As well as being a problem in its own right, I was thinking of this with respect to the "can't find people or interests" problem that you mentioned as one of the top reasons why people in your informal survey didn't stay. One of the things that people don't generally seem to know is that replies by somebody you follow don't wind up in your home timeline unless they're to (or maybe boosted by?) somebody you follow. On the one hand if you're following a lot of people it's good for keeping your home timeline from being overhelmed, but on the other hand it adds to the discovery challenge.
If I see somebody replying about a topic I'm interested in, the person they're replying to may well also be interested in that topic; repeat enough times, and I've found a bunch of people interested in the topic. But if I _don't_ see the reply, then I can't use this tactic. Of course this isn't the only problem, but it complements the challenges of the lack of search (unless you can guess the hashtag and people are using it) etc.
RE: https://universeodon.com/users/siderea/statuses/110845657548300479
quotingProposed: it is completely, utterly, gobsmackingly horrible that Mastodon users - even smart, highly engaged ones that read documentation and understand federation - *cannot tell* just who is going to be shown what they post or what the various privacy settings mean in practice.
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There is an animated conversation going on in the comments of the poll I just posted where we're trying to reverse engineer under what circumstances a comment reply will show up in the commenter's followers' timelines.
That this conversation even exists is, I'm sorry, completely horrifying. The fact that this is even a matter of discussion, to say nothing of needing to be a matter of speculation and investigation, is appalling.
How can anybody make informed decisions about participating on a platform, the behavior which they do not understand and cannot predict?
For instance,