"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