Mastodon Exit Interview
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Otherwise, if you want to stay informed, connected, but not addicted, Mastodon seems to work quite well.
Possible solution is to create a list with those accounts, remove them from the default feed and display them separately.
The posts I see on BlueSky make it not addictive for me. Everything there seems unnatural, unorganized and performative. It gets old after a few scrolls
I even don't care about "spamming" by serial posters anymore. I chose to follow them, and unfollow them if they bother me that much.
It's actually extremely antisocial! It's why I left, all the instances were tribes with beefs against the other instances, and that told me something about the design encourages the behavior
calling it antisocial is pretty apt imho
However, I have to admit that I grew used to the fact that it is easy to contact a node in my social graph, without having to go hunt for their email, or maintain my own contact database.
After all, the social network should be about people, at least to me. I don't care about corporate pages on social networks, they might as well only exist at normal websites outside of the walled garden.
I guess thats my point. In my book, social networks are about people. And not being able to easily contact people is pretty much useless.
As for the rest: I don't see the problem in people not seeing things they aren't interested in.
The right way to treat the Fediverse is as a collection of completely separate servers with some interoperability features. In this aspect it's more like old internet forums, than like Twitter. Unfortunately this isn't obvious at all until you've used it for a while, and the Twitter interface does make you assume it's like Twitter. I do not suggest Mastodon to people any more - I suggest Kolektiva if they're into politics or chaos.social if they're a hacker.
Also, the whole Internet could do with getting used to accounts becoming more ephemeral again. It used to be that if you moved house, you had to tell everyone you knew your new address and phone number - unless your new house happened to be served by the same central office. On the Internet, you can also have a different account on every site you regularly visit. Two different forums? Two different accounts. SSO is convenient but SSO doesn't mean using one site for everything, just using one site for authentication. I did prototype a "login with mastodon".
If they think bot accounts, with the sole purpose to repeatedly display information that is available in any modern mobile phone, takes up unnecessary resources then.. Well, they have right to restrict them IMHO.
He has his account on the mastodon.social instance, but since they block the instance where the bot is, he can't see the bot's content.
What's the point of being distributed if others can pick and choose what YOU get to see?
Nobody in the Fediverse can prevent you from posting what you want. But everyone can choose to band together in groups around shared policies and prevent you from imposing what you post on them.
Some users are unaware of which policies they opt into when they pick an instance, and that is an issue (and why moving ought to be made easier).
My experience is that while it makes discovery slightly annoying - a single user instance is the nicest Mastodon experience. Anyone who blocks your instance then is doing so because they're blocking you (don't share that instance with noisy bots). For some it might make sense to have an account on a major instance too, to check in for discovery, and to follow their own single-user instance account to kickstart some visibility (and it's a flaw that it is like this - Mastodon does not better discovery functionality).
Mastodon is by no means flawless, and to grow more it will need to fix a lot of them, but a lot of the purported issues are seen as features by users. E.g. the ability to band together and purposefully isolate but allow limited federation, is a feature.
An extreme example is a pair instances for a marginalized group where one of them federates with the rest of the fediverse, but the "inner" one only federates with the other instance. It's on purpose set up that way to provide a safe space for those who want limited exposure.
People have a right to choose not to associate just as they have a right to choose to associate.
Don't see the absurdity of that? The non-exaggerated version of this was thrown at someone running a sunrise notification bot. His bot posts that the Sun rises tomorrow on Earth. At specific local times. As it tends to.
"Mastodon is weakly federated, you can move to wherever you are better aligned" narrative is mere justification, if not mental traumatic response, against EU national counter-terrorism police special forces and Apple App Store imposing anime and Trump purge(note: AIUI, EU for anime, Apple for Trump, not the other way around, lol), leading to the once-united Fediverse becoming couples of severed virtual continents, all on terminal care.
That narrative just creates peace of mind for the European operator inner circles that it was the right call and it shall shield themselves from police flashbangs thrown at their face to harm them and their family members. But it just don't hold water as something logical.
No, I don't.
Nobody is obliged to carry his content.
Requiring individuals to carry his content would be authoritarian, abusive, and coersive.
