Not a single button to download the app on the landing page.
A lot of info about the company who made it, a lot of info about how bad other actors are, and a lot about requesting funding, but not a single video, neither how to explore the platform or download anything.
Alas, this is par for the course in the Fediverse. Mastodon is the only ActivityPub-using social network I'm aware of that has broken away from this. (Maybe Lemmy, to some degree?)
Social networks that focus on people and user experience have a shot. My hunch is those -- like PeerTube -- that focus on technical, political, or philosophical motivations will always be niche at best.
(Which is not to discourage experimentation! This seems to be a fantastic moment to experiment with social media design.)
> Mastodon is the only ActivityPub-using social network I'm aware of that has broken away from this
I tried signing up for Mastodon a couple years back, and failed somehow. Thankfully Threads and Bluesky are easier to use. Hopefully Mastodon has improved, but I'm already using two other competing micro-blogging platforms now.
Mastodon has changed quite significantly since a few years back. We take product design seriously and spend a sizeable amount of our resources on improving usability and reducing friction. If you could, please try again, and let me know how it goes this time. If you are an Android user, I strongly recommend our official app, as in my (obviously biased) opinion it is the best social media app right now and the user experience I am most proud of.
Yeah, absolutely. Despite its growth, IMHO Mastodon is still a usability mess in the sense that a typical user will find it needlessly complicated compared to any alternative that is perceived as equivalent. The confusion starts early, with onboarding. I think this is one of the reasons why, for instance, Threads became a larger social network in its first ~24 hours than Mastodon had in its entire 6-ish year run to that point.
I was curious what the experience was like, having never used Mastadon. I searched for "Mastadon Signup"
First page is a bunch of rules. I don't mind moderation and decorum, but leading with that sends a signal to me that the moderation is going to be even more capricious than Reddit.
> that sends a signal to me that the moderation is going to be even more capricious than Reddit
That's actually where mastodon (and other fedi-platforms) different from a mainstream social media, because you have a choice:
- you can choose an instance with very strict moderation to be in an echo chamber with like-minded individuals.
- or if you choose instance with little to no moderation - you'll find yourself on a platform where everyone speaks what's really on their mind, even if it's socially unacceptable.
Choosing instance is hard, because popular ones are blocking a lot of small instances (mostly because of spam). But simply choose a server close to your interests, you can transfer your account between instances later.
From cloudflare 2024 stats bluesky traffic shot up during the US election but is now back below (aggregrate across all servers) mastodon traffic [1]
But its true that mastodon did not have a major breakthrough as of late and bluesky will likely surpass it in the near future as some important "high information quality" communities (journalists, scientists etc.) seem to migrate there in preference.
Orientation towards general (mainstream, non-tech) users, easy usability etc is indeed a problem for the fediverse. The reasons are mostly an anti-commercial ideological stance which on the one hand makes funding scarce. Hence brilliant open source products - there are many more than peertube - remain unpolished, not marketed at all etc.). On the other hand this hostile culture keeps mainstream actors from joining the revolution.
But make no mistake this is a revolution. The hyper-concentration in social media is an aberration that does not fit any other pattern in society and the economy. Some more pragmatism from the decentralization pioneers will accelerate the inevitable.
Arguably, Bluesky being spun off from Twitter and having Jack Dorsey as one of the founding members is a somewhat Meta-like advantage, in a sense of immediate legitimacy in the press and networking opportunities/connections in Silicon Valley. Mastodon had to start absolutely from scratch. I had zero connections to anyone important when I launched it. Bluesky also raised over $8M in venture capital funding, while Mastodon was being developed on a $0/mo budget for the first year of its existence, and something like $5000/mo for the next 5. Our current annual budget of around $500K still pales in comparison to the money Bluesky has at their disposal right now to spend on e.g. marketing. They also have the advantage of not really trying to do decentralization. That being said, venture capital money isn't free, while Mastodon's funding comes from the community with no strings attached, so in the long term, I believe in our approach.
To add some color to my comments: I also believe in your approach and I admire the work you and your team have done.
To sum up my entirely unoriginal opinions:
1. Mastodon has far better usability than any other Fediverse software I'm aware of
2. Despite this, usability is still a material coefficient of drag on Mastodon's growth
To be clear, I don't believe Mastodon has to or even should aspire to match the growth of other more centralized networks; only that usability is a drag on what would otherwise be natural growth for Mastodon itself.
I know you and your team spend a considerable amount of time and energy on usability, so I hope I'm not saying anything you don't already know infinitely better than I.
I'm not the person you're asking to, but I failed at the "choose a server" part. I started having a bunch of questions over the choice of server and then gave up from analysis paralysis.
