Oh my his finally. The only fediverse platform I use is Lemmy because finding interesting stuff and communities here is so easy. Mastodon is a pain in the ass by comparison, and starter packs really helped me find some cool accounts at the beginning of Bluesky.
The thing I need to use Mastodon is a proper search. Their opt-in design using hashtags just isn’t usable enough.
My issue with starter packs is I don’t want to commit. What if I pick the wrong one? What if I pick the wrong one instance!?
The anxiety of picking the wrong instance is a design failure. Content discovery shouldn’t depend on getting that choice right.
The fediverse needs a better content discovery/curation infrastructure.
It’s actually a messaging failure, because picking “the wrong instance” is practically impossible. It really doesn’t matter what instance you’re in, since that’s not what limits or expands your available content.
It does matter. I signed up to lemm.ee originally. The 4th biggest instance It is no more and my account and a few communities went with it. That risk still exists on mastodon.
You can migrate instances, though. So it’s mitigated somewhat.
Yeah, I am just saying some of the things I have heard. People don’t want the cognitive overhead of having to make decisions before trying a thing. They just wanna sign up and look around get a feel for something before deciding to dive in.
Mastodon in particular has a steep onboarding process. In order to get it useful you have too
- Sign up for an instance (which they have to find)
- search for people to follow when people are thinking in topics.
There isn’t an easy way to stumble into new things. I found it tedious and others I have spoken with have said the same. I suppose Mastodon isn’t for me (hence why I am here).
Mastodon servers can have different character limits and other customizations, but migrating is supposedly easy so you got that quite right. In Lemmy though there is a ”local” feature where you can easily browse content in your own server. I never use it but I guess it could be useful for some communities.
Aren’t most instances connected and can’t you search all those instances for accounts you’d want to follow?
I don’t already know who I want to follow though. What do I search for?
BTW these are things I have actually discussed with people when they are trying to look into fediverse stuff. They don’t want to know how it works. They just want to open up their devices and turn their brains off.
Which is probably a good thing for federated services as it filters out a bunch of people we probably don’t want here. It’s like a test to join.
It’s not just Mastodon. MANY open projects are working on theirs as well. Bonfire (as well as others) are working on Circles. Surf has curated feeds. :) It’s built into the Fediverse. ;)
I was hoping for this to come to mastodon :) and a new user will enjoy it as well!
My big issue with starter packs was that I’d follow them, and they’d have some random content creator in it that was tangentially related to the starter pack. Great, that’s fine. I don’t need the same 12 people giving me news and updates, etc.
The problem was that they would inevitably be on my feed, constantly talking about other stuff I am not interested in, and hardly ever discussing the starter pack subject. Which again, is fine. But I don’t want that, I wanted the starter pack subject matter, and get unrelated content. So I just unfollowed all the starter packs.
