6 ms·

Mastodon is on the right track. They’ve been doing so much right, the UX has improved considerably. I think there’s some mainstream appeal, but there are also

Mastodon is on the right track. They’ve been doing so much right, the UX has improved considerably. I think there’s some mainstream appeal, but there are also ecosystem issues that aren’t solved easily, as well as a lack of algorithmic curation, which a lot of people deem very important.

andypiper 2y ago
My personal experience is that I use a number of other tools (Sill, Murmel, Fediview) to add an "algorithmic curation" of sorts so that I don't miss content I might have wanted to see. I think there's something to be said for the ability to have that added externally rather than built-in to the core. I guess I see both sides of the value of that kind of curation here; I definitely don't love it when I don't have a level of control of it for myself.
- Kye 2y ago
  What is functionally different from these tools other than the protocol providing a firehose of posts and APIs to filter it for people to make custom feeds?
- prmoustache 2y ago
  > so that I don't miss content I might have wanted to see. I think people should start by learning again that missing stuff is ok. I sometimes spend a week or two without checking my mastodon feed, and there is no way I will try to catch up. I was much more miserable when I was addicted to content.
WorldMaker 2y ago
> as well as a lack of algorithmic curation, which a lot of people deem very important. Twitter ran for enough of its early years without that and it still had "mainstream appeal". (Blogs and RSS for even more years.) I'm happier without algorithmic curation. I think a lot of people over-estimate what algorithmic curation is worth to them. Partly because algorithmic curation is a big business, tied in pretzel knots with advertising, and is marketed by major companies as a huge "improvement" or "user need" (to sell more ads).
- sunshowers 2y ago
  I use both Mastodon and Bluesky. I really like Bluesky's approach, where people build their own ranking models and publish them for others to use. I use a bunch of niche algorithms that are awesome (Quiet Posters).
- runako 2y ago
  I tried Mastodon before Threads & Bluesky, and I can say that the lack of algo was the part I liked the least. I tend to follow a lot of people, and like to see a mix of their posts. But on Mastodon, what I got instead was "who is posting right now?" I'm in EST, for example, which means that unless my Asian follows are up in the middle of the night, I will generally not see their posts on Mastodon. Also some people post a lot more frequently than others, but in practice that means I want to surface every post of the infrequent posters to make sure I catch them. As another comment noted, the Quiet Posters feed in Bluesky solves for exactly this. IMHO the pluggable algo design of Bluesky is the way to go. I already follow feeds that are based on manually-verified membership of the poster, content of individual posts, and on frequency of posts. I'm really excited to see what other algorithms people come up with.
  - allenu 2y ago
    > I tend to follow a lot of people, and like to see a mix of their posts. But on Mastodon, what I got instead was "who is posting right now?" This was a big issue for me. Some people I followed would constantly post, so your feed, over time, simply becomes whatever those extremely online users post. It becomes less of a "balanced media diet" if it favors people who are always online. Of course, you can just stop following those people, but you really don't know how prolific someone is when you first follow them. I remember seeing someone post a prototype of a view of the feed that instead treated it like a messaging app or RSS feed where you'd see a list of posters sorted by most recent post date first. That way, you could just click on a profile to see all their posts in chronological order instead of a mixed feed of everyone's posts. I thought might be a better way to go.
    - spartanatreyu 2y ago
darthrupert 2y ago
How has the UX improved? I just checked my Mastodon account and it's exactly as I remember it.
- jeromegv 2y ago
