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Nothing really. The core concept is let's say "wrong" (for my personal case). Mastodon is a stream of very short posts. Problem a - shortness, means no longfor
by Yizahi 4y ago
Nothing really. The core concept is let's say "wrong" (for my personal case). Mastodon is a stream of very short posts.
Problem a - shortness, means no longform texts there, so they are posted in different sites, externally. Short posts aren't very informative usually.
Problem b - stream. Currently almost all of the social media are structured like this and it is a bad format. It is not engaging, it is not possible to find something which flew by ten minutes ago. It's like a bad version of Facebook, if you didn't happen to see some post "in time" then it might as well don't exist.
Problem c - engagement, discovery, popularity and other similar issues. This is a common problem for all media, but for Mastodon it is even worse because of the fragmentation. It's broken even at the registration stage, e.g. just where should I register to find what I want? Impossible to find.
I've tried using it twice due to hype on HN, and abandoned it quickly.
- Zak 4y agoA also bothers me. It isn't hard for an instance admin to change the character limit, and does seem like a way instances could stand out from each other, yet it's rarely done. Federated instances do seem to handle long posts gracefully (there's a "read more" expando link). B seems inherent to social media as we know it. What would be a better design for you? C is handled in part by relay servers synchronizing content between instances. Small instances often aren't well-connected though and I think both instance admins and relay operators could do better here.