Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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Maybe ask the people what they find confusing about Mastodon, and listen.
I'll give you example. Say I want to sign up , but mastodon.social has currently closed sign-ups. People tell me I can just sign up on any instance, but there's dozens of them and they all appear to be the same. As someone who's not familiar with federated services, I don't know what to base my instance decision on.
How would you help me overcome this choice paralysis?
Additionally, there's the usability hurdle of interacting with non-home instances from outside mastodon. If I pull up someone's blog and click the little mastodon social media icon, it may very well link to mastodon.world. If my home instance is mastodon.social, now I have to launch into my own server, search up the account, and then begin interacting.
It's trivial to do but it is an extra step, but for your less-tech-literate friends and family it can be a point of confusion. Mastodon handles federation great in-ecosystem, but the broader web is still going to treat each instance as a different site.
As I said elsewhere, many people just want a place they can go to share memes, news, opinions and misinformation. But on the other hand, there are plenty affiliated with interests/hobbies/identities/ideologies where you can to share topical memes, topical news, topical opinions, and misinformation (as long as it's on topic).
Snark aside, I'm on two instances: one for socializing, and another for my interest in cybersecurity. So I'd start with: do you want an experience that's more typical of social media with a more general pool of people, or do you want to focus on a specific interest but with the understanding that entails a smaller userbase and a slower feed?
If the latter sounds best to you, what communities do you find yourself most active in on other platforms (e.g. reddit, lemmy, facebook, twitter)? If not, we can find a relatively well-populated instance that's likely to have staying power.