Rough edges that are a barrier to participation to non-technical people are absolutely problems that need to be addressed with intention and they do exist. This is without loss of generality, but also the federated web is no where near perfect, and Mastodon is absolutely not the best it will ever be.
That said, in a way there's something comical when programmers use "fedi too hard" as a disingenuous excuse to justify not participating in communities they don't really care about but never the less feel significantly peer pressured to join. Like, is pushing a button, typing your user name into popup and then pushing another button *really* too complicated for you, a programmer?! If so, why am I trusting you about anything technical at all lol
elitism
@aeva A lot of this seems to boil down to an unspoken belief that programmers are intelligent and everybody else is dumb, and therefore a programmer must be in the optimal situation to determine what is and isn't too hard for "normies", and the idea that different people just find *different* things easy or hard (in ways that they don't see) never comes into the picture at all.
@joepie91 I'm worried now that my first post is ambiguous. My intended meaning is definitely not to imply that programmers are intelligent or vice versa.
@aeva Oh no, I was criticizing tendencies of programmers, not your toot :)
@aeva That programmers are often elitist by assuming they are linearly more intelligent than everybody else, and believing that they can speak for everybody else, and therefore anything that bothers them must bother everyone else too
@joepie91 I'm not sure I follow your meaning. Are you saying that I'm elitist for suggesting that programmers do things like use other people's criticisms an indirection for declining social pressures (because it is a normal human thing to do), that programmers are elitists for pretending to speak for other people, or something else?