Instances aren’t even the biggest pain point for new users (though it’s certainly a big one as much as people insist that it’s easy for anyone to grasp).

The fact that by signing up to mastodon you don’t even get access to all content (every instance has their own block list and federated content) is a massive sticking point. The decentralized nature of mastodon means that you can’t have one uniform experience across the user base, and that’s a huge hindrance to new adoption because people see social media as central squares where everyone is seeing the same thing, but that can’t happen on mastodon by design.

Also, and I’ll die on this hill: the majority of people do not want chronological feeds that they curate themselves. They like recommendations and automatically curated home feeds with the hot new content tailored for them. Any product that only has chronological feeds is DoA when it comes to mass adoption.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on the fact you lose everything if your instance goes down (I’ve been through it twice, not fun). This is not actually the case with blue sky, funnily enough, since AT Proto was built specifically to detach your identity from the platform/instance you’re on and carry all your content anywhere.

Insisting that mastodon is easy to use for anyone is delusional. Mastodon, by virtue of being federated, requires you to be a much more conscious user than average. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and some people are happy about having this “normie filter”. I also think that anyone can learn to use mastodon if properly taught, but regardless, it is a massive wall for adoption.

It’s not that people aren’t seriously looking for an alternative (bluesky’s increasing popularity proves this), it’s that mastodon is too antithetical to what people want and expect from a modern social media platform. You can argue if it’s good or bad that mastodon is not following the trends of popular social media, but whether you like it or not, not following said trends is what makes it massively unpopular.

At the end of the day, people just want Twitter without the nazis.

Unfortunately I’m inclined to believe this is on purpose to filter out people with self-respect such as yourself.

It’s not just a cost-saving thing (though I’m sure that’s also a factor), it’s a way to make sure the only people who go through with such interviews are those who are very desperate. Because people who are desperate are more willing to subject themselves to poorer work conditions.

Companies will only stop doing this when it actually stops working, which is unlikely given the massive inequality in our world today.

This is legit the opposite of my experience. I am a relatively tech savvy user, I like to fiddle with all the settings and an ugly UI doesn’t inherently deter me as long as the experience is good, so when I first installed jellyfin I was ready to have a clunky experience fighting the UI.

Despite that, I was legitimately surprised at how Jellyfin was far less confusing for me to use out of the box than plex ever was. I found Plex’s UI very confusing to navigate on my TV and my family did not like using it either. I remember especially hating all the extra categories and freemium content plex added that I wasn’t interested in viewing but couldn’t remove (or at least did not find a way to remove). In Jellyfin all of my content is just there and very easily categorized and there’s no superfluous elements in the UI, just my stuff that I want to watch.

I remember plex also gave me more trouble during installation than jellyfin did. I actually found jellyfin very pleasant and intuitive to setup. Plex sent me down a Google rabbit hole to diagnose why it wouldn’t boot at all.

It was genuinely such an awful experience as a first-time user that it made me wonder why anyone would use plex.

The issue is really that Kakao is not just a comic app.

They are basically the Meta/Facebook of South Korea, one of the most valuable companies in the whole country, and they are in quite literally every facet of South Korean life.

They do instant messaging (KakaoTalk), payments (KakaoPay), banking (KakaoBank), public transportation (Kakao T), games (Kakao Games) and probably way more I’m forgetting. If you’re in south Korea you cannot live without Kakao almost.

Webtoons are not a significant portion of their income, but they have so much disposable income and such a drive to go after pirates that they don’t care.

Their actual audience in South Korea is very anti piracy too and support these moves. It’s a very similar case in Japan, but not even the richest Japanese manga publishers are as filthy rich like Kakao, they mostly spend their resources fighting piracy within their borders and leave it at that.

Also the monetization model you’re describing is unfortunately the most profitable currently. They employ it because it works. Webtoons are also by far, and I mean by faaaar, the most consumed comic format. Majority of the public is now reading comics on their phones and Webtoons thrive there. So there’s a very big financial incentive to go after mobile apps because of it.

Unfortunately that’s also the primary reason Kotatsu was targeted and shutdown

Bundling the sources with the app has become very risky because one specific multi-billion dollar Korean company (Kakao) has openly made it their mission to hunt down these apps’ creators and nobody can stop them. They literally brag on Twitter about it and everything.

So the best way to avoid litigation and ensure longevity at the moment is to completely separate the app/reader from the actual sources of content.

But it’s not that inconvenient. Once you add the repository url you can see all the available extensions in-app and download the ones you want. They are also updated automatically so it’s not that involved after the initial setup.

All Mihon forks also have an update checker so you’ll pretty easily keep the main app updated as well.

Mihon or any of its forks:

• Komikku
• Yokai
• TachiyomiAZ
• TachiyomiSY
• TachiyomiJ2K

Note you will need to add the extensions manually but that’s pretty easy to do. This is to avoid DMCA issues like what happened a few months ago with Tachiyomi and now Kotatsu (same company that took down both FYI)

Just to add on to this, in those unfortunate cases where there really is only Fandom, you can use an extension like LibRedirect which will redirect any Fandom pages to a breezewiki instance, which is a stripped down, privacy respecting, no BS front end for Fandom.