DaveI confess I'm bad at using this thing. It's not that Mastodon is bad, it's that the value in a social networking platform is in the network and velocity and people (including me) are still using the bird app predominately.
Rock Norris@all_caps three things that do Mastodon no favors: 1. Asking new users to “pick a server.” It’s a speed bump that really slows and confuses getting aboard, and kinda unnecessary. 2. Naming a tech after something prehistoric. This bugs me for a stupid reason. 3. A lack of a cute name for posts that can lodge in collective memory and news reports like “Tweet” does. And if you think “toot” is it, that’s a fart in my household, soooo…
@rocknorris The server/federated thing is a big hurdle. There should be a twitter.mstdn.com or something that's flat. I think they got rid of 'toots', they're called 'sharts' now.
estunautre@all_caps @rocknorris The server step is barrier for sure. It put me off for a while until I realized it doesn’t matter which one you choose. They could bury all the federated/local stuff under the hood for all I care.
@estunautre @rocknorris There's some benefit (and drawbacks) to the federated model: obviously there can be independent moderation (a plus and possibly a minus), subject matter focus (which could be managed with lists/tags etc), and of course distributed infrastructure (which I suspect is more pragmatic than technical).