I’m not saying Mastodon wouldn’t benefit from some UI improvements, but I suspect that at least some of the people complaining about how complicated it is weren’t early adopters of Twitter. And by "early adopter", I mean anything before 2010 or so. Trust me, early Twitter was fairly complicated.
@arush Ah yes, I remember it well. Hashtags, retweets, DMs and even mentions/replies were all originally handrolled, and devised by the users first, before being implemented by the devs.
@arush It’s a matter of what people are used to doing though. Having been used to an interface like Twitter, now they’re being asked to revert to tech/interface that, at least in their mind, is not convenient. We have to meet people where they are and not where we are.
@ppatel I get that, but it’s unreasonable to expect an open source project, which up until a couple of weeks ago was pretty low-use, to be at a standard that frankly took several years to evolve and is still (well OK was still) being regularly improved. Especially when none of us were expecting a huge migration like this.
@arush It’s both unreasonable and reasonable given that the open source community has been touting the advantages of Mastodon and the related services. I understand your point but I also understand why people find it difficult to convert from their existing mindsets.
@ppatel We’re touting the advantages of the protocol, with Mastodon being an example of software that uses that protocol. But honestly most of the hype over the last two weeks is coming from Twitter expats passing out what are effectively real estate brocheurs.
@ppatel Also, pretty much every admin has accommodated by scaling up resources, almost without complaint, and so far we’ve had to fight over alt text, content warnings, features expats demand get added, and verification. I think expats need to cut the community they’ve flocked to and are continuing to flock to some slack.
@arush plus remember what Twitter was like when it was 6 years old? Twitter of 10 years ago had lots of warts too.
@ppatel I’m almost hoping Facebook sticks around because there is no way we’re accommodating tons of screenshots of text and all the copypasta posts.
@mgifford Yeah that’s what I’m saying. Twitter didn’t get all the neat stuff that people love until around 2013. Hell, quote tweets weren’t a thing until 2015.