I don’t like the clickbait title at all – Mastodon’s clearly going to survive, at least for the forseeable future, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it outlives Xitter.
Still, Mastodon is struggling; most of the people who checkd it out in the November 2022 surge (or the smaller June 2023 surge) didn’t stick around, and numbers have been steadily declining for the last year. The author makes some good points, and some of the comments are excellent.
Decentralisation and having multiple instances isn’t even that much of an issue. 99.999% of all Twitter refugees were railroaded to Mastodon and what seems like 99% of these straight to mastodon.social. They genuinely thought mastodon.social was “the Mastodon website”, just like twitter.com was the Twitter website. It took many of them months to even notice that Mastodon is decentralised. And it took some of them even longer to notice that the Fediverse is, in fact, more than just Mastodon while half of them think that Fediverse = Mastodon after almost two years.
No, the biggest issue is: What they were looking for was not something radically different from Twitter, now that Twitter sucked. They were looking for a Twitter without Musk. Like, a drop-in replacement that doesn’t require them to adjust in any way. A 1:1, 100% identical clone of Twitter how it was the day before Musk took over with the same UI and the same UX and the same culture.
When they were railroaded to mastodon.social, they were told that Mastodon is “literally Twitter without Musk”. And they took it as literally. By face value. And then they ended up on something that looked and felt nothing like Twitter. No matter how many of Twitter’s limitations Gargron arbitrarily and unnecessarily implemented into Mastodon, he never got close enough to Twitter itself.
People would stick around because Mastodon felt like the only alternative to Twitter there was. Of course, they kept using Mastodon exactly like Twitter, not adopting to Mastodon’s culture and relying on their toots being delivered to people by an algorithm that Mastodon simply doesn’t have. Hashtag? Fuck hashtags, I didn’t need no hashtags on Twitter, so I ain’t gonna use none on Mastodon. And then they wondered why so few people discovered them and their content.
They didn’t want to adapt. They were waiting for Mastodon to finally “fix the bugs” that made it different from Twitter. Which it didn’t.
Instead, Mastodon developed its own culture (which is a story of its own). And they were pressured to adopt Mastodon’s culture. CWs for sensitive content for any definition of “sensitive”. Twitter ain’t got no CW field. Alt-texts for all images, and it had to be actually useful and informative. They ain’t never done no alt-texts on Twitter. Of course, the right hashtags. See above.
Also, Mastodon-the-app is lack-lustre. Whereas the official apps for just about everything else are fully-featured, the Mastodon mobile app is only there for there to be a mobile app named “Mastodon” for those people who join a new online service by grabbing their iPhones and loading the app with the same name as the service from the App Store. Especially newbies often can’t wrap their minds around using an online service with an app that doesn’t have the same name. But the official Mastodon app is actually just about the worst Mastodon app out there. At the same time, for many Mastodon users, this app IS Mastodon. They’ve never seen the Web interface. What the app can’t do, Mastodon can’t do.
Lastly, Mastodon was probably also way too techy. Like, you had people talking about Linux and Open Source and Web design and whatnot all over the place, something that they themselves knew nothing about and weren’t interested in. On top came those people with their weird-looking monster posts that said the Fediverse is not only Mastodon, and they were posting from something that is not and has never even been affiliated with Mastodon.
And then Bluesky came along. And Bluesky looked exactly like what they’ve been wanting all the time: a 1:1 Twitter clone. One big reason for Bluesky’s success is that it shamelessly ripped off the UI of immediately-pre-Musk-takeover Twitter, both the website and the mobile app. A fully-featured, well-polished mobile app with all the same features as the website. And at first glance, it feels like the same monolithic walled-garden silo as Twitter with the same kinds of users as Twitter, minus the Nazis. At least not as ripe with übergeeks as Mastodon.
Also, Bluesky grew faster and quickly had more users than Mastodon. Which sounded like more followers in less time. Exactly what all those famewhores that brag about their Twitter follower counts were craving.
