Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t

erinkissane.com

57 pointstagawa18 comments

Mastodon users praise it for somehow being “better” than other social media yet the whole “pick your subculture’s instance” thing really closes you into an echo chamber way easier. At that point one might as well just use Reddit, from a non-tech user standpoint it’s the same with the subreddits except it’s way easier to actually find your interests/people on there.

My understanding is you can follow us in other instances...?

I picked a big public instance and I think I never even got a follow from someone on that instance, despite having 600 followers. All interaction is with people from other instances. Of course you can join a tiny instance with a specific topic and check out people's profiles, but does it close you in? Not more than joining a facebook group does.

I think ActivityPub is future but we'll see the end of Mastodon as a "Gen 1" APub at some point. IMO it needs account and backend sharing over servers, as well as a timeline system not based on individual following.

>Mastodon users praise it for somehow being “better” than other social media yet the whole “pick your subculture’s instance” thing really closes you into an echo chamber way easier.

That's exactly what makes it better. People keep saying "echo chamber" as though having rules and standards is a universal negative but their definition of an echo chamber is just any platform that doesn't want to deal with their bullshit. Fine, it's an echo chamber. Go make your own with blackjack and hookers if you don't like it.

Mastodon is federated though. I follow and am followed by tons of folks from other instances, so it doesn't feel like I'm locked in.

In support of 3, 5, and 7 being the real drivers of the category listed separately just under them:

This is a map of Mastodon instances.

https://www.comeetie.fr/galerie/mapstodon/

I think it gives a good sense of proximity.

From the place in this clustering where I spend my time (in the jorts.horse space, if that gets enough across), it is almost unimaginable that someone could get an experience reminiscent of LinkedIn... but that's just one spot on the map, right?

I think my conclusions from this kind of thing are pretty different from Erin's in ways that could be anticipated from the framing in her earlier post: https://erinkissane.com/blue-skies-over-mastodon IMO that piece is worth reading first for context.

You can't even compare bluesky and fedi at this point. Last I checked bluesky isn't even federated, and will it ever be? Considering the financial hit of opening up your platform like that. I mean in practice it means anyone can build their own bluesky, with blackjack and hookers.

I really hope activitypub doesn't die out because people are choosing old centralized solutions again, have they learned nothing?

AP needs some help from government and news agencies. For example, you should be able to subscribe to news@nyt.com or alerts@usgs.gov. Any site can implement ActivityPub. It's not a twitter-clone until someone makes a twitter clone that is AP federated. So far it's just a fancy alternative to RSS.

> I really hope activitypub doesn't die out because people are choosing old centralized solutions again, have they learned nothing?

The same happened back when XMPP/Jabber was the big thing, even Facebook and Google supported federation

The funny part is that XMPP can essentially do what AP can with https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html

Pretty sure I remember the AP spec author saying the whole thing works very much like XMPP. But they couldn't have built on top of XMPP for some unspecified reason.

I think the biggest problem is the Mastodon devs (and community's) complete aversion to doing anything other than blaming the user for any flaws.

Onboarding didn't make sense? Well that's just because you're stupid, you have email don't you?

Difficulty discovering people to follow? Well that's just because you're using it wrong and if you were good at it you'd already know who to follow.

The "Mastodon devs" is still basically just Eugen, or just him making decisions anyway. And he's specifically talked about the need to improve onboarding. He certainly doesn't consider it a non-issue.

> Difficulty discovering people to follow? Well that's just because you're using it wrong and if you were good at it you'd already know who to follow.

Well - I'm not blaming the user, but that's how it's on any federated service. People don't seem to have the same complaints about email or matrix. While it's possible to create a global index of all Mastodon users, I personally feel that it is best enjoyed without it.

I have a very satisfying personal feed on Mastodon. There are personal acquaintances whose address I received directly from them - like how email addresses are exchanged traditionally. Some addresses were collected from webpages I'm interested in. All the rest are people whose comments were boosted by others and caught my eye.

All the above, together with whatever algorithm Mastodon uses seem to give me a much more interesting and less addictive experience than the traditional social media. Mastodon doesn't hand hold you in creating a feed. It does need a bit of effort. However, the result is high quality.

