Mastodon's weaknesses and how to fix them | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon's weaknesses and how to fix them

2ality.com

16 pointsVinnl7 comments

The first time I registered to Mastodon it autocapitalized my user name on the web form. Thus I ended up with a capitalized name. I didn’t like that as all my Social handles are lower case, thus deleted the account and registered again only to be alerted that the name was taken. So basically I couldn’t change it to lowercase on their interface, but when deleted I could not register it again.

And that in a nutshell is my experience with everything Mastodon :)

After years the issue is still open and makes the first impression of a lot of users pretty bad.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/20487

5.1 is the real weakness and a tricky one. Solving this one would move the network forward by light years. All the rest are just a matter of time and platform's maturity.

I'm not so concerned about that. Yes, a server might go down but so can a social network. You can easily redirect to a new account in a different server (there's a builtin feature) and it's easy to export/transfer your data. If you really have an issue here you can host your own server which isn't an option on other social networks.

To me the main hassle was small UX issues like following users from different servers, search etc. It just isn't as smooth.

Once you can roam between servers without being punished for it, you can change UXes at whim.

Anything else from this list is relatively easily solvable by putting some care and effort. This one not only needs a considerate forward-thinking design; it also has to fight against tech debt across many existing implementations. It's the main thing that actually tangibly holds the platform's design back.

Also, a decentralized social network can't really go down. The only reason going down is a potential problem for many fediverse users is because of 5.1. Being able to export your data and perform a Move is better than nothing, but it's still just a half-measure when you can't reconstruct the relations between interactions in any meaningful way and isn't actually much better than, say, exporting your tweets from Twitter.

With Mastodon as it is right now, I can't move my account to a self-hosted instance without either losing data or relying on continued existence of my old instance, and even then the UX of browsing my older content will be subpar in most clients. I'm still locked in.

In "Preferences/Account/Account Settings/Move to a different account" I can redirect to a new account in a different server. That means I can turn my current account to a ghost account and everything will move to that new account.

It isn't perfect but it lets you migrate while still keeping people engaged.

I'm perfectly aware of that. It's insufficient. It's akin of creating a new account and posting "find me there now" on your old one - the only added benefit aside of UX is that you can move most of your old followers automatically. When the old instance goes down, your whole old content goes down too. Even if you import your old content (which is rarely possible unless you're self-hosting), it becomes a fully separate new content that now spams other instances with duplicates and is disjointed from any replies and other interactions that happened on your old content. You could boost all your old posts, but then you're still relying on them being hosted in the old place and UX goes funky (no more "Media" tab, for example, and the usual woes that come with federation get amplified). You could end up with something semi-reasonable by writing your own implementation to host your content, but then you're forced to self-host forever.

All of those problems would disappear if you could separate your identity from the place that hosts your content. That's the one thing Bluesky got right - but since it didn't get many other things right, our biggest hope is still on Mastodon et al. fixing it in the future.

It's a decentralized system that tries to hide its underlying architecture, and the abstraction is very leaky.

The UI makes it look like a centralized system. That fiction fails in many subtle and silent ways that make the experience feel off and very difficult to reason about.

Let's say there's a really insightful comment on a post and I make a comment referencing it. Then I get a bunch of bizarre replies that miss the point so badly that I wonder if they're bots. Or maybe they speak a different language and they're reading everything in Mastodon's awful translation.

But actually it's none of those things, it's really because those users aren't reading the same set of comments that I'm reading. The conversation doesn't make sense if we're not actually reading the same thread.

Why don't we all see the same thread? Because we follow different people, and we're on different servers, and not all comments exist on every server.

It might be an interesting distributed-systems design challenge, but the user interface makes it appear we're all in the same conversation when we're not.

It's nearly impossible for one user to diagnose what another user isn't seeing, or what another user is talking about but I can't see.

The UI attempts to hide this, to make it appear like we're all having the same conversation, leading to these weird and uncanny situations where the abstraction leaks and you don't know it's leaking.

Social media comments are enough of a nightmare already, and now Mastodon has added stochastic threads that are different for every participant in the conversation.

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