boggoPeople regularly explain to me how they wish something exactly like mastodon existed, and then I explain mastodon exists and then they're like "I don't get it, sounds weird, anyway I wish this thing existed" and they explain mastodon again.
DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-labI think a lot of people have almost some kind of cognitive blindness to idea that technology can be community run. It's not enough to explain or show or take them to it, they'll keep excusing how it can't possibly be a thing, and if it is than surely it will "fail" or has already failed.
nnenov@boggo it feels like a lot of people also try to find excuses to not use it which are really silly when the only real reason they don't want to switch from their current poo platform is because "everyone else is on it", but that's like an embarrassing reason or something so they try and come up with other excuses
Shannon Clark@nnenov @boggo with social tools how quickly you go from "I don't know anyone here/don't have anything to see when I login"
to
"I have to check .... every day/hour to keep up with all the great content I'm really interested in"
is strongly correlated with how quickly such tools grow their audiences and "network"
For those of us who have a large existing network of people using the Fediverse migrating here was relatively easy -as was once active finding more folks to follow and engage with
@Rycaut @nnenov I had basically no friends using fedi when I moved here and my presence on mastodon has been more useful for me overall than anything I ever did on twitter especially when I would post something and the response would be 2 AI bots and 4 tech guys quote tweeting how I'm woke.
User experience may vary though 😀
@boggo @nnenov indeed - but think back to the experience when you first joined - how did you find the first people to follow and engage with?
It certainly isn't impossible - and there are many ways to make it work - but my point is that many people bounce off any new "social" platform if they can't find that "hook" the first couple of times they try that platform out.
This is why various platforms have suggested profiles to follow or have algorithmic feeds esp for users without a "real" feed
@boggo @nnenov and to be clear - I'm not a big fan of either approach (Twitter back in the day had suggested profiles - and friends who got put on that list rapidly grew their followers counts - I wasn't on such lists and my Twitter followers stabilized at around 3000 or so relatively early and never grew much beyond that
And I strongly dislike the algorithmic slop of the "feed" in platforms like FB where most of what gets shown me there isn't from my real friends of even groups I have joined
@Rycaut @boggo I think the old twitter algorithm was good, I found so many interesting accounts back then. And I was also a lot more discoverable which is kind of important if you are an artist. Im lucky enough that I have regular work at the moment otherwise I would be spending a lot more time on Instagram trying to get my work out there. I really like how personal mastodon feels and its probably for the best its not been massively adopted as I can imagine some bad stuff happening.
Haelwenn /элвэн/ 
@boggo Heh, would probably be very funny to tell them the fediverse has been running since 2008.
Robin Syl 🌸
@boggo yeah I truly believe people think a website isn't serious unless it's run by a company.
Mastodon is decentralized so it's too complicated and will never work
Bsky is decentralized so it's the future
Mastodon is decentralized so it's too complicated and will never work
Bsky is decentralized so it's the future