The *keys have a UI that has a similar design language to Twitter, but a fairly different layout. I think it's close enough that people would recognize it as "Twitter, but different", vs Mastodon's "Twitter, but archaic, and also different, and therefore confusing".

The *keys also had many of the features that Twitter migrants complained were lacking from Mastodon. But trying to talk to anyone on Mastodon about platforms that aren't Mastodon was a total non-starter. Mastodon is a giant Mastodon circle jerk.

It made my soul sad.

But the real issue with Mastodon is that it has a significant population of people who believe it's a sacrosanct cultural space, and that are very vocal about telling anyone coming into it that they need to learn the local customs or GTFO. The push-and-pull between "we want to be mainstream" and also "fuck the mainstream normies" is palpable, and super cringey, and it turns people away quickly.

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago

The *keys also had many of the features that Twitter migrants complained were lacking from Mastodon. But trying to talk to anyone on Mastodon about platforms that aren’t Mastodon was a total non-starter. Mastodon is a giant Mastodon circle jerk.

If you see someone tell Mastodon users that the Fediverse isn't Mastodon, they're hardly ever on Mastodon themselves. They're most likely on Friendica which suffers the most from obnoxious Mastodon users, and if not, they're likely to be on Firefish or Akkoma or sometimes on Hubzilla.

The most extreme case I've encountered was a Mastodon developer who tried to convince me, a Hubzilla veteran, that Mastodon is literally the only feature-complete project in the Fediverse. Fortunately for him, I didn't ask him about full text formatting support, permissions, nomadic identity, multiple independent identities on one login, WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV or a built-in wiki engine.

But the real issue with Mastodon is that it has a significant population of people who believe it’s a sacrosanct cultural space, and that are very vocal about telling anyone coming into it that they need to learn the local customs or GTFO.

Worse yet, "coming into it" is also applied to everything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon. After learning that there's, in fact, more than Mastodon in the Fediverse, many Mastodon users still think Eugen Rochko has invented the Fediverse, and everything must have come after Mastodon.

Thus, even Friendica users who have been around since before Mastodon even saw its very first release are being forced to ditch Friendica's own culture, adopt Mastodon's culture instead and stop using all of Friendica's features that Mastodon doesn't have. And Friendica is five and a half years older than Mastodon. It has its own well-defined culture which is very different from Mastodon's because Friendica is so much different from Mastodon.

It's almost like European colonists vs natives, only that the European colonists didn't assume the natives had entered the previously completely uninhabited land after them.