I am curious what Twitter features you are missing in Mastodon? The only thing I can think of that I feel like many people expect is some kind if "curated" recommendations system (e.g. I only want to see content that is relevant to me). This, of course, is a double-edged sword at best (who gets to decide what content is recommended? What are their goals/motivations?). Personally, I have not had any issues finding interesting folks to follow on Mastodon. Even though I started years ago on a completely fresh instance, I found some lists of recommended follows and started by following the ones who seemed interesting. The networking effect took it from there since following/interacting with those initial accounts surfaced more similar accounts to my server which I also chose to follow. Now my feed is full of cool stuff from the hundreds of accounts that I follow. Looking at the federated feed gives me an even more broad look at lots of things happening the the general fedi!

I really want to like Mastodon but there are two things that really bug me about it. First, searching for anything is very slow. Second, searching for people who are not on the same instance with me seems to return a lot of false negatives.

The first may be a Ruby on Rails problem (although I am not sure), possibly exacerbated by the decentralized layout of Mastodon instances. The second seems to be a fundamental design problem.

It seems to me that the original idea of Mastodon was that people would want to participate in communities that focus on specific themes. Many instances are aiming to serve people who are interested in one particular thing. Because of this, finding people and posts on other instances is harder. But reducing my interests to a single dimension is not how I used to use Twitter, so this is a major usability problem for me.

Exactly this. Mastodon seems to still focus on the community aspect of federation, yet few people want to have one or a few interests/groups. Decentralization is a great idea for operating, but I’ll never see the point of a “node” where I have more interest in interacting with those on the node than with others.

I’m only missing the simple/centralized everything.

I’m not interested in any kind of community/network/discovery effect. I know which people I want to follow so I just want to find them, be fairly sure it’s really them, and then only read their tweets and retweets.

If you want the convenience of a centralized service run by a single party you have to deal with the consequences.

In other words, just stay on Twitter! Why’d you move to mastodon to begin with?

I worry Twitter won’t be around forever. And a lot of the people I follow on Twitter moved to mastodon already.