I'm trying to point out that people have experience of Facebook and Twitter and other platforms, and they expect when they join a new platform that they can type in their friends' names and get results. They then find that Mastodon doesn't work like that, and complain about the lack of "discoverability".

And they're right ... discoverability on Mastodon is not like on other platforms, and it is harder to find things.

Yes, I know how to do these things, I am, after all, a moderator on an instance with over 20K users. I'm just trying to point out that for some people the fact that "discoverability" doesn't work as it does on other platforms is a huge stumbling block.