Most people consume Toots by going through their feed, retweeting is just a button away, just like on Twitter.
Quote tweet is definitely lacking, and thankfully is coming up soon according to their CEO and lead developer.
And yes, poor discovery, the search is awful. It's quite a lot better with hashtags and following hashtags in your feed (great feature IMO), but they need to work on that.
Personally I find that while there are flaws, they are smaller than having to endure the amount of spam, ads and garbage I see on twitter. Conversations with people are good and insightful. It's just better for my mental health as well, less of AI generated outrage takes showing up.
> 2. & 3. Mastodon is just one implementation. It happens to be the most popular, but it isn't the most full featured. I use Misskey, another implementation, and it supports all of the things mentioned here. see below.
>4. This is the main reason i prefer "fediverse" to stuff like facebook. I don't want to be gamed, i just want to read stuff as it comes in. If someone seems interesting, or a thread seems interesting, i can just click and read their profile or the thread.
Misskey has some faults. The admin experience, at least to me, is opaque. Me and a few other Misskey admins are looking for alternatives that aren't GNUSocial or Mastodon. We're hoping that someone develops a compiled implementation of activitypub to link against or use with an API; barring that i think we were debating if plemora was a good one to try.
And additionally, on point 2 above, mastodon supports what you say, it just opens a small window, which you may be blocking - however i admit that i may be misunderstanding this part. The window that opens says "what account would you like to use to <...>?"
To #2, a browser extension to help with this would be great, and wouldn't be hard. I'd expect that to come sooner or later.
I agree re: QT, and some Fediverse software has it already. It's coming.
Ranked/AI managed feeds are very much possible to do with Mastodon/Fediverse. You just can't expect it to get built into the main Mastodon UI. However you could do this w/external software that produces an ActivityPub actor that you can consume either by following it or by adding it to a list. It's on my list (sorry) of things to play with, but I hope someone beats me to it (and frankly, it's a space that's wide open for a variety of variations, going from shared up/downvoting a la reddit, to simple bayesian network over your own activity, to a more complex machine learning model or crazy stuff like asking the openai API questions about whether the content matches whatever profile you want.
There appears to be one for Chrome too here (not tested it yet):
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/graze-for-mastodon...
If you're in control of your feed, and your feed is filled with noise, I wouldn't call that a Mastodon issue.
Without a ranked/AI-managed feed I'm not truly in control of my feed - without it, I'm forced to curate who I follow based on different criteria to what I want.
It sounds to me like you are describing the opposite: being more in control than you would like.
The latter point of view is the one that is actually useful to me, and so the one I choose to take: I want to be able to see limit subsets of content from people that they label poorly (so following tags is insufficient) and without having to see everything else they post.
I'm perfectly fine with people preferring chronological too - the two can coexist. It doesn't even require any changes to Mastodon to do what I want; just a tiny ActivityPub server that processes my timeline and emits boosts to an outbox that I can put in a list is sufficient.
Fediverse isn't just Mastodon. There are other implementations of ActivityPub compatible with each other. For example I can use Friendica and comment or retrweet posts from Mastodon and vise versa.
> if I am on one mastodon site, I can not just retweet that post, I have to go to my server and then cut-and-paste a link to that other site.
It was simpler in past versions of Mastodon but they removed that feature for some reason. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/19306 Previously it was "remote interaction" dialog. Other implementations like Pleroma may have kept it.
> no quote tweeting, important for vitality.
Twitter can not do like this https://telegra.ph/file/9ea3a6f4f0e3a5c5fa06e.png
(1) poor discovery
(2) if I am on one mastodon site, I can not just retweet that post, I have to go to my server and then cut-and-paste a link to that other site.
(3) no quote tweeting, important for vitality.
(4) and most importantly, no ranked/AI-managed feed. Thus it is filled with noise.
In many ways, Mastodon is a purposely janked product because people don't want to make things easy to go viral. But that reduces engagement and interest.