If you approach the Fediverse as a social network, it has places with much better onboarding than Mastodon because Mastodon isn't a social network after all

I've come to the realisation that one big onboarding issue in the Fediverse appears after actually getting on board: It's getting connections. For you Mastodon users, that's people to follow first of all so your timeline is no longer silent and then followers so you yourself are being heard.

And I've come to another realisation: Of all server applications in the Fediverse, it's the ones that count as mind-warpingly difficult to use that have an edge over Mastodon here. Mike Macgirvin's creations. Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and the fledgling Forte.

Why Mastodon actually isn't a social network after all

Mastodon makes it unnecessarily hard to get your first connections by largely aping 𝕏 or rather pre-Musk Twitter. But 𝕏 is not about connections. 𝕏 is not a social network. It actually has never been. 𝕏 is a microblogging platform. 𝕏 is all about content, and it uses "The Algorithm" to serve this content to all its users on a silver platter. It's a murky, unfair, biased algorithm, but it does what it's supposed to do.

Mastodon largely apes 𝕏 all the way to some of its shortcomings from a tight character limit to no concept of conversations, and it apes 𝕏's microblogging platform architecture. But this architecture depends on that very algorithm that Mastodon so staunchly and proudly refuses to implement. On Mastodon, like in most of the Fediverse, if you don't have any contacts, you've pretty much got nothing.

But Mastodon is not about finding contacts. Mastodon is too much of an 𝕏-aping microblogging platform to actually be a social network.

Early Mastodon mostly managed to strive because Mastodon users told other Mastodon users about their Mastodon accounts outside of Mastodon. At the climax of the Twitter migration, new Mastodon users had tools that could help them find those whom they had followed on Twitter on Mastodon. But even these tools weren't known by all newbies, and they were too cumbersome to use for those who were used to the Twitter app.

And nowadays, not even these tools exist anymore. People leave Mastodon not because it doesn't look and feel like Twitter, but because it feels dead, because it's so hard to get content on your timeline. Others resort to spending a while indiscriminately following everyone whom they encounter on their federated timeline to at least have the same uninteresting background noise as on 𝕏. But many don't even manage to come up with this idea, or they simply don't know what a "federated timeline" is because 𝕏 has none. And even then, nothing interesting happens on their timeline.

Sure, you can follow hashtags. But newbies and even generally not-so-advanced users don't even know you can do that. You can't do that on 𝕏 either, after all, so the very idea that this should be possible on Mastodon eludes them because no Mastodon UI actively advertises this feature.

Sure, you can use the search to try and find people with your interests. But that requires active searching. That's cumbersome. On top of it, it requires thinking in hashtags because it only works with hashtags. The vast majority of people coming over from 𝕏 to Mastodon have never in their lives used hashtags before. That's also why they fail to find an audience, and that's another reason why they don't follow hashtags. They go on using Mastodon like 𝕏, but this would only work if there was an "Algorithm" forwarding content to users.

If you want content on Mastodon, if you want to be seen on Mastodon, you have to use it like a social network. But Mastodon isn't, technically speaking, a social network. The only reason why people try so hard to use it as a social network is the same reason why people try to use Mastodon as a whole lot of things that Mastodon isn't: because Mastodon is all they know in the Fediverse.

Enter the Facebook alternatives

But fortunately, the Fediverse is not only Mastodon. It has a whole lot more to offer. For example, actual social networking.

What's the world's biggest and most well-known social network? No, not 𝕏. It's Facebook. Say about Facebook what you want, but it has social networking down pat. Unlike 𝕏 which is about content, Facebook is about contacts or, as it calls them, "friends". Whereas 𝕏 is a soapbox, and whereas Mastodon, by aping 𝕏, is a soapbox, too, Facebook has the "social" aspect deeply engrained in its very DNA.

Now, some of you may say that it'd be great if someone made Facebook for the Fediverse.

But there already is Facebook in the Fediverse. There has been Facebook in the Fediverse since long before Twitter was cloned.

First and foremost, it's Friendica, the oldest surviving Fediverse project. Launched in summer of 2010 when even diaspora* was nothing more than a wild dream and an even wilder crowdfunding campaign, it was designed to be a Facebook alternative. Hubzilla is an all-powerful content management system blistering with features that can be expanded even further. But at its core, it's still the same Friendica fork that it was in 2012 when it was still the Red Matrix. The two newest members of the family, officially nameless (streams) and fledgling Forte, are back to mostly social networking, but give it a more advanced spin while still carrying Friendica's DNA within them.

Unlike Mastodon which has always been an attempt at mimicking Twitter, albeit an incomplete one, Friendica and its descendants have never tried to ape Facebook. Neither did they clone the unnecessary cruft that Facebook had already then, nor did they clone Facebook's data harvesting.

Instead, Friendica added sensible new features, and its descendants kept them. These included enough text and post formatting capabilities to rival not only bulletin-board forums, but full-blown blogging engines, including the use of BBcode markup instead of hiding everything behind a mandatory WYSIWYG interface.

At the same time, they all took over certain features because it made sense to take them over. One was the conversation structure which is the same on Facebook as on Tumblr, on Reddit, in the Usenet, on every blog out there with a comments section and in every Web forum. It draws a distinction between the (start) post and its follow-ups which are considered comments.

