Gregory's Server
Hey, @kissane , thanks for doing all this research!
Regarding the issue of what is described as the difficulty of finding people on Mastodon: I'm struck by the fact I'm not certain what people are talking about when they invoke that, because off the top of my head I can think of three [edit: make that four] [edit: no wait make that five] *extremely* different things they might be alluding to:
1) "How do I find the Mastodon presence of somebody I know from some other context?" For instance, a friend or colleague or fan of yours might find themselves thinking, "I hear Erin is on Mastodon somewhere; how can I find her in follow her there?" They may be coming to the Fediverse with the Twitter-conditioned assumption that they should be able to type your name into the search box, and have it turn up your Mastodon identity. If I understand federation right, that works fine on bigger instances, & terribly on smaller ones.
1/?
@kissane
2) "How do I find all of the people I used to follow on some other platform?" (Presumably Twitter.) This is related to the previous sense of "finding people", but I don't think anybody would consider it really satisfactory to have to manually search on every member of a, say, thousand-person follow list. It's really the question, "How do I auto-populate my follows here based on my follows on Twitter or somewhere else, to reconstitute my Twitter experience here on the fediverse?"
3) "How do I find a particular scene to become a part of it?" One of the valuable emergent phenomena on Twitter (and a different but similar thing is true of Reddit) is the ability to participate in "$thing Twitter": Black Twitter, Librarian Twitter, Fashion Twitter, Epidemiologist Twitter, etc. As I am not really a Twitter user myself, I'm unclear on how that actually happens and how people connect with it. Something something hashtags?
2/?
@kissane
2) "How do I find all of the people I used to follow on some other platform?" (Presumably Twitter.) This is related to the previous sense of "finding people", but I don't think anybody would consider it really satisfactory to have to manually search on every member of a, say, thousand-person follow list. It's really the question, "How do I auto-populate my follows here based on my follows on Twitter or somewhere else, to reconstitute my Twitter experience here on the fediverse?"