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

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.

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.

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.

They should try navigating Facebook

Every Reddit and Twitter user over the last few months: "OMG The Fediverse is so hard and complicated how can people figure this out?!?!?!!!!11eleven"

My brother(s) in data: It takes like 5 minutes to understand how it works and you're good to go (maybe 10 if you were the paint-chip-or-glue-eating-type back in school.)

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

One thing I don't get. Among the gazilion "Oh, it is sooo easy to do this better" complainers are countless developers and designers. This whole Mastodon thing is Free Software, where countless people spent some of their free time and energy to give you what there is today. Complainer devs and UX folks, are your PR's getting rejected?

I still don't even know what the servers on lemmy are, each "subreddit" is a different server?

i also love the "oh noes there are nerds on there!" concern trolling, motherfucker read the wikipedia page on who first adopted and built the communities on twitter and reddit

Its easy to signup & get started, just have to be awake...

They tend to portray everything new, different and/or popular with geeks as bad or complicated, I see this as a rite of passage for the fediverse. Remember when they were shitting on computer gaming in the early days of the hobby because of who it was initially popular among?

I think it's a mix of the way journalism works in the age of overstimulation (everything is the best/worst anyone has ever witnessed) and old(er) people being unfathomably tech-illiterate.

And I don't even mean that negatively. I often really am unable to fathom how disorienting even the slightest change in a software they're used to is to them.

If my mother were to use the birdsite, and they'd change their theme from blue to red one day, she would literally be unable to use it, because "it's all different now"

Also, mastodon does have some usability problems, though they are not that big imo.