This behavior is pathetic. As long as Meta is open to federation to other instances, this can only be a good thing for the entire ecosystem.
Nobody outside of the HN crowd gives half a fluff about distributed social. They'll use the one that lets them interact with people they know. If that means they can talk cross-instance, sweet, they will. If they can't, Mastodon and ActivityPub in general continues to be a pain that the majority wont bother with.
If that's Mastodon's goal, fair enough. I think it's a bad goal.
But indeed, if the goal is to self sabotage and remain an irrelevant corner of misfits, all good.
Yes instances occasionally have issues... But I've experienced less outages than on twitter.
Yes there are unsavory types on some servers, but in my experience most are pretty good at defed-ing from them if needed, and you can block/mute individuals.
First, the technical/usability part...
Picking an instance is a major hurdle. There's no usable feed from the get-go. Following people, especially from other instances, is not intuitive. There's no functional search, no quotes.
Mods are volunteers and can wipe you out at a whim, or just decide to quit the instance. They'll also regularly defederate with other instances, which means they break your followers and whom you follow. There's a perpetual worry of losing everything. In any case, media attached to your content is regularly wiped out, to save costs.
You'll have a feed and see like/boost/whichever icons showing zero. Then you open the individual post and it has non-zero values. Which still is wrong. The original post might have 100 likes but your version shows 15. Not only will it lag, it may never sync as this entirely depends on users on your instance following particular users on other instances.
Worse, the same is true for replies. You will not see most other users replies as those replies are only federated if that user is followed by anyone from your instance. Hence you'll get an original thread with tons of similar replies because users are not seeing the other replies.
I could go on, but almost nothing about it works correctly in the way conventional social media does. It is sorely lacking in basic features and features that are there work poorly.
Second, the cultural part...
Mastodon is basically a community of leftist tech folks, lgbtq, and general misfits. Nothing wrong with that, everybody deserves their place. The problem is that they developed a culture of anti-everything and extreme safetysm.
The bar for hate speech is so low as to exclude most people. They're against any type of commercialization, institutes, influencers. They're against any type of growth or improvement and consider the broken parts of Mastodon features, not shortcomings.
I don't mean to escalate this into a culture war discussion, I'm saying that this attitude is what sabotages Mastodon as a whole from improving and growing, and possibly becoming a much larger and more serious alternative network.
The culture is so cynical and counter productive that even those in the ideological bubble can't take it anymore, this constant in-fighting.
None of this means the entire Mastodon experience is useless. I have used it and it somewhat works. But the more you understand about how it works, the more you realize it can't possibly be a replacement for conventional networks.
It's worth noting that the only time I've payed any attention to twitter is in the last several months, so it's weighted to be worse than it was prior to recent happenings.
The server where I have an account has had downtime twice in the past 200 something days, and had search go down once in that time frame. Occasionally I'll see an update from another server saying "<search|image hosting|replies> are temporarily down", but life goes on fine and they rejoin when they can.
That’s a pretty doubtful condition, especially if Threads becomes too successful for the Fediverse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
> Fediverse users are already planning to boycott any instance
Though if this is true, yeah, I dislike that too. It should be individual admins’ choices.
I wager most Fediverse users aren't worried about this (at least speaking for myself). The status quo is 2 or 3 big private companies and a few thousand federated alternatives. If Meta betrays the community, things will go back to square one and core functionality of their app will start to falter. They need the community more than the community needs them.
I'm not worried about it really because I think the ethic of fediverse as such that they will be quickly de-federated. But it won't be fun along the way.
Defederated or not, Meta will have pretty much zero bearing on the instances outside their bubble.
You have to be kidding me. The entire fediverse is little over 1M MAU, almost all of them not monetizable. So...tiny and useless. Threads can launch whilst being fully defederated and instantly become the fediverse.
The ActivityPub ecosystem stands to lose nothing either way. Meta is walking a fine line with the remainder of the community that trusts them, but stands to integrate into a pretty nice system if they pull things off.
1. Meta conditionally federates with Mastodon instances that sign the deal (allow ads to be pushed, data to be collected, etc)
2. Small/vocal instances reject the deal and defederate.
3. Some large instances do take the deal.
4. Small/vocal instances defederate from the large ones.
5. Large Mastodon instances become pointless as they're isolated from the rest of Mastodon and have no real value over simply using Threads.
6. Large Mastodon instances implode, and the Mastodon fediverse becomes even smaller than it already is.
Believe it or not, most Mastodon / Fediverse admins & users aren't interested in taking over the world and having a huge reach. They just want a nice community.