my goal here isn’t to plonk down a big pristine block of research, but to offer a conversational glimpse into what real humans—who were motivated to try not one, but at least two alternatives to Twitter—actually report about their unsatisfactory experiences on Mastodon.

In my experience, building cultural norms into the tooling is much more effective and less alienating than chiding.

Constantly being told I was somewhat dim because I didn’t understand how to do things or what the unwritten rules were.

A lot of people in the responding group found the process of picking an instance, signing up, and getting set up genuinely confusing.

The Own Your Experience school doesn’t really grapple with the genuinely terrifying dynamics of mass-scale complex systems.

Even most of the emergent gestures in our interfaces are tweaks on tech-first features