On the flip side-- what if it were the case that Mastodon's onboarding, server setup, maintenance, moderation options, and overall UX are so poor that it cannot gain traction, even when a history of four "major events" would otherwise have delivered it a massive userbase by now?
Honestly, even if the interface was constrained to a HN aesthetic, if a social media alternative were as fast as git and as easy to install and get up and running, I'd use it in a heartbeat.
It’s still a confusing process though. Some kind of “find your friends” might help, if we could get people to participate in a big database of “this is my Twitter and this is/are my Mastodon(s)”. Ideally this would be on joinmastodon.org along with the instance picker.
While that’s vaguely a step in the right direction, it’s not even in the ballpark of how much friction needs to be removed to get non-nerd adoption. The general populace would stop using social media before they used any of the current federated offerings. Selling non-technical people on the tech when it’s less fun, harder to reason about, and more annoying is a non-starter.
The only design that would stand a chance would start with the absolute optimal user onboarding and usage path and begrudgingly degrade when absolutely technically necessary. That’s what the commercial offerings will do, and most people are fine with compromising their privacy and control of their data feed.
No spoonful of sugar, no medicine no matter how beneficial.
And there is not way to automatically follow lists of people either, so I cant even use curators. That is especially insane, given that there are curators who create lists of interesting people, you just have to click one by one to follow...
The algorithm is entirely based on "how many users did use this hashtag/share the post/share the URL/interact with account in the past week".
I joined to some instance just fine. The problems start after that. UX is laggy, buggy and unintuitive. Algorithms don't help to find people to follow. People curate some lists of people to follow, but there is no way to automatically follow the whole list. Interaction between instances should work in theory, but in practice it's very very clunky.
Every time some instance gets popular it's basically locked down afterwards and people tend to forget about it.