My Problems with Mastodon
Even with growing pains accommodating an influx of new users, Lemmy has made it clear that a federated social media site can be nearly as good as the original thing. I joined Lemmy, and it exceeded my expectations for a Reddit alternative run by an independent team.
These expectations were originally pretty low when Mastodon, the popular federated Twitter alternative, was the only federated social media I had experience with. After using Lemmy, Mastodon seems to be missing basic features. I initially believed these were just shortcomings of federated social media.
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Likes aren’t counted by users outside your instance, and replies don’t seem to be counted at all (beyond 0, 1, 1+), leading to posts that look like they have way more boosts (retweets) than likes or replies:
This incentivizes people to just gravitate toward the biggest instance more than people already do. My guess is that self-hosting a mastodon instance would also not be ideal, since the only likes you’ll see are your own.
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There’s really only one effective ways to find popular or ‘trending’ posts. There’s the explore tab which has ‘posts’, and ‘tags’ sections.
The ‘posts’ section shows some trending posts across your instance and all the instances that it’s federated with, this is the one I use it the most.
The ‘tags’ section is a lot like the trending tab on Twitter, but it’s reserved just for hashtags, which I guess isn’t a huge deal, but it feels like a downgrade. However, I do like the trend line it shows next to each tag!
The ‘Local’ and ‘Federated’ tabs are a live feed of post from your home instance and all the other instances, respectively. I feel these are pretty useless and definitely don’t warrant their own tabs. Having a local trending tab for seeing popular posts on your instance would be more interesting.
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The search bar basically doesn’t work, is this just me???
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This one is more minor and more specific to a Twitter alternative, but when looking at a user’s follows, you’ll only see the one’s on your home instance but for some reason this rule doesn’t apply to followers.
From what I’ve heard, a lot of these issues are intentional in order to create a healthier social media experience. Things like less focus on likes, reduces a hivemind mentality, addiction, things like that (I couldn’t find a source for this, if anyone has one confirming or disproving this please lmk).
Why this is a Problem
Mastodon seems to have two goals: To be an example of how a federated alternative to Twitter can work well, and to be a healthier social media experience. It’s not obvious, but I think these goals conflict with each other. A lot of the features that are removed in the pursuit of a healthier social media will be perceived as the shortcomings of federation as a concept.
In my eyes, Mastodon’s one main goal should be proving federated social media as a whole to the public, by being a seamless, familiar, full-featured alternative to Twitter. For me, Lemmy has done that for Reddit, upvotes are counted normally, you can see trending posts locally and globally same with communities, and the search function works! All its shortcomings aren’t design flaws, and I fully expect them to be fixed down the road as it matures.
As annoying as Jack Dorsey is, I have high hopes for BlueSky.
This reads like it was written by someone who wants to be an influencer on Mastodon and is frustrated that its designed so that can’t happen.
And that’s a bad thing. While you may think of Instagram- or OF models when thinking about influencers, there are also many artists and other content creators that rely on reach provided to them by large, easy to search through content platforms. If Mastodon by design hampers those people’s reach, they won’t join and with them all their followers won’t either.
But…it doesn’t. I guess some people just can’t live without an algorithm to them what to see.
So, there are commercial networks for people who want to do commercial things with corporations and sponsors. Mastodon doesn’t want to be that. If someone wants to use Mastodon for that, they are fighting the stream.
And there are small independent artists who want to display their latest artwork to an audience of followers on a social media platform, with the potential of broader reach and impact. And there are activists, who aim to raise awareness by doing the same thing.
What you seem to be saying, is that social networks like Mastodon are not for that. No artists. No activism.
So, what’s Mastodon for?
If by activism you mean paying money to the platform to force people to be exposed to your message even though they aren’t looking for it or interested, then no, you will have to stay in places where users are manipulated and exploited.
But if you wish to have meaningful conversations with people one-on-one about subjects that are important to you, then you can do that kind of activism very effectively.
If you just want Twitter, then friggin use Twitter, or Insta, or Threads, or whatever the corporate darling of the day is. They have that bullshit on lock. There is no point in just building the same thing again, and anyway, they’d do it better than us.
Mastodon definitely isn’t built or designed for one-in-one conversations.
It’s a microblogging platform for diffusing content, opinions or anything else people want to use it for, somewhat like Twitter, with some variations.
And then people keep wondering why twitter isn’t dying.
That’s a good thing for us. They will draw off all the crap, allowing our communities to breathe easily.
That is a recurring, moronic take. If you want a small community, go choose a small, defederated instance. Don’t declare that Mastodon/the Fediverse should by design be hostile to people reliant on discoverability.
What’s moronic is advocating for the enshittification of a platform.
How can a platform be enshittified when it is by design federated and can, as such, have defederated communities?
Changing the algorithm would probably be implemented as a version update which all instances would eventually need to adopt, or be left behind in features & security patches.
Allowing people to game your algorithm to keep their content higher is not a good thing. It made reddit unbearable (thankfully we have Local feed on Lemmy), twitter, etc. It is why YouTube (as far as genuinely informative videos go) is circling the drain.
I agree. The thing I like about Mastodon is that I made friends and met other people with similar interests. Nobody is trying to make interaction bait, it’s great.