Comment by ColinWright 4 days ago
I use Mastodon almost exclusively.
It requires that you curate your connections, and discoverability is a known problem.
But I get to see posts from the people I follow, and "boosts" of posts they think are worth seeing, and there are no ads, and no algorithms deciding what I should be seeing and filling my feed with them.
I'm not saying it's a good alternative, but I'm finding it useful and refreshing.
The challenge is:
You join Mastodon and want to find a specific friend.
Good luck!
People are accustomed to using centralised sites. They search by typing the target's name into a search box and get presented with a collection of options. That's less successful on Mastodon.
I'm trying to point out that people have experience of Facebook and Twitter and other platforms, and they expect when they join a new platform that they can type in their friends' names and get results. They then find that Mastodon doesn't work like that, and complain about the lack of "discoverability".
And they're right ... discoverability on Mastodon is not like on other platforms, and it is harder to find things.
Yes, I know how to do these things, I am, after all, a moderator on an instance with over 20K users. I'm just trying to point out that for some people the fact that "discoverability" doesn't work as it does on other platforms is a huge stumbling block.
> discoverability is a known problem
Is it? Are you sure centralized authorities for "discovery" are a good thing? After all, the "discovery" algorithm is making people move off FB to Mastodon...