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