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Comment by stewbrew | Hacker News Reader

I don't think these are just ergonomic wrinkles. I was surprised to learn that it seems to matter which instance you join. I assumed "decentralized" means "it doesn't matter where you're located". To me this is rather a basic, philosophical flaw.

I would also expect a decentralized network to easily support multiple identities. At least the default client seemingly does not. Twitter on the other hand allows switching between profiles.

I think these two issues are connected. It seems to me the mastodon community (or parts of it) leans towards a rather weird understanding of identity and community.

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You should think of it more as multiple places joined together rather than as one place spread out.

It's more like the old BBS networks of old, like FidoNET, etc. And it has a similar vibe to that.

I like it for this reason. If you go in expecting Twitter, you will be disappointed. That's not what it is.

FidoNET (got I loved FidoNET) had a central coordinating authority, you had to get on a nodelist.

With Mastodon it gets incrementally harder to just add someone. Are they on the same Mastodon instance as me? Does my Mastodon instance federate the Mastodon instance they're on? Is this handled client side with multiple identities? Now how do I handle these multiple identities, so I broadcast "toots" (cringe) to all of them?

I don't get it.. So far I've been able to add anybody on Mastodon. I'm on indieweb.social, but most of the people I'm following are elsewhere. Seems to work fine. Yes, it isn't spoonfeeding me contacts or content like Twitter wants to, but that's also a good thing. I see a lot less bullsh*t.

Also almost nobody I've come across actually says "toots" -- they just say "posts" :-)

The equivalent of the FidoNET nodelist would basically be whatever the most popular Mastodon servers are choosing to federate with. It seems in practice to be more of a consensus driven thing, but has the same net effect. We'll see if it scales.

I'm also confused about your description. I host my own single user mastodon instance and have no problems to follow anyone, just put their username into the searchbar and click follow.

This way I can follow anything on the fediverse, not only Mastodon accounts but PeerTube, Friendica, PixelFed, FunkWhale, etc. all from my Mastodon account.

If you don't own the instance can you follow things on instances you're not federated with?

Yes you can but that's not how hardcore mastodon users describe things. Did you ever wonder what the local feed is about?

I expected XMPP-like federation where it really does not matter from where you are but it's kinda disappointing.

Software ecosystem is also less "decentralized" and more "schizophrenic"

> I would also expect a decentralized network to easily support multiple identities. At least the default client seemingly does not.

The official iOS client certainly does. Long press on the profile icon at the bottom right to switch/add.

oh well. speak about discoverability. many thanks for this hint.

Yeah there are some UX optimizations that could probably be made...

OTOH, I can't think of many big-name mobile apps that don't have some issues with less-than-obvious long-press functionality. (Snapchat seems to literally do this shit on purpose, because it's "fun" apparently.)

IMO that's a general problem with mobile UX... long-press actions have zero affordance. There's no way to tell short of randomly long-pressing on stuff what's going to have an action associated with it.

Tried the iOS app for the first time today and I got a prompt right after login with a small overlay pointing at the profile icon explaining this.

Gmail client on Android lets you change profiles by swiping up/down on the profile icon which is probably one of the best discoveries of my week (its been a slow week)

>It seems to me the mastodon community (or parts of it) leans towards a rather weird understanding of identity and community.

I get that sense too. It feels mostly like vBulletin with Birdsite skin with some cross-forum RSS built in.

> At least the default client seemingly does not.

Mastodon for Android seems to support that (long press your profile icon in the bottom right corner).

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