People wanted a pre-Musk Twitter clone. Mastodon isn’t one. Everything else in the Fediverse is one even less. Bluesky is just that. Bluesky is what people had wanted all the time.
Also, let Mastodon shrink if that means that the “market share” of other native Fediverse server apps grows.
The fewer people think the Fediverse is Mastodon, and the more exposure the other stuff in the Fediverse gets and what features it has over Mastodon, the better.
Because Threads and BlueSky form effective competition with Twitter.
Also, short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks. It’s become obvious. That Twitter was mostly algorithm hype and FOMO.
Mastodon tries to be healthier but I’m not convinced that microblogs in general are that useful, especially to a techie audience who knows RSS and other publishing formats.
short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks.
I 100% agree with this sentiment.
Jaron Lanier has a great book called You Are Not A Gadget, where he talks about the way we design and interact with systems, and he has some thoughts I think reflect this sentiment very well:
“When [people] design an internet service that is edited by a vast anonymous crowd, they are suggesting that a random crowd of humans is an organism with a legitimate point of view.” (This is in reference to Wikis like Wikipedia)
“Different media designs stimulate different potentials in human nature.”
He talks about how when a system becomes popular enough, it can “lock in” a design, when others build upon it as standard. Such as how the very concept of a “file” is one we created, and nearly every system now uses it. Non-file based computing is a highly unexplored design space.
And the key part, which I think is relevant to Mastodon, the fediverse, and social media more broadly, is this quote:
“A design that share’s Twitter’s feature of providing ambient continuous contact between people could perhaps drop Twitter’s adoration of fragments.”
Fragments, of course, meaning the limited, microblogging style of communication the platform allows for. I’ve seen some Mastodon instances that help with this, by not imposing character limits anywhere near where most instances would, opting for tens of thousands of characters long. But of course, there is still a limit. Another design feature by Twitter that is now locked in.
But of course, people are used to that style of social media. It’s what feels normal, inevitable even. Changing it would mean having to reconceptualize social media as a concept, and might be something people aren’t interested in, since they’re too used to the original design. We can’t exactly tell.
As Lanier puts it,
“We don’t really know, because it is an unexplored design space.”
Non-file based computing is a highly unexplored design space.
No it isn’t; that’s what databases are.
That’s what some databases are. Most databases you’ll see today still inevitably store the whole contents of the DB within a file with its own format, metadata, file extension, etc, or store the contents of the database within a file tree.
The notion of “lock in” being used here doesn’t necessarily mean that alternatives don’t or can’t exist, but that comparatively, investment into development, and usage, of those systems, is drastically lower.
Think of how many modern computing systems involve filesystems as a core component of their operation, from databases, to video games, to the structure of URLs, which are essentially usually just ways to access a file tree. Now think of how many systems are in use that don’t utilize files as a concept.
The very notion of files as an idea is so locked-in, that we can rarely fathom, let alone construct a system that doesn’t utilize them as a part of its function.
Regardless, the files example specifically wasn’t exactly meant to be a direct commentary on the state of microblogging platforms, or of all technology, but more an example for analogy purposes than anything else.
What social media platforms don’t have some kind of character limit?
What platforms don’t use a feed?
What platforms don’t use a like button?
What platforms don’t have some kind of hashtags?
All of these things are locked-in, not necessarily technologically, but socially.
Would more people from Reddit have switched to Lemmy if it didn’t have upvotes and downvotes? Are there any benefits or tradeoffs to including or not including the Save button on Lemmy, and other social media sites? We don’t really know, because it’s substantially less explored as a concept.
The very notion of federated communities on Lemmy being instance-specific, instead of, say, instances all collectively downloading and redistributing any posts to a specific keyword acting as a sort of global community not specific to any one instance, is another instance of lock-in, adapted from the fediverse’s general design around instance-specific hosting and connection.
