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
#meta
Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t - Erin Kissane's small internet website
After my last long post, I got into some frustrating conversations, among them one in which an open-source guy repeatedly scoffed at the idea oferinkissane.com
reshared this
Erin Kissane
•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.
Erin Kissane
•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
Baldur Bjarnason reshared this.
Michael 🇺🇦
•The feeds (algorithms) at Bluesky are really great. Good thing is that you can build them by yourself and people can follow them. This is completely different from what Twitter, Facebook or Threads is doing.
In fact I'm thinking about the creation of some similar service for the Fediverse. From the technical perspective this isn't a big deal.
Peter Ellis
•@doot @derwinmcgeary i still remember clearly though when i joined twitter, apart from the instance selection shenanigans it was just as daunting, lonely and alienating as people report about fedi
i had actually had a go at twitter a few years earlier and gave up two weeks in, it was an absolute disaster
knowing a few people already on the platform makes such a big difference in the early days
gelato_al_pollo
•@derwinmcgeary
Another Angry Woman
•@gelato_al_pollo @derwinmcgeary yeah, ime the instances with the highest incidence of the awful HOA posters (ie the scolds, who are off-putting) are also the ones who tend to defed the servers which make good posts, so if you end up joining on one of those, the english-language fedi is generally pretty miserable.
Luckily for me, the first thing I stumbled on upon joining was quality shitposters, and from there I found tons more shitposters
Another Angry Woman
•Erin Kissane
•Another Angry Woman
•Fade
•EVHaste
•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. :)
Erin Kissane
•@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.
@Gargron
Eugen Rochko
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