@legion @TendieMaster69 Are you onboarding using the browser or using the official #Mastodon app? Onboarding online is a lot more understandable than onboarding in the app IIRC
I think people are intimidated by step 3. Don’t ask me why, but for a certain type of web user, it’s an absolute deal breaker for some reason.
Yeah, having to actually choose a place to go was the main impediment for meto create a mastodon account in the first place. I kept stalling and putting it off, once I did it iwas easy enough. I think a lot of people don’t realise at first you can make other fedaration accounts with the same email and how easy it is.
Except I’m I was not a big twitter user in the first place, so I probably should have started with one of the niche feds first, like star trek or the art one, those would prompt me to interact more.
Tbh it’s capitalism. It teaches people to be afraid of choices, and to just take what the corporation is handing them. It’s… disconcerting how pervasive this kind of convenience culture has become and what kind of effect it’s having on people’s lives
Fedi doesn’t have an onboarding problem, people have a capitalism problem
In the browser. It’s not confusing to me, but I’m a software developer. Millions of Twitter users aren’t going to make it past the server selection step. And many that do are going to be confused when they click to Follow someone and get a weird popup (because that someone is on a different Mastodon instance) instead of instantly following the person.
It’s nowhere close to a smooth enough experience for the lion’s share of Twitter users to transition over. I think people that are used to even slightly technical things vastly overestimate what the average end user is capable of handling. These are the people that ask for help to plug in an HDMI cable.
I feel like the hurdles are kind of features. If your elderly parents can’t figure out then they can’t well flood it with trash. Reddit was the same way at first, oh so long ago. People weren’t used to the format and users without any tech savvy were dissuaded from entry. That turned into a libertarian foundation. This time around the generations that are tech savvy aren’t libertarians, they’re progressives. So we’re seeing a progressive foundation in the federation become established, and that’s going to narrate the future culture here, just like libertarians narrated the culture of reddit for so long.
The onboarding for Masterson is the best of all the fediverse sites but I still think the average internet user would get confused.
