7 ms·

Mastodon Exit Interview

77 points by icy 2y ago

INTPenis 2y ago
You sound disgruntled. You keep saying it won't work, but it does work, but it won't work, but it does work. Make up your mind. What I take away from this is that you had a bad experience and you're now giving up on the only large scale social media platform powered by the people, for the people, and instead going to bsky which keeps promising federation but in fact requires way too many resources for regular people to federate with. That's the issue, resources. Who are we expecting to host these nodes? The fedi had a low entrance threshold. But you can't federate every single message, that drastically increases the entrance threshold. Fediverse is in fact just a bunch of individual message boards with some federation between them. You can find an instance that becomes your home, your family, but you can still follow people on other nodes, you can still respond to people on other nodes.
- lifthrasiir 2y ago
  A "bunch of individual message boards" is not usually called a "social network" as Mastodon seems to claim itself to be. That's exactly what the OP points out, in my reading.
  - vidarh 2y ago
    But Mastodon is not a bunch of individual message boards only, but a bunch of individual message boards with federation between them. When you cut off an essential part of the statement you respond to, you're setting up a strawman.
    - lifthrasiir 2y ago
      I omitted that because the OP explicitly mentions and shows that the federation doesn't work. Given no rebuttal about that, "with fedration between them" has no further meaning to me. (I also don't like how the original reply avoids a detailed discussion by merely pointing out the inconsistency instead, but that's another story.)
      - vidarh 2y ago
        The OP claims federation doesn't work. It's a purely subjective viewpoint, and in my experience entirely false. I run two Mastodon instances, one of which is a single-user instance. On neither of those do I have the problems OP claims means Mastodon federation does not work.
        lifthrasiir 2y ago
        Yeah, you should have said that first to claim that. It is still entirely possible that the OP did experience what you thought to be impossible---that's a nature of any sizable service, innit?
        vidarh 2y ago
        Or you should have not cut off an essential part of what you responded to baed on a belief about the veracity of OPs arguments. Federation provably works. All of my exchanges involve federation because there are no other users on my instance. As such his claims are exaggerations based on his subjective notions of how federation ought to work.
        lifthrasiir 2y ago
        We are clearly talking about the federation in social networking services (which I and many others would call simply social networks, but since someone clearly didn't like that). The OP analyzes the federation as a means to build such services, while your anecdote only says that the federation is enough to serve your needs---the anecdote which the OP doesn't even object. While I don't use Mastodon for a lot of reasons, I had operated an IRC network for a long time and experienced its eventual demise as well. IRC started out as a worldwide federated network until it isn't, and many IRC networks only worked because of its constituent users---my network never reached that critical mass in comparison. I would have no reason to worry about that if IRC did have the working federation to this day! In the current fediverse choosing the correct nodes (or to federate, if you have your own personal node) is mandatory, indirectly showing that its federation is not enough, just like IRC.
  - mattashii 2y ago
    No, not individual message boards per se, but when they're connected they are called a social network. Case in point: Reddit is called a social network. And Mastodon, by its inclusion in the fediverse, is part of that fediverse social network. Yes, it isn't a monolith, but when has that become a requirement for something to be called a network?
    - lifthrasiir 2y ago
      That would be a "social" "network" (any network formed with social properties), not a "social network(ing service)" (an online platform primarily used to replicate and often independently construct social networks in the human society). They are not identical in usage and the latter is the common sense.
      - cassianoleal 2y ago
        > the latter is the common sense. Common to whom?
        lifthrasiir 2y ago
        Most Internet users who have used Facebook and likes? (And even I, who never have used Facebook, primarily use that sense.) It is the first sense in the Cambridge dictionary [1], the second sense in the Oxford dictionary available via Google Search, and the second sense and also the first non-academic sense in Wiktionary [2]. It is clearly common enough for me to say so. [1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/social-network https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/social-n... [2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/social_network https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/social_network
        mattashii 2y ago
        Yes, but even if you take the first definition of the Oxford or the second of Wiktionary, then still would Mastodon be a Social Network, as it does match both descriptions.
        2y ago
  - INTPenis 2y ago
    It's miles better than what we used to have. Imho fedi is exactly where I want to be. I was active in vbulletin/phpbb/punbb boards for years, and I always wished I could participate in all of them with one user account. That's exactly what I can do now. I think the marketing of Mastodon is what skews the image of the fediverse. We need to stop marketing as a Twitter, or a Bluesky, and more like individual communities that are able to communicate with each other. Set more realistic expectations. The USP is still that it's easy for anyone to run a node, it's still for the people, not for the millionaires with tons of resources.
TheChaplain 2y ago
Well, I believe it is fair for the host owner to decide what they serve or not. If they think bot accounts, with the sole purpose to repeatedly display information that is available in any modern mobile phone, takes up unnecessary resources then.. Well, they have right to restrict them IMHO.
- vidarh 2y ago
  And a bot account like that is if anything the easiest thing to host on a purpose-made instance. You need a full Mastodon instance for that. You just need to generate an outbox collection, individual pages for the objects and actor, and a webfinger endpoint. It could be easier, but it's not that hard.
  - seba_dos1 2y ago
    You don't need*
- xdennis 2y ago
  I haven't used Mastodon, but I think what he's saying is that no one can choose to see the bot's content. He has his account on the mastodon.social instance, but since they block the instance where the bot is, he can't see the bot's content. What's the point of being distributed if others can pick and choose what YOU get to see?
  - vidarh 2y ago
