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(Disclaimer: Hate musk, disapprove of Mastodon's fundamental architecture) I haven't noticed anything get worse yet. As usual, I get about one spam DM per week

(Disclaimer: Hate musk, disapprove of Mastodon's fundamental architecture) I haven't noticed anything get worse yet. As usual, I get about one spam DM per week. As usual, the app freezes or crashes about three times a week. As usual, the app takes seconds to load what I click on about 5% of clicks. I'm worried it's not sustainable, though. At this point the vast majority of employees have quit. Musk's attempts to retain them suggest he doesn't understand his employees' thinking, suggesting he'll continue to have problems. So I'm continuing to use Twitter while actively looking for alternatives. When I tried mastodon it completely failed to provide the basis functionality I expect. I think that's because it's technically decentralized, but they've then built a centralized service through social coordination on top of that. And that's the worst of both worlds.

smoldesu 4y ago
> it's technically decentralized, but they've then built a centralized service through social coordination on top of that Can you describe that? Mastodon is Federated, much like any other decentralized service you have the right to reject or block content from certain users or sites. That's your privilege as a paying administrator of a Mastodon instance. If you disagree with the way a particular server is being run, you can find others who agree with you or host you own instance for less than the price of Twitter Blue. This is the case with IRC, Matrix, I2P, even Bittorrent. None of these protocols are living in "the worst of both worlds", they're merely taking their architecture seriously and deliberately choosing not to build their software like a product. If you take issue with the social coordination layer of Mastodon... maybe social media isn't for you?
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  There are strong incentives to tolerare bad moderation. Given the choice between cutting off their users' friends and letting something slide moderators will often let things slide. This bears out in practice: There's a socially centralized network of sites that all federate with each other, and some loons and Nazis on the periphery. The effect is similar to if a centralized service randomly chose which of a few tens of moderation policies to apply every time they get a report. That's a big disadvantage. You lose because you see content that pushes past what your chosen moderator would prefer, and you don't see content that your chosen moderator would allow. If Mastodon provided something nice in return I'd consider it, but they consider that disadvantage as their main advantage.
guerrilla 4y ago
> I think that's because it's technically decentralized, but they've then built a centralized service through social coordination on top of that. What do you mean by this? I think you may misunderstand the architecture if I'm interpreting you correctly. Mastodon is decentralized and there's no centralized service on top of it. You can just pick any instance you want and don't have to federate with any others (and in some cases can't due to blocking.)
plonk 4y ago
> When I tried mastodon it completely failed to provide the basis functionality I expect. I think that's because it's technically decentralized, but they've then built a centralized service through social coordination on top of that. And that's the worst of both worlds. What's centralized on Mastodon? It's just a bunch of autonomous server instances whose users can contact users on other servers.

smoldesu 4y ago

> it's technically decentralized, but they've then built a centralized service through social coordination on top of that Can you describe that? Mastodon is Federated, much like any other decentralized service you have the right to reject or block content from certain users or sites. That's your privilege as a paying administrator of a Mastodon instance. If you disagree with the way a particular server is being run, you can find others who agree with you or host you own instance for less than the price of Twitter Blue. This is the case with IRC, Matrix, I2P, even Bittorrent. None of these protocols are living in "the worst of both worlds", they're merely taking their architecture seriously and deliberately choosing not to build their software like a product. If you take issue with the social coordination layer of Mastodon... maybe social media isn't for you?

iudqnolq 4y ago
There are strong incentives to tolerare bad moderation. Given the choice between cutting off their users' friends and letting something slide moderators will often let things slide. This bears out in practice: There's a socially centralized network of sites that all federate with each other, and some loons and Nazis on the periphery. The effect is similar to if a centralized service randomly chose which of a few tens of moderation policies to apply every time they get a report. That's a big disadvantage. You lose because you see content that pushes past what your chosen moderator would prefer, and you don't see content that your chosen moderator would allow. If Mastodon provided something nice in return I'd consider it, but they consider that disadvantage as their main advantage.

guerrilla 4y ago

> I think that's because it's technically decentralized, but they've then built a centralized service through social coordination on top of that. What do you mean by this? I think you may misunderstand the architecture if I'm interpreting you correctly. Mastodon is decentralized and there's no centralized service on top of it. You can just pick any instance you want and don't have to federate with any others (and in some cases can't due to blocking.)

plonk 4y ago

> When I tried mastodon it completely failed to provide the basis functionality I expect. I think that's because it's technically decentralized, but they've then built a centralized service through social coordination on top of that. And that's the worst of both worlds. What's centralized on Mastodon? It's just a bunch of autonomous server instances whose users can contact users on other servers.