In the world of social media, alternative platforms, such as Minus exist, that explore unique design decisions not available on other platforms, like limited total post counts, vague timestamps, and a lack of likes, but compared to all the other sites in the social media landscape, it’s a drop in the bucket.
The broader point I was trying to make was just that the very way microblogging developed as a core part of social media’s design means that any shift away from it likely won’t actually gain traction with a mainstream audience, because of the social side of the lock-in.
Wow!
“Minus is a finite social network where you get 100 posts—for life.”
@grue @ArchRecord An example of a database that doesn’t keep it’s data in files?
I’m not a big expert on database technology, but I am aware of there being at least a few database systems (“In-Memory”) that use the RAM of the computer for transient storage, and since RAM doesn’t use files as a concept in the same way, the data stored there isn’t exactly inside a “file,” so to speak.
That said, they are absolutely dwarfed by the majority of databases, which use some kind of file as a means to store the database, or the contents within it.
Obviously, that’s not to say using files is bad in any way, but the possibilities for how database software could have developed, had we not used files as a core computing concept during their inception, are now closed off. We simply don’t know what databases could have looked like, because of “lock-in.”
Memory is still structured like a file and referenced over addresses, we just call it something else.
Bluesky certainly provides another option … when Apartheid Clyde led to Twitter getting shut down in Brazil, there was a small bump in Mastodon’s numbers, but a much bigger influx to Bluesky. Then again Bluesky’s addressed a lot of problems people coming to Mastodon in 2022 had, and Mastodon hasn’t, so if everybody had come to Mastodon instead the pattern would likely have repeated itself and most of them wouldn’t have stuck around.
What are some of the issues you’d like to see addressed? I don’t use mastodon as much so I’m not familiar with what has / hasn’t been done.
ex. I hear they’ve been working on content discovery, such as with the recommended accounts carousel
https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt is a good overview (not by me!) of issues that the November 2022 wave ran into. What’s frustrating is that so many of these are very similar to the issues the April 2017 wave ran into!
Release 4.3 did some work on the recommended accounts, that’s good, but the problems start even before that. What instance to sign up to? Most people have better experiences on smaller instances that match either their interests or their geography … but how to find them? mastodon.social is (for most people) kind of meh – certainly not the worst, but it’s not all that well-moderated, and it’s big enough that the local feed isn’t useful for finding interesting people or stuff – and that’s now the default. Also it took over a year to get 4.3 out; I get it, they’re a small team, some stuff turned out to be a lot harder than expected, and they had to deal with a bunch of security patches in the interim … still, that means progress is frustratingly slow.
The fact that like an rethreads are not federated is I pretty big issue. Like if you come from a small instance, you’ll see most global posts at 0 likes, which makes the platform look dead.
Thank you!
@otter @thenexusofprivacy I personally find the three-pane design a bit “busy”.
Also, short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks
Your post could fit on Mastodon
My post above is 376 characters, which would have required three tweets under the original 140 character limit.
Mastodon, for better or worse, has captured a bunch of people who are hooked on the original super-short posting style, which I feel is a form of Newspeak / 1984-style dumbing down of language and discussion that removed nuance. Yes, Mastodon has removed the limit and we have better abilities to discuss today, but that doesn’t change the years of training (erm… untraining?) we need to do to de-program people off of this toxic style.
Especially when Mastodon is trying to cater to people who are used to tweets.
Your post could fit on Mastodon
EDIT: and second, Mastodon doesn’t have the toxic-FOMO effect that hooks people into Twitter (or Threads, or Bluesky).
People post not because short sentences are good. They post and doom-scroll because they don’t want to feel left out of something. Mastodon is healthier for you, but also less intoxicating / less pushy. Its somewhat doomed to failure, as the very point of these short posts / short-engagement stuff is basically crowd manipulation, FOMO and algorithmic manipulation.
Without that kind of manipulation, we won’t get the kinds of engagement on Mastodon (or Lemmy for that matter).
