> I’m not saying designers are fundamentally more useful — If FOSS projects were primarily run by groups of designers who were as dismissive about technical improvements as developers are about design, you’d have a shitload of super duper slow electron apps that are all super neat and give you just the right controls to solve your problem but do a terrible job at it, at best… and we’d all still be using CLI utilities from the original system V.

This is music to my ears. I'm firmly in your camp. I just mean the current Mastodon design is such a slavish copy of the Twitter interface that there won't need to be a lot of work here to clean things up. But I agree that without dedicated design/UX work, Mastodon will continue to appeal to tech nerds.

> Right now, sure. That’s the problem. Luckily, you can have your own corner of the internet that will be exactly like that even if someone builds something on the Fediverse that’s useful to people who don’t regularly read man pages.

Oh I agree. But the Fediverse isn't the only flavor here. I think the Matrix project is also taking a great stab at making social chat (like Discord or Slack) open and usable by people who don't read manpages and worship terminals for a living.

My broader point here is that many open projects right now enable socializing "in the small" so to speak. The Fediverse, Matrix, XMPP, etc let you socialize with your friends in a small like-minded community without reading config docs (if you don't want to). These are important but don't replace true social media, where anyone can just frictionlessly join and talk with millions of others. Here the Fediverse hopes that federation can make this work and the Matrix project hopes that sending messages between homeservers can work, but both projects fundamentally don't address the "socializing at large" capability that social networking gives you. Until a free alternative to social media has been made, I still think adoption will remain small. FWIW I'm not a social media person myself but many family and friends of mine want the true social media experience, not the cozy small one on the Fediverse or Matrix.

> Many people in the FOSS world position various Fediverse offerings as our savior from the ills of social media and seem utterly baffled by the lack of mainstream adoption, assuming it’s a matter of marketing or some other money-related corporate magic. It’s not. Just like Gimp and every other major user-facing FOSS application that managed to remain an “alternative” despite a giant demand and its technical capability to cater to it— they only really cared if horrible-UI-tolerant developers found it usable.

You'll find this true of many FOSS believers. I've all but given up on FOSS movements. The movement in practice gets hung up over things completely irrelevant to anybody but themselves, such as complaining about lack of configurability, terminal interfaces, or "bloat". The community also gets very defensive and emotional the moment you point out any criticisms. This is why I see so many FOSS folks rely on "marketing" or "corporate conspiracy" as reasons why their cause is hampered. Many of them genuinely cannot see the forest for the trees.

I'm not holding my breath for FOSS personally.