    If he's unhappy about mastodon.social, he can move elsewhere. He should. Moving ought to be made easier - he has a point there. Nobody in the Fediverse can prevent you from posting what you want. But everyone can choose to band together in groups around shared policies and prevent you from imposing what you post on them. Some users are unaware of which policies they opt into when they pick an instance, and that is an issue (and why moving ought to be made easier). My experience is that while it makes discovery slightly annoying - a single user instance is the nicest Mastodon experience. Anyone who blocks your instance then is doing so because they're blocking you (don't share that instance with noisy bots). For some it might make sense to have an account on a major instance too, to check in for discovery, and to follow their own single-user instance account to kickstart some visibility (and it's a flaw that it is like this - Mastodon does not better discovery functionality). Mastodon is by no means flawless, and to grow more it will need to fix a lot of them, but a lot of the purported issues are seen as features by users. E.g. the ability to band together and purposefully isolate but allow limited federation, is a feature. An extreme example is a pair instances for a marginalized group where one of them federates with the rest of the fediverse, but the "inner" one only federates with the other instance. It's on purpose set up that way to provide a safe space for those who want limited exposure. People have a right to choose not to associate just as they have a right to choose to associate.
numpad0 2y ago
imo the problem is in instance ownership. users has to own and the system should still work. current mastodon model of bunch of aristocrats owning instances doing rounds of 2-minute hatred obviously didn't work. any obligations forced upon above-citizen classes will be abused, and they are for mastodon, leading to some of problems elaborated. I'm imagining a model of network in which, old Android phone as server for power users collect RSS for initial content density problem, then clients do Discord-y stuff on client devices. client also sync public content with other servers it also belongs to for viral element. Content authenticity shall be handled by blockchain-y chain signing and that can also be proxy for content value. NAT and therefore central server requirement can be a problem in fully decentralizing such platform. mean income/education/skill level of mastodon instance owner is like global top 0.01% no? that's a flaw in itself.
- vidarh 2y ago
  ActivityPub is reasonably lightweight, though it could be trimmed down. Mastodon is not particularly. But we likely will see it become easier to run Mastodon-compatible-enough single-user instances with improved discoverability sooner or later. Content is already signed. The problem is that with Mastodon, the user does not control the private key unless you run your own instance. You can demonstrate that the content originates from a given instance, but not from a given user. That's an issue, but it's fixable.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    No, I'm thinking that we need something fundamentally different, "locked-open" decentralized... The system should be so built that information relaying happen at discretion of individual users, not of benevolent mega-instance operators, so that the acts will be interpreted in context of local moral, ethical, and legal standards(that I believe to be roughly universal anyway, but sometimes do show conflicts). In my opinion, as long as there would be hubs of information in the network, like Mastodon instance and its "core" networks, there will be constant asteroid impacts. Therefore the system needs to be able to ingest, sign, share, metricize data without relying on broadcasts from fault- and manipulation-prone tight mesh core structures. I think abuse and/or legal problems should be able to be handled at edge just fine, with such means as phone-sized ML models, user discretion to share or not, voluntary flagging, reporting, and source blocks, as well as tipping to classical police law enforcement, etc. Ordinary people should be good at spotting and reporting illegal activities anyway.
janandonly 2y ago
I agree that Mastodon isn’t it in its current form. I’ve left Twitter a while ago now, although when I have to, I will read messages via https://xcancel.com/ https://xcancel.com/ Since there is no clear winner I’ve set up a mastodon and nostr and bluesky account and I use https://openvibe.social/ https://openvibe.social/ to read and cross-post to all platforms, when I feel the need to share anything at all. There are other apps that do the same trick like https://nootti.com/ https://nootti.com/, but I am content with OpenVibe. Mostly, I’ve found that not being on any “social” media is better for my mental state.
oytis 2y ago
Deliberate choices to avoid being addictive is exactly why I use Mastodon. I do agree that private messages don't quite work - probably it's best to use a third-party messenger for that. There is also an annoying corollary to anti-virality and lack of recommendation algorithm that if you subscribe to an account that posts or reposts a lot (like an organization or just a very active user), then you feed gets dominated by that account, and you end up unsubscribing. There is no solution to this problem as far as I know, and I'm not sure it's widely discussed either. Otherwise, if you want to stay informed, connected, but not addicted, Mastodon seems to work quite well.
- Timshel 2y ago
  > then you feed gets dominated by that account, and you end up unsubscribing Possible solution is to create a list with those accounts, remove them from the default feed and display them separately.
- tempfile 2y ago
  Totally agree on both points. I follow Cory Doctorow and every time he posts it's a 20-long thread that just spams my timeline.
- lynx97 2y ago
  Claiming a social "network" without useful DMs is OK seems like masssive cope to me.
  - oytis 2y ago
    I dunno, I'm pretty old and am used to an Internet without walled gardens and super apps, using different tools for different tasks, so seems fine to me. But I agree it would be convenient.
    - lynx97 2y ago
      Yeah, I am also rather old, so old that I started with FidoNet before I got Internet. However, I have to admit that I grew used to the fact that it is easy to contact a node in my social graph, without having to go hunt for their email, or maintain my own contact database. After all, the social network should be about people, at least to me. I don't care about corporate pages on social networks, they might as well only exist at normal websites outside of the walled garden. I guess thats my point. In my book, social networks are about people. And not being able to easily contact people is pretty much useless.
deleted 2y ago
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rckt 2y ago
> Mastodon culture has taken a scolding, censorious tone This is the main issue I see with Mastodon. Any instance is administrated by a real person and this person has views of their own. And they attract people like them to the instance, forming a kind of an invisible ruling committee. And if you happen to post anything that goes against their beliefs, preferences, views, you get fucked. For me this is just ridiculous. A federated social media where every instance can be an authoritarian state. Well, no thanks. In my opinion what would help in this case is an ability to set up your single account instead of a whole Mastodon instance. I would gladly do this. This way the worst people can do to my account - block me on theirs, and I'm completely fine with it. Currently if you fall into disfavor of the instance administration, you can be restricted and banned in seconds.
- vidarh 2y ago
  My main Mastodon account is a single-user instance. Mastodon is heavy-duty for that compared to what it could be, and so a better single-user server would be nice, but it's also not that big a deal. Incidentally, I'm working on an app server with ActivityPub support at its core, and I have pondered giving it sufficient compatibility with Mastodon to allow repurposing it as a lightweight instance.