Look I love lemmy/reddit style social networks and I don’t disagree with the shallow reasons for why twitter has a character limit but there are legitimate and interesting reasons for character limits to posts. Is it better? probably not but sometimes less is more.
My Mastodon instance uses a 500 character limit
How is mastodon healthier? Please provide examples. Healthier for whom? As there’s an extensive list of people harmed that absolutely do not find mastodon “healthy” let alone “healthier” particularly Black and Brown folks. Bluesky defaults to the same way feeds are presented as Mastodon does, so your statement is false
@dragontamer @thenexusofprivacy
“short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks”
I agree and that’s why the first site I put up was friendica, but I find on friendica, even though people have the space to express their thoughts in depth and eloquently, few do so, so perhaps Mastodon is so successful because it appeals to people who are incapable of effective self expression. At any rate, it is a reality that it is, so I do run one of those also.
Microblogging is definitely useful for many things, short and quick thoughts, links to news articles, jokes, memes etc. You can also comment and share things easily. Microblogging actually resembles instant messaging in a lot of ways, just with an undefined ’group chat’ size.
I find it kinda funny that Twitter has become so toxic that people start thinking there must be something wrong with the format.
Also RSS clearly can’t replicate a big chunk of the desirable properties of microblogging (eg. easy sharing and commenting).
They are in competition with Mastodon, and have a marketing budget.
Five years from now, those platforms will become enshittified as their budgets dry up. They will need to milk the users for revenue. Well see another surge in a few years, until they learn that Mastodon is actually better.
Then the next Billionaire with a massive ego and huge budget comes out and makes another one.
Or we get Jack Dorsey making a new company for a 3rd time.
Because Threads and BlueSky form effective competition with Twitter.
why is that though?
It’s not dead but it has one big and massive issue that prevents mass adoption - discovery. If I can’t just write the name of my friends in search and find them no matter where they made their account - for an ordinary user, or one that comes from centralized services, this seems extremely alien and hostile.
And in the end, if you can’t find your friends, you want to interact with, what is the point of using the service?
Luckily, Mastodon is working on a discorvery protocol that should offer a way to find people across the board, which will hopefully make the Fediverse “appear” centralized to the average Joe while maintaining all the benefits of decentralization to the advanced users.
Luckily, Mastodon is working on a discorvery protocol that should offer a way to find people across the board, which will hopefully make the Fediverse “appear” centralized to the average Joe while maintaining all the benefits of decentralization to the advanced users.
I’d bet that this will be so proprietary and non-standard again that it’ll only work within Mastodon, maybe plus a few of its own soft-forks, effectively ignoring 30% of the Fediverse.
It’s open source standard, anyone can contribute…
I guess it’s for people like me, who have no friends?
William Shatner couldn’t find me on Mastodon
You can put in their handle, with the domain they’ve signed up with
If you’re looking for more wider fuzzy search for that; mastodon 4.4 is gonna implement independent search services, meaning that search will be expanded beyond one server, and you can find new accounts on other servers just by keywords
I don’t know or need to know the handle. I know my friends name and surname and that must be more than enough. Facebook doesn’t need “@facebook” and twitter doesn’t need “@twitter” to find people if they exist there. I know the feature is coming but it is the key to make it accessible to wide range of average Joes who don’t want to, in their own vision, be rocket scientists to find people on the fediverse. It needs to be as simple as on facebook or other networks.
I know my friends name and surname and that must be more than enough.
I see. However; no.
Problem: even with discovery, if your friends are on Threads or X, you still won’t find them on Mastodon. But its a step in the right direction.
You would be able to find them if every instance didn’t decide to defederate with Threads.
Unless you can follow specific people on blocked instances, this is a fail. If my friend is on another instance which is blocked from my instance… whats the point of the fediverse? Might aswell go back to Facebook or X/Twitter. They are shitty but at least I can see my friends.
this right here
I don’t understand. Mastodon has implemented global search a while ago. If I type “Steve” in the search bar, I get Steves from all sorts of places, not only from my instance.