As mentioned in the article it's just that if nobody is interested in your posts then they won't propagate.
> Crucially, the posts did not exist even if I visited the profile page of the account: even after weeks of daily posts
This means he did not even follow his own bot account, otherwise the posts would be visible ...
I’ve left Twitter a while ago now, although when I have to, I will read messages via https://xcancel.com/
Since there is no clear winner I’ve set up a mastodon and nostr and bluesky account and I use https://openvibe.social/ to read and cross-post to all platforms, when I feel the need to share anything at all. There are other apps that do the same trick like https://nootti.com/, but I am content with OpenVibe.
Mostly, I’ve found that not being on any “social” media is better for my mental state.
That is patently untrue. What users want to see is the posts of the accounts they follow. That's it.
I see OP expected to see his bots' posts without trying to follow them, I wonder where the miscommunication that could have led to such a misunderstanding stems from. And if there is such a misunderstanding what kind of hubris do you need to have to write things like "XY doesn't work"...
I browse fediverse stuff occasionally, and mess around with single user instances for the technical fun, but I've never really had a mature mastodon account anywhere.
The reason why I occasionally browse mastodon is because the vast majority of content I consume online (alright, often from nerds) also list or have a mastodon profile. Sometimes it's not always up to date. But I see and use the mastodon profile links more reliably than I see and use Twitter ones now.
It clearly works. It's obviously not perfect. But I feel like the author is constantly judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree here. E.g.
> The most immediate problem is that you only have access to posts that are present on your local instance, and posts are only propagated to your local instance if it has expressed interest in them (to the instance where they originate). It’s a chicken-and-egg issue: how do you know whether you’re interested in something if you can’t see it?
Maybe I've misunderstood, but I thought this was the entire sales point and draw of many to mastodon, that it's not just one big messy free-for-all like Twitter. It's partially separated by design, and you get to choose.
But then they go on to speak positively of Bluesky with:
> It offers much of the best of Twitter: with a well-curated set of follows (and a chronological, not algorithmic timeline), I get to hear directly from a lot of true experts commenting in real time on current events.
So Bluesky is good with a curated set of follows, but mastodon is bad because you have to curate who to follow?
IMO, most of the authors problems here are with parts of social networks that are put in place to deal with the products of the worst part of human nature (spam, greed, aggression etc.) I can't help but feel the only sort of social network this author will be happy with is one that doesn't have an humans on it.
100% agree. There's no technical reason to use bsky - people are there mostly for the ... people. It has turned into another echo chamber; but that's probably what everyone wants.
In my view, true decentralized networks (which would be great) won't take off until the Direct Sockets API [1] (or similar) and the File System API [2] are adopted across browsers. Chrome (and Edge et al) has had them for a while now.
Add: Why do I think it won't work?
In my view, federation is a compromise because p2p isn't possible right now. Federation brings all sorts of issues w.r.t. identity and portabilty. Users just want to talk to other people, and p2p is the simplest abstraction for it. Bluesky is as of now a centralized service, no different from Twitter. We're still waiting for the Napster moment.
[1]: https://wicg.github.io/direct-sockets/
[2]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/capabilities/web-apis/file...
This is the live-or-die consideration for a social network. Inside that is the consideration that many people will not use a network that has certain other people on it.
When you say "Account migration does not work" I am forced to ask "compared to what"? There are literally no alternatives. If you have a twitter account with 20k tweets, and you want to leave twitter, "GFY". Ditto if you get banned. A public, instance-independent list of banned and redirected accounts (which survives the death of an instance) could perhaps be a really useful service.
Culturally, mastodon people do seem opposed to bots. There are a lot of people who are hostile to indexing, and hostile to really any automated interactions at all. This causes a huge controversy every few months, when someone tries to build search and gets run out of the community for using a crawler to do it. It is worth mentioning that fedi socials have a pretty high concentration of trans and other marginalised users, who are burned by targeted harassment on other parts of the internet. I think the resistance to bots is part of this.
Quite a few people downloaded their entire Twitter archive and uploaded it to Bluesky. For example: https://bsky.app/profile/shortformernie.bsky.social
I can download my entire repo in one click and move it to another PDS, perhaps one I run, or save it for later when there are more options. Or come up with my own way to transform it.
