@noracodes I really resent the whole "Mastodon is too technical" thing because
1) it feels like a concerted effort by a subset of influencers and opinion leaders who have realised that Mastodon is a lot harder to game and they may not be able to preserve clout they didn't earn, and
2) I'm a music major who doesn't use cohost because I couldn't CSS my way out of a wet paper bag, and I picked up Mastodon inside a couple of minutes, tops. People are trying to speak "Mastodon is too hard" into existence because they don't want their world to change, but an unchanging world is a luxury some of us have never had.
@estrapade @noracodes The thing is, unfortunately... Mastodon *is* too technical in a few key ways that will matter for adoption.
It's things that a lot of techies will gloss right over but will turn off a lot of users of centralized services because they never had to deal with the added layer before. Really simple but persistent things like "If you find the name of a user on another node's web UI, following a user who is on another node requires you to copy-and-paste their Mastodon ID into a search bar in the UI for your own node, re-find them, and then join them along that direction."
Seems easy to just do, makes the whole thing look an absolute hot mess to a naive user (and technically speaking, will be hard to improve given the modern domain security model for web sites).