  Some of the changes are listed here: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/10/mastodon-4.3/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/10/mastodon-4.3/
- glenstein 2y ago
  I had the same experience as you. But now, if you go to preferences, there's an option to disable "advanced web interface". If you uncheck that, you get the simpler view. Of course, the thing now being called the advanced interface used to just be the default.
kps 2y ago
> the UX has improved considerably. Does the default web client respect `:prefers-color-scheme` yet?
- gargron 2y ago
  Yeah.
  - kps 2y ago
    Thanks; that does seem to be the case, and (as someone afflicted by astigmatic halation) I will no longer avoid following Mastodon links.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> lack of algorithmic curation, in my view, this is a feature, not a bug
- solarkraft 2y ago
  This is the view of many deeply in the space, but not that of the broader public. This divide needs to be crossed and this is where Bluesky is ahead of Mastodon.
  - mystified5016 2y ago
    Framing it as competition between mastodon and bluesky is just flatly wrong. There is no competition. Bluesky isn't "winning" because there just is no game being played. Mastodon is just doing its own thing all by itself.
ClassyJacket 2y ago
Algorithmic curation is exactly what ruined the existing social networks. They were absolutely better without it.
lxgr 2y ago
There are fundamental problems with their model resulting from their architecture that I don't see them tackle at all. The most important one is that both your identity and your data are tied to whichever instance you pick (and picking is not easy). The latter is forgivable, but the former (i.e. the fact that you can't "port out" from an uncooperating server) really isn't, in my view. Discoverability is another big one, and while I generally don't care much for algorithmically curated feeds myself, not being able to do a handle or keyword search is a dealbreaker for me. Compared to Bluesky, which makes efforts to modularize/federate all essential components of a social network, Mastodon's approach is firmly stuck in a past where sysadmins completely rule their respective kingdoms, and that distinction runs deep to the core protocol level and is, I'd argue, not fixable.
- spartanatreyu 2y ago
  > The most important one is that both your identity and your data are tied to whichever instance you pick [...] (i.e. the fact that you can't "port out" from an uncooperating server) really isn't [forgivable], in my view. You can "soft-migrate" to another Mastodon account and server my creating your new account, then pointing your old account to your new account. All the old content remains on the old account/server, and all the new content/notifications appear on the new account/server. They have a "soft-migrate" (as opposed to a "hard-migrate" where all your activity would be migrated across to the new server) because Mastodon is built on the ActivityPub standard which has more than just Mastodon using it. Since it's an open standard, there are already proposals underway to allow the hard-migrate behavior, but it would be able to support Mastodon and all other compatible ActivityPub apps, not just Mastodon by itself. > Mastodon's approach is firmly stuck in a past where sysadmins completely rule their respective kingdoms, and that distinction runs deep to the core protocol level and is, I'd argue, not fixable. I see this as a feature, not a bug. I'd rather have a reddit (before the great '23 moderator purge and subsequent death spiral) style moderation where each fifedom (e.g. subreddit/mastodon instance) has it's own rules and moderators that actually care about the designated content (e.g. cooking, gamedev, etc...) in their fifedom where the moderators are part of the community and the community can discuss and vote on rule changes. As opposed to: A facebook style moderation where the mods are a faceless corporation and where reporting something equals a filling out a form of preset answers which don't allow for further explanations and having maybe 3% of anything actually getting fixed.
throwawayq3423 2y ago
A decentralized social network is an oxymoron. Centralization is the point.