Bluesky allows you to use your domain as your account identity, so if you want to move, you just change the DNS record.
I’m on Bluesky too, and it’s alright, but the internet has changed, the world has changed, and I have changed. It can’t ever be quite the same experience.
This is the main issue I see with Mastodon. Any instance is administrated by a real person and this person has views of their own. And they attract people like them to the instance, forming a kind of an invisible ruling committee. And if you happen to post anything that goes against their beliefs, preferences, views, you get fucked.
For me this is just ridiculous. A federated social media where every instance can be an authoritarian state. Well, no thanks.
In my opinion what would help in this case is an ability to set up your single account instead of a whole Mastodon instance. I would gladly do this. This way the worst people can do to my account - block me on theirs, and I'm completely fine with it. Currently if you fall into disfavor of the instance administration, you can be restricted and banned in seconds.
Incidentally, I'm working on an app server with ActivityPub support at its core, and I have pondered giving it sufficient compatibility with Mastodon to allow repurposing it as a lightweight instance.
There's GotoSocial[0], Takahē[1], epicyon[2], etc.
When I was thinking of a "better single-user server", I was thinking more in terms of a single binary, or a single container - the Mastodon resource use is less of a problem (unless you run a big instance) than the complexity of it.
I do appreciate the suggestions, though. If anything, looking at how others have handled Mastodon API support will be useful.
GotoSocial is a single binary.
To me, the length of those installation instructions is themselves an indication this is still not what I'm after.
They could do with a pithy Quickstart page for people who already have domains, servers, etc.
[0] My installation is from source and I'd never really seen their installation instructions as they are now.
As for the "not a big deal", I get it. But still, it feels overkilling to have a whole instance that has the same capabilities as one with thousands of users, just for yourself.
I miss the culture of early Internet systems administrators that saw their services as protocols to be integrated. Mastodon admins are too interested in shaping society. Let the messages flow, the users have enough ways to block stuff they don't want.
Too many people started services because they wanted an axe not a network.
I'm imagining a model of network in which, old Android phone as server for power users collect RSS for initial content density problem, then clients do Discord-y stuff on client devices. client also sync public content with other servers it also belongs to for viral element. Content authenticity shall be handled by blockchain-y chain signing and that can also be proxy for content value. NAT and therefore central server requirement can be a problem in fully decentralizing such platform.
mean income/education/skill level of mastodon instance owner is like global top 0.01% no? that's a flaw in itself.
But we likely will see it become easier to run Mastodon-compatible-enough single-user instances with improved discoverability sooner or later.
Content is already signed. The problem is that with Mastodon, the user does not control the private key unless you run your own instance. You can demonstrate that the content originates from a given instance, but not from a given user. That's an issue, but it's fixable.
In my opinion, as long as there would be hubs of information in the network, like Mastodon instance and its "core" networks, there will be constant asteroid impacts. Therefore the system needs to be able to ingest, sign, share, metricize data without relying on broadcasts from fault- and manipulation-prone tight mesh core structures.
I think abuse and/or legal problems should be able to be handled at edge just fine, with such means as phone-sized ML models, user discretion to share or not, voluntary flagging, reporting, and source blocks, as well as tipping to classical police law enforcement, etc. Ordinary people should be good at spotting and reporting illegal activities anyway.
That part about content moderation made me laugh. It's like that cycle of reinventing moderation joke.
I suppose the fact that people actually still use it.
Crucially, the posts did not exist even if I visited the profile page of the account: even after weeks of daily posts, the profile page displayed by mastodon.social claimed the account had never posted, and the posts would only begin appearing after someone on mastodon.social began following the account.
Same when opening threads.
You keep saying it won't work, but it does work, but it won't work, but it does work. Make up your mind.
What I take away from this is that you had a bad experience and you're now giving up on the only large scale social media platform powered by the people, for the people, and instead going to bsky which keeps promising federation but in fact requires way too many resources for regular people to federate with.
That's the issue, resources. Who are we expecting to host these nodes? The fedi had a low entrance threshold. But you can't federate every single message, that drastically increases the entrance threshold.
