Mastodon

I think it's a mix of the way journalism works in the age of overstimulation (everything is the best/worst anyone has ever witnessed) and old(er) people being unfathomably tech-illiterate.

And I don't even mean that negatively. I often really am unable to fathom how disorienting even the slightest change in a software they're used to is to them.

If my mother were to use the birdsite, and they'd change their theme from blue to red one day, she would literally be unable to use it, because "it's all different now"

Also, mastodon does have some usability problems, though they are not that big imo.

I've gotten really tired of repeating this to people. The fediverse is, to an end user, very simple. Just imagine the days of old forums, but your account for your main forum works in most other places and all the feeds are unified. Super simple.

UX needs work, but it's still miles better than traditional forums.

Every Reddit and Twitter user over the last few months: "OMG The Fediverse is so hard and complicated how can people figure this out?!?!?!!!!11eleven"

My brother(s) in data: It takes like 5 minutes to understand how it works and you're good to go (maybe 10 if you were the paint-chip-or-glue-eating-type back in school.)

It is almost impossible to make mastodon similar of an experience as Twitter was. I used Mastodon and found it kinda boring so I didn't even try. But I did want to use Lemmy since I am a Reddit refugee. I had a pretty hard time trying to figure out how to choose the best instance, where to find my communities (should I join technology at beehaw or lemmy.world?). I still somewhat get confused trying to wrap my head around the fediverse AND I HAVE A FUCKING COMPUTER ENGINEERING DEGREE. If you think that the average user is gonna confidently just make a user and not get confused at all the new concepts you don't know normies.

i also love the "oh noes there are nerds on there!" concern trolling, motherfucker read the wikipedia page on who first adopted and built the communities on twitter and reddit

They tend to portray everything new, different and/or popular with geeks as bad or complicated, I see this as a rite of passage for the fediverse. Remember when they were shitting on computer gaming in the early days of the hobby because of who it was initially popular among?