product work for the Mastodon team. :) @Haste Thank you! I had to try three times—my first two instances blew up after I wandered off because it was so quiet. Eugen is probably so sick of seeing my name come up at this point, but I tried to express my very real sympathy in this post. For what it's worth you did a good job in being solution-oriented rather than the 🔥 that this topic can sometimes inspire. So mission accomplished!  Yeah, that's a bummer. I try to provide gentle, private feedback to the unsolicited-tip dogpiles. My hope is that if, culturally, we got to this point where providing alt-text is part of the Mastodon identity (which is rad af), we should be able to do the same thing for the new user welcome and not dogpile folks for perceived CW transgressions, etc.  @kissane @kissane wow, thanks so much for this. I think I understand now why my adult son, not at all put off by anything tech, said Mastodon was an immediate no.  @NoraReed Thank you! I love Valkyrie for long things, one of my top five screen-friendly serifs.  @kissane Thank you for doing this. I'm trying to build fedi software that doesn't suck, and this kind of thing is incredibly helpful.  @kissane "Lastly, I’ve intentionally done this work in a way that will, I hope, prove illegible and hostile to summary in media reports. It’s not for generalist reporters, it’s for the people doing the work of network and community building." praxis <3 Love this: If I had to pick a way forward, I’d probably define a target like, “precisely calibrated and thoughtfully defanged implementations of double-edged affordances, grounded in user research and discussions with specialists in disinformation, extremist organizing, professional-grade abuse, emerging international norms in trust & safety, and algorithimic toxicity.” @kissane The way I find people is by subscribing to hashtags of topics that I am interested in. Then when you read interesting posts under a hashtag, you just subscribe to the author. That should be more widely known.  @cdoremus @kissane The problem is that the official app doesn't support it. Whether we like it or not, the vast majority of "normal people" do everything on smartphones, and if the app can't do it, they won't do it, as having them sign on with a browser is just making it needlessly complicated. The Web UI for Mastodon is mostly *great*, but the official app lacks so much stuff and also uses different terms for stuff which is frustrating. IMO, there should be a push for feature parity here. @kissane Thanks for that! As someone that's 'struggling' with Mastodon, I'd describe it as 'clunky'. It's more involved to find and add people, to reply to posts, to read threads. I like the different atmosphere, but part of what i joined twitter for (following news stories) just doesn't work here. Using Mastodon is just .. hard work! I'll likely keep at it. But I'm waiting on a bsky invite code in the hope it's closer to what I'm looking for. @kissane That's a fantastic article that I think hits most of the things that need to be fixed. I love Mastodon, but I can understand why it's not growing faster.  @kissane This is really interesting. Thanks for sharing. One thing I've been thinking is that I'm fine if Mastodon doesn't grow a lot. I know a lot of people aren't because they're using it to make their work reach a wider audience, but I tried that on Twitter many years ago and got burned out. Now I'm just using social media to goof around and share some thoughts. I still understand why becoming more welcoming is important, but I think we shouldn't be so fixated on perpetual growth. @kissane this is fascinating and super insightful! Thank you for this work :) @kissane That's it, I'm calling it Scold'odon from now on. That is literally the personality of this platform. That or holier than thou, but I'll have to work on the pun for that one.  This is wonderful - thank you! I recognize so much of my own experience in your summary and example quotes. @kissane really excellent post, as a relatively recent user can relate to some of these comments @kissane@mas.to even as a longtime member of the fediverse who hasn't struggled with most of the other things here, the quote "What I got was a series of TED Talks about how people like me were everything that was wrong with social media" really rings true  @kissane @ipanalysis I have felt all the things raised by your respondents. Not sure what has kept me pushing through. I was lonely here for the first 6 months, despite trying to make friends. Oh and someone chastised me really early on and for not CWing a post about insomnia, which I felt was really over the top @kissane Great write-ups. Thank you! I’m staying active here at least for the time being, but I’m also following you over on bsky so I’ll see you there @kissane @kissane this is a really interesting analysis!! Thanks for taking the time to do this. I'm new to Mastodon AND to Bluesky and I've been seeing a lot of similar criticisms on both. As if people are walking into a space where there are unspoken rules but nobody knows what they are.   @kissane The other day someone said that me identifying as ‘ethnically Chinese’ while talking about a China specific political issue and how it impacts the Chinese diaspora, was not surprising for an ‘American’ because we are all obsessed with race  @skinnylatte That’s… certainly a take. 