this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Mastodon
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Decentralised and open source social network.
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Even if you can figure it out, it’s still just unintuitive and a hassle. Theres a lot of friction and friction is the enemy of adoption. I’m a datacenter engineer and despite know exactly how Mastodon works it would just be too much time and effort to get the content flowing. I setup my account, figured I’d get around to it and never did. I wouldn’t blame any average person for just not feeling. Like putting in the effort.
The only reason I’m on Lemmy because I followed specific subreddits here so I didn’t need to go looking for anything.
Except facebook used to be like that, and somehow we did just fine. Shit myspace just gave you Tom when you signed up for a new account and nobody found that confusing either.
Standards have certainly changed, but it's really not that hard to follow a few people that look slightly interesting and grow your network based on who they post.
Yes clunky, unintuitive social media platforms did just fine back when they were all equally immature, clunky and unintuitive. But social media has changed a lot in the past 20 years and it’s grown to be more intuitive, usable, and relatively frictionless to adopt.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect every Tom Dick and Harry who are used to modern social media platforms built on decades of improvements to form and function, to just dive in head first to an experience that rivals the social media of a bygone era.
Facebook had an advantage in that you very likely already knew 98% of the people you wanted to add as a friend by name, and only had to search their name. After adding your friends, most of the work of setting up facebook is done