The two instances run by the dev team seem to be operating as that to no small extent. They’re super hammered right now.
It’s still a confusing process though. Some kind of “find your friends” might help, if we could get people to participate in a big database of “this is my Twitter and this is/are my Mastodon(s)”. Ideally this would be on joinmastodon.org along with the instance picker.
While that’s vaguely a step in the right direction, it’s not even in the ballpark of how much friction needs to be removed to get non-nerd adoption. The general populace would stop using social media before they used any of the current federated offerings. Selling non-technical people on the tech when it’s less fun, harder to reason about, and more annoying is a non-starter.
The only design that would stand a chance would start with the absolute optimal user onboarding and usage path and begrudgingly degrade when absolutely technically necessary. That’s what the commercial offerings will do, and most people are fine with compromising their privacy and control of their data feed.
No spoonful of sugar, no medicine no matter how beneficial.
Also there is no recommendation algorithm, so it's very hard to find people.
And there is not way to automatically follow lists of people either, so I cant even use curators. That is especially insane, given that there are curators who create lists of interesting people, you just have to click one by one to follow...
There is a recommendation algorithm in the newest versions; your instance has an explore tab that shows popular hashtags, posts and accounts, plus popular articles shared in many tweets. The instance admin has to greenlight them on a case-by-case basis (though you can greenlight an entire website if you want and it amounts to 10 minutes of work a day).
The algorithm is entirely based on "how many users did use this hashtag/share the post/share the URL/interact with account in the past week".
It’s still a confusing process though. Some kind of “find your friends” might help, if we could get people to participate in a big database of “this is my Twitter and this is/are my Mastodon(s)”. Ideally this would be on joinmastodon.org along with the instance picker.