  - rckt 2y ago
    Nice, I'm looking forward for something like this. As for the "not a big deal", I get it. But still, it feels overkilling to have a whole instance that has the same capabilities as one with thousands of users, just for yourself.
    - vidarh 2y ago
      I mean, I think most of the overkill of Mastodon comes from design choices that stems from building it on Rails. It's possible to do Rails in a lean way, but the "done thing" in Rails is to build a big monolith talking to a full RDBMS, and use Sidekiq for jobs and, and ... I love Ruby, probably more than is good for my sanity (half my desktop stack is written in Ruby), but Rails has always come across to me as overcomplicating things.
jeswin 2y ago
> But I see absolutely no reason to expect the platform to avoid the problems that Twitter encountered as it grew (and Mastodon fostered as it failed to grow). Its own “federated protocol”—literally the entire reason it was built, and the main/only technical pitch in its early days—is totally irrelevant. 100% agree. There's no technical reason to use bsky - people are there mostly for the ... people. It has turned into another echo chamber; but that's probably what everyone wants. In my view, true decentralized networks (which would be great) won't take off until the Direct Sockets API [1] (or similar) and the File System API [2] are adopted across browsers. Chrome (and Edge et al) has had them for a while now. Add: Why do I think it won't work? In my view, federation is a compromise because p2p isn't possible right now. Federation brings all sorts of issues w.r.t. identity and portabilty. Users just want to talk to other people, and p2p is the simplest abstraction for it. Bluesky is as of now a centralized service, no different from Twitter. We're still waiting for the Napster moment. [1]: https://wicg.github.io/direct-sockets/ https://wicg.github.io/direct-sockets/ [2]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/capabilities/web-apis/file-system-access https://developer.chrome.com/docs/capabilities/web-apis/file...
- pjc50 2y ago
  > people are there mostly for the ... people. This is the live-or-die consideration for a social network. Inside that is the consideration that many people will not use a network that has certain other people on it.
  - jeswin 2y ago
    That's right. And there's nothing wrong with it.
smittywerben 2y ago
> every user has to parse dozens of different moderation policies to understand both what instance they want to host their account on as well as which other instances will accept their content That part about content moderation made me laugh. It's like that cycle of reinventing moderation joke.
jwr 2y ago
After watching several platforms undergo successive enshittification, I learned my lesson. I am done with commercial platforms, no matter how shiny and inviting they look right now. Puppies always look nice, for a reason. Threads or Bluesky looking good today? Let's talk in a couple of years, once they start growing the KPIs that matter to them using you as unpaid labor providing data input and eyeball time.
bawolff 2y ago
I never really understood what mastodon offers over blogs and rss feeds. I suppose the fact that people actually still use it.
karel-3d 2y ago
Federation doesn't really work. Moxie was right.
- darthrupert 2y ago
  Yeah. RIP email, too bad you never worked.
rvz 2y ago
Quite frankly unsurprised to see that Bluesky succeeded in appealing to tens of millions of users and getting the onboarding right compared to Mastodon. As predicted. [0] Tells you why the majority of those who decided to leave Twitter ignored Mastodon and chose Bluesky (or even Threads) instead because of all the issues the author of the article listed beyond basic usability that Mastodon still struggles with. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35750185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35750185
deleted 2y ago
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immibis 2y ago
Mastodon is not using ActivityPub. Firstly, the AP specification is so terrible you can't actually implement it practically. Secondly, Mastodon mostly ignores the spec anyway and just does something similar. For instance, AP specifies the use of JSON-LD for documents and Mastodon uses plain JSON, so every other application also uses plain JSON and the spec doesn't matter. As for the rest: I don't see the problem in people not seeing things they aren't interested in. The right way to treat the Fediverse is as a collection of completely separate servers with some interoperability features. In this aspect it's more like old internet forums, than like Twitter. Unfortunately this isn't obvious at all until you've used it for a while, and the Twitter interface does make you assume it's like Twitter. I do not suggest Mastodon to people any more - I suggest Kolektiva if they're into politics or chaos.social if they're a hacker. Also, the whole Internet could do with getting used to accounts becoming more ephemeral again. It used to be that if you moved house, you had to tell everyone you knew your new address and phone number - unless your new house happened to be served by the same central office. On the Internet, you can also have a different account on every site you regularly visit. Two different forums? Two different accounts. SSO is convenient but SSO doesn't mean using one site for everything, just using one site for authentication. I did prototype a "login with mastodon".
zorked 2y ago
Crucially, the posts did not exist even if I visited the profile page of the account: even after weeks of daily posts, the profile page displayed by mastodon.social claimed the account had never posted, and the posts would only begin appearing after someone on mastodon.social began following the account. I hate this. Even assuming that my server can't host every message ever posted on the network, why can't it go and talk to the other server and fetch a timeline so that I don't see a completely empty account for a user that didn't happen to have their messages relayed to my server? Same when opening threads.
marcus_holmes 2y ago
I'm really enjoying Mastodon. I have not encountered any of the censorial tone that the author complains of - not only has no-one criticised any of my posts, but I haven't seen this on anyone else's posts either. It feels like early usenet rather than early Twitter, for sure. But that's a feature. I am uninterested in a "critical mass" of people, because that has always become a shitshow. I follow people who post interesting things, and I don't care if I don't see everything they post. It works for me, I'm glad it exists. I hope it doesn't get more popular.
1dom 2y ago
