Anyone sane has left Xitter already and the crazies stay on their own platform, making the Web generally much more pleasant, as less and less sites link to Xitter.
I’d like to like Mastodon better. I’d like it - ot a simular open, decentralized platform - to be the one that everyone uses, if anything.
However, I do not like it as much. And Bluesky is getting the momentum, which is important.
They’re also at least theoretically relatively open and decentralized (but we do all know how that would go long-term)
But like you said, either is dramatically better than Twitter. Heck, just having many healthy options is good.
It’s my perpetual gripe with many of those open tools that I love ideologically, but practically find lacking in some respects, typically UI/UX (including the pre-experience of the decision whether to use them). I don’t have all the skills or knowledge to fix the issues that bother me, as it’s often far eaiser to know what’s wrong than how to fix it.
I understand and endorse the philosophy that it’s unfair to demand things of volunteers already donating their time and skills to the public, but it creates some interdisciplinary problems. Even if capable UX designers were to tackle the issue and propose solutions or improvements, they might not all have the skills to actually implement them, so they’d have to rely on developers to indulge their requests.
And from my own experience, devs tend to prioritise function over form, because techy people are often adept enough at navigating less-polished interfaces. Creating a pretty frontend takes away time from creating stuff I’d find useful.
I don’t know if there’s an easy solution. The intersection between “People that can approach software from the perspective of a non-tech user”, “People that are willing to approach techy Software” and “People that are tech-savy enough to be able to fix the usability issues” is probably very small.
