Federated social media does have usability concerns, and yes there is a learning curve. But this kind of knee-jerk negativity is disappointing! (Counterpoint: Eh, whatever, we don't need Mastodon to be Twitter-scale anyway.) http://mashable.com/2017/04/05/mastodon-wont-survive/#NkGEpFit9aqh
@sonya Yeah but its good in a way because it allows early adopters certain benefits several years in the future, if it scales and users increase significantly. lol
@sonya I can see the hot takes are rolling in
@sonya That article just reeks of "I don't like things I don't understand and I don't care to understand them either"
@Thracky yeeeeup
@sonya I don't know the writer. But, he doesn't seem to have the desire to explore new tech. Several of his points were just dead wrong.
The more valid criticisms of Mastodon are things such as responsiveness of the main developer to the user community, federation bugs which need fixing, doesn't support gnusocial groups yet and not clear if it will and the need to scale out across servers rather than up on a single server. With too many users on mastodon.social it may be too much effort and cost for one admin to handle. Better to have many instances with fewer users on them.
@sonya That article was hard to read.
@sonya Excessively negative, but maybe it highlights a need in the UI. The chief complaint seemed to be "how can I tell other people to follow me." Maybe a button that lets you manually type in a complete username would fix that.
@sonya he's so wrong
@sonya boooo this guy sounds like he didn't even use masto for more than a couple minutes.
Username urls ARE a thing, he's judging the apps which are in active development, he doesn't understand that the whole POINT is that it's decentralised, and he hates toots!
@sonya Also, I kind of have to laugh that william shatner is incapable of understanding username at instance ;-)
@sonya Honestly I think the the name/toots, etc. are great to keep the "herp derp let's monetize this" people away.
@seabre if enough people flock here, the marketers will follow no matter what :)
.@sonya I'm fine with him staying on bird Twitter. I think for many migrants what's not here is at least as important as features. In Birdland, (ever since he-who-must-not-be-named came to power) the ambiance is just such a drag--more a matter of who the adopters are than tech. Most people I follow I found through the social links in mentions. I did get started by looking up traditional media authors. My feel is that Mastodon is viable for communities that are sufficiently self-aware.
@sonya This is gold. Thanks for sharing.
@johnhenry author @LanceUlanoff is here, fielding criticism, if you want to check out his timeline
@sonya "to protect my name" uh...