What are the implications of choosing one server over the other? Does this affect search and discoverability in between servers? If I really like Baking and really like Fencing as well, should I join the "Matodon Baking" server, the "Fencing fans" server of a neutral one? If I choose the Fencing server, will the people on the Baking server start seeing me as some sort of outsider since I'm not originally from the Baking server? Will they even be able to organically find me? How does the algorithm evaluate these choices? Can I restrict/split my posts between Baking, Fencing and general? And so on...
> What are the implications of choosing one server over the other?
Unless you choose a political or spam-friendly server - it doesn't matter.
> Does this affect search and discoverability in between servers?
A little.
> If I really like Baking and really like Fencing as well, should I join the "Mastodon Baking" server, the "Fencing fans" server of a neutral one?
Shouldn't matter.
> Will the people on the Baking server start seeing me as some sort of outsider.
Never seen anything like this, but I can imagine if you choose a server associated with 'A' and leave a comment in a server where people hate 'A', they might have a prejudice against you, so it's better to choose a very neutral, general server.
> Can I restrict/split my posts between Baking, Fencing and general?
Use tags.
> How does the algorithm evaluate these choices?
There's no algorithm, you follow people you like and block people you don't like.
On mastodon you have three timelines/feeds: local, federated and global.
Local is for posts local to your instance. Federated is local + posts from other instances, from people that are followed by somebody on your instance. Global is for any posts from anyone.
For example: if you join art instance your local feed will be very artsy and federated feed will be slightly artsy.
It matters little, because most people use and subscribe to hashtags to discover posts. Federated feed is too random, especially in big instances.
I would suggest to pick one of the larger instances – they are stable and have been for a while. For example, I'm on mstnd.social. You can also go with the official mastadon.social, probably the simplest. hachyderm.io is also a popular one, especially with programmers.
Even after reading this comment I went searching for the button and it took a while to find it.
And the homepage says in bold letters “The PeerTube mobile app for Android & iOS is out!” but it’s not a link! There’s a link further down but it goes to this article where you then have to scroll.
Not every site has to be super conversion optimized but it’s just common sense to put a CTA at the head of an announcement. joinmastodon.org gets it!
That's an assumption and not necessarily true. Some users may read it, some may skim, some may come to the page already convinced. For those latter groups, having a fast lane/shortcut call-to-action visible someplace like the top gives them a way to get started before they get overwhelmed/distracted and potentially leave.
that's the kind of attitude that makes otherwise successful apps/content/etc created by stiff engineer minds to never experience any success: "they didn't want it anyway", when people literally didn't _understand_ what you were trying to sell.
Right. They even have a nice picture of their SepiaSearch web page, with a picture of the search box. But is it a live search box? No. I have videos on PeerTube, and I never heard of SepiaSearch.
PeerTube is a good way to host videos, but nobody will discover them from PeerTube. I put technical videos there, which are referenced in other forums. They play fine. Here's one.[1] I get maybe a hundred plays. I just view PeerTube as something like imgBB, a place to host content that you can't store on a forum that doesn't handle images. Like HN.
PeerTube should be used more like WordPress - something lots of sites run for their own videos.
What PeerTube does is offload playout to the browsers of others watching the same video at the same time. This allows modest streaming servers to, at least in theory, serve large numbers of users. I don't think any PeerTube video has gone viral enough to test that scaling.
Note that this is not like BitTorrent. It's just caching and streaming, not copy distribution. There's one master copy, and peers only host copies while playing.
I was under the impression that you could permanently "seed" videos for others, even if you're not the origin instance, through WebTorrent or something along those lines. Fuzzy memory tho
It's amusing that the Mastodon creator is German, and PeerTube French, as the user experience on Mastodon can feel strikingly similar to dealing with the labyrinthine bureaucracy of European regulations.
On Mastodon, the fragmented network of servers and the need to grasp federation mechanics mirrors the intricate web of European policies, where navigating localized laws and cross-border harmonization can feel like wading through red tape.
Both present an ostensibly open and decentralized structure, promising freedom and community-led participation, yet are riddled with complexities that bewilder newcomers.
I've used PeerTube for years and it has always baffled me how laughably bad its user experience is. Literally so bad that I've never told someone about it without them immediately just asking me stuff instead of getting the information - or even better: videos that the person wanted to see - from the website(s).
Maybe the mobile client is a step in the right direction? I can hope! But the fact that I have to tell people "okay, so sepiasearch is kind of like the youtube front page...ish?" is already just infinitely dumb. Make a damn client whose name indicates, in some way, that it's a video website. And then shows some damn videos on the front page. Randomize them if you really can't stand "algorithms", but honestly, just put some videos on a page with "videos" in the url (or something similar), and you can cut down on most of the confusion I've seen.