I thought this was an interesting read, but I don't necessarily like or agree with it. I browse fediverse stuff occasionally, and mess around with single user instances for the technical fun, but I've never really had a mature mastodon account anywhere. The reason why I occasionally browse mastodon is because the vast majority of content I consume online (alright, often from nerds) also list or have a mastodon profile. Sometimes it's not always up to date. But I see and use the mastodon profile links more reliably than I see and use Twitter ones now. It clearly works. It's obviously not perfect. But I feel like the author is constantly judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree here. E.g. > The most immediate problem is that you only have access to posts that are present on your local instance, and posts are only propagated to your local instance if it has expressed interest in them (to the instance where they originate). It’s a chicken-and-egg issue: how do you know whether you’re interested in something if you can’t see it? Maybe I've misunderstood, but I thought this was the entire sales point and draw of many to mastodon, that it's not just one big messy free-for-all like Twitter. It's partially separated by design, and you get to choose. But then they go on to speak positively of Bluesky with: > It offers much of the best of Twitter: with a well-curated set of follows (and a chronological, not algorithmic timeline), I get to hear directly from a lot of true experts commenting in real time on current events. So Bluesky is good with a curated set of follows, but mastodon is bad because you have to curate who to follow? IMO, most of the authors problems here are with parts of social networks that are put in place to deal with the products of the worst part of human nature (spam, greed, aggression etc.) I can't help but feel the only sort of social network this author will be happy with is one that doesn't have an humans on it.
tempfile 2y ago
Some of these criticisms I can understand and agree with. Direct messaging is broken and should be fixed rather than removed (since you need to share credentials in order to use a third party messaging app). When you say "Account migration does not work" I am forced to ask "compared to what"? There are literally no alternatives. If you have a twitter account with 20k tweets, and you want to leave twitter, "GFY". Ditto if you get banned. A public, instance-independent list of banned and redirected accounts (which survives the death of an instance) could perhaps be a really useful service. Culturally, mastodon people do seem opposed to bots. There are a lot of people who are hostile to indexing, and hostile to really any automated interactions at all. This causes a huge controversy every few months, when someone tries to build search and gets run out of the community for using a crawler to do it. It is worth mentioning that fedi socials have a pretty high concentration of trans and other marginalised users, who are burned by targeted harassment on other parts of the internet. I think the resistance to bots is part of this.
- Kye 2y ago
  >> "When you say "Account migration does not work" I am forced to ask "compared to what"? There are literally no alternatives. If you have a twitter account with 20k tweets, and you want to leave twitter, "GFY". Ditto if you get banned. A public, instance-independent list of banned and redirected accounts (which survives the death of an instance) could perhaps be a really useful service." Quite a few people downloaded their entire Twitter archive and uploaded it to Bluesky. For example: https://bsky.app/profile/shortformernie.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/shortformernie.bsky.social I can download my entire repo in one click and move it to another PDS, perhaps one I run, or save it for later when there are more options. Or come up with my own way to transform it.
- xigoi 1y ago
  > When you say "Account migration does not work" I am forced to ask "compared to what"? There are literally no alternatives. Bluesky allows you to use your domain as your account identity, so if you want to move, you just change the DNS record.
Nextgrid 2y ago
The "fediverse"'s issue is that it wants to displace established social media and its problems without even trying to understand why it has the problems it has. The thinking is that if you throw enough technical complexity at it then magically those problems will go away. Established social media is not flawed for the sake of it. No matter how much you hate them, nobody at Facebook is saying "let's make the world a miserable place just for the sake of it". They do for revenue and profit - all the noxiousness of traditional social media can be traced back to its advertising-based business models; including the lack of interoperability. No amount of "federation" or technobabble or artificial complexity is going to solve this fundamental problem - someone needs to get paid to keep the lights on, the servers humming, and the bad guys out. The current approach of the fediverse is to stick their head in the sand and pretend there is no problems. In reality of course there are problems - instances go down, the federation model means data is duplicated lots of times and makes hosting even costlier, and spam/bad actor prevention is non-existent (the only reason the whole thing isn't full of spam is because it's too irrelevant to actually bother spamming). If you actually think about addressing the root cause that makes existing social media noxious and opt for a different funding model (paid accounts, etc), then you'll realize none of that "federation" complexity is actually needed because suddenly you no longer have an incentive to do a lot of the obnoxious things that federation wants to solve. You can run a conventional centralized platform as a non-profit, and still let people attach their own domains, use alternative clients, etc. As a bonus, not having to duplicate the data many times means your costs will be lower than a "fediverse" equivalent and you can actually scale. And you could even pay a marketing intern for him to tell you that calling your consumer-facing product "Mastodon" is a recipe for failure (but hopefully if you've made it that far you'd already have the common sense to know this).
- oytis 2y ago
  > No amount of "federation" or technobabble or artificial complexity is going to solve this fundamental problem Yeah, it's not solved by federation, but by running on donations and volunteer work. 9 years uptime, looks good so far. Not everything needs to be profitable.
jt-hill 2y ago
I’m sympathetic to the desire to recapture the electricity of early Twitter, but I’m reminded of the famous quote that “a man cannot step in the same river twice.” I’m on Bluesky too, and it’s alright, but the internet has changed, the world has changed, and I have changed. It can’t ever be quite the same experience.
Kye 2y ago
I had to accept after almost 10 years that Mastodon and the broader AP fediverse were never going to suit me. Bluesky came along with a reminder of all the stuff I missed from Twitter with an organization and developer community that actually listens. The potential is there, and so far the devs haven't given me any reason to doubt they want to develop toward creating a credible exit[0]. AP is effectively centralized. The way art all but vanished from my timelines when mastodon.art's admin decided the server I was on was full of and run by evil racists[1] really hammered that point home. Everyone has to test for Mastodon's quirks to interoperate. [0] https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t [1] Spoiler: it's not
mariusor 2y ago
> Mastodon simply doesn’t show users the posts they ask to see That is patently untrue. What users want to see is the posts of the accounts they follow. That's it. I see OP expected to see his bots' posts without trying to follow them, I wonder where the miscommunication that could have led to such a misunderstanding stems from. And if there is such a misunderstanding what kind of hubris do you need to have to write things like "XY doesn't work"...
evilsetg 2y ago
The way I see it, joining social media requires your account to be bound by a chain to either a corporation or some rando. I'd much rather bind myself to some random person on the internet because at least there is a chance that they will treat me like a human. A corporation just does not care. The fediverse is run by humans. Good humans, bad humans, but humans at least. This you will never get from a company, at least not in the long run.
theturtle 2y ago
[flagged]

