This week, I went over to Bluesky and asked people who'd left Mastodon why they left, and lots of people told me. I grabbed the replies and crunched them and wrote up a summary. I think it's really interesting and often kind of wrenching.
https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt
Rather than trying to head off the unusual unpleasantness about clout-chasers and the ritually/technologically impure, I will just say this:
I wrote this up for fedi people who are actively curious and interested in other people, and I'm not going to worry too much about how it lands for those who aren't.
The tl;dr (because TL! it's TL) is that, for this group:
- people feels stressed and anxious when they get yelled at for breaking rules and norms they didn't know about
- it's hard to find people and conversations, and specifically hard to follow people across instances
- people want better organic and algorithmic ways to connect with each other
- instance-picking stresses people out, and a lot of the sign-up and settling-in processes are confusing and/or too much work for unknown returns
something I didn't have room for in the post itself is that a non-tiny group of people have had instances blow up on them over the years, leaving them starting over again and again—this is especially destructive for newer folks, who don't always understand what's happening
Lastly! I squeaked this post in under a rapidly dropping door—I'm going to be really busy for a day or so and then offline for awhile. If you ask questions after today and don't hear back, that's probably why!
Please be cool with each other and don't make me come back to screaming fights in my replies. <3
Reading through now.
In case I forget (I always forget):
"building cultural norms into the tooling is much more effective and less alienating than chiding"
One of the best encapsulations of this idea, born of the challenges of managing the StackOverflow community norms (which tend towards scolding like lava), is Jeff Atwood's "Just In Time" Theory of User Behaviour:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-just-in-time-theory/
I return to this a lot - it's useful.
Re. the second "couldn’t find people or interests" group, I viscerally feel this.
I set up an alt-account to indulge in therapeutic socialising around the (big) football (soccer) team I follow.
The experience has been excruciatingly difficult in many ways. It's been a job. I'm two week into relentless *work* to drum up even a little consistent sociability. It's been almost zero fun. If I were normal, I'd have given up on day two.
Two idea I think would make it easier (cont)...
@charlesroper @kissane I use the Qoto instance specifically because they have implemented a Domain list feature which means I can also monitor the federated feeds from a number of geo based servers without needing to join each.
