If email were invented today people would complain about how complex and annoying it is to sign up.

As someone who worked in IT support at a university and later as a sys admin: I believe MOST people (including young people) can not use the internet or a computer when it goes beyond installing and using a (popular) app from the App Store.

Many people can not, for example, look up a program via search engine, go to its website, find and click the correct download link and then install the program. Many people don’t even use websites anymore, they only use applications.

Their voices are missing online simply because they are basically tech illiterate. And I think that is a huge problem.

I flirted with journalism before getting my degree in CS.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the faculty and many of the students were almost proudly “bad at math” and basically bad with tech too, other than learning the basics of a Macbook.

Doesn’t have to be that way and many journalists are smart, great people, but there’s a weird self fulfilling culture when it comes to tech. Not totally sure about how tech focused writers would be similar or different.

Edit: Just googling “journalists bad at math” and got this from the Columbia Journalism Review:

“In many cases, they got into journalism to stay away from math.” Journalists love to joke about how we suck at math.

Edit 2: I guess I was bringing up my experience to be an example of how many journalists do not have a strong grasp of technical concepts and sometimes are almost proud of that. So it doesn’t surprise me that many may have struggled with Mastodon.

That being said, that attitude is far closer to the average user than, say, the user base of this platform, which is likely far more tech savvy. Streamlined user experience is not a bad thing if you desire mainstream use and is something that could be improved, though Mastodon has been making strides in that regard.

To be fair, if you want content on Mastodon, you have to actively go out, find people, and follow them. After you get past that Step 1 of signing up, your home page is empty. There’s no algorithm that automatically deposits content on the main page. You have to do a little bit of work to get anything. As you say, doing this work is not that god damn hard, but sadly for about 80% of people (maybe more), this is an impassible barrier.

On the bright side, once you do get past this barrier, none of the Mastodon content that you are getting is from that bottom eighty percent.

It’s pretty obvious 99% of users bounce off the signup page. People who think otherwise simply are too disconnected from normie reality

Here is what happens

Let’s join this thing

I have to choose a server ? Ok which one ?

Wow that’s so many, is this important or cani pick at random ?

If you pick wrong, everything you write could be deleted or never seen by anyone.

Ok, well I better choose properly

Read server rules pages for 2-3 minutes

There’s a distraction

Later, joins threads

Meanwhile, when you sign up for Threads your timeline is nothing but shitty influencers for the first few days, yet somehow they manage to press on through that without getting the vapors or whatever.

The problem is the paradox of “it doesn’t matter what server you pick” while also giving them a choice.

If choices don’t matter, why have a choice?

Although I disagree that it doesn’t matter