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It's gotten dramatically worse since premium started rewarding payouts for engagement/views, alongside zero moderation. Now there's an actual incentive to be a

It's gotten dramatically worse since premium started rewarding payouts for engagement/views, alongside zero moderation. Now there's an actual incentive to be a jerk, a spammer, and make repeated bad faith arguments / "just asking questions" -- people reply, your tweet is seen by more people, you get paid a share of ad revenue. Then you have the regurgitated messages in replies (AI or otherwise) endlessly copied and distorted. Recently it's been 5+ pages until I see a real reply, while I have 3000+ accounts blocked by now. It's getting harder and harder to find the real person who wrote that witty reply, and not the endless blue check accounts who copy-pasted it to farm engagement on their visibility-boosted tweets. Genuinely getting more and more unusable.

wcarss 2y ago
Why not, um... stop using it? Mastodon has a lot of great people, and a lot less of all this stuff.
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  Not parent, but I did use Mastodon for about a year. I ended up moving back to Twitter because: 1. I just couldn't vibe with the culture there. From my POV, Mastodon is made out of pearl-clutchers and politics. 2. So much drama. The FediSearch drama. The Raspberry Pi incident. It's just so tiring and you feel like you need to walk on eggshells all the time. 3. So much drama. You would just pray that your admin didn't get into a spat with another admin and get defederated. You could get a solo server, but that costs money and you might get blocked by a large server's admin anyway. 4. So much drama. Pray that your server doesn't shut down, because you can't import your posts elsewhere. Solo, yes, but costs money. At least with Twitter, the rules are sort of well known, and you can follow anyone there unless they block you personally. I heard BlueSky is good, though. Haven't tried it yet. Nostr was also another one, to get around the admin drama issue, but it doesn't seem very popular.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    >4. So much drama. Pray that your server doesn't shut down, because you can't import your posts elsewhere. I would have thought a well-designed decentralized system would allow you to, for instance, download/export all your posts, and then import them all to a new server, in case you have to move servers for some reason.
    - Nextgrid 2y ago
      The server-oriented aspect of Mastodon was the second-worst decision ever (the first one was the name). Mainstream social media doesn't ask you to pick a server (nor deal with the consequences of it going down), its replacement shouldn't either.
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        I agree about the name: they shouldn't have stolen the name of a great metal band.
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        As for the server-oriented aspect, what's the alternative? There's only two ways I see to run a social media service like this: centralized and decentralized. The mainstream ones are centralized, of course: FB, Xitter, etc. You just connect to their web server and do everything there. Any centralized alternative would have be a well-financed corporation able to set up a huge IT infrastructure to accomplish the same task. But the whole idea of Mastodon is to not be a big, for-profit corporation, and to be in the hands of the users instead, which I don't think is possible with a centralized service. So the only alternative is a decentralized service. But this means you have to have multiple servers, leading to the whole "federated" approach, so users can run their own servers and control things themselves, or use accounts on servers of their choice. This of course leads to all the consequences you named, and more: servers going down, servers defederating other servers, etc. But again, what's the alternative? If the requirement is "not run by a single big for-profit company", I don't see one. If you think that having a decentralized service actually be competitive with a centralized one like Xitter simply isn't feasible, that's fair. My prior complaint still stands though: if you want users to have freedom (of which server to put their account on, etc.), then why would you not have a way of migrating their account/data to another server, and force them to lose everything if their server disappears?
- smileybarry 2y ago
  I have a Mastodon account, a Bluesky account, and apps for both. Mastodon doesn’t replace the comedy part of Twitter, and Bluesky is great but 99% of local social media is still on Twitter. So I’m “trapped” on Twitter until they move to Bluesky, but they won’t because a part of that crowd is addicted to the revenue share off their political tweets.
numpad0 2y ago
Tangential but there's my disappointment to AI in there: they haven't found a way to build convincingly human bots, let alone a procedural content creation system. Both AI believers and doomers insist generative AI could surpass humans by every single metric that matters in social media. All we've got is first Nigerian, then Indian, and now increasingly Pakistani spammers desperately reply bombing trending posts made by 10 years alpha users, as if whoever behind it completely failed to do it and has been wasting gullible human spammer candidates faster than Aperture Science.
- rchaud 2y ago
  > they haven't found a way to build convincingly human bots, let alone a procedural content creation system. The 'they' being the corporations that hired thousands of people from the very countries you're associating with spammers , to review, correct and train AI models?

wcarss 2y ago

Why not, um... stop using it? Mastodon has a lot of great people, and a lot less of all this stuff.

