I already tried them out and made starter packs for Visual Novel developers and artists I like. I got a 500 error a few times while trying to add a user to a starter pack, but apart from that it works pretty well. Wish there were better filtering options for the search though.

We’ve had this exact conversation in this community two months ago already, in case you want to back read the comments from back then. Nothing significant has changed

To paraphrase my opinion from back then:

• Easier onboarding, and a familiar, easier UX
• customizable feeds you can subscribe to + starterpacks instantly give you full timelines and people to follow (and followers, if you’re in many starter packs)
• better discoverability, and therefore higher engagement
• stacking moderation and excellent security features (e.g. detachable quote boosts, “the nuclear block”)
• many users who tried Mastodon first had bad experiences with “HOA”-like behavior and over-enthusiastic mods

Yeah, the biggest problem with this approach is different moderation philosophies. You would have to set up a vetted set of approved non-problematic instances. I’ve read several accounts of people who tried out fedi and left soon after, and nothing sours the newcomer experience more than unknowingly joining an instance with a toxic community/moderators

What timconspicuous said. Make sure your instance hasn’t blocked bluesky as well

My perspective as someone who is mainly active in the anime/gaming fandom and gamedev space:

• Easier onboarding overall since you don’t have to bother with choosing an instance and all that
• despite starting out with less features than mastodon (no gifs, they are only getting video in the next update wth), the UI is overall more user-friendly and similar to Twitter’s
• Customizable feeds you can easily subscribe to in-app so you instantly have some content on your timeline (+ it’s easy to be found in these feeds without having to research the specific tags to use)
• Discoverability (through features and community efforts) is so much better. As someone who mainly follows artists, the last few days my TL was full of people doing artshares via quote-repost chains or sharing “starter packs” with lists of people to follow
• I have seen exactly one artshare post on mastodon so far (the japanese side seems to have it figured out a bit better, though. I regularly see tag-based artshares going around)
• meanwhile, to achieve a similar experience on mastodon I had to manually build myself different feeds in phanpy in which I’m following ~30 tags I have painfully collected to find the posts I’m interested in
• quote-retweets don’t exist yet but I kind of see the benefit now
• the stackable moderation also helps a lot

Overall, I think the main problems on Mastodon’s side are difficult onboarding and lack of actual community-building efforts. Also, the community just seems to be less welcoming for creators in general imo