@evan I'm not totally sure I know what "remote actor" means in this context. After Googling, I'm guessing it has to do with users on other servers and for me the hardest part of Fedi stuff (which for me, so far, is Mastodon) is following a link someone gave me to a Masto post but then having to somehow copy that link into an open Masto tab f I want to reply to them. So it's not "seeing" it, it's the UX of it when I'm coming from somewhere else, and I'm nearly exclusively on desktop.

@evan
Almost went with choosing a server, but I think the random invisibility of comments in threads causes more ongoing trouble. So I settled on that.

@evan techbros

@evan tough choice! I picked "choose a server" because that's the first barrier a new user faces, and I imagine (but don't know) we lose a lot of people at that point. Unless everyone just defaults to mastodon.social, but that brings other problems.

@evan

Too many polls.

@evan I didn’t pick “picking a server” because that was easy for me. Our server was the only server I knew of at the time, seven years ago or so. I would say “finding your friends“ but that’s only because no one I know in real life is here. For new users however I can see that picking a server is a little bit difficult.

@evan all of the above

@evan

For me, I think it is finding people and search in general. But I put picking a server because that's the biggest barrier to entry and retention of new users. Once they're signed up, I think search becomes the next biggest barrier for most people.

I'll mention again that two years ago I used someone's little app (not recalling the name at the moment) that scraped my Twitter follows' bios for fedi usernames and turned it into a CSV that I could import to Mastodon, so I had an immediately familiar large group of people to follow. I believe that ended with Twitter lockdown its API.

@evan

You're missing people not realizing it's their responsibility to mute and unfollow people they're not interested in instead of complaining to them about their posts.

@evan The one time I gave my digital literacy students homework to sign up for fediverse accounts had them all stumbling pretty hard at picking a server followed by finding people to follow.

@evan wow yeah all of the above

@evan Easy discovery of (active) people folks would like to follow, IMHO.

@evan I really don't understand why people make such a big deal about picking a server. While the e-mail metaphor doesn't always hold up 100%, this is one of the parts of Fediverse access where it kind of does. It really doesn't matter a whole lot what server you pick. (I won't say it doesn't matter at all, but it really isn't the big deal people seem to make of it.) Whichever you pick, unless it has crazy blocklists, you're going to have access to the majority of the Fediverse.

@evan

"Finding your friends" presumes that people follow or want to follow actual friends online. None of my IRL friends are on Mastodon, and few IRL acquaintances are active in common social media to me.

@evan I posted something on Pixelfed and realized it’s invisible to most of the fediverse, no matter what hashtags I use, unless it breaks containment by being boosted by a user with lots of followers. This is hugely disappointing as it means there effectively is an algorithm on the fediverse, and it’s controlled by the most popular accounts.

@evan incessant polls

@evan depends on who the user is.

newly arriving -> Picking a server.
acquainted but not fluent -> Finding friends.
others -> following a remote actor.

@evan I should never EVER have to follow a link to another server to do anything. If the system can figure out what link to show me, it should just get the content from there and show it to me on the page I'm already looking at.

@evan

Platform interoperability and consistency is mine main issue.

Fediverse promises seamless connection between different federated platforms. While this holds true for instances of the same platform, consistency between different implementations can be flawed.

Examples are, Mastodon and Pleroma sometimes experience anomaly, where hashtags made on Pleroma federate as formatted link to Mastodon, not working as expected.
Misskey (at least Sharkey) sometimes federate user handlers weirdly, also making them formatted links on Mastodon side.
Mbin and Lemmy interoperability with Mastodon and Misskey also flawed when federating a post of link type from former two. What looks like a post with one attached image, turns into imageless post with only direct link to image on Masodon / Misskey side.

This issue breaks it the most for me. Those in the poll, some of them I don’t find real or fixable. The seeing full convo one is probably one of the issues that should be addressed, but understanding how the network works, I learned to open original post to seek for full context. This is fine by my standarts.

@evan One major annoyance is following or replying users from different servers, which can also be a difficult for newcomers to understand, giving the impression that interacting on the platform is complex.

@evan
I would say 'picking a server'.
But while I had to think about it, it wasn't an issue.

I'm happy here.

@evan

@evan I know from my own experience that finding a server is a major problem.

I think that the Fediscovery project from the @Mastodon team can help with the discovery and search problem.

@evan Picking a server that accepts you and isn't blocked by and doesn't block instances that you want to interact with.

@evan I was already on identica and I liked the idea of it. So when Mastodon came around, I wanted to try it. But I didn't know what would make a good server for me. I finally just chose a medium sized German server, hoping I could move my account if that was the wrong one.

@evan posts not migrating when you migrate servers