The eponymous Bloonface recently shut down their Mastodon instance, with a blog post discussing in detail the current culture clash gripping the decentralized social network as various folks contend with the launch of Instagram Threads, which will eventually interoperate through the ActivityPub protocol.
[T]he people who are broadly “in charge” of Mastodon, as much as anyone is “in charge” of it, are those who are happy with it as is. So things like the follow UX do not matter to them, because they are already on big servers and have big follow lists already, so they have no insight into what new users go through. The new users have no real feedback mechanism, so they just leave and get frustrated, so things will never change.
To strain the analogy to breaking point; rather than a nice desktop login screen, a new user to Mastodon on pretty much anything except a big server gets presented with the equivalent of the blinking white-on-black text of a barebones Debian login screen. This is not fine. No wonder people left.
[Café Lob-On]
