"After my last long post, I got into some frustrating conversations, among them one in which an open-source guy repeatedly scoffed at the idea of being able to learn anything useful from people on other, less ideologically correct networks. Instead of telling him to go fuck himself, I went to talk to about fedi experiences with people on the very impure Bluesky, where I had seen people casually talking about Mastodon being confusing and weird.
“My purpose in gathering this informal, conversational feedback is to bring voices into the “how should Mastodon be” conversation that don’t otherwise get much attention—which I do because I hope it will help designers and developers and community leaders who genuinely want Mastodon to work for more kinds of people refine their understanding of the problem space.”
I kinda agree with most of hese points tbh, I still have an account on Mastodon but due to issues outlined in the article it is still very empty and soulless to me, even compared to twitter that after all the bullshit it’s been going through still has actual interesting content and people there (and the algorithm that actually shows me their content I’m interested in instead of an chronological timeline with 90% worthless comments).
#explore on Mastodon is a good way to find stuff you wouldn’t see on your own feed. (It’s how I found this article.)
And there are various bots that allow you to follow people on Twitter (birdsite.makeup etc). Although my instance has decided they don’t like that so it’s a bit harder to find them than it was.
But yes, I think the article does a good job of articulating the problems. I hope they get solved because there’s a lot I like very much about Mastodon but it does not have the depth and breadth of content (yet). And hashtags do not work well enough as a replacement for search (I followed #BBC to get more news in my feed and ended up with a bit of news and a lot of porn).
You know, I’ve been using Mastodon for 10 months and I’d never noticed the Explore link! My interface even has the fresh, dismissable help text at the top of that column! :D