Or are you talking about some sort of “contacts scan” implementation?
Personally, I just don’t enjoy that Twitter-like format. I never used Twitter so I find it… Awkward? To me its kinda like a platformer with bad controls, everything else about the game might be great but if it doesnt feel satisfying to play, I’ll skip.
I still have my account and Megalodon on my phone but I just can’t get into it.
I’m with you on the Twitter style format. Reddit / Lemmy is nice because you can have actual conversations. Twitter you are basically shouting into the void and sometimes it shouts back.
That format was pretty good for “Come see us live at the Sodbury Theatre in Glurpfortshire, Feb 32nd @9PM!”
I remember an instance where a Cracked.com article pointed out something like “5 creepy places on the internet” one of which was a dicussion forum in which one account was posting over and over, many times a day, about public appearances and such of the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and readers showed up en masse to harass this person. Turns out she was off-label using a forum engine as her own little microtwitter to publish alerts to a fan club. But when the Cracked author rejected that context and substituted his own, it smelled a lot like Humanbeing151.
But yes in general I find discussion boards to be more useful; I think it’s why they were invented first; Reddit and Lemmy are basically just different approaches to implementing Usenet.
i have a mastodon account but it’s completely useless for me.
the only thing i use twitter for is to follow updates and news from professional journalists and artists who are not on mastodon and likely will never be. if your job depends on twitter, switching to mastodon is not going to happen.
if i want to engage with random average people, i come here to lemmy.
Uff, imagine getting news from a rightwing nutjob owned social network. Big yikes.
sports news, get off your high horse.
Sure, blue checkmark.
you are everything that’s wrong with the internet.
No u
Mastodon is pretty different to its competitors. It looks similar to Twitter / Bluesky, but the way the social network functions is completely different.
It’s designed to be anti-infuencer… One of the things I hate about most social media platforms is a few people get all the attention. There are a few reasons for this, but it’s not really based on merit.
I think a lot of people joined Mastodon wanting a Twitter clone. It’s obviously not and Bluesky is, so people moved there. The approach Mastodon takes is far from perfect, and may not work out in the long run. But it seems like it’s worth at least trying something different.
It’s designed to be anti-infuencer
When my own feed, free of the algorithm, did not have content of interest. Because I or others took turns shouting into the void. Then I would go on the explore /front page where there was definitely an algorithm of influencers, many who had follower counts of thousands, talking about the same stuff. Many seemed to be upper middle class Americans .
I soon hated them, but many were broadcast to other instances’ front page too. Between them and lack of interaction from people I wanted to hear from, I left
Mastodon is not struggling.
- Mastodon is not a single entity, if mastodon.art dies tomorrow I would just create a new Mastodon profile on another instance.
- Yeah, Mastodon use surged in 2022 and 2023, and yeah most users didn’t stay around, but compared to the numbers before 2022, Mastodon has s big bump of new users.
Looking at two surges of new users seeing the vast majority not stick around and missing that a sizable chunk still stayed is missing the point.
This article would never have been written if the user increase didn’t have temporary surges, that result would be the same number of users, but less brand recognition.
Mastodon is also not driven by the same kind of metrics as a centralized system, plenty of people can just run their own instance just for the fun of it, they don’t need constant growth.
So calm down, and take it slow.
Don’t sell Mastodon short.
But the issue is that the temporary surges are not even followed by stability, they’re followed by decline. That’s not a recipe for sustainability.
Don’t sell Mastodon short.
Alternative analysis: it doesn’t help it to pretend there’s not a problem.
But the issue is that the temporary surges are not even followed by stability, they’re followed by decline. That’s not a recipe for sustainability.
You mean after a surge there’s less active users than before?
The graphs suggest that there is a dependence on surges to counteract slow decline.
On the very end of the graph you can see it sort of beginning to stabalize, there was even a small uptick in the second to last point, and sure, the last point shows a small decrease again.
