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A lot of these downsides are huge deal breakers to me. But the one downside not mentioned and the one I'm curious about is the trending posts, hashtags, and new

A lot of these downsides are huge deal breakers to me. But the one downside not mentioned and the one I'm curious about is the trending posts, hashtags, and news features of mastodon. I can understand that most of the trending stuff might want to be instance isolated, or somewhat curated. But on a one person instance last time I looked, news for example was horrible because I had to actively approve sources every time. Perhaps this has changed. The other thing I noticed was that trending posts didn't work. But hearing that you can't see another instances posts or replies properly without doing extra work, sounds like a huge oversight. For me decentralized social needs to at least allow me to look at all the posts or replies.

kibwen 3y ago
> But hearing that you can't see another instances posts or replies properly without doing extra work, sounds like a huge oversight. As she mentions, this might be a weird artifact of some servers apparently imposing a blanket block on single-user servers. I have an account on a large server and I can see profiles of users on other servers without issue.
astro1 3y ago
These shortcomings bug me like hell, too. I tried to overcome these by building https://fedi.buzz https://fedi.buzz but the Fediverse community is quite split over its usefulness or it being a threat to their privacy.
- intothemild 3y ago
  This will start a little off topic but I will get back to the main point. I feel like there's a group of users who are very against anything that might bring MORE users into their service of choice. So for mastodon, it's things like fedibuzz, and recently on Lemmy (at least on android) it's the Sync App coming out. The Lemmy situation was a very polished very good former reddit app, which is now a Lemmy app, seems to have upset a lot of people because its "Not Open Source". Which I can understand, but I get the feeling the pushback is basically the fear that MORE users will come to Lemmy now that the experience is nicer. The third thing is that the more I use bluesky, and the more I see these same kinds of infighting or issues come up in Masto/Lemmy .. the more I realise that perhaps BSKY is just the better longterm choice for me. Now back to the main point. I kind of WANT some way to discover new users, or topics, or anything discovery related, and having your own Masto instance just seems to nerf those things. I'm happy that fedibuzz exists, and I'm happy that there's a kind of trending posts/news in Masto. But It needs to be better if it wants to survive. The average user will not put the kinds of effort in to FIND new people that exist elsewhere. So users join larger instances, because theres discovery features there. But then the Local feed is just not great. The other side of this is single user instances, and those aren't great either.

kibwen 3y ago

> But hearing that you can't see another instances posts or replies properly without doing extra work, sounds like a huge oversight. As she mentions, this might be a weird artifact of some servers apparently imposing a blanket block on single-user servers. I have an account on a large server and I can see profiles of users on other servers without issue.

astro1 3y ago

These shortcomings bug me like hell, too. I tried to overcome these by building https://fedi.buzz https://fedi.buzz but the Fediverse community is quite split over its usefulness or it being a threat to their privacy.

intothemild 3y ago
This will start a little off topic but I will get back to the main point. I feel like there's a group of users who are very against anything that might bring MORE users into their service of choice. So for mastodon, it's things like fedibuzz, and recently on Lemmy (at least on android) it's the Sync App coming out. The Lemmy situation was a very polished very good former reddit app, which is now a Lemmy app, seems to have upset a lot of people because its "Not Open Source". Which I can understand, but I get the feeling the pushback is basically the fear that MORE users will come to Lemmy now that the experience is nicer. The third thing is that the more I use bluesky, and the more I see these same kinds of infighting or issues come up in Masto/Lemmy .. the more I realise that perhaps BSKY is just the better longterm choice for me. Now back to the main point. I kind of WANT some way to discover new users, or topics, or anything discovery related, and having your own Masto instance just seems to nerf those things. I'm happy that fedibuzz exists, and I'm happy that there's a kind of trending posts/news in Masto. But It needs to be better if it wants to survive. The average user will not put the kinds of effort in to FIND new people that exist elsewhere. So users join larger instances, because theres discovery features there. But then the Local feed is just not great. The other side of this is single user instances, and those aren't great either.