@kissane Nice, I don't have to write this myself.

@kissane finding good follows is a problem for me too. I find a lot of my follows are just bots that repeat what someone posts on Twitter accounts I followed.

@kissane
I do find Content Warnings a lot on things I would not place a Content Warning but then I would probably never place a CW on a post.

@kissane Thank you so much for doing this sort of research and presenting it to the table! There’s a lot of room for improvement, and I definitely will keep it in mind as I continue fleshing out Fedigardens.

@kissane Great writeup, thanks for putting this together! Mastodon has a lot of room for improvement but I'm optimistic seeing how much people care about the platform and the communities within.

@kissane This is excellent work! I’m new to Mastodon, discoverability was a big issue for me. Naming the issues and talking about them is the best way forward!

@kissane thank you for this.
The boredom-self-shocking note was nice too.

@kissane that was a fantastic breakdown. I see myself in a lot of those comments and largely agree with your assessment.

@kissane Nice post! I think I’ve seen examples of much of the scolding people complained of. I was used to the lack of an algorithmic timeline as I didn’t use one on twitter. However, I have friends who used twitter’s algorithm to discover science they were interested in and found mastodon and its hashtags useless for that. Still, my followers on mastodon seem to be human unlike the bots on twitter 😏.

@kissane Interesting write-up! I'm a returning user giving Mastodon a second try. I'm liking it much more this time, but it's helpful to see what didn't work for users who left.

First time I tried here was a few months ago, during a twitter exodus when many instances were closed. Imo when you're a new user, this did make it confusing/too time-consuming to research where to go instead (bc all recs were closed!)

Now I'm on the default instance, which is partly what convinced me to try returning.

@kissane @w7voa It’s amazing how different my experience has been. Rather than read the instance’s firehose or follow hashtags, I’ve done the same thing I’ve done on all other platforms — I’ve followed a few people I know or know of and then followed people whom they boost. Eventually, I carve-out the experience I want. Scoldy or boring people don’t get followed. I take responsibility for my own feed and don’t blame “the culture.”

@kissane Very interesting! Thanks for doing this.

@kissane This is such an interesting write-up, and I really appreciate it. As someone with a lot of friends who came here and then left--it certainly echoes a lot of what I hear from them.

Much as I love Mastodon for my own experience, if I do give up on it, 50% will be “my friends were stressed out by being here", and 50% will be people in the fediverse smugly telling me that any of my friends who left are stupid, or bad, or both, for not appreciating the current version. I see that so often!

@kissane

Really thoughtful article, thanks for such good work.

@kissane "People in the “poor discoverability” group": Mastodon has updated with a trending & finding folk to follow that might make it easier for some folk.

The CW lecture folk need to learn to be proactive with filters.

I noticed that many folk seemed to have left without seeming to have tried very hard. They didn't get an immediate twitter experience, got bored/frustrated quickly, so went to a place run by algorithms.

It IS sad that not all jumping Twitter found the same lifeboat. :(

@kissane Yeah I think this article is spot on! There's a weird mixture of tech issues that are made harder by social issues (e.g. like counts not federating properly because the devs don't think people should care about them, bad search, no algorithmic feeds, etc) and social issues that are made harder by tech issues (e.g. the giant counter that says "it has been 0 days since a dumb defederation slapfight"). Like I've been here for years and a lot of these things still bite me in the ass.

@kissane excellent summary. Thanks for sharing!

@kissane very interesting stuff!

The scold culture was pretty crap.

Some of the stuff seems to be "This isn't like Twitter" and yeah it's not and probably won't ever be.

Maybe in 3 years nice Fediverse will be fun in a new interesting way that people find newly appealing.

You can't stand in the same river twice.

@kissane my block filter is overflowing with purity assholes i’d pepperspray if they approached me irl. Things got much better after a while doing this

@kissane
I liked this analysis and it gives me a lot to think about. I'd be interested in a more demographic breakdown of users - particularly those that had positive experience with creating connections through algorithms.