> Well - I'm not blaming the user, but that's how it's on any federated service.

There it is! It’s absolutely fixable, and pretending it’s some defect inherent to federation is just lazy. If you want to see federated content discovery done right, I’d say the best right now is Lemmy — it’s trivial to see all posts across all instances, sorted by votes, or even other algorithms.

This article is fantastic, but I have a hard time understanding some of the complaints around community norms. My experience with Twitter-like services is that nobody badgers me — or indeed even notices that I exist — until I start getting followers. There’s no overarching community that I can detect, but instead many overlapping ones. So why the complaints about content policing and what-not? Doesn’t that entirely depend on who’s following you?

If someone told me to wrap my post in a CW, I’d just ignore them if it was an unreasonable request. What do I care what some rando on the public internet thinks?

I guess I take some issue with the idea that there’s any coherent Twitter culture or Mastodon culture past a certain size.

The funny thing is that I found myself generally agreeing with every point in the post, but seeing them as positives where the survey participants saw them as negatives.

> got yelled at, felt bad

> Constantly being told I was somewhat dim because I didn’t understand how to do things or what the unwritten rules were.

Well, yeah, welcome to any social group. Personally, I like that people second-guess themselves a bit, and self-limit what they post, to some extent at least. At the other extreme of the spectrum, we would get Eternal September.

> couldn’t find people or interests, people didn’t stay

> For me, it was that Mastodon seemed to actively discourage discoverability. One of the things I loved most about Twitter was the way it could throw things in front of me that I never would have even thought to go look for on my own.

I appreciate anyone making the effort to pierce their own bubble. However,

- I simply don't use Mastodon for that.

- I didn't like Twitter's suggestions

- And btw, Twitter's algorithms never had a reputation of piercing anyone's bubble.

> too confusing, too much work, too intimidating

> I’m tech savvy and have found mastodon simply opaque. [...]

I actually don't totally hate just a little bit of a technical barrier to entry. Quite frankly, that barrier is very very low.

> Discoverability/self promo is limited & typing out 6 hashtags is annoying. # being in the actual posts clutter things (unlike cohost/insta).

"Self promo is limited" sounds like a huge bonus to me!

> too serious, too boring, anti-fun

> ultimately, I just bounced off of the culture, because it wasn’t banter-y and fun. It feels too much like eating your vegetables.

I only follow people on Mastodon for the technical stuff, so I don't really need fun. But then some of those technical people I follow turned out to be lots of fun.

The average Mastodon experience is, I think, much more dependent on who you follow (and maybe your instance) than the average Twitter experience. As a result, different people will get very different things out of it. Of course, all my remarks above are very much only due to my own preference. But I do love my little corner of Mastodon, and this article inadvertently hits on all the reasons why I do.

Most of the problems seem to stem from unfamiliarity with fediverse. Except this:

> Personally, I like that people second-guess themselves a bit, and self-limit what they post, to some extent at least.

The given examples include badgering people to put content warning on discussions about anti-trans legislation or pictures of reptiles. That feels more like thought-policing. If people are so sensitive, they probably shouldn't be on the internet, much less the social media. This though, seems like them saying "Nobody wants to hear what you have to say. Go away!". It doesn't just feel insensitive - it feels like bullying of new users.

I have been on the Fediverse for a while now. I have had nothing but respectful discourse from others even when they disagree with me. However, if anybody bullied me like this, I would rather just call them out for it than put a CW on my content.

> At the other extreme of the spectrum, we would get Eternal September.

I hear you when you say Eternal September would be the extreme. But Eternal September is really only applicable to shared communication spaces like forums, Reddit or Lemmy. Mastodon is more of a personal space akin to personal blogs, Twitter or Facebook. The quality of your Mastodon feed depends on who you follow and not on everyone around. The quality of posts should be allowed to vary with each individual - except in extreme cases. Let people be themselves in their own spaces.

The recent influx of users to Mastodon has actually enriched my feed. There is always interesting content and new users to follow. I personally am happy with all the new users.

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