everything you just mentioned is as bad as or 100x worse on nostr
> reply and like counts where always wrong
10000x worse on nostr are you kidding me? There isn't even a canonical version of a thread to know if the count is correct.
> threads never loaded completely
same, except you'd never even know on nostr.
> everything was slow as hell
Maybe *only* 100x worse on nostr
> DMs suck
Nostr DMs weaken the security of your key dude
> no search
Factually incorrect, even in 2017.
> following people if you had their name/address was often cumbersome
Allow me to introduce you to non-human-readable pubkeys for identifiers
> sometimes you're just browsing on other servers, not your home server, for some reason, and there is no way to go home so you can interact
That's wrong, there literally is an "interact on my home server" button. But that's an admittedly clunky UX.
And in closing, mastodon is not the only fediverse server software. Pleroma is what I recommend, with the soapbox frontend. I genuinely have no idea what instance you used, or when, my only conclusion is it was misconfigured. Even in 2017 mastodon's UX was far better.