Being real? That’s a load of malarkey. Discoverability is easy on mastodon. It’s reddit easy. Just like you can put r/ in front of damn near anything and find a subreddit, the # system is as close to dummy proof as possible. Interested in a topic? Slap a # in front of keywords. That’s it. End of problem discovering posts and users to follow.

While I don’t doubt that there are assholes in mastodon, good luck finding anywhere that doesn’t have them. There’s always someone that’s going to bitch at noobs. It could be a brand new, first day situation, and somebody is going to bitch at people that are two minutes newer.

The CW complaint is an annoyance, I guess, but it’s simple enough to resolve in the same way as most other social media. Block the idiots. Boom, immediate cessation of whiners.

Instance rules are easy to find. It isn’t buried behind anything complex. It is our responsibility as adults to look for, and seek understanding of those rules. If we can’t be bothered to do it before signing up for a new service of any kind, that’s not on the service. But it’s also quite easy to do after signing up. If someone can’t do due diligence before diving in head first, that’s on them.

Compared to lemmy and reddit, mastodon is much easier to discover rules. They’re only instance based. The r/ and c/ structure means each community can also have rules beyond those of the instance. Even that’s absurdly easy to find though.

I think the survey behind this piece had to have been answered by people that don’t have the sense of a turnip. It takes all of a minute just exploring mastodon’s interface to find rules by accident. That means anyone answering that as a reason for not using it didn’t even bother to find out what is and isn’t possible via the main interface. That’s either laziness or stupidity.