since MySpace, social media has been primitive in the forms of expression afforded its users … essentially plaintext and an emoji or two. This has produced exceedingly low expectations in users about the richness of what content they are permitted to author online. Damn that.
The great big elephant in the room for the fediverse (apart from #Mastodon ) is that choosing an instance is simultaneously meaningless and important. But the ways in which this is so are not intuitive or even known to anyone but acolytes and admins.
5a) Proof: even if you learn the details of how instance interactions work and cause things like incomplete reply retrieval, you will forget it until reminded, because it’s unintuitive.
The Fediverse's biggest mistake so far was not laying out the carpet for the Twitter et al Migrants. They were forced to recognise that the fediverse was always
"correct"/good and to simply "join" a foreign place and obey its customs.
Instead, they should have been given their own "place" (a soft Mastodon fork and separate instances) to grow, call and have a culture of their own.
If new platforms eat the fediverse's lunch (eg BlueSky), it will be by providing this experience.
Add up all of the design missteps or confusions (which happen), mixed and confusing but often strongly felt cultural standards, lacking or hard-to-find documentation or explanations, and, federation strangeness/quirkiness ... and you get a platform that crosses past the reasonably intuitive line.
You may disagree, but others, perhaps many (?) see it that way and feel that the virtues of a properly designed and managed centralised social media are superior to chaotic volunteer-run decentralisation.
Maybe we should be forced to "work it all out together in the public square"?