Yeah, if you copy Twitter’s UI users will expect it to behave like twitter.
Again, breaking from that expectation is not an inherently bad thing. Fediverse projects are not looking for some stupid IPO pump and dump exit strategy.
Decentralization is not a feature, it’s an implementation detail.
Decentralization is an implementation detail to achieve the feature that is “an online service that doesn’t treat you like cattle and owns all of your fucking data”. Clear?
This is not a matter of good vs bad, or right vs wrong. It is about expected vs unexpected. The users expected a similar experience to Twitter but the goal of Mastodon is not to emulate Twitter.
A lot of the UI/UX may resemble Twitter, but the high level decision making, design, and stakeholders of the project are completely different.
Do you mean to say that Mastodon and similar projects have to adopt an entirely different UI/UX that is unintuitive in order to produce something different just because Twitter is what they expect? Are you aware that big tech pours in inordinate amounts of money into psychology and UI/UX research to ensure they provide experiences with the lowest amount of friction possible?
This feels rather unreasonable, uninformed, and confused in motivation.
What planet are you on? What “users”? Lemmy users? Obviously they do!
Twitter users? Who cares!? Privacy, data ownership, apps that don’t fucking implode and DDOS themselves because the owner is an absolute moron, etc. may not be features most Twitter users care about.
But, why should anyone here care? Fediverse projects are not in a market competition to make money. These projects exist to add value to the lives of its users without perverse corporate incentives ruining everything.
I don’t think I will find myself asking, “What app would Twitter users want me to design?”, ever. Why would you want to recreate something as awful as Twitter?