Technology

Your point about Joinmastodon is too true. It's a terrible starting point for someone who just wants to test the waters: "I have to learn about an entirely new type of digital networking AND commit to an instance? I bet Bluesky doesn't have all these layers of obfuscation."

It would be easier if the community would just agree that there is a default instance with open enrollment—preferably the biggest and mosy popular, or at least one that's maintained by a group with staying power—and just send all the newbies there. If they want to dig deeper, nothing's stopping them, but that way their first impression isn't analysis paralysis.

To your other points:

1. for discovery, there are the usual methods: trending, hashtags, the search, and people sharing their usernames elsewhere.

2. I assume that people who are making the hard decision to leave the site where they know all the people they want to follow already are, are also prepared to accept some amount of loss to that pool. It happens all the same whether it's Threads or Mastodon

Yep exactly this. I'm pretty tech oriented and even I was confused about the concept of instances at first.

you have to find people and discovery has always been one of the worst aspects of the fediverse.

How is this different than Twitter?

Additionally, there's the usability hurdle of interacting with non-home instances from outside mastodon. If I pull up someone's blog and click the little mastodon social media icon, it may very well link to mastodon.world. If my home instance is mastodon.social, now I have to launch into my own server, search up the account, and then begin interacting.

It's trivial to do but it is an extra step, and for your less-tech-literate friends and family it can be a point of confusion. Mastodon handles federation great in-ecosystem, but the broader web is still going to treat each instance as a different site.

It's true. And people try to jump on to similar things. "It's just like how email works!", or "It's just like how international phone calls work!"

Yeah, nobody has any clue how those two things work, either.

You don't get logged in to other accounts. Just follow people at their address, like you'd send an email. The server does the rest.

If your question is about finding people to follow, that's another matter. Folks on other instances won't show up in your searches unless someone on your instance already follows them. For popular people, that's usually no problem. For others, you might get their address from their web page. In any case, once you have their address, you just... follow them. No matter where they are, follow them from your instance and it just works. You don't have to "log in" anywhere else; that's the "federated" part of the fediverse.

What's most fantastic about it is that you can often follow accounts on entirely different platforms. How well this works depends on how well the platform supports the AP protocol, and fundamental models of data. But you can easily follow PixelFed accounts from a Mastodon account, and it works pretty well. It's as if you could follow Instagram accounts from your Twitter account; that's the killer feature of the Fediverse, IMO. Discovery is still clunky, and how these things interoperate in "World" can be kludgy. But the possibilities are really very revolutionary.