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@james

It's not that baffling.

1. Good user experience, fundamentally requires above all else, empathy for the user.

2. A lot of the Mastodon community, lacks this basic empathy for these users.

hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/113

There's not much attempt made to understand why users are choosing BlueSky, and what Mastodon could change to have them choose Mastodon.

Instead, there's fierce resistance to change, and disdain directed at users for even wanting some of these basic improvements.🤷🏿‍♂️

@mekkaokereke @james Except this doesn't explain why people we had relationships personally, decided after zero experience on here, to wait and go to BS. The Twitter front end is the entire reason why all of these people went over there. They wanted something easy. Trust me. The vast number of people that just migrated last week are all of the notion that this is too complicated. They do not care as long as it is easy for them and they don't have to put any work in. And they care deeply about follower counts.

@noondlyt @james

1. "Trust me!" But... I don't trust you.🤷🏿‍♂️

2. I don't have to put my hand in the fire to know that it's hot. I can see a friend get burned, and learn the lesson through their pain. When they warn me that fire is hot, I believe them.

Said another way, the influential first Black women who tried to land on Mastodon got burned very badly, and told all their friends on Twitter that this place is hell.

Eg hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/112

@noondlyt @james

Even your response, without a shred of irony, says absolutely nothing about making Mastodon better, but is full of value judgements of your friends for choosing a better UX.

And we act like there's something noble about fighting through bad UX, and being "Willing to work for it." There's not. It's just bad UX, and a bad on-boarding experience.

@mekkaokereke @james My reply is based in two years of concerted effort to get very close friends over here. This included making our own instance. Doing everything technically imagineable so that they wouldn't have to worry about that. They do not care about decentralization, at all. This must be addressed. The vast majority of people that are over on bluesky are never going to leave that server. That is important to understand. It has nothing to do with Mastodon or the Fediverse and what has been presented to them. Making the fediverse into Twitter 2.0 is not the answer. This still comes down to the fact that there are billionaires funding that entire operation and that it is a for-profit corporation.

mekka okereke :verified:

@noondlyt @james

You don't have 20 million friends. And I'm guessing that most of your friends aren't Black. So you might be extrapolating your friend group out to everyone else.

What I call "good UX," you're framing as "they don't want to work for it." On that we agree.

"They care deeply about follower counts." "They don't care about decentralization." On that we agree, for a subset of users. Again, empathy. That's why it's important to support early adopters who don't care about followers.

@mekkaokereke @james You are correct in that I am definitely speaking from my own experience. I am not trying to delegitimize anyone's actual experience on here. I saw the issues that many had and they need to be addressed. This place is far from perfect but it is better suited for change than Bluesky.

Popular and easy is what got us Trump. And yes, I am judgmental when it comes to people picking the billionaire funded social platforms.

White people is what got us Trump lolsob. And judgemental white people criticizing Black people for not coming to the anti-Black environment here is one of the whitness-related that drove away my friends who *did* try it -- and kept my other friends from trying it when they heard about it.

(And these are friends who have started their own social networks in the past, so it wasn't the complexity. It was the whiteness and anti-Blackness).

@noondlyt @mekkaokereke @james

@jdp23 @noondlyt @james

Thanks Jon!

I didn't have the energy to respond to "popular and easy is what got us Trump." But yeah, no. Not at all.

@mekkaokereke @noondlyt @james the thing is, social media isn’t anyone’s duty to the nation. It’s supposed to be fun and supposed to be social. If there aren’t enough interesting people that you connect with, it’s not social. If the UX is bad and there aren’t interesting features, it’s not fun.

I want a federated environment. If for no other reason than it allows different kinds of services to emerge (think Threads). But it should still be fun.