My point is that it is too early to call out for danger regarding mastodon, that is too alarmist and may scare new users from the platform, speeding up the end of Mastodon.
So untill we have a period of time without surges it is hard to determine user growth
Fair enough.
I’ll say it again, the name sucks. It’s not cute, it sounds like mastrubate compared to twitter, it just is not catchy.
TicTic, snapchat, the apps that make it have a stupid catchy name, mastadon ain’t it.
Mastodon wasn’t launched by a VC-backed Silicon Valley startup to become the phone app that replaces Twitter.
It was created by a German high school graduate and metalhead all alone as not much more than StatusNet with a different UI and some features cut for simplicity. It was designed by a nerd for nerds, nerds who didn’t rely on phone apps for everything. At this level, and back in 2016, not even an official native iPhone app was mandatory.
Maybe rebrand as Y
Twitter really isn’t that much better. I remember when Twitter first started and it was getting a lot of crap for its weird name and that you made tweets. It count on eventually, but it’s going to take constant exposure.
I like my toots.
Better name than X.
I do kind of like that they call messages “toots.” That’s my kind of stupid.
i think maybe because it has 3 syllables
I have a Mastodon account and now on my fourth, fifth instance. I instance hop a lot, which helped me find my people.
I dont agree with a huge chunk of what was said in the post. But I understand where the white people in Bali reference comes from. I am an Asian woman in tech and took me awhile to find people that I can actually connect with. What I like about Mastodon is the fact that I can find niche topics that I wont see in other social media. Also, want to flag that I no longer have accounts in proprietary social media since 2017 which probably helped my drive to find an online community.
In saying so, I have faced some crazy level of stalking (one person only so I guess its isolated?) to the point that this person messaged me on Linkedin and emailed me to tell me I was being impersonated on Mastodon. Because he didnt believe that I am myself??? He went on saying, Hi Miss, I saw youre being impersonated blah blah.
But I also want to mention that I have met so many amazing people through Mastodon.
Its a weird space, but I am weird so I guess I belong there. Loo
There definitely are some great people there. Finding the right instance makes a big difference… unfortunately, almost eerybody starts off on mastodon.social, which for most people isn’t a great choice, and don’t realize they can move – and when they do try to move, they lose their posting history which is annoying.
I agree with top comment.
I’m Indonesian. Most of trending fediverse are Western related topics which It’s not relevant to me.
There’s one time when I randomly post about my country politics, and people on Mastodon just assume or comment using Western mindset.
Other than this Lemmy account, I mostly stick with hobby-related fediverse that mostly East Asian and Southeast Asian people (mostly Misskey instance)
Also, Indonesian is currently the highest user on Twitter, recently bypassed Brazil. People still use it as our local feed is… well localized. No Western-related discussion and much more comfy.
That was a great comment. It’s frustrating because the fediverse should be good at making it easy for people to find topics their interested in … but it doesn’t work out that way in practice.
I use mastodon every day and I’m glad it’s not dominate. It’s not a vc funded a shit hole looking for a growth market. I use mastodon because not every one is there, is a nice little niche place where I can play with my friends in peace
Pew pew pew
Mastodon is the only place where I don’t get triggered, and instead get inspired and/or informed.
Good moderation, no bots, no fascists, no “famous, because stupid” idiots. Just a nice bunch of people sharing cool, interesting shit. I absolutely love it.
because its name is Mastodon, something that when people google it pulls up a band.
Also because it’s trying to be a hot fresh new thing but it’s literally named after an animal that’s extinct.
If it had a catchier and more unique name it probably would have caught on more.
I hear “Twitter” is available again
ZING!
And dipshit elon literally argued in court that “twitter doesn’t exist anymore”
HMMM MAYBE SOMEBODY SHOULD INVENT IT
🤔
Yeah, lemmy suffered from this too, SEO is completely neglected when picking name.
I think a better title & question would be, “Why is Mastodon struggling to thrive?”
