mtswa lot written about its lack of quote-tweets but a big feature that mastodon missed that bluesky already has is "i can easily click on someone's profile and quickly follow a bunch of people they are following" which is really vital for this initial network building
you could KINDA do this on mastodon - if you go to someone's home instance then search their profile and then go to their following list then MANUALLY COPY AND PASTE the user name of whoever you want to follow back into the search bar of your home instance and like man thats a lot of work.
there's some stuff on mastodon that's missing that was kinda like "ah well things are just different here" but that's a problem that really just seems like inattention or indifference to the user experience and could've been handled much better.
David M. Levinson ⁂@mtsw On the browser version, I click on your name, then "Followers" on your profile, and I can add any follower. (And Following, and add anyone you are following).
Nick 𐃥 and one otter@Transportist @mtsw I think that’s because you’re both on mastodon.social. There are features only available when viewing someone’s profile while the url in your browser matches the one after the second @ in their username, and that will always be confusing to a lot of people.
@AdjectivalNoun @mtsw I see some but not all of your followers.
Evan Prodromou@mtsw it's good to note it!
Jef Poskanzer@mtsw When I was using Pinafore it let you do this, and as people mention other UIs do it too. There's no excuse for the default UI to lack this feature.
Dreaming of dad jazz.
Pär Björklund@mtsw I'm hoping the recent boost in popularity means we get a lot of polish, especially with multiple clients "competing" and trying different things and copying eachother
SM@mtsw The problem with this worthless website is I click on your name and click on Posts and it says the last time you posted was 5 days ago and I refuse to believe this is true, I literally cannot figure out how to see anything on here, I couldn't program a worse website if i tried
Ollie@mtsw Soapbox already has this feature, along with few other Pleroma servers. Mastodon seems to be going bad in recent times.
Sarah_jwh@mtsw I think this depends on the app you use. Tusky has this feature and I've used it several times
Just because it is possible does not mean it is a good idea. You may end up following people that have divergent subject matter interests from your own, and your timeline can get clogged up.
There are a lot of Venn diagrams.
@SpaceLifeForm @mtsw It replaces an algorithm really easily and you can unfollow anyone you want easily. Its a great starting point for people who don't want to put the effort in.
@mtsw are you concerned about their TOS being horriffic?
@mtsw i was able do that on the android app when i clicked you profile, then click on following.
I stole a bunch of your follows to bootstrap off of, it was basically the same experience as twitter. It also worked for stealing from people explicitly on different servers like fosstodon. Not sure if i got lucky or something
Jonathan Joelson@mtsw I definitely agree that Mastodon should be focusing hard on these UX paper cuts but that said Bluesky has a lower degree of difficulty by not actually being a federated platform at this point.
Starting with good UX and then adding federation on top might turn out to be a good strategy; or perhaps the federation part will never happen and Bluesky will just be the new Twitter, same as the old Twitter. 🤷♂️