Finding people I knew and shared interests was something that I found difficult at first, but it also feels easier the more time I've spent on the Fediverse.

@kissane I'd like an invitation to Bluesky. Can you help me?

@kissane
Thank you. Very helpful.

@kissane Interesting!

I'd say I'm around the 60th percentile for understanding new programs and such. I'm a 56 year old, decade-long Twitter user who came over to Mastodon in Nov 2022.

I believe that the responses were heartfelt and truthful. And yet, my experience was different. E.g. I had very little confusion about choosing a server.

Makes me wonder if this is tied to individual learning styles and preferences? Almost like coffee drinkers who argue about Tims vs Starbucks (in Canada)?

@kissane good article and research. Did the people who replied understand they can fork masto to their own liking or ask for features and things by contributing time/money via open collective/their own instance funding route?

@kissane this is very interesting, great work!

@kissane I agree with the rest of that article, but why are you pushing that bullshit Stanford study? It's pure FUD (edit: this sounds much more combative than I want it to on reflection, but it is absolutely a completely bullshit study that doesn't deserve the light of day, it's pure "think of the children" fearmongering", so it annoys me)

@kissane “moral brine shrimp” - nice.

@kissane People are almost never happy being in the same place.

@kissane I had this idea that since there is no full text search we could use AI (shut up, I know) to recommend hashtags from the text we've typed. My very lazy research into this found that those hashtags are for shit. Still... maybe a good-ish idea? [ed.: insert the "in theory communism works" quote from Homer Simpson]

@kissane The one thing that jumped out at me, and led me to feel bad for you, was the extent to which you felt the need to qualify the work. It spoke volumes to the emotional safety of the environment you were posting to 😢

@kissane

It’s very interesting and useful. I like your suggestion about making culture part of the design (prompting users to use alt-text, for example).

One thing that I appreciate here and that helped me feel welcome is shared games - they’re like weird little ice breakers, but digitally. For me, that was advent of code, because I joined at the very end of November, so my local feed was alight with people talking about solving the same problem.
1/ more pages

@kissane none of it's wrong. People here like to put these concerns down and rationalize, both of which are exclusionary

these are valid concerns and experiences people had here that drove them away. Mastodon is like the UU church who can't figure out why people aren't sticking around while ignoring the broken stairs and cliques that make it uninviting for so many

@kissane
Thank you for all your research. It was hard for me at first too. I got yelled at a lot on some instances & left. I almost gave up a few times. I'm an older person & it was frustrating. Despite everything I like it here.

@kissane do you have invites for blue sky?

@kissane pretty interesting post! I have heard from people who would fall into the first group, scolded by other users for “breaking” arbitrary other-instance “rules”, first-hand. especially early in the Twitter migrations, it was a definite chilling factor among some groups. I wish we could reach out to those people, and the light humor people, and say “please come back, we need you to normalize the network”.

@kissane really interesting to read. As a non-Twitter user i find Mastodon a pretty friendly thing. Although not a dev myself i can meet and see techie content on fosstodon, and i connect to new people or learn other things. And at least once a day i burst out laughing. Discoverability and finding interesting topics is, at best, nearly impossible and tooting can make you feel like the man on the soapbox in Hyde Park. It does help a lot to stay connected to friends, and that's my main purpose.

@kissane I am still here, but my gosh, this one...

"I’m tech savvy and have found mastodon simply opaque. I’ve set up 4 accounts, each on a different server, and don’t know how to amalgamate all the people I’m following everywhere (assuming all those servers federate with each other)."

@kissane Thank you for looking into this. I do wonder how much of these are really nostalgia for the Twitter of yore, manifesting itself by people following the old Twitter staff wherever they go.

@kissane I can completely see how some personalities would not mesh well with any platform. Everything develops its own culture. And perfectly reasonable to gravitate to another if things don't work out.

I will say that I'm always confused with the idea that everything should orient around the newcomer, and that everyone has to be on the same platform. Both of those ideas just seem to lead to consolidation and enticement over quality. Not everything needs to be instantly gratifying.

@kissane Top notch and very informative. Thanks for taking the time to compile this.

@kissane Very well-written article, thank you for sharing it!

On the points presented, I think I'm almost completely in alignment with your findings.

I don't know what the right answer is to the Health First vs Own Your Experience problem, but I don't at all envy the group(s) that have to make the call on it.

I do think the people who are building features eg opt-in full-text search are well-intentioned and acting in good faith, but even then there are cries of it not being The Fediverse Way.

@kissane Nice article, thanks for putting that together and putting in the work. =) I think people raised a ton of valid points, and I hope that whoever is ultimately responsible for Mastodon takes it to heart and makes them a priority.

@kissane I can relate to this somewhat as a similar event happened when AOL opened it's gateway to the internet. At that point only savvy users who knew the “rules” mostly had access. There were written and unwritten ways to act in email and message “boards” etc. The unwashed horde of AOL users swamped the net overnight.. and we never recovered.

Many of those new users received lots of crap from the “establishment” and were made to feel unwelcomed as well.

@kissane thank you!

Let’s see what we can do to improve with this!♥️🥰

@kissane This is so good! Thank you. I am still here, but I empathize with most of what you discovered, particularly Mastodon users’ tendency to be forever earnest, not fun or funny, preachy, etc. I tolerate it because I understand their positions, though I’m generally less motivated to post here.

@kissane

I'm about as un-tech savvy as they come and I find Mastodon MUCH easier to use than Bluesky (at the moment) I can make a list, but I have to write code to do so? Whaaat? Otherwise, is it just me or are people NOT complaining about Mastodon, but instead the users they encounter there? I've curated a near perfect experience here muting, blocking and making lists, which I have found much more difficult to accomplish on Bluesky (at the moment).

@kissane you'll probably be offline by the time i chew through my own thoughts around this. so i'll just say: thanks for consistently providing such excellent material to think with & against.

@kissane
Thanks for doing this!

@kissane ern yer a good egg, more patient & resilient than most of us, thanks

@kissane I think most of us on Mastodon have had these complaints too. I'm still here, and don't anticipate leaving, because I think the structure of the network is valuable. But it's inarguably worse than Twitter at its best. For me, the lack of network effect is the real killer. I know how to find and follow people. But MANY of them aren't here. Discoverability is a problem. And maybe instances could have an algo toggle. But that won't make the people you want to be here be here.

@kissane Very thoughtful and well written.

What I find interesting is how the solutions to many of these problems seem to have similar roots, eg hiding as much of the technical complexity as possible while making automated suggestions such as helping people find their community, and educating new users through systems as to the less obvious cultural parts of the system.

One of the greatest challenges seems to be the complex web of which servers federate with /block others.

@kissane “Others said that their fear of unintentionally breaking CW expectations or other unwritten rules of fedi made them too anxious to post, or made posting feel like work.”

What does “CW” stand for?

@kissane Wow, very interesting! Thank you for doing—and mostly, sharing—this!

@kissane @timbray Good read, thanks for that. The 'scolding' level is certainly too high on Mastodon. Otherwise I'm a little baffled by people thinking it's confusing to join Mastodon and to make one's experience here interesting. Just needs a little energy following, replying and boosting. But we can definitely do better at making that easier, I imagine.

@kissane

My biggest complaint about Mastodon is the user interface and the conception (or lack thereof) of how people are supposed to interact -- message size and markup, subject lines, timeline, replying, threading, searching, feedback, etc.

No one cited those reasons for leaving?

@kissane It’s an interesting piece. I might guess the larger harm has come form scolding; people generally don’t like their hangouts to be like that (maybe a very *niche* crowd does that sort of thing as a kink). The hostility to poc has been the most notable example.