It’s surviving no problem, but it’s not thriving for a multitude of reasons. Some are pretty well covered across comments here & in the linked discussion, and are more or less reiterations of prior discussions on the matter.
Ultimately I think as much as many of those reasons are correct, the biggest reason is the same as ever: network effects. All the jank and technical details could be endured and adjusted to if there was sufficient value to be had in doing so, i.e. following accounts of interest/entertainment, connecting with friends, etc. That’s proven to varying degrees by those that have stuck with Mastodon. In turn, however, it’s also clear by how many bounce off that for many there’s still insufficient value to be found across Mastodon instances to justify dealing with all the rough edges.
If Mastodon had enough broadly appealing/interesting people/accounts across its instances, people might deal with the various technical and cultural rough spots the same way they deal with similar on other social networks they may complain about yet won’t leave. There still aren’t enough of those sorts on there for many though, so Mastodon simply survives but doesn’t thrive.
Agreed, that would have been a much better title. There’s a lot of negativity around Mastodon – the Twitter migration in 2022 is often described as a “failure”. It certainly wasn’t a success, but I see it much more as a missed opportunity.
Network effects are certainly a big deal but every social network has to deal with the issue, and some succeed. Addressing some of the reasons for bouncing not only improves retention, but makes it more likely that people recommend it to their friends. So many of the problems from July 2023’s Mastodon Is Easy and Fun Except When It Isn’t were problems back in 2017 as well … how much progress has Mastodon made? Fortunately other fediverse software’s making more progress, but it’s still frustrating.
I’ll throw my -opinion- in the ring here because no one else is saying it the same way.
- Echoing what other people said, finding a server was hard especially as at the time I thought defederating seemed stupid (changed my mind somewhat now that I use Lemmy). Then once signed up discovery was/is a pain. How do I find good accounts when they aren’t synced with the instance I am on? Fuck if I know, I never found an equivalent to lemmyverse.net for mastodon.
- Now into the big problem I had: federation was a pain. It was my first interaction with a federated service that isn’t email and it was confusing and annoying. Finally find an account you like? Well you either can’t see any of their posts or the few you can have 1 reply and 5 likes. Eventually you realise you have to click onto the account’s instance to see everything and they have 100 replies and 500 likes (made-up numbers, obviously) but guess what you can’t interact with any of them because you are no longer on your instance. It basically forced me to browse logged out for 99% of my browsing, constantly following links between websites. I have not had quite the same trouble with Lemmy because despite having some similar problems, it has been a LOT quicker to sync especially once you point your instance to another.
- The lack of algorithm or fine control of my feed was off-putting. I still hate that Facebook and other platforms make it hard or impossible to sort chronologically, but having only chronological makes for a potential to miss out on massive amounts of stuff.
- And on a personal note, I think I’m just falling out of favour with the idea of a microblogging platform with strangers. If my friends used it things might be different.
I did try out Firefish and enjoyed that way more as it had a fun and engaging UI and lots of extra features, but it holds the same federation and discovery issues.
Then once signed up discovery was/is a pain. How do I find good accounts when they aren’t synced with the instance I am on? Fuck if I know, I never found an equivalent to lemmyverse.net for mastodon.
Feels like the A.1 issue of Mastadon as a platform. If person A on instance Q wants to follow person B on instance R, there’s no straight line easy path to do that. Compared to Twitter or BlueSky or Threads, where its all one ecosystem and you just say “I’d like to follow @LieutenantDickweasel” and now you’ve got their posts in your stream, Mastadon is byzantine and not worth the effort to explore.
On the flip side, Truth Social is a Mastadon instance, and it’s trading with a market cap of several billion dollars. Seems successful enough to me.