andypiper 2y ago

My personal experience is that I use a number of other tools (Sill, Murmel, Fediview) to add an "algorithmic curation" of sorts so that I don't miss content I might have wanted to see. I think there's something to be said for the ability to have that added externally rather than built-in to the core. I guess I see both sides of the value of that kind of curation here; I definitely don't love it when I don't have a level of control of it for myself.

Kye 2y ago
What is functionally different from these tools other than the protocol providing a firehose of posts and APIs to filter it for people to make custom feeds?
prmoustache 2y ago
> so that I don't miss content I might have wanted to see. I think people should start by learning again that missing stuff is ok. I sometimes spend a week or two without checking my mastodon feed, and there is no way I will try to catch up. I was much more miserable when I was addicted to content.

WorldMaker 2y ago

> as well as a lack of algorithmic curation, which a lot of people deem very important. Twitter ran for enough of its early years without that and it still had "mainstream appeal". (Blogs and RSS for even more years.) I'm happier without algorithmic curation. I think a lot of people over-estimate what algorithmic curation is worth to them. Partly because algorithmic curation is a big business, tied in pretzel knots with advertising, and is marketed by major companies as a huge "improvement" or "user need" (to sell more ads).

sunshowers 2y ago
I use both Mastodon and Bluesky. I really like Bluesky's approach, where people build their own ranking models and publish them for others to use. I use a bunch of niche algorithms that are awesome (Quiet Posters).
runako 2y ago
I tried Mastodon before Threads & Bluesky, and I can say that the lack of algo was the part I liked the least. I tend to follow a lot of people, and like to see a mix of their posts. But on Mastodon, what I got instead was "who is posting right now?" I'm in EST, for example, which means that unless my Asian follows are up in the middle of the night, I will generally not see their posts on Mastodon. Also some people post a lot more frequently than others, but in practice that means I want to surface every post of the infrequent posters to make sure I catch them. As another comment noted, the Quiet Posters feed in Bluesky solves for exactly this. IMHO the pluggable algo design of Bluesky is the way to go. I already follow feeds that are based on manually-verified membership of the poster, content of individual posts, and on frequency of posts. I'm really excited to see what other algorithms people come up with.
- allenu 2y ago
  > I tend to follow a lot of people, and like to see a mix of their posts. But on Mastodon, what I got instead was "who is posting right now?" This was a big issue for me. Some people I followed would constantly post, so your feed, over time, simply becomes whatever those extremely online users post. It becomes less of a "balanced media diet" if it favors people who are always online. Of course, you can just stop following those people, but you really don't know how prolific someone is when you first follow them. I remember seeing someone post a prototype of a view of the feed that instead treated it like a messaging app or RSS feed where you'd see a list of posters sorted by most recent post date first. That way, you could just click on a profile to see all their posts in chronological order instead of a mixed feed of everyone's posts. I thought might be a better way to go.
  - spartanatreyu 2y ago

darthrupert 2y ago

How has the UX improved? I just checked my Mastodon account and it's exactly as I remember it.

jeromegv 2y ago
Some of the changes are listed here: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/10/mastodon-4.3/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/10/mastodon-4.3/
glenstein 2y ago
I had the same experience as you. But now, if you go to preferences, there's an option to disable "advanced web interface". If you uncheck that, you get the simpler view. Of course, the thing now being called the advanced interface used to just be the default.

kps 2y ago

> the UX has improved considerably. Does the default web client respect `:prefers-color-scheme` yet?

gargron 2y ago
Yeah.
- kps 2y ago
  Thanks; that does seem to be the case, and (as someone afflicted by astigmatic halation) I will no longer avoid following Mastodon links.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

> lack of algorithmic curation, in my view, this is a feature, not a bug

solarkraft 2y ago
This is the view of many deeply in the space, but not that of the broader public. This divide needs to be crossed and this is where Bluesky is ahead of Mastodon.
- mystified5016 2y ago
  Framing it as competition between mastodon and bluesky is just flatly wrong. There is no competition. Bluesky isn't "winning" because there just is no game being played. Mastodon is just doing its own thing all by itself.

ClassyJacket 2y ago

Algorithmic curation is exactly what ruined the existing social networks. They were absolutely better without it.

lxgr 2y ago

There are fundamental problems with their model resulting from their architecture that I don't see them tackle at all. The most important one is that both your identity and your data are tied to whichever instance you pick (and picking is not easy). The latter is forgivable, but the former (i.e. the fact that you can't "port out" from an uncooperating server) really isn't, in my view. Discoverability is another big one, and while I generally don't care much for algorithmically curated feeds myself, not being able to do a handle or keyword search is a dealbreaker for me. Compared to Bluesky, which makes efforts to modularize/federate all essential components of a social network, Mastodon's approach is firmly stuck in a past where sysadmins completely rule their respective kingdoms, and that distinction runs deep to the core protocol level and is, I'd argue, not fixable.

spartanatreyu 2y ago
> The most important one is that both your identity and your data are tied to whichever instance you pick [...] (i.e. the fact that you can't "port out" from an uncooperating server) really isn't [forgivable], in my view. You can "soft-migrate" to another Mastodon account and server my creating your new account, then pointing your old account to your new account. All the old content remains on the old account/server, and all the new content/notifications appear on the new account/server. They have a "soft-migrate" (as opposed to a "hard-migrate" where all your activity would be migrated across to the new server) because Mastodon is built on the ActivityPub standard which has more than just Mastodon using it. Since it's an open standard, there are already proposals underway to allow the hard-migrate behavior, but it would be able to support Mastodon and all other compatible ActivityPub apps, not just Mastodon by itself. > Mastodon's approach is firmly stuck in a past where sysadmins completely rule their respective kingdoms, and that distinction runs deep to the core protocol level and is, I'd argue, not fixable. I see this as a feature, not a bug. I'd rather have a reddit (before the great '23 moderator purge and subsequent death spiral) style moderation where each fifedom (e.g. subreddit/mastodon instance) has it's own rules and moderators that actually care about the designated content (e.g. cooking, gamedev, etc...) in their fifedom where the moderators are part of the community and the community can discuss and vote on rule changes. As opposed to: A facebook style moderation where the mods are a faceless corporation and where reporting something equals a filling out a form of preset answers which don't allow for further explanations and having maybe 3% of anything actually getting fixed.

throwawayq3423 2y ago

A decentralized social network is an oxymoron. Centralization is the point.