Mastodon Is the Good One
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> Here is how you make a Mastodon account: You go to this website. [...]
For now. If my memory is correct, Diaspora was also like that; at first everyone went to the same instance. Then they closed registrations, and every post that was saying something similar was suddenly linking to an instance that no longer accepted new accounts.
And now users will need to do the exact thing that you (presumably) wanted to avoid: choosing an instance from a list.
> Not difficult to use
The first thing that comes to mind is if you visit a different Mastodon instance and want to "Like" a post. Don't you have to go back to your own instance and find this post on your instance before you can "Like" it?
Same with login credentials. I can see someone not techy enough accidentally leaking their account credentials by trying to login to a different Mastodon instance that looks exactly the same as their usual instance.
> Anyways, I am using Threads, and I will continue to use Threads, because I am a pragmatic person who wants to connect with readers wherever they are because my livelihood and my reporting relies on it.
Eh, this is probably also the reason why many people don't even think of moving out of their current centralized social network site.
At this point the Mastodon.social people also run Mastodon.online and the last time Mastodon.social closed registrations it redirected people to Mastodon.online as the biggest headline redirect, with the choose from a list as the second option.
So far, whatever "load balancing scheme" that Mastodon gGmBH is running they haven't closed registrations on both Mastodon.social and Mastodon.online at the same time.
That said, personally, I would never suggest to someone that Mastodon.social or Mastodon.online should be their first instance as I think the two huge instances give a poor first impression of what the "Fediverse" can be, but that's as much as that I like the "small neighborhood" feel of many other types of instances and that showcases Mastodon's strengths better than Mastodon.social/Mastodon.online look enough like Xitter/Threads/BlueSky firehoses that people feel comfortably familiar (but not enough like them that people feel some friction/dissonance). But it probably is fine advice for this particular blog post.
> The first thing that comes to mind is if you visit a different Mastodon instance and want to "Like" a post. Don't you have to go back to your own instance and find this post on your instance before you can "Like" it?
First up, why are you browsing a different instance directly and not just following it from your home instance or home client/app at least? (Most of the reasons I'd think to do at this point that are cases when the instances don't federate, in which case you can't send that "Like" anyway.) Sure, people post links in other places like websites and Discord, but "I saw this in passing somewhere and thought to Like it" rarely feels like a need I have. It's not like the old Twitter where likes fed algorithms and you might be trying to game your algorithm views, or the badder days of Twitter where Likes became soft-retweets that random followers would see. Mastodon likes are truly disconnected "kudos" (which is also something great about them), and just liking something you see flit by outside of the feeds of your home instance I think is much less of a need overall. (Boosts maybe are a bit more worth it, but even then, Mastodon doesn't have the same sort of "retweet culture" that other social networks have. I know a lot of Mastodon users with boosts entirely turned off from their feeds and they are happy about that.)
Second, there is a "federated like flow" and the main Mastodon client can actually help you login to your home instance and like the post you were looking at. It is certainly more complicated than the usual "Login to Like" because it needs in the pop up window to open the login prompt of your home instance in a relatively standard OAuth-like flow, but it works well some of the time. (It does open up more ways for credential stealing from bad/evil instances, sure.)
Third, finding posts on your own instance is mostly simple enough because you just copy and paste the webpage address (URL) into your instance and that works every time (so long as the remote instance isn't blocked) whether your instance already saw that post sometime earlier or it needs to download its own copy at that search request. Discovering that is all you need to do can be complicated for non-technical users, but it is a skill that so far I've found easy enough to teach to friends that I have that needed to learn that.
From my very limited knowledge in software engineering, I guess this is the killer feature that separates a low-cost initiative, that mostly involves keeping the server patched and running, from a highly expensive operation, that would require more expensive hardware, advanced knowledge in hosting infrastructures and experience in software engineering in order to handle all the complexity that will derive from the search capability.
For this reason only I can't use Mastodon at the moment.
Ghost town/just reposts of other platforms.
Just face it, the social landscape is fragmented into a bunch of platforms now of varying sizes. and mastodon is just silo'd niche servers with limited network-effect/discoverability. Might as well be just a series of forums ppl happen to be posting on. The option of more open interoperability between activitypub integrations is nice and seems like a forgotten dream from the early days, but will see how far that goes with wordpress etc.
In my experience, it is exactly that because I'm subscribed to 3 different r/Technology replacements, each one on their own domain, and the duplicated posts becomes my problem. Each one with disjoint discussions. I am very cognizant my complaint is about the Lemmy/Kbin/link-aggregator situation but Mastodon shares the discovery problem, as well as the replies problem, if a user happens to have multiple accounts with different followers
Threads may actually be one of the better(sic) parts of this problem since they have claimed to have ActivityPub support, but BlueSky is off doing its own thing with its own protocol, and thus even more siloed than something from Meta ... and whew that's saying something
I'm more hopeful/wishful that Nostr [0] will take over.
Just about no one wants to be the target of great drama or huge gossip so there are definitely cultural mores and norms that collectively form to skip some of the more common cycles and some people just "obey them" without question. It's hard to call that "unrepresentative" of the general population when by definition organically-grown cultural norms reflect a cultures values.
Sure, many of those norms are standardized and stabilized in "Code of Conduct" documents that individual instances post and mandate in their instance's internal moderation and that obviously then gets reflected in their external moderation as well, but that's still a distributed "vote with your feet" culture. The population on an instance with a strict Code of Conduct believes at least implicitly in that Code of Conduct or leaves. They've agreed to the Code of Conduct. It doesn't matter if there are only a "minority" of Codes of Conduct and those documents are mostly chosen by "fiat" by instance admins, if users don't believe in their instances' chosen Codes of Conduct they are free to leave to other instances.
Just the idea of a protocol that can be interacted with over different clients and different instances is hard to grasp.
IMO, Mastodon has to find ways to be more accessible in the onboarding process without compromising on the decentralization feature.
But it's not easy to do that without text?
Personally I've moved to Cohost. Not simping for them, but at least I can comprehend the business model and operation of the platform.
I wish at least one of their team was more focused into improving their ActivityPub code and try to act like a good community member instead of the preserving the status quo, which is: being a microblogging platform before being a fediverse platform.