I think I’m just falling out of favour with the idea of a microblogging platform with strangers
Generally speaking, you’re not on these services to follow strangers per say. You’re on there to interact with D-list celebrities and other highly niche personalities. Or you’re on the system to self-promote and become a D-list celebrity/niche personality. Webcomics artists, semi-famous musicians, podcasters, and political bloggers are all over my feed. I’d never talk to these people IRL. And I’d never interact with them if they were even slightly more popular or famous. But in this space, its a cozy little “oh let’s check in on what the author of AtomicRobo Comics is up to?” fan relationship that’s fruitful and fun for everyone involved.
But Mastadon is shit at putting indie fans in touch with their focus of attention. After that, what am I using this for other than a stripped-down Discord or glorified group-SMS? Pointless.
One reason why Truth Social was able to work stemmed from the fact that it was a single magnetizing D-list celebrity that drew people in. But even then, you’re talking about an audience in the… thousands? Even as a one-stop shop for all things Donald Trump, it’s low energy and lame when compared to Twitter.
Feels like the A.1 issue of Mastadon as a platform. If person A on instance Q wants to follow person B on instance R, there’s no straight line easy path to do that. Compared to Twitter or BlueSky or Threads, where its all one ecosystem and you just say “I’d like to follow @LieutenantDickweasel” and now you’ve got their posts in your stream, Mastadon is byzantine and not worth the effort to explore.
You do know that the Fediverse is more than just Mastodon, Truth Social and the Threadiverse?
Search that covers 100% of the Fediverse is technologically impossible. Any Fediverse-wide search would need to know all of the Fediverse. All of it.
Like, let’s suppose R is B’s personal instance. Let’s suppose B spins up the instance for the first time. Any all-encompassing Fediverse search would have to know about it immediately. The very millisecond Apache or nginx or whatever comes to life, that search would have to know it’s there to be able to always cover exactly 100% of the Fediverse.
How’s that supposed to work?
If it’s one centralised search engine, it would have to be hard-coded into the source code of every last Fediverse project out there so all new instances can automatically announce their existence to the search engine.
And that’s not four projects or so. It’s over 100. Not only Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin and PieFed. It’s also Ecko and Hometown and Glitch and many other Mastodon forks. And Pleroma and Akkoma and other Pleroma forks. And Misskey and Firefish and Iceshrimp and Iceshrimp.NET and Sharkey and CherryPick and Catodon and Meisskey and Tanukey and Neko and dozens upon dozens of other Misskey forks. And Mitra. And Socialhome. And GoToSocial. And micro.blog which, by the way, is closed-source. And Friendica and Hubzilla and the streams repository and Forte. And Pixelfed. And Funkwhale. And Bandwagon. And Castopod. And PeerTube. And Owncast. And Mobilizon. And Gancio. And BookWyrm. And Flohmarkt. And so forth.
It’d be even worse if it was supposed to be built into the Fediverse projects themself. Like, you could search the whole Fediverse from Lemmy’s Web interface or any one Mastodon app.
That’d require each new instance to announce its instance to each running instance.
That’d require each new instance to know all running instances immediately.
That’d only be possible by building a list of 20,000++ Fediverse instances into every last Fediverse server software repository so that it’s installed along with new instances.
And that list would always have to be up-to-date.
So when B spins up R, the following would have to happen:
- R
git pulls the most recent version of the main branch of Mastodon’s source code to have a most up-to-date list of active instances possible. - R starts up.
- R announces its existence to the 20,000++ Fediverse instances on the list.
- R goes through a list of all Fediverse server application code repositories which it has pulled from the Mastodon code repository as well.
- R announces its existence to every last one of these repositories by creating a new branch, editing the list of active Fediverse instances, submitting the edit as a pull request and merging its own new branch into the main/stable/release/… branches of all these code repositories.
Any Fediverse server out there would be able to hack into any Fediverse server code repository and manipulate the production code. Otherwise, this whole thing couldn’t work.
Fediverse server code repositories would be flooded with automated pull requests plus mergers. Oh, and if Mastodon can add a new instance to a list in the Mastodon production source code, anything could remote-manipulate anything in the Mastodon production source code.
- R
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