Engineers get so lost up their own asses about this stuff because they can't see that UX is entirely divorced from functional processes. The user needs to do thing X, and the computers can only provide processes Y, Z, etc; forcing the user to reconcile with Y and Z just because they want X is the definition of "programmer design". It's refusing to engage with the very real ways in which users understand and interact with services, for whatever sake the engineers want to make up ("I don't like to obfuscate what is happening", "this is not complicated. users should be able to understand", "it would waste resources to provide a more streamlined experience", etc. These are all terrible reasons to not bridge the interaction gap between developers and users). Bluesky is my favorite example of people abstracting away the complications of this stuff. Yes, they had to centralize some parts to start with, yes they had to compromise on features - but the damn thing is instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with microblog social media. That's all peertube has had to do for years now, and they have just staunchly refused to do it.
Like I said, hopefully the mobile app is their first steps in the right direction with this stuff. They've been doing the dev stuff - made it work, made it fast, made it good! Now they just need to do the user stuff - make it simple, make it familiar, make it accessible.
> Engineers get so lost up their own asses about this stuff because they can't see that UX is entirely divorced from functional processes.
This is one of the main reasons that open source has never penetrated beyond engineers, IT people, and computer hobbyists.
The problem is that when you are good at using computers it's not easy to see how unbelievably confusing they are to people who are not good at using them.
The other is that there's no funding system to pay people to do the not-fun parts of programming or to maintain the more user-facing aspects of projects.
The crazy thing is that in many cases there isn’t even really much novel work required to end up with a user-friendly product. Devs can easily benefit from the vast amounts of time and money put into UX research by simply pattern-matching on the mountains of prior art now out there. It’s not like it’s still the early 80s where graphical UI is still in its infancy and there are no examples to follow.
> This is one of the main reasons that open source has never penetrated beyond engineers, IT people, and computer hobbyists.
This is also the reason there's so many multimillion dollar businesses that are essentially front end interfaces to open source projects. Hell, how many for ffmpeg alone?
> The other is that there's no funding system to pay people to do the not-fun parts of programming or to maintain the more user-facing aspects of projects.
I think there are plenty of people that make things looking nice. I do, but I hate web. Maybe this is why TUIs are taking off? But there definitely is a funding problem. My partner is doing a PhD in economics and whenever I talk to any of them about open source software, and how much of the world is dependent upon it, they get very confused and it's a lot of fun to see. I highly recommend (plus, I'd love to see the actually thinking about these kinds of frameworks. Clearly us devs haven't figured it out and it's worth asking for outside viewpoints)
For a while at least Apple was the most valuable company in the world, mostly on the back of caring a lot about UI/UX. Under the hood it’s just BSD and a bunch of services and libraries.
It's true. BUT I think they are currently making a fatal mistake. They are ever increasingly being hostile to devs and powerusers.
I see a lot of sentiment (including around these parts) that one should not care about those groups because they are a small percentage, but you could say that about any group. These groups definitely give your stuff a lot more value. I mean what is a smart phone with no apps? That's the real reason they took off. Arguably the same reason computers did too. Unless you really think you can do everything in house, then you need devs and power users (besides that it helps with finding bugs). You don't need to make the platforms geared towards them, but I think there is a difference when you start acting hostile. I mean isn't the reason Silicon Valley is full of macbooks in the first place is because mac felt more nix like and we could program on them more easily than windows? Seems short sighted.
Edit: fatal is too strong of a word. Google is doing it too and its monopoly behavior
The problem is all the competitors are also megacorps. Apple and Google and Microsoft are all hostile to power users in different ways. They can all make different fatal mistakes and it won’t matter because there is no real competition to this oligopoly in tech.
It’s why I made the edit. I still think it’ll end up being fatal in one way or another. Maybe someone can get past the excessive barrier. Or maybe because well behaving monopolies are less likely to get forcefully broken up. But yeah, we’re on the same page
I mean in reality, this is an excuse. We can and do build good software for many and all people, but the bad ones make it look like every engineer is out to lunch.
Counterpoint, it's rarely an incentive to OSS software (individuals) to sit down with focus groups of early adopters to gather valuable feedback that can help iron out rough spots, so maybe a classic a little of A, a little of B here.
That is the fediverse disease. Boosters seem to believe that people care about all this inside baseball stuff, when in fact it is repulsive to normal people.
Many of the comments here on hacker News are talking about how like difficult it is to find a linked download to get the video so that you can watch the video so that you can go lull and share meme videos about cats playing pianos and what not. Dopamine junkies talk like this.
So perhaps there's a need for a dopamine specialist, or a dopamine hit specialty in software development and product management?
