Twitter failing so hard recently makes me furious how fucking stupid Mastodon's UI is. the fact that opening a post or profile in a new tab takes you to a different domain (so, effectively an *entirely* different app, which has no idea who you are or what you just did) is so, so, so bad. that one utterly idiotic decision would be enough to have single-handedly ruined the best chance at pulling people away from Twitter, and that's not even the only decision Mastodon made on that scale of incompetence:

- no quote tooting (which had the more harebrained justification from Eugen), nor can you even link to toots inside your toot and have their contents render in the UI

- hiding like and retweet counts, which is justifiable at a stretch but a *huge* count against Twitter user comfort

- absolutely godawful UI for replies/threads that's at least as confusing as Twitter's - a true achievement

- the RIDICULOUS complexity to self-hosting, which is too annoying even for most technical people to bother. this is the worst screw-up, because being beholden (technologically, censorially, economically) to incompetent internet randos you have no reason to trust is like the ONE thing people who despise Elon Musk are trying to avoid - and @admin just reiterated for us all how incompetent and shitty even ordinary internet randos can be

- the fact that the whitelabel version of Mastodon comes with omnipresent Mastodon branding, which confuses people as to what's "Mastodon" and what's specific to each server. like, it doesn't say "a Mastodon server", just "Mastodon"

in summary @Gargron you fucked the dog