Mastodon needs a way of automatically populating your feed for new users, like the "All" button does here on Lemmy if your instance has done the work.

I consider myself somewhat technology literate and I got frustrated/bored after trying on my phone to find popular accounts elsewhere to follow on the smaller instance I signed up on. Still stuck with an empty feed, but mostly out of laziness*. New users don't stand a chance.

[–] thawed_caveman 4 points 1 year ago

This is just a different manifestation of a core problem the fediverse has: it can get annoying to try to interact with content outside of your own instance.

And then we wonder why people flocked to Threads instead of Mastodon.

I really think the federated aspect should be almost invisible infrastructure, like how we never think about OpenSSL behind the scenes when we make a secure payment. There's even a browser plugin to simplify Mastodon federation, so it can't be that hard. Frankly, something even more seamless than that should be the default.

But it wasn't designed this way for whatever reason, i'm sure there's good reasons but it's hard to empathize when i follow a link and suddenly i find myself in a new place where i'm not logged in, even though this "place" is still on Lemmy.