Certainly marketing exists but marketing has become such a fuzzy wuzzy taboo subject and I think you know we'd like to just inject it all straight into our veins ..
.. so how about making a role in open source projects called the Dopamine Optimizer?
That way we could celebrate the intention, making a delicious physically resonant software tool? Functionality is a joy, for sure, there's an intellectual Joy to programming, yes, but social acceptance and the delight that comes from having our brain glands squirt out dopamine is an underappreciated aspect of I think the work that a lot of us may do.
this is basic design 101. Well designed content works better than badly designed content. If you want someone to read your page and find the button, the onus of making it readable is on you. And there's plenty of pretty basic techniques to achieve that. No need to be a "dopamine specialist".
I think that's mainly because PeerTube itself is software, not a platform. It'd be like complaining "The Thunderbird website doesn't show me how to get an e-mail account."
Granted, they can and should do a bit better here by giving people who searched "PeerTube" some directions to go in (including, clearly, adding app downloads.) That said, it's somewhat understandable that it's not a focus: I reckon 9 times out of 10 when someone finds PeerTube in the wild, it's from a PeerTube instance itself. Besides that, having a specific place to go defeats the purpose of federation somewhat.
Thunderbird is a client, and that's all it is. PeerTube is a lot of things, and that makes it hard to have a single coherent landing page. I still agree with putting the damn button on there realistically (please note that I already agree to that in my first comment, and no, I didn't edit it in after the fact), but if anything I think they need more than one landing page in either case.
That's why software loses to platforms. Platforms are convenient, and software isn't. Businesses know this, but open source developers don't really, and they don't have money to commit to running platforms anyway. You couldn't make a new email today with any degree of popularity - and many attempts were made, from XMPP to Matrix to the Fediverse.
The thing that leads to confusion is thinking about things in terms of winning or losing, but open source devs rarely actually care about what's most successful in the market. At best, success in the market is merely a means to an end for open source developers. The real goal of most open source developers is merely to produce the software.
For some things, this actually is okay. Like for example, market-wise, Discord has dominated online chat. Does anyone still using XMPP or IRC care? Nope, because as long as there are networks to chat on and more than one person the network works. At worst, the main pain felt by market dominance is that the rooms may be smaller than they could be since people are less wont to join. But in practice, the quantity often isn't that big of a problem. I had some of my best conversations and met people I still know today in an IRC chat that never had more than 50 users online at any time and was inactive most hours of most days.
The market can do whatever it wants as far as I am concerned.
Free Software as a movement started by Richard Stallman and the FSF has inherent political and ideological goals.
Open Source was coined to contrast with this, and this term was endorsed by a lot of people working on open source software at that time, including Linus Torvalds.
So, the goal of open source software is not to change the world. The goal of open source software is to produce software that is open source. (The goals of "free software" are out of scope.)
Most things are worthless if not in service of something else. If you follow this line of thinking all the way to the end, then you just come to the useless conclusion that all life and everything we do is meaningless.
edit: This is not a very good response, it leaves too much unsaid. I'm basically just trying to conclude that most open source developers out there, at the very least, the long tail of them, are just writing code and working on things chiefly because they want to do so, with no particular expectations of anything in return. That doesn't mean they have zero goals or aspirations, but they are not the primary reason to do the work. And even without starting with such a goal, it doesn't mean nothing can be achieved, as one can see from projects like Linux, Krita, OBS and so forth. Clearly people don't write software in a vacuum for literally no reason at all, but OTOH whereas commercial software almost certainly has the explicit goal of "succeeding in the marketplace", there is no real inherent goal for open source software, and many people work on it without a stronger reason than "Because I want to."
Checking again, I've made a realization: that's the same landing page. Which does actually have the operative information on it, but it's acting half as a landing page for what PeerTube is and half as a call-to-action for where to go. I think this is a bit disorienting: the two different purposes should be split into different pages and possibly even different websites in my opinion. It'd be ideal if what you got as a user was a couple sentences explaining what PeerTube is and then just an interface to find an instance.
I also think a big CTA for "Download App" would be a good addition to the credit of the root comment of this thread.
The top of the page has "What is Peertube • Browse Content • Upload video"
I mean, it could be a bit more visible, I guess, but it's not exactly invisible.
I get the point that maybe have browse content as the main page ... but given that the point of peertube is the network not the videoclient, the current page also makes sense to me.
It's a blogpost about the release of their app for peertube. If you don't know what peertube is, just check their homepage...? It's been around for a while.
A lot of info about the company who made it, a lot of info about how bad other actors are, and a lot about requesting funding, but not a single video, neither how to explore the platform or download anything.
I guess this is not made for users...