An interesting problem:
I've been hearing from a lot of folks that "I'm trying to sign up for Mastodon and it's not letting me / it's confusing / it's a mess / it's broken"
When I inquire, these folks are always using a mobile app to sign up
My sense is ... many mobile apps are bad *in general*, and their signup is *particularly* broken
I tell these folks to sign up using a plain 'ol browser and it works
I'm now switching my "hey, sign up!" advice to insist on using a browser
@jwill i’m the same way, I go web browser first!
But it appears that a big chunk of the population now, by convention, expects an app to be the way things work. And for a chunk of the population that uses the phone only — and may not even own a computer — apps are significant
@clive Yeah, I had that in my first version before I sneaky "delete & re-draft"-ed. It is def a paradigm shift...also the expectation that stuff is never down and always stable.
It's wild to think that those who joined Twitter deep in the twenty teens have no concept of the phenomena that was the failwhale. I mean people got it as a tattoo.
Clive Thompson
jwill