Can Big Social just swoop in and take over the Fediverse on a whim?
Realistically, that can't happen.
1. Pivoting a big business is like captaining an aircraft carrier: it is slow and takes deliberation
2. Most businesses don't like to kill their cash cow, and the network effect that they own is their cash cow
3. Big Social itself is in disarray and doesn't have the wherewithal to make good strategic decisions
And there's other reasons too! 🧵
Big Social are no longer the innovators they were.
In actuality, for the past 10 years, most innovations in social media have been created by small, nimble players—which Big Social then attempts to either acquire or copy.
In essence, they've replaced R&D with M&A.
Thus, they probably have nothing new to add to the Fediverse.
The Fediverse is one thing that Big Social cannot acquire or copy.
No one owns the Fediverse, so that's not an option.
And to copy or integrate the Fediverse is to kill their own cash cows.
In essence, the Fediverse targets the chunk in their armour.
Big Social is obsessed with metrics, and proving value through metrics.
What metrics prove the Fediverse's value?
No one knows. Every metric regarding the Fediverse is at best conjecture. Nobody even knows its true size.
Hard to convince a CEO to buy into an idea when nothing is probable through metrics.
Nobody has validated the Fediverse as a place to make money.
Sure, tiny web-hosts might charge for services, but the average Big Social executive isn't looking to make tiny increases in a new venture. They want to 100x or 1,000x their ROI.
Somebody might eventually try this, but Big Social isn't going to be first.
Yes, Big Social has more than enough money and tech to upset the Fediverse.
What they don't have is the capacity to onboard knowledge about the Fediverse quickly and easily.
This is because the actual inner workings of the Fediverse are held by only a small handful of people.
Believe it or not, most people who work at Big Social are *not* social media nerds, and have zero interest in how the technology works.
When they look at Mastodon, their response is pretty much the same as everyone else's: they throw up their hands and say, "This is too complicated!"
And then they close their browser tab.
Chris, I have often been baffled by this: several good people I happen to know in the twitterverse, when they first experience something like #Mastodon, keep saying , 'it's too complicated'. I must be missing something that they have experienced, what it could be? If you want to post, follow, like, share, how much difference exists between twitter and this? Is it the tweetdeck like appearance of Mastodon client? Perhaps a phone client will make for easy onboarding (tusky/mtext)?
@atomicpoet @arin_basu It’s the server choice you must do to get in. When you try to enter this seems like an extremely important choice and there is almost no information available to help make the choice.
There should be a huge button saying “Pick a random server” and under it a text “you can easily change later if you don’t like it”.
This is probably everything that needs to be done.
Great point!
Just the other day, I got a question from a friend, 'But is it OK to join two servers?'
@rasmusdotse
> There should be a huge button saying “Pick a random server” and under it a text “you can easily change later if you don’t like it”.
The account creation page in the latest version of Mastodon specifies that you can follow accounts from different servers to the one you join. It has two options; join this server, or join another server, with a link to JoinMastodon.org. If they need to close registrations, the 'other server' option remains.
@rasmusdotse
It makes the point that choice of instance doesn't matter as much as people think it will. Because we make our own community here, regardless of which instance people are on (putting aside defederations etc). Having said that, it would be cool if that page also made it clear that it's possible to migrate between instances, carrying follows/followers along for the ride. So initial choice matters even less.
@rasmusdotse
Feel free to expand on that, keeping in mind that other new users may see things quite differently from you.
@rasmusdotse
Fair enough. What's your proposed solution? How and why do you think it will work better than what we're currently doing?
@rasmusdotse @strypey @atomicpoet
Hi Rasmus,
I am keen to see what UX/UI you come up with.
Say someone is interested to join mastodon and not too savvy about it. I know an elderly literature prof active in bird site, but she got very confused when some of us invited her to join mastodon without actually inviting her to a server.
Visiting joinmastodon, it was obvious why she found joining mastodon so complicated, 🙂
Need better onboarding
@arin_basu @rasmusdotse
> Need better onboarding
This is often hard to see from the inside. Any detailed feedback on this you can give the Mastodon folks, and fediverse devs in general, is valuable.
One possibility is a quiz that walks people through choosing a server. It wouldn't even have to be limited to Mastodon, as long as it's selecting from a list of servers that are accepting new accounts, and have been recently vetted for sanity and uptime.
@atomicpoet
Questions could include;
* Do you mainly want to post text, photos, audio, or video?
* Do you want a character limit on the length of posts?
* Do you prefer a crowded street or a quiet bar or cafe? [addressing server size]
* Do you prefer random chats at a street party or meeting people with similar interests at a conference or convention? [addressing general vs. themed servers]
* What's your favorite type of themed event?
@arinbasu1
> best asked once a person haa created an account
The point of the questions is to help them choose the right instance of the right software to create an account on. See instances.social as an example. I'm imagining a joinfediverse.foo site that uses a quiz like this to narrow down instance selection, but not limited to Mastodon or micro-posting. But with better graphic design, more like the joinmastodon server page.
@arin_basu @rasmusdotse When I said...
> One possibility is a quiz that walks people through choosing a server.
... turns out it wasn't my idea. I'd already seen this:
https://instances.social/
@arin_basu
> invited her to join mastodon without actually inviting her to a server.
Maybe we have something to learn from @snikket_im here? Maybe the best way to grow the 'verse sustainably is to get more organizations to set up servers and invite their people to join that way? People could join servers for their workplace, activist group, sports club, spiritual fellowship, educational institution etc etc.
Totally.
But my question was simpler: on the surface level, without delving any deeper, the basic operations at the server level are not that different.
Most people tend to ask where are their friends, and so on. Before twitter exodus, a lot of people would 'complain' that #Mastodon (ahem) is so empty ... where are the people?
Now there are people, but they ask, 'Where are **my** people I am familiar with?'
Chris Trottier
Arindam Basu
Rasmus Larsson #NAFO
Strypey
Arindam Basu
Steve Hunt 🇪🇺🔶 #RejoinEU #FBPE