To set aside the exclusionary shit and put my educator's hat on for a minute, the primary thing that makes mastodon complicated for people to get started with is not technical or practical, people know how to fill out forms - it's conceptual.
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To set aside the exclusionary shit and put my educator's hat on for a minute, the primary thing that makes mastodon complicated for people to get started with is not technical or practical, people know how to fill out forms - it's conceptual. Understanding how to choose an instance requires a significant amount of context, together with a clear sense of the implications of that choice. And we haven't done a great job of providing that context in an accessible way, so far anyway.
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@sue it feels to me that the problem is compounded by the fact that in order to get context, you need to understand the conversations that are happening on each instance, which you only really get by joining one, and then that completely shapes your experience.
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@sue Getting started with mastodon felt to me a lot like setting up a programming environment for a programming language I am trying to learn, in that I had to make a bunch of decisions about basic things where I didn't know enough yet to have an opinion, or whether it mattered.
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Right. And the two most common bits of advice - “it doesn’t matter what instance you’re on” or “start up wherever, it’s easy to move” - are both very wrong.
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