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.

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".

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.

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.

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/

Since there is no clear winner I’ve set up a mastodon and nostr and bluesky account and I use 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/, but I am content with OpenVibe.

Mostly, I’ve found that not being on any “social” media is better for my mental state.

> 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"...

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.

> 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/

[2]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/capabilities/web-apis/file...

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

I never really understood what mastodon offers over blogs and rss feeds.

I suppose the fact that people actually still use it.

  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.

Same when opening threads.

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.

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

[1] Spoiler: it's not

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).

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

[flagged]

Federation doesn't really work.

Moxie was right.