This is, at least in part, a UX problem. Even as someone with a lot of technical experience I found Mastodon quite disorienting at first. Bluesky has solved this much better which is why they've won out over Mastodon.
Regardless, I think there's another thing that helped Bluesky: VC capital. In particular, to hire people to work on UX. It's a bit of a pet-peeve of mine, but I find it strange that designer don't contribute more to projects like Mastodon, which definitely need it. Even from the selfish angle of building a portfolio, helping solve Mastodon's UX challenges is much more impressive and realistic, than doing the millionth redesign of Gmail that will never get implemented.
PDS's to hold users data, relays/firehoses to aggregate & forward traffic, AppViews to create composite views of likes, replies, etc, resolvers to lookup DIDs, clients to access the network. Each of these has independent implementations. BlueSky is already decentralized & already has viable credible exit. It's not decentralized, and indeed the scalability & accessibility of having firehose consumers has the greatest scale out decentralization characteristics we've seen anywhere short of BitTorrent.
I try very hard to find the positive & to upvote things I don't fully agree with, if well argued. I wish the social network of HN could do more against adversarial zero-sim thinking, didn't have people who insist on draining.
As a general rule I’d say polished user friendly software takes 10X the effort at a minimum vs software only nerds can use. That’s probably an underestimation. For consumer software it’s probably 100X. It’s because computers are incredibly confusing and hard to use and it takes immense effort to overcome that.
(If you don’t agree that computers are confusing and hard to use, you are part of a tiny highly educated minority.)
I’ve said this around here like a hundred times because it feels like I am the only one who gets it.
The tech to create an excellent decentralized network with an excellent experience and without the weaknesses of Mastodon exists. It doesn’t get used because nobody pays for it. Centralization gives you an economic model from either directly charging for access or selling data or ads, and none of that works in a decentralized world.
Right, but that's the entire point: Mastodon's UX problems are caused by its decentralization and mostly cannot be separated from it. Arguably all the problems of decentralization that make users disprefer it are UX problems-- that doesn't mean they are easy to solve.