Another one was discussion groups which were implemented on Friendica not as a wholly separate feature, but as user accounts with special settings. Hubzilla took them over as channels, and (streams) and Forte still have them. They make discussing certain topics a whole lot easier than Mastodon's fumbling around with hashtags, hoping someone follows them, and murky and unmoderated Guppe groups.

New contacts on a silver platter

But what really helps in onboarding is another feature that Friendica took over from Facebook: contact suggestions. Since you start out with no contacts, you also start out with no content and no interactions. But Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte suggest people to you whom you may want to connect to. If you've taken some time to fill out your profile, especially the keywords field (it's actually a separate profile field on all four), they'll suggest users who have the same keywords as you in their profiles.

Oh, and they can suggest groups or, as they're called from Hubzilla on, forums just the same.

On Mastodon, you have to learn to use the search to find people with e.g. certain interests. Or you have to shout into the void and hope someone hears it. Or you have to indiscriminately follow hundreds or thousands of people on the local or federated timeline and hope there's someone interesting among them. It's you who has to take action.

On the other hand, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte serve you potential new contacts on a silver platter. All you have to do is go where they're being suggested and look through the list. If you like one suggestion, you can connect to them with one click. (At least on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, you'll still have to configure the connection to your liking, but you don't have to jump through hoops and use search or copy-paste URLs or IDs to connect in the first place.) And just like on Facebook, if you don't like a suggestion, you also have a button to remove that suggestion from the list. But unlike on Facebook, you won't see that suggestion forced back on you after some time.

Granted, you only get accounts or channels suggested which are known to your home server. And your home server does not know everyone everywhere in the Fediverse. Still, it's a good start, your timeline or stream becomes busy, and you may get some exposure yourself if you're followed back. By the way, users on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are more likely to follow you back than Mastodon users because they have to follow you back to let you follow them. As I've said: Connections on these four are always mutual, just like Facebook "friends".

Also, on Hubzilla, this feature is kind of limited. Hubzilla only suggests channels using the one protocol that Hubzilla has built into its core, Zot6. This means that Hubzilla only suggests Hubzilla and (streams) channels. It can't suggest connections using e.g. ActivityPub or the diaspora* protocol, even of you have them enabled.

(streams), on the other hand, has ActivityPub built into its core and on by default for new channels. It suggests ActivityPub-using accounts as well, so you do have e.g. Mastodon users among your suggestions. And Forte is based on ActivityPub itself, so that's a given. It doesn't exclude Hubzilla or (streams) channels because these communicate with Forte via ActivityPub themselves.

Getting to the suggestions is easy enough. On Hubzilla, you first have to go to your connections. Unlike Mastodon, they haven't been stashed away in the settings. They've got their own menu item, and if you want to, you can add the icon to the navigation bar as well. And there you have a link to the suggestions. Each suggestion shows you a bunch of profile fields, more than Mastodon has altogether, including the keywords which are even clickable to filter the list. There's also an estimation on how many connections you have in common with that suggested contact, another Facebook feature. In addition, there's a keyword cloud that can be used for filtering. Also, you can remove channels flagged not safe for work, you can limit your suggestions to channels on your home hub, and you can limit it to public forums.

(streams) and forte make it even easier: They have a small connection suggestions box with two suggestions on the stream page which is the default landing page and akin to Mastodon's personal timeline. (It's possible to add them to Hubzilla's stream page as well, but that isn't exactly what a newbie would do.) The same box can also be found on the connections page, taking the place of Hubzilla's simple link to the connections.

The suggestions themselves are different, too. Even though (streams) and Forte only know mutual connections, they list followers and followed separately on suggested ActivityPub connections. Hashtags in the main profile text are converted to and used as keywords. In addition, keywords that you have in common with a suggested connection are shown in bold type.

In all these cases, connection suggestions are actually a sub-feature of the so-called directory. The directory contains and lists all Fediverse actors known to a server instance, so you can feel free to go and browse these as well. Again, they can be limited to only SFW and/or only local channels and/or only forums. Speaking of forums or groups: (streams) and most likely also Forte even recognise Friendica groups, Guppe groups, Lemmy communities, /kbin and Mbin magazines, NodeBB forums, Flipboard magazines, the Social Web Foundation website etc. as discussion groups. Not even Facebook does anything similar.

Finally

A wide-spread attitude among people who are used to Mastodon is that Mastodon is the Fediverse gold standard, and everything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon should become more like Mastodon.

But the Fediverse is widely regarded one big social network. And if there's something in the Fediverse that has actual social networking down pat, that isn't Mastodon. Mastodon is still what it has always been: a Twitter-mimicking microblogging platform. And it's every bit as bad at finding new connections as 𝕏 which, by the way, has never been meant to be a social network either.

Sorry to all you Mastodon fans, but: Just like 𝕏, Mastodon is not about people and connections. It is all about content. It has always been all about content.

Still sorry, but: Finding your first connections is vastly easier and more convenient in those places in the Fediverse that are actual social networks, that are Facebook alternatives rather than 𝕏 alternatives. And that's Friendica and its nomadic descendants, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte.