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“One difference is that Twitter doesn’t have to educate it’s users about federation since it’s centralized, so there will always be that requirement “

I strongly disagree because Fidonet and E-mail don’t need to teach its users they’re not centralized. The UX and UI don’t need to explain it for users to use it effectively.

I see most current issues with the Fediverse to be a UI or associated UX issue.

“As for interactions starting from a remote server, some of that can add unnecessary complexities and slower experience (e.g. the ‘remote follow’ workflow of typing in your WebFinger ID, authenticating, action confirmation, etc). There’s not a lot available to simplify it without expecting browser extensions or similar. “

I certainly agree this particular problem isn’t a trivial issue to solve, mainly because it requires adoption of a solution across different implementations.

“The only thing that could be done is designating a protocol handler URI scheme, such as ‘web+activitypub:’ for remote actions”

Technically speaking, don’t even need to do that. Just have generic specific agreed upon webpage domain for this. Phones apps can intercept that URL, non-app aware browsers landing on that page on the other hand get a normal webpage that can simply accept your username@instance (and maybe offer to store it in local storage so you don’t have to reenter it next time) and do the necessary forwarding to the appropriate instance for an action.

I don’t think though this is where users are immediately running into problems. I think there are a lot more basic problems like content discoverability, which isn’t a problem on stuff like Fidonet.

I frequently think about a situation a couple of new users on this instance complained about recently with me. You want to talk about a particular topic? Well, there’s a group of servers over here that cover it, they’re the standard, except, none of them are accepting registrations, they’re not on public relays, the admins on those instances don’t want to join a relay or don’t respond. They’re federating with your server, but equally, you don’t know anyone on that server and vice versa so discovery is difficult. They locked down the ability to see their feeds, so you don’t even see who you could follow remotely. This is really bad and I think the couple of users that complained about this have given up on the fediverse entirely since they haven’t logged in, in a week now.

Edit: Fixed non-sense sentence.