Whatever your fears for Twitter future are, Mastodon is already that
twitter.com
twitter.com
Does a confederation of instances have it's issues? Sure. But we've already solved a lot of that with email for a long time anyway. I view mastodon/activityPub as almost an analog of email in the "social media" space. With time and use, it has every opportunity to become the mainstream used service for these types of needs imo. It 'solves' alot of problems that centralized social media systems bring, with only some of the detriments (imo).
a) participating in already existing, well-defined communities. Mastodon works for that, but so does Discord, Gemini, Gopher, tilda communities, IRC servers, and so on. Mastodon's peculiarities like tiny scale instances, inter-instance admin wars, non-existent search are perfectly fine for this use case. That's what it is made for, effectively.
b) connecting with friends and following their interests. This is just miserable with Mastodon: you might be on different instances that mute/ban each other, you might not find each other if you don't know their instances, if instances are interest-specific you have to follow on a number of instances, if their instance admin gets fed up with it and shuts it down you need to reconnect somehow, etc. Mastodon is not an identity-first design, it's community-first, and it's a problem for this use case.
c) following celebrities or creators famous in the world of atoms. Celebrities would want massive following, which requires massive scale, which is hard to achieve for something effectively run by volunteers. If it's smaller scale celebrities, they'd also want discoverability, which is hampered by the lack of search, federation bans, etc.
Mastodon is widely presented as a "twitter backup/alternative". It's just misleading unless the person moving to it only wants (a). There is nothing wrong with wanting (a)! However, it means that Mastodon has very little similarity to Twitter if people want (b) or (c).
> you might be on different instances that mute/ban each other,
only an issue if it's actually bans (mutes dont affect following), and if you don't explicitly pick a very ideological instance (either towards banning a lot or towards tolerating behavior that gets you banned a lot) that's not really a problem. I don't believe I've ever encountered a "I want to follow this person but can't", even when e.g. looking through a few hundred accounts I got from my twitter followings.
> you might not find each other if you don't know their instances,
To follow people you need to know their username, yes (which happens to include the instance). Is there anything where that isn't the case? I certainly wouldn't reliably find my friends on Twitter either without knowing that.
> if instances are interest-specific you have to follow on a number of instances,
Very few instances are that strictly interest-specific that they force people to take other interests elsewhere. And if someone does run multiple accounts and wants people to follow multiple, they link them so its just a few extra clicks once, hardly a big hurdle in the few cases where it does happen.
> if their instance admin gets fed up with it and shuts it down you need to reconnect somehow
True if the instance just disappears without warning, otherwise the account move feature handles this transparently.
b) If their your friend, you know their user@domain, because they tell you, same as they would their email address. Unless you're on an Antifa instance and your friend is on a Nazi instance, it is highly unlikely they will be disconnected from each other. If you join one of the instances on joinmastodon.org they have agreed to give 3 months notice for any shutdown. You can move to a different instance at any time, export your follow list and redirect to the new instance.
c) They're already joining and there's a list on fedified.com . Of your use cases, this is IMO the least important. Most of the celebrities will join Bluesky and that's fine. But not only does Mastodon allow you to verify using your personal website, fedified gives a list of important verified accounts, and a number of organization specific Mastodon instances have started up for people in those organizations.
Mastodon is not Twitter, it isn't supposed to be. But if the point is to have social media with interesting conversations with friends and people you'd like to discover, it does that. And it can't be destroyed by a single billionaire. If the point is an algorithm that makes you sad and sells you things, and brands that want to grow followings to sell things, either hope Twitter recovers or Bluesky works.
They're both fine for what they are...but one doesn't replace the other.
I also use it for open source intelligence following (in English) for the Ukraine war and following space news people. Most of them are not on Mastodon (in both cases) are not on twitter.
Also this is regional and dedicated to English. In Japan the alternative being pushed by a lot of Japanese twitter users is Instagram. I've not seen one Japanese post talk about Mastodon. I don't think people really realize how popular Twitter is in Japan. It's basically the de-facto most popular social media service there.
Growth has already been extreme in the last days: https://datasci.social/@estebanmoro/109370591683609825
I don't like the comparison to email. Email providers don't normally read or moderate your content, because it's not publicly hosted by them. The fediverse is more like a bunch of forums where the admins have decided to connect their users.
I hope there will be even more diversity in the rules and features between instances. When instances disagree about each other's rules or (lack of) moderation, they can reduce visibility or completely block each other. Some instances have already silenced the flagship instances, because they honestly look like a startled flock of birds in a too small room.
That’s not people’s fault to make the comparison. Mastodon and the larger community does little to disambiguate this and make it clear.
(I say this as someone that’s used both Twitter and mastodon for years. They’re just different, period.)
(There is a lot of discussion on paid instances on mastodon. There is also e.g https://masto.host/ for a managed solution.)
Similarly IRC was run for the longest time by federated servers from peoples basements. It only really started to diminish at all with the advent of Slack.
* Different instances - yes some are problematic. But that's the beauty. You can move instances easily and everything redirects.
* Instance run by random dude - be that dude. One of my communities is starting its own server. Pretty cool. Also relatively simple to do so the "support" aspect doesn't need much.
Not an OSS fanatic. I'm still keeping my twitter but Mastodon is fine too and if Twitter is gone tomorrow, it's a decent alternative.
* There is intentionally no global search. Mastodon is about conversation among people, not about searching out every single person in the entire fediverse who mentions your name or a topic you want to argue about so you can argue with them.
* Mastodon instances can intentionally choose to not federate with other instances. This is why, even though people regularly bring up that there are servers full of Nazis on Mastodon, you never see them. Because everyone blocked their instances. Everyone blocks The Gab immediately for example. If someone on an instance is harassing people, the first step is to report them to their instance admin. If they don't take any action, the next step is to defederate from that instance because they don't have the level of moderation safety your instance expects. Defederating is what keeps out harassment and trolls, because the instances that don't moderate them get iced out of the Fediverse. But it is not, as described, a situation where one instance "Doesn't Like" another. Harassment ~= "Doesn't Like." There might be a few who defederate with that little reason, but not the vast majority.
* Sure, the small instances are an old server in someone's basement. There are also massive instances with many servers and redundancies. You can also get a managed Mastodon instance. You could also run an instance for just you on a Raspberry Pi. Your choice whether you put it in the basement or your living room.
* I'm surprised he didn't also mention a lack of quote tweets, but that's also intentional.[1]
All these complaints come down to: join an instance that runs how you want it. Join one with text search or not. Join one with strong or no moderation (but with no moderation, expect it is isolated from many other instances). Join a small instance in someone's basement or a big one with a huge patreon. Or just put up your own, in your own basement, at a host, or managed.
Or just don't join mastodon. Don't tell people to quit having fun because you choose not to understand it.
1. https://scott.mn/2022/10/29/twitter_features_mastodon_is_bet...
I mean, that's pretty much Twitter's raison detre, isn't it?
And it's not just about "nazis" many instances do block instances that allow porn or simply opinions they don't like. For example the largest instance lists plenty of blocked instances just under "inappropriate content" (they list "hate speech" separately, which I assume nazis would fall under)
The only way to get access to the entire fediverse right now is to host your own instance, that doesn't seem desirable.
Maybe I don't understand it. Or maybe that's the idea of federation.
So, the solution is then to have your instance join the larger federation (for convenience), and then sign up as just an account on all other blocked ones. I guess.