Nora Reed"everyone who can't figure out how to use mastodon is stupid" your website does not have a functioning system for following people on other servers
like i am sorry but i saw a survey going around on here where like 80% of the respondents used linux. no one on this website has any idea how normal users of technology work
"why do journalists keep telling people our website is hard to use" because there's a million weird little idiosyncratic things like "replies aren't all visible" and "you have to copy paste stuff to follow people on another instance" and the site culture is to gaslight anyone who points this out
this is not a safe space for whining about journalists who accurately assessed that your website has a long way to go if it's going to appeal to very many people who aren't linux freaks
i dunno maybe the fact that this website responds with hostility and 'splaining to everyone who points out that it has problems with features like "finding your friends" "talking to your friends across instances that have inexplicable beef with each other" "following accounts from links on websites" is part of why all bluesky managed to win over so much of shitposting twitter
and maybe the fact that there's barely contained hostility against people who chose to use other websites, such as the "if you use Threads you basically deserve to have your privacy violated" attitude i have seen, is why mastodon has a reputation for being a bunch of scolding linux guys
the fact is that the bad reputation that mastodon has is well deserved both because of technological and cultural failures
i would like it to be better on here but the prevailing attitude seems to be that people who bounced off the platform are just too stupid to deserve the deeply annoying comments they could be receiving
i dunno maybe try to both make the app or whatever the fuck this thing is (don't tell me i don't care) better and stop acting like a bunch of comic book nerds who are mad that a girl came into their shop once
Michael@NoraReed it is very silly to me that people have to constantly say "don't use the official app, use (app of choice here) instead" because it's such a poor user experience. I feel like at this point that even just taking the app down so people would download a different one first would be better
flabberghaster@NoraReed yeah it's very gatekeepy. It was even worse in November during the first influx. It's gotten better which is more a testament to how bad it was than to say it's at all acceptable now.
I think it's legit to want nothing to do with threads but to sneer at threads users like I see so often is quite different, and troubling.
hapbt@NoraReed not sure who you are talking to, mastodon isn't a singular entity, there are 10000+ servers which means 10000+ admins, all doing volunteer work for free, programming, hosting, content moderation. this whole entitled karen complaining to the manager of twitter thing just isn't valid here.
Lew Riley@hapbt @NoraReed I think the message is aimed at all of the individual users making individual choices that shape what this distributed, federated community is like. So, talking to you (not to some imaginary manager, and casting them as a karen isn't as devastating to your target as you think it is).
flere-imsaho 🇺🇦@hapbt shut up & fuck off.
Stephen Hoffman@NoraReed Yes. The sign-up and on-boarding process is poor, finding folks you know or that might interest you is poor, and the standard web user interface is… probably too complex for many folks new to the Fediverse to start out with.
Progressive disclosure on the website user interface would be a nice addition.
I’m not sure how automatically finding friends would work. There’s no social graph implemented around here, which is how Meta and other services can offer those recommendations.
Finding friends does work when you know names or such, but (confusingly) uses the search box.
I’ve found other ways to do some things that work for me, but the lack of a social graph and the lack of a generic search can be off-putting. (There are dolks that will claim the lack of search is a benefit, but less often included in those discussions is that the entire Fediverse firehose is ingested into various servers and indexed for who-knows-what purposes, which kinda makes the whole no-searches discussion seem kinda moot.)
For other client options for access the Fediverse, I’m using Tapbots Ivory, which is a client available for Apple devices, and that greatly simplifies the user interface.
@HoffmanLabs oh fedifinder works really well for finding people if you're coming from twitter i just hate how confusing it is to interact across instances sometimes
Delicious Terrine@NoraReed I love not being able to see who people follow without jumping through hoops. This is Good Actually
CBDawson 🏳️🌈@NoraReed When I first joined I was surprised by the abundance of posts lecturing about acceptable mastodon etiquette (vs platform functionality & tools), essentially saying that there was only one correct way to use the platform. Most striking, though, was how quickly new folks jumped on the lecture circuit: a significant number of those explainer posts were from folks who had only recently joined! I found that baffling.
nice glutes 
@NoraReed There’s a reason Threads had so many signups. I’m a tech person, been doing programming and sysadmin work for over a decade now, but I also want social media to be easy to use.
Like, if I could just easily search and find everyone in one place, why wouldn’t I use that? Threaded replies don’t even work well all the time here with federation and all of that BS.
I like the fediverse and everything but I don’t want it to be a technical exercise to interact with and find people
@NoraReed I guess the truth is that the fediverse is an amazing concept mostly being developed on by technical people who don’t necessarily always understand the average non-technical user
0xC0DEC0DE07EA@NoraReed there are at least two disjoint visions of this whole thing. One of which thinks that any form of discoverability impossible and immoral.
Gavin Sheedy@NoraReed Though I put myself on the waiting list for BS weeks ago, and I’m getting good value, still on it…
Just Boby