@daveleeFT I think it's a number of things. So many features missing from mastodon that people valued on twitter: full text search, quote tweets, good first-party web and phone clients, easy onboarding, verification that's understandable to non-nerds, ease in finding old follows and new people to follow, ease in people finding them, etc.. [1/3]

@daveleeFT People asking for improvements to those things are often met with "it's a feature not a bug" resistance from purists that's really off-putting. Same with the gatekeeping posts and passive-aggressive "just a friendly reminder" posts about alt text and content warnings; weird "well actually" posts that mastodon is not the fediverse; and the usual insistance that open-source is better just because. That makes it feel like those improvement asks just won't happen on mastodon. [2/3]

@daveleeFT For all its problems, millions of people liked twitter before Elmo screwed it up. Bless mastodon for trying things that are different, but a lot of people aren't finding those things to be better for them. They're trying mastodon, thus the growth in accounts, but then they're walking away in frustration. At first glance, blusky seems to promise more what of what they want. We'll see if that pans out. [3/3]