77 points by icy 2y ago

You sound disgruntled. You keep saying it won't work, but it does work, but it won't work, but it does work. Make up your mind. What I take away from this is that you had a bad experience and you're now giving up on the only large scale social media platform powered by the people, for the people, and instead going to bsky which keeps promising federation but in fact requires way too many resources for regular people to federate with. That's the issue, resources. Who are we expecting to host these nodes? The fedi had a low entrance threshold. But you can't federate every single message, that drastically increases the entrance threshold. Fediverse is in fact just a bunch of individual message boards with some federation between them. You can find an instance that becomes your home, your family, but you can still follow people on other nodes, you can still respond to people on other nodes.

lifthrasiir 2y ago
A "bunch of individual message boards" is not usually called a "social network" as Mastodon seems to claim itself to be. That's exactly what the OP points out, in my reading.
- vidarh 2y ago
  But Mastodon is not a bunch of individual message boards only, but a bunch of individual message boards with federation between them. When you cut off an essential part of the statement you respond to, you're setting up a strawman.
  - lifthrasiir 2y ago
    I omitted that because the OP explicitly mentions and shows that the federation doesn't work. Given no rebuttal about that, "with fedration between them" has no further meaning to me. (I also don't like how the original reply avoids a detailed discussion by merely pointing out the inconsistency instead, but that's another story.)
    - vidarh 2y ago
      The OP claims federation doesn't work. It's a purely subjective viewpoint, and in my experience entirely false. I run two Mastodon instances, one of which is a single-user instance. On neither of those do I have the problems OP claims means Mastodon federation does not work.
      - lifthrasiir 2y ago
        Yeah, you should have said that first to claim that. It is still entirely possible that the OP did experience what you thought to be impossible---that's a nature of any sizable service, innit?
        vidarh 2y ago
        Or you should have not cut off an essential part of what you responded to baed on a belief about the veracity of OPs arguments. Federation provably works. All of my exchanges involve federation because there are no other users on my instance. As such his claims are exaggerations based on his subjective notions of how federation ought to work.
        lifthrasiir 2y ago
        We are clearly talking about the federation in social networking services (which I and many others would call simply social networks, but since someone clearly didn't like that). The OP analyzes the federation as a means to build such services, while your anecdote only says that the federation is enough to serve your needs---the anecdote which the OP doesn't even object. While I don't use Mastodon for a lot of reasons, I had operated an IRC network for a long time and experienced its eventual demise as well. IRC started out as a worldwide federated network until it isn't, and many IRC networks only worked because of its constituent users---my network never reached that critical mass in comparison. I would have no reason to worry about that if IRC did have the working federation to this day! In the current fediverse choosing the correct nodes (or to federate, if you have your own personal node) is mandatory, indirectly showing that its federation is not enough, just like IRC.
- mattashii 2y ago
  No, not individual message boards per se, but when they're connected they are called a social network. Case in point: Reddit is called a social network. And Mastodon, by its inclusion in the fediverse, is part of that fediverse social network. Yes, it isn't a monolith, but when has that become a requirement for something to be called a network?
  - lifthrasiir 2y ago
    That would be a "social" "network" (any network formed with social properties), not a "social network(ing service)" (an online platform primarily used to replicate and often independently construct social networks in the human society). They are not identical in usage and the latter is the common sense.
    - cassianoleal 2y ago
      > the latter is the common sense. Common to whom?
      - lifthrasiir 2y ago
        Most Internet users who have used Facebook and likes? (And even I, who never have used Facebook, primarily use that sense.) It is the first sense in the Cambridge dictionary [1], the second sense in the Oxford dictionary available via Google Search, and the second sense and also the first non-academic sense in Wiktionary [2]. It is clearly common enough for me to say so. [1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/social-network https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/social-n... [2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/social_network https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/social_network
        mattashii 2y ago
        Yes, but even if you take the first definition of the Oxford or the second of Wiktionary, then still would Mastodon be a Social Network, as it does match both descriptions.
        2y ago
- INTPenis 2y ago
  It's miles better than what we used to have. Imho fedi is exactly where I want to be. I was active in vbulletin/phpbb/punbb boards for years, and I always wished I could participate in all of them with one user account. That's exactly what I can do now. I think the marketing of Mastodon is what skews the image of the fediverse. We need to stop marketing as a Twitter, or a Bluesky, and more like individual communities that are able to communicate with each other. Set more realistic expectations. The USP is still that it's easy for anyone to run a node, it's still for the people, not for the millionaires with tons of resources.

TheChaplain 2y ago

Well, I believe it is fair for the host owner to decide what they serve or not. If they think bot accounts, with the sole purpose to repeatedly display information that is available in any modern mobile phone, takes up unnecessary resources then.. Well, they have right to restrict them IMHO.

vidarh 2y ago
And a bot account like that is if anything the easiest thing to host on a purpose-made instance. You need a full Mastodon instance for that. You just need to generate an outbox collection, individual pages for the objects and actor, and a webfinger endpoint. It could be easier, but it's not that hard.
- seba_dos1 2y ago
  You don't need*
xdennis 2y ago
I haven't used Mastodon, but I think what he's saying is that no one can choose to see the bot's content. He has his account on the mastodon.social instance, but since they block the instance where the bot is, he can't see the bot's content. What's the point of being distributed if others can pick and choose what YOU get to see?
- vidarh 2y ago
  If he's unhappy about mastodon.social, he can move elsewhere. He should. Moving ought to be made easier - he has a point there. Nobody in the Fediverse can prevent you from posting what you want. But everyone can choose to band together in groups around shared policies and prevent you from imposing what you post on them. Some users are unaware of which policies they opt into when they pick an instance, and that is an issue (and why moving ought to be made easier). My experience is that while it makes discovery slightly annoying - a single user instance is the nicest Mastodon experience. Anyone who blocks your instance then is doing so because they're blocking you (don't share that instance with noisy bots). For some it might make sense to have an account on a major instance too, to check in for discovery, and to follow their own single-user instance account to kickstart some visibility (and it's a flaw that it is like this - Mastodon does not better discovery functionality). Mastodon is by no means flawless, and to grow more it will need to fix a lot of them, but a lot of the purported issues are seen as features by users. E.g. the ability to band together and purposefully isolate but allow limited federation, is a feature. An extreme example is a pair instances for a marginalized group where one of them federates with the rest of the fediverse, but the "inner" one only federates with the other instance. It's on purpose set up that way to provide a safe space for those who want limited exposure. People have a right to choose not to associate just as they have a right to choose to associate.

