Some people think Mastodon is too weird to become popular:
I joined Twitter in 2008. We had to put a "d" in front of a tweet to convert it to a direct message and every other day you had some embarrassing private moments exposed because someone forgot about the “d”. Hashtags were just a community hack, introduced by Chris Messina to somehow tag content. Search? Hah, you wish! Tweets via SMS were supposed to be a thing. Oh, and the daily meet and greet with the failwhale. Totally not weird.
@bastianallgeier the federated concept does make it a little bit harder nowadays though.
For example, I could not tell if your toot had more than one reply (I assume so as you mentioned 140 replies in a different one). I can only see one.
I cannot search across instances, at least starting from my small own instance (if someone knows how to add more relays, please let me know). I wonder where the tech people are.
I cannot follow someone from another instance by looking at their profile.
@bastianallgeier ie. I have to enter their username/instance in my search field as following them on their profile page would require me to login to their server, which is not possible.
I do not want to complain but it's a long way until it gets the UX that supports easy networking and discovery.
I do understand that Twitter and many other services that we got used to nowadays also took years to mature.
But new services will be measured against that UX nowadays.
Bastian Allgeier
Sven Tiffe