The Seven Deadly UX Sins of the Fediverse Web Experience (To Fix)

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This post invites input in “the comments” but contains no link to any comments that I can see, and there’s no sign of an email address either, so I’m making a thread here.

The list opens on the problem of Instance Selection Paralysis – and I gotta say, the usual narrative here is both right and wrong in my experience. In theory, I’m part of the demographic being described: I have not made an account on the Fediverse, and that’s related to the task of selecting somewhere to join in the first place. With that said, paint a picture like that and you’re at risk of people getting the wrong idea.

I have the curiosity and the patience to deal with this process. I’ve looked at the directories. I’ve looked at the rec lists. I’ve repeatedly spent hours at a time evaluating my options. I still haven’t made an account on any of them. And as long as Fediverse advocates keep thinking of the problem in terms of “selection paralysis” (and denying me a comment section), they’re not going to find out why.

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IMO, this Tim Chambers guy is focusing on the wrong problem. The biggest UX problem besetting the Fediverse isn’t technogical. It’s social. It’s the people. I can’t fault them their passion, but every time I see somebody posting about politics on the Fediverse I think of “Spreading the Disease” by Queensryche:

Fighting fire with empty words
While the banks get fat and the poor stay poor
And the rich get rich and the cops get paid
To look away as the one percent rules America

The more online activism I see, the more I doubt the sincerity of the people doing it. Do they actually give a shit, or are they just trying to gain clout through performative concern for the cause du jour?

I’ve been there before, and I don’t ever want to participate in the Fediverse again, because once I started suspecting the motives of everybody posting about politics there it became impossible to stop.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend the Fediverse to others. I honestly believe that people would be happier online if they had their own websites, with or without blogs.

Nothing Tim Chambers suggests will fix that.

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Not what I had in mind, but I can understand adding it to the list. On the one hand, I figure some folks would argue that you can avoid certain kinds of pontificating by setting the right filters and picking the right website. On the other hand, on the social front more broadly, there’s a known problem with federated diplomacy being… underdeveloped, to put it mildly.

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Maybe you can, but I don’t think you should have to, and I think that many of Chambers’ proposed fixes would make the problem worse.

I was writing about this sort of thing years ago.

The problem with social media is that all of the downsides are opt-out:

  • public posting by default
  • being followed by random strangers
  • receiving unsolicited private/direct messages
  • receiving unsolicited public replies (sometimes you just want to broadcast)
  • being visible to the open web
  • being indexed by search engines
  • being subject to gamification via likes/retweets or favorites/boosts

I’m not just talking about Twitter, incidentally. The Fediverse honestly isn’t much better. When Eugen Rochko designed Mastodon and “lain” created Pleroma, they seem to have deliberately replicated all of the worst aspects of corporate social media and made many the same mistakes the GNU Social people made while adding new failures:

  • Posting to public timelines by default.
  • Anybody can follow you by default.
  • Your profile contains a hidden RSS feed accessible from the public web.
  • Search engines can index your public posts by default.
  • People can see how popular you are by default.
  • New accounts not only can but are encouraged to follow complete strangers, which rolls out the welcome mat for trolls and spammers.
  • Anybody can reply to your public/unlisted posts or direct message you by default.
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I can open the post in my mastodon client but of course I can’t see any of the replies. :skull:

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While perusing the comments on this PR discussing fixing the phantom reply issue I see there is apparently a necessity to make a request to every server involved in a discussion.

This darkens my already dim view of the W3C which can’t seem to do anything useful in the current decade.

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Were you able to find the Mastodon crosspost of Part 1? Because I only found Part 2.

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I just pasted the full URL into the search bar and “[opened] URL in Mastodon.” Is that a crosspost? I couldn’t say.

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Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I enjoyed both articles and I agree with most of the suggestions. I had actually already thought up the first two fixes myself and I think those would make for a much better onboarding experience. But I don’t use the Fediverse, at least not directly (I hadn’t realised Discourse was connected to the Fediverse until reading that article)

As someone who bounced off Mastodon when I decided to leave Twitter, I experienced many of these UX sins early on that left me confused, anxious and disensentivised to keep exploring the Fediverse. I’m not looking to use it again in its current form. I’d rather have my own website. I don’t use any of the big silo alternatives like Threads either. I ultimately found that I didn’t need a Twitter replacement for all the issues such services have.

(In the interests of full transparency, I am planning to return to Micro.blog for cross-posting updates from my website as I like the way it encourages connection while also baking safety into its features)

Instance selection paralysis was real for me. As I started reading about how this all works, it quickly became apparent that there were some servers you should avoid as they’d become too big, and too toxic. It also sounded like the choice was pretty final: get it wrong and you’d find yourself stuck. That’s not the case, but that’s the impression the conversations at the time gave.

In practice, you can move servers, but the experience is clunky. You leave behind a graveyard of dead profiles in your wake. This stopped me moving servers because it just feels icky.. but it also made it hard to find other people when I came across their dead profiles. That this is still the case three years later, doesn’t inspire confidence.

I’d rather see a Fediverse that allowed you to freely move between communities - profile and all - while keeping your followers. After all, when you move house you don’t leave your family photos on the wall for the new owners to look at, and you don’t cut off contact from all your neighbours. From a technical point of view, that might not be possible in the purest sense.. but I don’t need to know the technical details. Abstract that away and make it feel like i’ve packed up and moved to another community. Hide my dead profile on the old server.

There was also a real lack of help with user error on Mastodon. Shortly after joining, I got locked out of my account for a week.. or so I thought. I’d gotten mastodon.social confused with where I actually was, which was mstdn.social. No guidance to help me realise my error and no amount of password resets would help.

The whole private/not private DM thing also made me apprehensive. Of course I know that the big silos can also look at your private conversations, and I don’t trust billionaires, but I agree with the article’s comments about how it’s presented. There’s far too much risk of sharing the wrong thing in the wrong place.

I really like the idea of the Fediverse in principle, but I think the UX still leaves a lot to be desired. The way it is promoted too - the focus on the technical side of things - is also discouraging for less technically-inclined people who just want to talk to their friends. The indie web has a similar issue in terms of marketing imho, but at least communities like 32-Bit Cafe exist which are more welcoming and provide better onboarding.

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( Linking the proposed solutions again for convenience )

While the site selection process does warrant some… discussion… I think Tim Chambers’ suggestion of a website randomizer – and the way the post just glosses past the question of how the under-the-hood database will be assembled or managed over time – betrays a lack of familiarity with how comically ill-maintained a lot of these lists tend to be.

For example, last month, I decided to look for instances of Plume, so I started at the main Plume website linked on Delightful Coding and scrolled down to “Find an instance.” Of the 12 websites listed, 9 were no longer online, 1 was completely awash in spam, and of the remaining two, 1 was in Portuguese, and the other wasn’t even made out of Plume.

Regrettably, I am not fluent in Portuguese, so I guess that’s it for me and Plume.

I think Mastodon seems to mark “migrated” profiles now with a link to the next one (if that’s been set up), but yeah this is part of what makes it so ridiculous when people pitch the Fediverse by saying “You can switch away and still keep your followers!” – as if getting people to follow your account is all you care about, and you’re not expected to care at all about your own posts.

Dismaying, and a problem I imagine could be made a lot worse if your onboarding wizard doesn’t even reliably point you to the same place.

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While the article is written slightly obnoxiously, it makes some okay points, but to call the peculiarities of the fediverse deadly sins is hyperbole - beyond the intended amount of hyperbole, that is.

Choosing an instance never struck me as that hard, ‘just pick one of the big ones’ is sound advice and I don’t think it drives too many people away - I’ve never seen evidence that it has, at least. This one gets discussed so much but I’ve never seen the numbers to back it up. Just plug ‘which mastodon instance’ into a search engine and the first page you click will give you good advice.

Three timelines? You get used to it, don’t see the problem really. Just scroll through them, see what’s on them, see which you like for your daily peruse. Follow some users and hashtags, just kinda look around and figure it out. It’s fun! There’s no instant deluge of Content, that’s the whole point.

There’s an ongoing discussion about giving people the option to instafollow a bunch of users and hashtags to get them started fast, but IMO that would be counterproductive. Just let people explore and find stuff they like and slowly build up their own experience; that’s supposed to be the whole advantage of the fediverse.

As for interacting with other instances, I somehow never experience the difficulties that this kind of article likes to hammer on. Worst case you get redirected from the other intance to your own to boost/reply from there - works pretty consistently. I use an Android app that makes it entirely seamless, no goblins required.

I like DMs existing right alongside public posting - it’s an important visual and UX indicator to users that DMs are not private. Unencrypted, out in the open, your instance admin can read all your messages. The more you set it apart and give it its own interface, the more users will just assume it’s private. This is more secure and discourages users from posting sensitive stuff in plaintext.

The last points are about federation causing some posts to be invisible to some users, other users being difficult to find, and so on. This is mostly a strength to me - discovery is a slower process, you do not get the firehose of all instances blaring at you, there are no algorithms recommending you stuff, you just have to curate hashtags and follows from word of mouth.

A given user not seeing messages from unfederated servers - that’s one thing where you could fairly argue for a fix, a ‘show unfederated messages’ button. Right now you can visit the poster’s instance, but I agree it could do with a slightly smoother experience. Personally I’m fine not seeing stuff from unfederated sources, there’s a reason they’re unfederated.

I dunno… there are many articles like this and most of the complaints seems to amount to the fediverse not having all the wonderful features of Twitter, that haven of friendly discussion. Yes it’s different, yes it may take a little more work from the users, yes it’s not doing all your socialising for you and yes, you may even have to figure some stuff out for yourself - when did we decide that this is bad?

It seems that any learning curve is met by a chorus of tut-tuts from the UX experts these days, with their trueisms about retention and discovery. I guess we’ll just have to wait for Bluesky to inevitably turn to crap to see if people finally see the light of taking things a bit slower.

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I have been on and off searching for an instance since about 2016. It’s not exactly that it’s hard, per se, so much as that putting in time and effort go unrewarded.

Comms. What they want is comms.

I don’t appreciate this way of writing it off. This particular article and its followup are flawed, but that’s not the reason why.

No waiting necessary.

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Don’t let the number of instances and their differences stop you from just joining one on a whim - I’ve been on oldbytes.space for a while now, it’s nice and stable. It’s geared toward people talking about old computers but I pretty much never talk about that. Moved from fosstodon a few years ago because I wanted to write longer messages - also didn’t really talk about FOSS on there. It really doesn’t matter that much which instance you join, unless you want to talk about stuff many instances ban you from discussing - don’t know if that’s the case for you but if it isn’t, just hop on a big instance, see if you like it, and if you don’t, just hop over to another one. That’s the beauty of it, the freedom to hop around! Don’t worry too much about which instance is right, just give it a shot. Just my two cents.

I’m still in favour of the build-your-own model - you dip your toe into the million-little-silos Discord model and suddenly you’re dealing with a whole different beast to administer. It feels more elegant than following a bunch of people and hashtags at once, but I’d still prefer that to this kind of community. Wouldn’t oppose it really, but would not be in favour of it. Just talking fedi here, I do not doubt this works well for other communities.

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This is not the obstacle.

Discord is certainly not the model to emulate, it’s true. Dreamwidth is. The DW/LJ-style set of community features is categorically superior to running repeat tag searches because you can have actual moderation and better deal with homonyms. For instance, back when I was trying to look for posts about Bluesky by running a tag search on Mastodon.social, I kept running into posts that people had tagged as #bluesky that were just pictures of the actual sky. People were well within their rights to use that tag, but I didn’t have any particular way to avoid what from my perspective felt like clutter.

Point being, adding support for a comms feature would net you the benefits of one-click subscribing to multiple accounts and tags without the downsides of actually doing that, since a community has a designated topic to give you an idea of what you’re in for.

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I see the sense in it, though it occurs to me that that’s already, theoretically, what instances are - you can read an instance’s feed and while many of the larger instances are very permissive in what topics can be discussed, many of the smaller ones are laserfocused on particular topics, like these comms. The advantage of actual comms would be that you’d be able to join in from any instance, I suppose.

Guess I’m a fedi conservative to some extent; see what we can do with what’s already there, just make accessing the present features more intuitive. We have these features, such as topical instances and hashtags, that are supposed to facilitate this, but they’re not doing a good enough job. I tend more toward tweaking UX and smoothness of the process than adding features - especially these comms, which would presumably necessitate more admins and mods when many (most?) instance admins are already spread quite thin.

Though It would kind of expand the decentralisation concept in a new way, where the instance you join starts to matter even less because you’d be interacting in these comms that are independent of instances… I’m going back on forth on this one if you can’t tell, it’s an interesting idea.

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I appreciate you giving it some thought.

One of the distinctions I would draw between instances and community features is that comms are meant to be more deliberately topic-focused, categorically, as a rule. Though some Fediverse instances are built around various themes, it’s my understanding that staying “on topic” isn’t generally enforced at the instance level. If you go onto Indieweb.social, for example, and make a post about your pet cat, I wouldn’t expect the administrator to come in and remove your post for being off topic.

I figure the closer point of comparison for comms might be subreddits, in that they’re not just groups of people who share an interest; they’re collections of posts dedicated to those interests. They’re also generally small scale and moderated by individual users who manage just a given community, not the entire website.

Reddit does have federated equivalents out there like Lemmy and such, I’m aware, but I don’t know how well those have handled inter-instance groups or how ordinary it is for Fediverse users on other types of platforms to subscribe to those groups.

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