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by BinaryIdiot 2621 days ago
> It's always amazing, how strong the force of centralization is.

This is because Mastodon is a UX nightmare because of the way they decentralized it. With Twitter you go on and you @ your friends / etc and you're done. With Mastodon you have to figure out where they are and if they're not all in the same place it becomes a nightmare to try and manage.

I get it, decentralization can be great. But so far most of the implementations of decentralized social networks have been a UX nightmare for even the casual user.
2 comments
Leace 2621 days ago
> With Twitter you go on and you @ your friends / etc and you're done. With Mastodon you have to figure out where they are and if they're not all in the same place it becomes a nightmare to try and manage.

Nope, that's actually not the problem with Mastodon UX. On Twitter you still have to ask if your friend is @Johnny or @John1256 or @JDoe or depend on visual cues (avatar).

The problem with Mastodon UX (and Fediverse in general) is the friction of "remote follow" buttons instead of one-click Follow (the same goes for reply/like etc.)

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coldacid 2621 days ago
I find that remote follow is only an issue this way if you've gone directly to the other party's profile rather than following them from your own instance, or when your instance is being banned for some reason by the other party's instance. It could be smoother, but this is what we get for having to defend against XSS.

The bigger problem with Mastodon is the explicit support for censorship via defederating instances you don't like.

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Leace 2621 days ago
> rather than following them from your own instance

This all requires people to explicitly copy user/page URL to clipboard and paste it on their instance. "Follow me" buttons or twitter.com/share-link URLs are just not possible on Mastodon. Copying and pasting stuff doesn't look like good UX to me.

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willvarfar 2621 days ago
People managed to share email addresses, which are name@domain.
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lifthrasiir 2621 days ago
And the domain is predictable. There were (and still are) a two-part email form around the web, where the domain part is a drop-down list.
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dewey 2621 days ago
That would not be much different from a drop down of Mastodon instances then?

For both it's a bad way of doing it because people with their own domain can't use it for email and the Mastodon one would be too long to select something.

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lifthrasiir 2621 days ago
I meant that the comparison to the email is not adaquate because the number of common email domains had been steadily decreasing (and I hate it).
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