@sun I think part of the issue is that people come here expecting it to be like Twitter (Threads, Instagram, Facebook, etc). That is, they expect the feature set to be those things best implemented in a centralized fashion, including centralized moderation. This was true since the Mastodon invasion *, but it is especially true now that people are fleeing Twitter because of Elon Musk's political activities.

Compounding forces include Fediblock, which actively partitions the network into multiple subnetworks without giving people any clue which of their contacts will be suddenly unreachable, the slowness of development throughout the many software projects, and the longstanding and wrongheaded decision to try and hide most of the Federation aspects.

If we insist on only showing people's display names and partial @username all the time, we're always going to confuse new folks, and make it more difficult to develop features which depend upon and are strengthened by federation ... which are the things that federated networks can do better than centralized networks.

And likewise, if the only positive thing we can think of is censorship resistance, we're likely to attract mostly people who are intentionally offensive and therefore blocked.

There's a lot more to say, but I've got some grandkids upstairs that I haven't really hung around with for 5+ years. I need to log off and go spend time with them.

* It was definitely an invasion, as Mastodon sought out and attracted people very different from the then-current Fedizens, which led to a much less satisfying culture throughout the network. (This predated Fediblock, but that was inevitable once these users brought their culture here from the sites they'd been using before.) I suppose the flood of 4chan folks shortly before and during the first Masto wave was also an invasion, but at the time, they weren't so noticeably vile.