😬 I’m not surprised, but deeply disappointed, by the sheer number of people (on fedi and otherwise) who spout this kind of thoughtless, half-baked nonsense. @digichelle to be clear, these folks are everywhere (also on the bad place) but it's more deeply ingrained in the reply guy culture here. you know, the sort of people who think that saying 'race' is 'racism' while ignoring actual racism @skinnylatte Yup. Definitely familiar with the type. And I agree—reply guys on fedi are a special kind of obnoxious. I’ve encountered (and blocked) a fair few of them myself. @kissane Fantastic post and there are a bunch of points I agree with. I had my partner sign up and she expressed annoyance when trying to follow someone on another instance and I had to admit that it's not the greatest right now, and you just sort of have to do the search-and-follow dance right now. So many little obnoxious things that I've gotten used to that could be so much better. I'll stick with it, though, because I have hope for a user-supported internet.  @kissane this was a very nice little project and great idea. @kissane I can relate to most of that. I was lucky with the Twitter migration - the tools worked well for me. Anybody complaining because I missed an alt text on an image gets blocked (sorry, not sorry - don't need complainers and most of the time I add it). Overall, my experience here is similar to Twitter was in the early days, though I have a lot more photos in my feed (following the photography hash tag helped there 😀) @kissane this was a fantastic read, and a really good idea! I had a very superficially similar thought the other day which I think comes from the same place. https://mastodon.social/@philbetts/110716348339170186  @kissane "I think the other piece of this is probably the idea of organizing people into interest-based instances, which I think is fundamentally flawed, but that’s a subject for another time." Fully agreed! I'm a mod on an interest-based server, and I frankly think it's a horrible model. 2/3 of the people I follow are on other servers, so what good are interest servers? Interest-centric *indexers* could be useful. But picking a server is really picking your mod team. That's non-obvious. @kissane @kissane Thank you for doing this! A good way of getting folks to think about this in a way that very much is trying not to make this about people being bad or good but just people all trying to work things out.  The HOA strikes again. Mastodon takes a minute to get into, and we've got people here calling the cops on anyone they don't recognize. I feel like almost everything else sorts itself out if you give people time to get into it. @kissane i don't think i knew all those ways network effects make the small instance experience genuinely worse — if replies work like hashtags where you have to be already actively federating to discover anything you didn't already have on your timeline, that's a nightmare, and an "everyone self-hosts a single user instance" future would be a technical disaster even if self-hosting was easy
@kissane Thank you so much for doing this work! I found your summary interesting and entertaining.  @kissane Thank you for sharing. Very interesting to read this (still reading kinda dumbfounded, because my experience has not been like that, but some parts of it I can relate to) @kissane As someone who has contributed in building those massive corporate social networks and deeply wants federation to succeed, this post should be a guiding beacon to those working on the future of Mastodon and all other federated software. Thank you for putting in the time to do this research, however unscientific it might be.   @intothetilian @kissane that’s unfortunate. If I was interested in fitness more than say, News I’d be following you right away buddy 👍  @kissane Social media websites like Tik Tok, Facefuck, Instagram, twitter, mastodon, ALL have one thing in common …… EVERYONES talking, posting cute pictures , but NO ONE is listening. It’s ALL just yap, yap, yap. And a good portion of the posts don’t even make any sense. You can have them all. 👎 @kissane My experience, also just an anecdote. Came here last fall, in a big exodus from bird site. No one has lectured me or criticized how I use the site. Not one time. :pikachu_dancing:  @kissane excellent post. As it’s 2am I’ll have to compile some thoughts around this tomorrow, but now I have something to think about while trying to sleep @kissane I kind of hate the community here. @kissane Very cool. Some of the reasons people don’t like it here are some of the reasons that I do…  @kissane I’m glad you mentioned what happened in Myanmar, and why. I’m glad any time someone mentions what happened in Myanmar, and why. I no lie want “Zuckerberg” to sound like “Himmler” in the ears of generations to come.  @kissane i am staying here for now because i sort of don't have a lot of choice LOL but i resonate with pretty much all of the featured replies and my biggest peeve is the faulty federation. Because it's literally the selling point of the network and majority of the time it doesn't work as 'advertised'. I imagine a lot of people who felt this place was empty were just on a weakly connected server 😭 Super interesting. All the “unwritten rules” stuff makes me wonder how those folks deal with cultural diversity IRL, or if they’ve just never encountered it? I really feel like there should be a notice when you sign up that says "Remember, if anyone tells you you're doing Mastodon wrong ignore them or tell them to fuck off, as you see fit." @kissane I really like Mastodon, and yet I agree with all of these points to some degree.  @kissane In some ways I think it’s when people expect Mastodon to be another version of Twitter they get frustrated. I’m new and really enjoying it.  @kissane Excellent synthesis, thank you for doing this. I think you hit all the points that would have occurred to me. @kissane Mastodon feels like Open Source communities from the early 2000's, with semi-religious dogmatic positions towards "you are either free or a sheep" attitude, and its not easy to use. @kissane it isnt rocket science but things dont just work at first time. I had to copy your user into another tab so i could follow you and then reply; and algorithms can be useful for discovery, which currently we don't have. @kissane however, i can work with this philosophy; i use algorithims in all other social networks, and I want to see how it works over here. @kissane I liked this article. Thanks for writing it. While it doesn’t offer solutions, it does give a great baseline from which to build better federated network ideas. 👍 nicely done Erin. @kissane @kissane for me, the most positively reinforcing part of writing anything is seeing 1st how many people have read it (the views stats), and then how people responded to it. Interestingly I don't see issue number 1 nearly as much as I used to. The "yell at people for not using CWs or asking for search" was pretty prominent when I first joined last November but now I hardly ever see that any more. @kissane I think some of the problems are a product of an early platform with a small user base. But a lot of the problems in that list feel solvable with enough effort in UX improvements. It should be possible to improve without making the positive things about Mastodon fall apart. @kissane A really nice write-up! My main takeaway was how different the experiences can be. For my tech-oriented interests, finding interesting people to follow was pretty easy, besides the initial hump of running my own single-user instance. But that doesn't seem to have been the norm for many other people. What I'm curious about: What is the "copy-paste dance" the article mentions for following people on remote instances?  @kissane Ugh, "the copy-paste-search-follow dance". I run into this at least once a week and it still drives me F-ing nuts. Edit: Make that three times in the last two days, so far. @kissane your findings seem pretty accurate from my exoerience. I love the idea of an open platform but sadly too many feel like they should tightly control who can post, and what they can post. There have to be limits / rules but some instances seem to be extreme in their censorship.   @kissane As a relatively new user, I would definitely say the search/discoverability issue is preventing me from becoming attached to Mastodon. I think users can live without the algorithms, but it's tough to live without robust indexing. Also, this is the only place on the internet where people can debate an issue, and the 2 parties debating have different character limits. That just chafes at your egalitarian instincts. @kissane Random thought: How many of these people tried Mastodon during Nov 2022? During that time most instances ended up restricted, so it was very easy to find yourself in questionable places if you still pushed through and joined, which I felt perhaps exacerbated some issues? I feel it's a lot better now, I've had a few friends join on the usual big instances and it's been pretty smooth sailing, but I wonder how it would have been if they were on tiny instance #57 when everywhere was shut.    @kissane I faced similar responses, and I didn't come from any of those poisonous social media platforms yet I was treated as though I had. Those "yelling" at the ones that eventually left may have learned to do that from other platforms. Could it be that everyone (especially those from poisonous social media platforms) should take a step back, drop the baggage, and start again? @kissane Thanks for putting this together. Looks really well-thought out. Also great points on a lot of those things. For me, the experience has been interesting because of my bifurcated interests. A lot of my tech follows have moved over here. But, book twitter has mostly not gone to Mastodon (notable exception: John Scalzi). So I've stayed on X nee Twitter to follow some of my favorite authors. @kissane purely from the survey standpoint, really appreciated the deliberate choice you made of steering away from reducing answers to numbers. What you did takes a lot more work (been there before!), but captures much better the nuances. Really nice work! @kissane Without asking you to do extra work or subject yourself to another FB product, I’ll just say that I would be fascinated to see what answers someone might get to this question on Threads.
 @kissane@mas.to I appreciate the work you do. This was excellent and most insightful. I’m also impressed with the comments, typically once bluesky is mentioned you get a bunch of nasty comments. I actually did something similar earlier this year. Based on that feedback is why I started my fedi project. @kissane Erin I would love to move over to Bluesky, and chance you can DM me a invite code? @kissane I agree with them on all these points. But I doubt they’ll return even if all of these (valid) issues are fixed. The competition is just too compelling. Who doesn’t want to be where the “cool kids” are hanging out? @kissane @JasonMythForgedGames This was an incredibly interesting article and actually included some of the hurdles I faced before you encouraged me into a good group. |
Gregory's Server
Rather than trying to head off the unusual unpleasantness about clout-chasers and the ritually/technologically impure, I will just say this:
I wrote this up for fedi people who are actively curious and interested in other people, and I'm not going to worry too much about how it lands for those who aren't.