Fediverse is in fact just a bunch of individual message boards with some federation between them. You can find an instance that becomes your home, your family, but you can still follow people on other nodes, you can still respond to people on other nodes.
And Mastodon, by its inclusion in the fediverse, is part of that fediverse social network.
Yes, it isn't a monolith, but when has that become a requirement for something to be called a network?
Common to whom?
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/social-n...
> a website or computer program that allows people to communicate and share information on the internet using a computer or mobile phone
From Wiktionary:
> A network of personal or business contacts, especially as facilitated by social networking on the Internet.
In which sense do either of those fail to describe Mastodon?
(I also don't like how the original reply avoids a detailed discussion by merely pointing out the inconsistency instead, but that's another story.)
Federation provably works. All of my exchanges involve federation because there are no other users on my instance. As such his claims are exaggerations based on his subjective notions of how federation ought to work.
While I don't use Mastodon for a lot of reasons, I had operated an IRC network for a long time and experienced its eventual demise as well. IRC started out as a worldwide federated network until it isn't, and many IRC networks only worked because of its constituent users---my network never reached that critical mass in comparison. I would have no reason to worry about that if IRC did have the working federation to this day! In the current fediverse choosing the correct nodes (or to federate, if you have your own personal node) is mandatory, indirectly showing that its federation is not enough, just like IRC.
You're response comes across as an incredibly bad faith reading of what I wrote.
Federation does not give you a right to expect every instance to want to talk to you. This is the typical left- vs. right-libertarian thinking, where the right-libertarians tend to get all angry and upset when left-libertarians point out that maximising freedom includes maximising our freedom to choose who to associate with and set rules for that association.
It's still federation if someone blocks your instance.
I was active in vbulletin/phpbb/punbb boards for years, and I always wished I could participate in all of them with one user account. That's exactly what I can do now.
I think the marketing of Mastodon is what skews the image of the fediverse. We need to stop marketing as a Twitter, or a Bluesky, and more like individual communities that are able to communicate with each other.
Set more realistic expectations.
The USP is still that it's easy for anyone to run a node, it's still for the people, not for the millionaires with tons of resources.
AP is effectively centralized. The way art all but vanished from my timelines when mastodon.art's admin decided the server I was on was full of and run by evil racists[1] really hammered that point home. Everyone has to test for Mastodon's quirks to interoperate.
[0] https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t
[1] Spoiler: it's not
Established social media is not flawed for the sake of it. No matter how much you hate them, nobody at Facebook is saying "let's make the world a miserable place just for the sake of it". They do for revenue and profit - all the noxiousness of traditional social media can be traced back to its advertising-based business models; including the lack of interoperability.
No amount of "federation" or technobabble or artificial complexity is going to solve this fundamental problem - someone needs to get paid to keep the lights on, the servers humming, and the bad guys out. The current approach of the fediverse is to stick their head in the sand and pretend there is no problems. In reality of course there are problems - instances go down, the federation model means data is duplicated lots of times and makes hosting even costlier, and spam/bad actor prevention is non-existent (the only reason the whole thing isn't full of spam is because it's too irrelevant to actually bother spamming).
If you actually think about addressing the root cause that makes existing social media noxious and opt for a different funding model (paid accounts, etc), then you'll realize none of that "federation" complexity is actually needed because suddenly you no longer have an incentive to do a lot of the obnoxious things that federation wants to solve. You can run a conventional centralized platform as a non-profit, and still let people attach their own domains, use alternative clients, etc. As a bonus, not having to duplicate the data many times means your costs will be lower than a "fediverse" equivalent and you can actually scale. And you could even pay a marketing intern for him to tell you that calling your consumer-facing product "Mastodon" is a recipe for failure (but hopefully if you've made it that far you'd already have the common sense to know this).
Yeah, it's not solved by federation, but by running on donations and volunteer work. 9 years uptime, looks good so far. Not everything needs to be profitable.
Tells you why the majority of those who decided to leave Twitter ignored Mastodon and chose Bluesky (or even Threads) instead because of all the issues the author of the article listed beyond basic usability that Mastodon still struggles with.
Moxie was right.