@charlesroper @kissane @bersl2 So much of this I vibe with. I feel like my largest frustration running Mastodon for my users is that good options are not straightforward. (And apologies in advance for rambling)

I joke sometimes "if Mastodon is so good, how come there's not Pterodactyl" as a goofy Power Rangers joke, but the reality is, the current helm of that project is too boxed-in. I feel like Gagron's succumbed to "works on my box" syndrome. "Works fine for me!" "Works fine for my users!". That's lovely. But it's not broadly-applicable.

Glitch-soc is kind of a start, but it wouldn't surprise me if, within the next few months, a serious fork of Mastodon itself starts to emerge because it _is_ implementing all these things that users and admins are begging for, not just 'cool' things, but functional UX!

I want alt text to be something highlighted to folks when they add media, draw attention to adding it (no, Gagron, the current is NOT attention). I want the CW box to be always avail as a subject/summary box, suggestion text that draws attention to using it, and is ignored when not needed (and, properly, marks it either way based on anything typed there). I want my instance to fetch posts from a remote instance when someone clicks into a detail view so they get a broader conversation (maybe, there's something to be said for this not being the case too), to fetch media and posts PROPERLY when someone clicks to view a profile. A phone client shouldn't have to implement doing this to supplant the crappy native behavior.

And that's only scratching the surface on things that aren't 'cool', but 'needed', things that make the user experience better. And I feel like no one on the Masto team at least has any idea what the hell UX actually means.