Comment by justusthane

Not disagreeing with you that there is an amount of friction at the moment. However, just to provide some counterpoints:

> All clients are straight up bad but this is mostly personal opinion.

There are a _lot_ of new clients in active development right now. I'm on the private alpha of Ivory by Tapbots (who built the popular Tweetbot client), and it's quite good.

> On public instances there is always the risk of the admins deciding not to run it anymore without notice. In that case you lose all your followers.

Agreed that this is an issue, but there are ways around it. I'm a member of a coop-run instance, social.coop.

> Due to how it's designed; some things are very inconvenient. For example; when I click a link to someone's profile on the internet, I can't see if I follow them or not unless they are on my server. Then I have to copy their url, go to my instance, search and follow.

Agreed, but most clients resolve this.

> it's imho impossible for it to go mainstream.

Strong disagree - I think it's already going mainstream, and lots of non-tech people are picking it up every day.

> Even the concept of "choosing an instance" is confusing for most people. I don't want to just follow or be followed by techbros and edgy artists. I like having normal converstaions with regular people.

Agreed, but this is resolved by just picking one of the big, popular instances. I was on universeodon.com first, and was immediately having "normal" conversations with "regular" people.

Again, your comment absolutely rightfully points out that there _is_ friction there. However, I don't think it's at all insurmountable, and I think it will continue to improve and gain traction.