CaptainFever 2y ago
Not parent, but I did use Mastodon for about a year. I ended up moving back to Twitter because: 1. I just couldn't vibe with the culture there. From my POV, Mastodon is made out of pearl-clutchers and politics. 2. So much drama. The FediSearch drama. The Raspberry Pi incident. It's just so tiring and you feel like you need to walk on eggshells all the time. 3. So much drama. You would just pray that your admin didn't get into a spat with another admin and get defederated. You could get a solo server, but that costs money and you might get blocked by a large server's admin anyway. 4. So much drama. Pray that your server doesn't shut down, because you can't import your posts elsewhere. Solo, yes, but costs money. At least with Twitter, the rules are sort of well known, and you can follow anyone there unless they block you personally. I heard BlueSky is good, though. Haven't tried it yet. Nostr was also another one, to get around the admin drama issue, but it doesn't seem very popular.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >4. So much drama. Pray that your server doesn't shut down, because you can't import your posts elsewhere. I would have thought a well-designed decentralized system would allow you to, for instance, download/export all your posts, and then import them all to a new server, in case you have to move servers for some reason.
  - Nextgrid 2y ago
    The server-oriented aspect of Mastodon was the second-worst decision ever (the first one was the name). Mainstream social media doesn't ask you to pick a server (nor deal with the consequences of it going down), its replacement shouldn't either.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      I agree about the name: they shouldn't have stolen the name of a great metal band.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      As for the server-oriented aspect, what's the alternative? There's only two ways I see to run a social media service like this: centralized and decentralized. The mainstream ones are centralized, of course: FB, Xitter, etc. You just connect to their web server and do everything there. Any centralized alternative would have be a well-financed corporation able to set up a huge IT infrastructure to accomplish the same task. But the whole idea of Mastodon is to not be a big, for-profit corporation, and to be in the hands of the users instead, which I don't think is possible with a centralized service. So the only alternative is a decentralized service. But this means you have to have multiple servers, leading to the whole "federated" approach, so users can run their own servers and control things themselves, or use accounts on servers of their choice. This of course leads to all the consequences you named, and more: servers going down, servers defederating other servers, etc. But again, what's the alternative? If the requirement is "not run by a single big for-profit company", I don't see one. If you think that having a decentralized service actually be competitive with a centralized one like Xitter simply isn't feasible, that's fair. My prior complaint still stands though: if you want users to have freedom (of which server to put their account on, etc.), then why would you not have a way of migrating their account/data to another server, and force them to lose everything if their server disappears?
smileybarry 2y ago
I have a Mastodon account, a Bluesky account, and apps for both. Mastodon doesn’t replace the comedy part of Twitter, and Bluesky is great but 99% of local social media is still on Twitter. So I’m “trapped” on Twitter until they move to Bluesky, but they won’t because a part of that crowd is addicted to the revenue share off their political tweets.

numpad0 2y ago

Tangential but there's my disappointment to AI in there: they haven't found a way to build convincingly human bots, let alone a procedural content creation system. Both AI believers and doomers insist generative AI could surpass humans by every single metric that matters in social media. All we've got is first Nigerian, then Indian, and now increasingly Pakistani spammers desperately reply bombing trending posts made by 10 years alpha users, as if whoever behind it completely failed to do it and has been wasting gullible human spammer candidates faster than Aperture Science.

rchaud 2y ago
> they haven't found a way to build convincingly human bots, let alone a procedural content creation system. The 'they' being the corporations that hired thousands of people from the very countries you're associating with spammers , to review, correct and train AI models?