something I have had hammered into me by working in software for the past fifteen years is that it's impossible to overstate how important a smooth and intuitive user experience is most people want things to Just Work, the second you put any tech barrier up you lose 90% of users
I've seen new hires trying to setup the company VPN The doc is "okay" , not really fancy but if you follow it step by step it works (there are 4 steps) They scrolled through the whole doc, and said "it doesn't work". They did not even read a word of it, it was too overwhelming for them
This is why my Mastodon experience lasted all of three or four hours. I'm a pretty sharp guy. I work in this industry. I could have figured it out... but for a "hey, let's try this out and see if it sucks" scenario, not worth the effort.
Mastodon truly was not straight forward for me. It felt like reddit but if each subreddit required a separate long in. I could be super wrong but I didn't stay long enough to find out
Carpentry tools based software pedagogy.
Hard agree, speaking as someone who tried Mastodon twice and ultimately bounced off it both times.
I like to think of myself as tech savvy, and even I thought Mastodon was a bit much. Like, clicking a link, being told I'm not logged in, trying to, and failing. Why? Wrong server. But the same login interface as any other. Not intuitive, and I imagine many users would simply quit there.
The default app pushes you straight to mastodon.social right now I think. But I think initial impressions have stuck. I still love it there because there’s a few communities that are great and I have friends there. But it’s clear it hasn’t worked for a lot of folks.
I've gotten a lot of mileage out of pointing my colleagues to the classic Don't Make Me Think.
I'm pretty tech savvy, I build my own PCs and grew up having to tinker to make computer things work. That said, my social media is not worth my time to tinker with. Bluesky still has some work in that regard but it's leagues ahead of mastadon