@kissane I have to say, I understand these people. I'd say that Mastodon is a hard platform for non-tech people to find their place.

Hashtags feel foreign to me, as they aren't used as often (anymore) on other platforms. With Twitter, they are kinda discouraged because of the character limit. It's sometimes hard to find the right hashtags, or even come up with right hashtags for your post.

The "build your own feed" philosophy seems still bit hard for me. The "follow everyone, unfollow if don't like afterwards" also feels bit foreign to me, as on platforms that have a recommendation algorithm, I just follow the people that I want to see the content more often. Like, that person has to prove their worth to me, before I follow them.

From 0, finding people is really, really hard, especially out of your instance. If you have to leave your own home instance to for example view older posts, it might be an other frontend, theme or software even. And interactions from other instances work, well not very greatly without any browser extensions.

I am currently at a point that I have started to get my own little bubble big enough that I have new content on the feed pretty regularly and notifications pretty often (especially now with the release of #Mastopoet). But still I miss being able to scroll away and have new suggestions provided by an algorithm from accounts I haven't seen before. I didn't use Twitter before the algorithm was introduced, so I don't know a time before that.

It would be very likely that I would not have started to use Mastodon actively if it wasn't for @rolle moving here. I actually created my first account on March 2022 on social.isekai.fi, an instance that was deleted at some point, RIP. Oh yes, instances. Didn't even cover them!

Instances allow to have a lot of variety, but for a normal user, they probably don't care that much. For them the most important things are probably:
- people there, same interests
- rules in which they feel safe
- possibly theme

Moving instances is bit difficult, especially if your instance has a WebFingered domain (like social.vivaldi.net being vivaldi.net on Mastodon). Got confused when I transitioned here.

It's also difficult, because your posts don't come along with you. You leave them on the old instance. And instances get deleted sometimes (like the first instance I was on, and the popular mastodo.fi here in Finland soon). You get your followers (if you transfered in time) and your following. Otherwise you are left with a blank slate.

I mean, I like it here. #Mastodon is amazing in it's own ways. I love the API, the developer community here, but I understand it's challenges with the non-techy people. It's just too hard for them to get their feed built and get to that dopamine rush by scrolling.

Twitter and other commercial social media are designed to be addictive. To feed you dopamine. To get you to be more active and use the platform more, to get more ad revenue. Mastodon doesn't aim for that, so people get withdrawal symptoms and resort back to Twitter or other social media.

That's my personal analysis.