Search on tags is wanting, it’s finicky.

@kissane I’m on for family and a couple of others, otherwise I’d leave. I find it clunky, hard to manage. I also have chronic conditions and don’t like the extra typing I have to do. Basically, open Mastodon. Wait, wait, wait. Finally it says, see new posts (or something). Won’t let me do ANYTHING until the new posts are shown. Read a couple of posts, start writing something. Then it freezes again. New posts again. Repeat, ad nauseum. I use Mastodon on iPad. Won’t let me read/join on iPhone. All up, AGGRAVATING.

@kissane @cristyclark this is an amazingly useful article - thanks so much

@kissane well I’m still waiting for an invite so I just wait! Lol

@kissane yeah, I almost left after being scolded for multiple posts on an instance. I was testing the a Mastodon scheduled post tool and following the site's instructions.

The site ended-up posting multiple times. I deleted many of the duplicates but, was still DM'd with the threat of suspension. My account was 3 days old.

I did not feel comfortable on that instance after that. I stopped logging in a week later and have not been back since.

@kissane Funny, because like half of the posts I see on here are about anti-trans legislation.
I might be exaggerating a bit, but it really does feel that way sometimes.
But I have gotten some really nasty responses from arguments and one guy who got really defensive over cheap cardboard cards.

@kissane Mastodon has a steep learning curve. It got easier for me when I downloaded the Mastodon app for iPad/iPhone. It allows searching by name-much easier than cut/paste, and connects across servers.

@kissane@mas.to

Thank you for the great article.

What do people mean when Mastodon is not fun? What do they expect? That statement always sounded so suspicious to me, especially coming from the Twitter and Bluesky users.

@kissane I definitely feel #2. It was why, during the initial surge of new users in 2017, I gave up on the ‘verse. I (an autistic person) have relatively niche interests that only have a robustly-sized fediverse community amongst Japanese users, and I only know very basic Japanese.

I also just don’t like having an immutable username and having to make an entirely new account to change usernames. Other people, especially trans folks, have voiced the same concern.

@kissane

The last paragraph is insightful.

You did a good job.

My feeling is that (eventually) the servers will be able to make all these tasks easier... eventually.

Thank you Erin.

@kissane This is a fantastic piece, thank you!

There is one way in which Mastodon, for me, is very much like Twitter.

Some of the people dominating progressive discourse are not as committed to real progress as they purport to be.

They crush good-faith debate, locking out even people they claim to be advocating for, if those people dare challenge a small part of their thesis.

So I, a progressive with "minority cred", cede the podium to people who think they know my needs better than I do.

@kissane These are all real issues for folks who want Mastodon / Fediverse to grow and have many more users — these issues may be inhibiting that kind of growth. A lot of folks on Mastodon don’t care about overall growth of the platform at all, and are just happy to have found communities that make sense to them. So maybe that is a different take on this.

@kissane

Great post and a terrific probe into all this!

I have such hilariously contradictory thoughts on the question of mastodon’s ease of use — it’s good to get a bit of research to chew on

@kissane one of the paragraph is duplicated

@kissane all of this, yes

@kissane I definitely felt a bit of scolding (e.g., getting scolded if I missed alt text in images). I brushed it off, but I can see how it would feel unwelcoming to many people.

@kissane Great research & write-up. This kind of work is really necessary for the meta discussions about #Mastodon and to forge a path forward. Thank you!
--
One thought I have about the restriction of affordances, is that many of these features we are denied out of fear of abuse (like quote posts) are also tools that are used to fight abuse & harrassment. Sometimes Mastodon is cutting off its nose to spite its face. 🤦‍♀️

@kissane I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are many of the same issues that are the bane of people learning to program.

@kissane
Fantastic suggestion about building #alttext prompts in. I’d much rather do that than my current occasional prompt for people to do it one at a time 🤩

@kissane @laescude thank you for putting this together. It was a fascinating read.

