[tekchip]

Pretty tired of this rhetoric. Mastodon functions basically identical to email and damn near every normies has figured it out. Pick a server, sign up, share your handle(email address) with your friends. Type in box zoom zoom.

Content wise it's a timeline so you, by default, only get who/what you follow. Sure local server timeline and global is an option but then it's no better or worse than the random crap X's algo throws, uncontrollably, in your face.

[BoiledCabbage]

> Pick a server, sign up, share your handle

Except nobody picks email servers really anymore.

And even back in the day, during the main growth phase, people didn't really pick email servers. They picked an ISP (like AOL) which gave them an email server. And there really was very little choice.

> share your handle(email address) with your friends.

People don't use twitter to talk to their friends. They use twitter to hear from people they don't know. And they won't know which server people they want to follow have signed up for.

Now they need to figure out how to search for them across all servers.

People don't adopt "tech", they adopt "solutions". And everyone I hear about that tries Mastodon says it's tech, maybe even good tech, but nobody says it's really a one click solution.

Make Mastodon adoption as familiar and easy as Bluesky is and it would will growth faster.

Saying "you just have to understand these 3 things" isn't how to get adoption. And saying how easy they are to understand doesn't help either. Figure out how to make it so they have to understand 0 new things - that's how to grow adoption.

[TeeMassive]

> Mastodon functions basically identical to email and damn near every normies has figured it out.

People struggle with emails everyday. Phishing, spam, identity theft, etc. We just delegated the complexity to Big Tech and even then it is barely working.

> Pick a server, sign up, share your handle(email address) with your friends.

Just "picking a server" is one step too much that the vast majority of people don't even know what it means or entails, hell most people don't even know what a server is.

Also nobody is going find friends and share their handles with. Facebook just proposes you people after subscribing. X and Reddit just gives you the front page that makes the news. Mastodon / Bluesky / Threads never make the news.

> Content wise it's a timeline so you, by default, only get who/what you follow.

People don't know what they want or what to follow. The "I just get a community of people I want and know" becomes an echo-chamber very quickly and echo-chambers are boring and doesn't get millions of views. Call it "random crap the algorithm throws" if you want but it doesn't change the fact that people want to be on the social media where everyone else is at.

[theshrike79]

But, like email, there is a discoverability issue.

I want to find person X's email/mastodon. I know their name and they use that name attached with the account, how do I do it without leaving the application?

With Twitter, Threads and Bluesky, I can just search and find the person.

[verdverm]

The ATProto FAQ describes the problems of AP they aim to make better

1. Account portability

2. Data distribution on the network (Mastodon is known for DDOS'n small servers when a post goes viral)

3. Global search

https://atproto.com/guides/faq