@stefan that is all fair, and I certainly support having empathy, assuming good faith, etc. The meaning of my comments are essentially that in my honest opinion Mastodon doesn't have a significantly higher barrier to entry or steeper learning curve than other 'social media' platforms. Additionally, read through the comments on @libreoffice X post and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that there is quite a bit of bad faith / trolling going on in addition to genuine preference for X over Mastodon

@stefan I hope and tend to assume unless shown otherwise that outright lying may is rare, but I do strongly suspect that some people who parrot the 'unusable' line have put zero (or close to) effect in to really trying it.

@stefan @ghouston @oblomov @libreoffice yeah, I'm all in favour of usability improvements. Nothing complex is ever finished and certainly not perfect. I just don't see how anyone who can function unaided in the general world can't use mastodon, especially someone who has used Twitter / X. Really the only 'issues' I can imagine are initial uncertainty about choosing an instance, and the fact that 'feed' will be very quiet unless / until you proactively populate it.

@andre123 "choosing what to eat is hard and I'm hungry now, just stitch the sewage pipe directly to my mouth"?

@ghouston @oblomov @libreoffice I do find it strange that there seems to just be this accepted wisdom that 'Mastodon is a usability nightmare'.. parroted widely, including by those who claim to love open source and have tried it. I just don't see it.

@oblomov @libreoffice wow, there is a lot of hate and ignorant nonsense there (and some everywhere, but that's pretty concentrated). Anyway, I'm glad to see you prioritising open tools as well as keeping up the good work of making them.