I’m here and Bluesky, and the vibes at Bluesky are kinda off putting. Everyone is trying to be their “best” self, “snarky” self. Despite having followers I know in IRL it feels like the interactions there are super stilted and everyone is worried about clout.

Here I’ve found fun and interesting people. The interactions are genuine and I have more fun here.

@kissane "I don’t know where all the many rules for posting are documented for each instance, you definitely aren’t presented them in the account creation flow"

This is a lie. many instances post them on the front page when go to the URL and many remind you right before you sign up.

@kissane Great post. I hope it's read by Fedi devs! About onboarding, I remember that in my mailing list WebSanDiego I had a default for new members to be moderated, and I would quickly pass through a real person, ban spammers, and talk to marketers and recruiters about what constitutes a first post. This is not a model of social media that scales in a Twitter-like manner, with the immediacy and "it's just for fun" expectations that are now built in. But clearly any new service needs greeters.

@kissane I do agree with missing the algorithm where I was able to find fun uplifting people, news reporters and general Interests like hobbies, TV shows, music and art. It’s not as easy here to find what I’m looking for. I’m not as satisfied with mastodon as I was with twitter, but that just means I spend way less time scrolling and living life. So the trade off isn’t that bad! 🤷🏼‍♀️

@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, "

That part right there. I don't understand why anyone would think it's a good idea. Nobody is one dimensional single interest, who will only ever want to talk about one topic.

I started out by joining a region-specific instance and I've been very happy with the results.

@kissane Very interesting. Some of these complaints mirror my own though I have managed to find enough content and connections to keep slogging, as it were. I suppose it does help I have no personal investment in historical twitter...

@kissane Thanks for conducting this! This is really useful information

@kissane very interesting. When I joined Twitter you could view the entire timeline. You could use JSON to do fun things. I am hopeful Mastodon’s programmability could create some really useful tools; its “decentralisation” might help people find corners of the internet which they enjoy. I’ve been on the Bluesky waiting list for months and months, so Mastodon wins merely because I cannot use Bluesky. Perhaps it’s keeping my particular brand of bland away from the more interesting people 🤣

@kissane "Lastly, I’ve intentionally done this work in a way that will, I hope, prove illegible and hostile to summary in media reports."

I cannot describe how awesome this sentence is.

@kissane Twitter to Mastodon feels a bit like putting a pair of very comfortable shoes on the wrong feet. You can still walk, but it’s a bit more difficult and uncomfortable. Like a Mac or Windows user booting into Linux for the first time. Like biting into what you think is an apple, but it’s an onion. And so on…

@kissane But an excellent snapshot. I think finding an instance and trying to find other #Twiiter escapees to have bern the hardest part.

@kissane A lot of these are similar criticisms I've had of Mastodon in my time here too. A lot of the "I got yelled at" and "posting feels like walking on eggshells" responses felt especially familiar. I've fortunately found my niche now, but I hope people start to realize how unwelcoming this site can be for newbies. I appreciate you taking the time to gather all this data; hopefully it helps make this site a friendlier place.

@kissane I'm curious if anyone on this thread has insight into how bluesky plans to address the instance-picking problem defined here once they open their identity network up to federation.

It seems it's only easier on bluesky right now because they haven't scaled up or let independent instance operators federate yet. Once they do, what stops it from being equally alienating for users that don't know how to pick an instance?

@kissane Let’s also face it; Mastodon is also straight up buggy.

For me it currently shows that this post has 8 replies. When in fact I can scroll down many more replies 🤷

Things have to work correctly.

@kissane this is some excellent excellent work, really unpacks a lot of things I’ve been thinking about this platform and the people the choose to use it vs. not use it.

My experience with it is micro-blogging, more for myself than others, but knowing other people can see it. Kind of like a cross between Livejournal and Twitter. I can understand the frustration of not getting engagement if that’s the goal, the most traction I’ve ever seen is like 3000 people, and that was on serious content.