Post #4223680

@chroma@raccoonisland.social @flyingpenguin@infosec.exchange Fedi UX is inconvenient and/or broken in a number of ways. Its not the fact that people have to choose an instance. Its the fact that the fedi rubric still doesn't know what to do when you click on a link to fedi content, and no other application knows either. So an Ivory user may click on a link to a regular web page, and if that web page (or any page on any site) links to fedi content then the user will likely end up on a Mastodon web page – not Ivory – which doesn't recognize them and (gasp!) presents a prompt to log in to their home instance (on the web, not Ivory). The confusion is compounded by the makings of an eventual security nightmare; phisher's delight. There is so much UX f_ckery contained in that one example that I'm positive anyone encountering it more than once – and is not a techie who easily recognizes the context rug pulls and hops over them as you and I do – will probably run away from this. Non-fedi web sites can't effectively link to fedi content, because you are going to land on the author's instance not your own. So authors who began experimenting with fedi en masse in 2022 don't expose their readers to the fediverse.. they just keep using the "Share with Facebook/X/Insta" links. That is a sad, if not dead, ecosystem. Does the lack of monetization drain urgency from these UX issues? It might. But IMO, that still leaves us with a competence issue in much the same way that a Linux community which insists on presenting 7 different GUI options to users is a competence issue. Mastodon is the Linux Desktop of social media, and monetization won't make it popular. If monetization thoroughly explained the gap in popularity, we would see a version of the fediverse with instances that display ads. The problem is that the ActivityPub spec is incomplete (it should have a protocol handler definition) in addition to a raft of other UX issues that are ignored or even aggravated by Mastodon devs.