numpad0 2y ago

imo the problem is in instance ownership. users has to own and the system should still work. current mastodon model of bunch of aristocrats owning instances doing rounds of 2-minute hatred obviously didn't work. any obligations forced upon above-citizen classes will be abused, and they are for mastodon, leading to some of problems elaborated. I'm imagining a model of network in which, old Android phone as server for power users collect RSS for initial content density problem, then clients do Discord-y stuff on client devices. client also sync public content with other servers it also belongs to for viral element. Content authenticity shall be handled by blockchain-y chain signing and that can also be proxy for content value. NAT and therefore central server requirement can be a problem in fully decentralizing such platform. mean income/education/skill level of mastodon instance owner is like global top 0.01% no? that's a flaw in itself.

vidarh 2y ago
ActivityPub is reasonably lightweight, though it could be trimmed down. Mastodon is not particularly. But we likely will see it become easier to run Mastodon-compatible-enough single-user instances with improved discoverability sooner or later. Content is already signed. The problem is that with Mastodon, the user does not control the private key unless you run your own instance. You can demonstrate that the content originates from a given instance, but not from a given user. That's an issue, but it's fixable.
- numpad0 2y ago
  No, I'm thinking that we need something fundamentally different, "locked-open" decentralized... The system should be so built that information relaying happen at discretion of individual users, not of benevolent mega-instance operators, so that the acts will be interpreted in context of local moral, ethical, and legal standards(that I believe to be roughly universal anyway, but sometimes do show conflicts). In my opinion, as long as there would be hubs of information in the network, like Mastodon instance and its "core" networks, there will be constant asteroid impacts. Therefore the system needs to be able to ingest, sign, share, metricize data without relying on broadcasts from fault- and manipulation-prone tight mesh core structures. I think abuse and/or legal problems should be able to be handled at edge just fine, with such means as phone-sized ML models, user discretion to share or not, voluntary flagging, reporting, and source blocks, as well as tipping to classical police law enforcement, etc. Ordinary people should be good at spotting and reporting illegal activities anyway.

janandonly 2y ago

I agree that Mastodon isn’t it in its current form. I’ve left Twitter a while ago now, although when I have to, I will read messages via https://xcancel.com/ https://xcancel.com/ Since there is no clear winner I’ve set up a mastodon and nostr and bluesky account and I use https://openvibe.social/ https://openvibe.social/ to read and cross-post to all platforms, when I feel the need to share anything at all. There are other apps that do the same trick like https://nootti.com/ https://nootti.com/, but I am content with OpenVibe. Mostly, I’ve found that not being on any “social” media is better for my mental state.

oytis 2y ago

Deliberate choices to avoid being addictive is exactly why I use Mastodon. I do agree that private messages don't quite work - probably it's best to use a third-party messenger for that. There is also an annoying corollary to anti-virality and lack of recommendation algorithm that if you subscribe to an account that posts or reposts a lot (like an organization or just a very active user), then you feed gets dominated by that account, and you end up unsubscribing. There is no solution to this problem as far as I know, and I'm not sure it's widely discussed either. Otherwise, if you want to stay informed, connected, but not addicted, Mastodon seems to work quite well.

Timshel 2y ago
> then you feed gets dominated by that account, and you end up unsubscribing Possible solution is to create a list with those accounts, remove them from the default feed and display them separately.
tempfile 2y ago
Totally agree on both points. I follow Cory Doctorow and every time he posts it's a 20-long thread that just spams my timeline.
lynx97 2y ago
Claiming a social "network" without useful DMs is OK seems like masssive cope to me.
- oytis 2y ago
  I dunno, I'm pretty old and am used to an Internet without walled gardens and super apps, using different tools for different tasks, so seems fine to me. But I agree it would be convenient.
  - lynx97 2y ago
    Yeah, I am also rather old, so old that I started with FidoNet before I got Internet. However, I have to admit that I grew used to the fact that it is easy to contact a node in my social graph, without having to go hunt for their email, or maintain my own contact database. After all, the social network should be about people, at least to me. I don't care about corporate pages on social networks, they might as well only exist at normal websites outside of the walled garden. I guess thats my point. In my book, social networks are about people. And not being able to easily contact people is pretty much useless.

deleted 2y ago

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rckt 2y ago

> Mastodon culture has taken a scolding, censorious tone This is the main issue I see with Mastodon. Any instance is administrated by a real person and this person has views of their own. And they attract people like them to the instance, forming a kind of an invisible ruling committee. And if you happen to post anything that goes against their beliefs, preferences, views, you get fucked. For me this is just ridiculous. A federated social media where every instance can be an authoritarian state. Well, no thanks. In my opinion what would help in this case is an ability to set up your single account instead of a whole Mastodon instance. I would gladly do this. This way the worst people can do to my account - block me on theirs, and I'm completely fine with it. Currently if you fall into disfavor of the instance administration, you can be restricted and banned in seconds.

vidarh 2y ago
My main Mastodon account is a single-user instance. Mastodon is heavy-duty for that compared to what it could be, and so a better single-user server would be nice, but it's also not that big a deal. Incidentally, I'm working on an app server with ActivityPub support at its core, and I have pondered giving it sufficient compatibility with Mastodon to allow repurposing it as a lightweight instance.
- rckt 2y ago
  Nice, I'm looking forward for something like this. As for the "not a big deal", I get it. But still, it feels overkilling to have a whole instance that has the same capabilities as one with thousands of users, just for yourself.
  - vidarh 2y ago
    I mean, I think most of the overkill of Mastodon comes from design choices that stems from building it on Rails. It's possible to do Rails in a lean way, but the "done thing" in Rails is to build a big monolith talking to a full RDBMS, and use Sidekiq for jobs and, and ... I love Ruby, probably more than is good for my sanity (half my desktop stack is written in Ruby), but Rails has always come across to me as overcomplicating things.

jeswin 2y ago

> But I see absolutely no reason to expect the platform to avoid the problems that Twitter encountered as it grew (and Mastodon fostered as it failed to grow). Its own “federated protocol”—literally the entire reason it was built, and the main/only technical pitch in its early days—is totally irrelevant. 100% agree. There's no technical reason to use bsky - people are there mostly for the ... people. It has turned into another echo chamber; but that's probably what everyone wants. In my view, true decentralized networks (which would be great) won't take off until the Direct Sockets API [1] (or similar) and the File System API [2] are adopted across browsers. Chrome (and Edge et al) has had them for a while now. Add: Why do I think it won't work? In my view, federation is a compromise because p2p isn't possible right now. Federation brings all sorts of issues w.r.t. identity and portabilty. Users just want to talk to other people, and p2p is the simplest abstraction for it. Bluesky is as of now a centralized service, no different from Twitter. We're still waiting for the Napster moment. [1]: https://wicg.github.io/direct-sockets/ https://wicg.github.io/direct-sockets/ [2]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/capabilities/web-apis/file-system-access https://developer.chrome.com/docs/capabilities/web-apis/file...

pjc50 2y ago
> people are there mostly for the ... people. This is the live-or-die consideration for a social network. Inside that is the consideration that many people will not use a network that has certain other people on it.
- jeswin 2y ago
  That's right. And there's nothing wrong with it.

smittywerben 2y ago

> every user has to parse dozens of different moderation policies to understand both what instance they want to host their account on as well as which other instances will accept their content That part about content moderation made me laugh. It's like that cycle of reinventing moderation joke.

jwr 2y ago

After watching several platforms undergo successive enshittification, I learned my lesson. I am done with commercial platforms, no matter how shiny and inviting they look right now. Puppies always look nice, for a reason. Threads or Bluesky looking good today? Let's talk in a couple of years, once they start growing the KPIs that matter to them using you as unpaid labor providing data input and eyeball time.

bawolff 2y ago

I never really understood what mastodon offers over blogs and rss feeds. I suppose the fact that people actually still use it.

karel-3d 2y ago

Federation doesn't really work. Moxie was right.

darthrupert 2y ago
Yeah. RIP email, too bad you never worked.

rvz 2y ago

Quite frankly unsurprised to see that Bluesky succeeded in appealing to tens of millions of users and getting the onboarding right compared to Mastodon. As predicted. [0] Tells you why the majority of those who decided to leave Twitter ignored Mastodon and chose Bluesky (or even Threads) instead because of all the issues the author of the article listed beyond basic usability that Mastodon still struggles with. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35750185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35750185

deleted 2y ago

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immibis 2y ago

Mastodon is not using ActivityPub. Firstly, the AP specification is so terrible you can't actually implement it practically. Secondly, Mastodon mostly ignores the spec anyway and just does something similar. For instance, AP specifies the use of JSON-LD for documents and Mastodon uses plain JSON, so every other application also uses plain JSON and the spec doesn't matter. As for the rest: I don't see the problem in people not seeing things they aren't interested in. The right way to treat the Fediverse is as a collection of completely separate servers with some interoperability features. In this aspect it's more like old internet forums, than like Twitter. Unfortunately this isn't obvious at all until you've used it for a while, and the Twitter interface does make you assume it's like Twitter. I do not suggest Mastodon to people any more - I suggest Kolektiva if they're into politics or chaos.social if they're a hacker. Also, the whole Internet could do with getting used to accounts becoming more ephemeral again. It used to be that if you moved house, you had to tell everyone you knew your new address and phone number - unless your new house happened to be served by the same central office. On the Internet, you can also have a different account on every site you regularly visit. Two different forums? Two different accounts. SSO is convenient but SSO doesn't mean using one site for everything, just using one site for authentication. I did prototype a "login with mastodon".

zorked 2y ago

Crucially, the posts did not exist even if I visited the profile page of the account: even after weeks of daily posts, the profile page displayed by mastodon.social claimed the account had never posted, and the posts would only begin appearing after someone on mastodon.social began following the account. I hate this. Even assuming that my server can't host every message ever posted on the network, why can't it go and talk to the other server and fetch a timeline so that I don't see a completely empty account for a user that didn't happen to have their messages relayed to my server? Same when opening threads.

marcus_holmes 2y ago

I'm really enjoying Mastodon. I have not encountered any of the censorial tone that the author complains of - not only has no-one criticised any of my posts, but I haven't seen this on anyone else's posts either. It feels like early usenet rather than early Twitter, for sure. But that's a feature. I am uninterested in a "critical mass" of people, because that has always become a shitshow. I follow people who post interesting things, and I don't care if I don't see everything they post. It works for me, I'm glad it exists. I hope it doesn't get more popular.

