The search paradigm on Mastodon greatly reduces the platform’s usefulness and I expect presents to many users as simply being broken rather than an intentional choice.

Being real? That’s a load of malarkey. Discoverability is easy on mastodon. It’s reddit easy. Just like you can put r/ in front of damn near anything and find a subreddit, the # system is as close to dummy proof as possible. Interested in a topic? Slap a # in front of keywords. That’s it. End of problem discovering posts and users to follow.

While I don’t doubt that there are assholes in mastodon, good luck finding anywhere that doesn’t have them. There’s always someone that’s going to bitch at noobs. It could be a brand new, first day situation, and somebody is going to bitch at people that are two minutes newer.

The CW complaint is an annoyance, I guess, but it’s simple enough to resolve in the same way as most other social media. Block the idiots. Boom, immediate cessation of whiners.

Instance rules are easy to find. It isn’t buried behind anything complex. It is our responsibility as adults to look for, and seek understanding of those rules. If we can’t be bothered to do it before signing up for a new service of any kind, that’s not on the service. But it’s also quite easy to do after signing up. If someone can’t do due diligence before diving in head first, that’s on them.

Compared to lemmy and reddit, mastodon is much easier to discover rules. They’re only instance based. The r/ and c/ structure means each community can also have rules beyond those of the instance. Even that’s absurdly easy to find though.

I think the survey behind this piece had to have been answered by people that don’t have the sense of a turnip. It takes all of a minute just exploring mastodon’s interface to find rules by accident. That means anyone answering that as a reason for not using it didn’t even bother to find out what is and isn’t possible via the main interface. That’s either laziness or stupidity.

I wish ppl would realize the solution to Mastodon problems is to stop focusing on Mastodon. It’s not the fediverse. Fediverse services need to focus on interoperability so that the entire network is the platform instead of depending on Mastodon to fix its built-in shortcomings. These are the same issues that mastodon has had since the beginning and are working as designed. Instead of fighting upstream against mastodon, we could improve the fediverse as a whole.

Kbin and Lemmy bring a huge discoverability boost to the fediverse and microblogging services. Non threadiverse services could better emphasize Group posts to lead users to finding groups that match their interests. Right now they show up as normal boosts on other platforms and there’s no indication that it’s a Group instead of a single user. Real search features could be built in; the lack of it is a philosophical decision by mastodon that doesn’t have to apply to the rest of the fediverse. To fix the CW arguments, services could build in better user based filtering. If you can auto CW other users posts, there’s no need to yell at ppl about CWs.

There’s plenty of other ways the rest of the fediverse could improve without mastodon; Mastodon is intent on just being a better twitter but the rest of the fediverse could be a platform that’s more cohesive and feature rich than any other solical network. And if the non-masto fediverse gains enough traction, mastodon can keep holding back the fediverse and masto users can’t keep bullying users into trying to fit into their various disparate rules.

Imo part of the problem with mastodon, at least in my experience, is that it’s sold as a twitter replacement while still being devoloped and largely populated by people who don’t like twitter (because it’s too “toxic”). This means that you can’t really have the twitter experience on mastodon by design so people coming from twitter mostly wanting to get away from musk bounce of. Bluesky has been a more successfull twitter replacement and I think that’s largely because it basically is twitter with feeds.

I think that mastodon should either commit to being more like twitter (which it is propably too late for at this point since I don’t imagine that their current userbase would be into that) or people should stop trying to make it the new twitter and instead let it be it’s own kind of different thing.