Creatrix Tiara is a user on mastodon.social. You can follow them or interact with them if you have an account anywhere in the fediverse. If you don't, you can sign up here.

So I'm seeing some discussion about why Mastodon isn't necessarily taking off with certain minorities (let's be honest, they mean POCs while trying to dance around the term, this place is super White asides from the apparent Japan contingent).

Here's some thoughts:

1. The whole notion of "instances" is really unintuitive. When you Google "Mastodon", you get an instance like mastodon.social, but it's not immediately apparent that M.S isn't your only option or WHY you'd want a different instance

2. Linked to #1 - there's no meta-Mastodon site that can explain the basics of what Mastodon is, give some suggestions for instances, and explain the whole instances thing.

3. Hell, I'd suggest changing the wording of some of these to make it sound less like you need to have been immersed in Open Source World to understand. "Instance" could be "community". "Federated" could be "across Mastodon". Etc etc. Relate it to terms that laypeople can understand.

@creatrixtiara I just referred to it as "maddeningly opaque" in my writing Slack. I think that's a serious obstacle.