1dom 2y ago

I thought this was an interesting read, but I don't necessarily like or agree with it. I browse fediverse stuff occasionally, and mess around with single user instances for the technical fun, but I've never really had a mature mastodon account anywhere. The reason why I occasionally browse mastodon is because the vast majority of content I consume online (alright, often from nerds) also list or have a mastodon profile. Sometimes it's not always up to date. But I see and use the mastodon profile links more reliably than I see and use Twitter ones now. It clearly works. It's obviously not perfect. But I feel like the author is constantly judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree here. E.g. > The most immediate problem is that you only have access to posts that are present on your local instance, and posts are only propagated to your local instance if it has expressed interest in them (to the instance where they originate). It’s a chicken-and-egg issue: how do you know whether you’re interested in something if you can’t see it? Maybe I've misunderstood, but I thought this was the entire sales point and draw of many to mastodon, that it's not just one big messy free-for-all like Twitter. It's partially separated by design, and you get to choose. But then they go on to speak positively of Bluesky with: > It offers much of the best of Twitter: with a well-curated set of follows (and a chronological, not algorithmic timeline), I get to hear directly from a lot of true experts commenting in real time on current events. So Bluesky is good with a curated set of follows, but mastodon is bad because you have to curate who to follow? IMO, most of the authors problems here are with parts of social networks that are put in place to deal with the products of the worst part of human nature (spam, greed, aggression etc.) I can't help but feel the only sort of social network this author will be happy with is one that doesn't have an humans on it.

tempfile 2y ago

Some of these criticisms I can understand and agree with. Direct messaging is broken and should be fixed rather than removed (since you need to share credentials in order to use a third party messaging app). When you say "Account migration does not work" I am forced to ask "compared to what"? There are literally no alternatives. If you have a twitter account with 20k tweets, and you want to leave twitter, "GFY". Ditto if you get banned. A public, instance-independent list of banned and redirected accounts (which survives the death of an instance) could perhaps be a really useful service. Culturally, mastodon people do seem opposed to bots. There are a lot of people who are hostile to indexing, and hostile to really any automated interactions at all. This causes a huge controversy every few months, when someone tries to build search and gets run out of the community for using a crawler to do it. It is worth mentioning that fedi socials have a pretty high concentration of trans and other marginalised users, who are burned by targeted harassment on other parts of the internet. I think the resistance to bots is part of this.

Kye 2y ago
>> "When you say "Account migration does not work" I am forced to ask "compared to what"? There are literally no alternatives. If you have a twitter account with 20k tweets, and you want to leave twitter, "GFY". Ditto if you get banned. A public, instance-independent list of banned and redirected accounts (which survives the death of an instance) could perhaps be a really useful service." Quite a few people downloaded their entire Twitter archive and uploaded it to Bluesky. For example: https://bsky.app/profile/shortformernie.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/shortformernie.bsky.social I can download my entire repo in one click and move it to another PDS, perhaps one I run, or save it for later when there are more options. Or come up with my own way to transform it.
xigoi 1y ago
> When you say "Account migration does not work" I am forced to ask "compared to what"? There are literally no alternatives. Bluesky allows you to use your domain as your account identity, so if you want to move, you just change the DNS record.

Nextgrid 2y ago

The "fediverse"'s issue is that it wants to displace established social media and its problems without even trying to understand why it has the problems it has. The thinking is that if you throw enough technical complexity at it then magically those problems will go away. Established social media is not flawed for the sake of it. No matter how much you hate them, nobody at Facebook is saying "let's make the world a miserable place just for the sake of it". They do for revenue and profit - all the noxiousness of traditional social media can be traced back to its advertising-based business models; including the lack of interoperability. No amount of "federation" or technobabble or artificial complexity is going to solve this fundamental problem - someone needs to get paid to keep the lights on, the servers humming, and the bad guys out. The current approach of the fediverse is to stick their head in the sand and pretend there is no problems. In reality of course there are problems - instances go down, the federation model means data is duplicated lots of times and makes hosting even costlier, and spam/bad actor prevention is non-existent (the only reason the whole thing isn't full of spam is because it's too irrelevant to actually bother spamming). If you actually think about addressing the root cause that makes existing social media noxious and opt for a different funding model (paid accounts, etc), then you'll realize none of that "federation" complexity is actually needed because suddenly you no longer have an incentive to do a lot of the obnoxious things that federation wants to solve. You can run a conventional centralized platform as a non-profit, and still let people attach their own domains, use alternative clients, etc. As a bonus, not having to duplicate the data many times means your costs will be lower than a "fediverse" equivalent and you can actually scale. And you could even pay a marketing intern for him to tell you that calling your consumer-facing product "Mastodon" is a recipe for failure (but hopefully if you've made it that far you'd already have the common sense to know this).

oytis 2y ago
> No amount of "federation" or technobabble or artificial complexity is going to solve this fundamental problem Yeah, it's not solved by federation, but by running on donations and volunteer work. 9 years uptime, looks good so far. Not everything needs to be profitable.

jt-hill 2y ago

I’m sympathetic to the desire to recapture the electricity of early Twitter, but I’m reminded of the famous quote that “a man cannot step in the same river twice.” I’m on Bluesky too, and it’s alright, but the internet has changed, the world has changed, and I have changed. It can’t ever be quite the same experience.

Kye 2y ago

I had to accept after almost 10 years that Mastodon and the broader AP fediverse were never going to suit me. Bluesky came along with a reminder of all the stuff I missed from Twitter with an organization and developer community that actually listens. The potential is there, and so far the devs haven't given me any reason to doubt they want to develop toward creating a credible exit[0]. AP is effectively centralized. The way art all but vanished from my timelines when mastodon.art's admin decided the server I was on was full of and run by evil racists[1] really hammered that point home. Everyone has to test for Mastodon's quirks to interoperate. [0] https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t [1] Spoiler: it's not

mariusor 2y ago

> Mastodon simply doesn’t show users the posts they ask to see That is patently untrue. What users want to see is the posts of the accounts they follow. That's it. I see OP expected to see his bots' posts without trying to follow them, I wonder where the miscommunication that could have led to such a misunderstanding stems from. And if there is such a misunderstanding what kind of hubris do you need to have to write things like "XY doesn't work"...

evilsetg 2y ago

The way I see it, joining social media requires your account to be bound by a chain to either a corporation or some rando. I'd much rather bind myself to some random person on the internet because at least there is a chance that they will treat me like a human. A corporation just does not care. The fediverse is run by humans. Good humans, bad humans, but humans at least. This you will never get from a company, at least not in the long run.

theturtle 2y ago

[flagged]