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.
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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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.
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.