I really don’t get how people don’t understand that for mass adoption you need as little fucking friction as possible, lol. What you are doing is just gatekeeping. My experience with Mastodon:
The home feed is completely empty at first. I can go to some recommendations which are (I think) based on my home instance. I have no idea what those people even talk about so I just follow them to be able to check the platform out at all.
Looking at the “Trending Topics” (or whatever) tab shows stupid hashtags like #silentsunday or #photomonday. I don’t really care about those and they don’t even matter for my home instance infosec.exchange. So how do I even find any topics I really care about? It’s so much work.
I’m very technically inclined and I went in with an open mind and am now following quite a few people and have even found properly nice profiles like bellingcat. But that was way too much friction - there should be less, and I’m not talking for me.
Anyway, I never really used or liked Twitter and Mastodon seems the same. There’s just too many uninformed opinions and people fishing for likes. I don’t care about that, I want proper discussions even if I, IMO completely undeservedly, get downvoted ;) I like Lemmy way more for that.
As Twitter flounders, Mastodon refreshes its official app for Android users (techcrunch.com)