Mastodon is great. It's just unfortunate that the number of people is on the low side.
People and interactions between them are just messy. And that's not a thing there can be any tech solutions to.
For me, there are several clear step changes in groups based on size and there closeness of the relationships. A close circle of perhaps up to a dozen or two trustworthy friends is different to that same sized group of less trusted people. As the group size grows, it becomes less possible for the sort if "trusted" status of all group members to exist, and that fundamentally changes things. There's another step change when the group gets big enough that you can't personally know all the members. And another big step change when the group gets big enough that you can't even recognise all the members names (in my head, this is associated with a lot if the postulating about Dunbar's Number, however bad that research really was).
Normal people are getting buried beneath all of this trash and if you actually want to have some conversations you need to either look up by particular tags or comment in trending posts.
This is the entire opposite of my experience on Mastodon. I get buried in trash on Twitter, any semi-popular tweet ends up with hundreds of bots and racial slurs. I see none of that on Mastodon
Really curious how you ended up in a situation like that.
Also no matter if content was filtered or not, three different applications on iOS and Android were crashing after trying to scroll through streams - local and federated. I guess it was because of that trash overload.
It's not like I don't like mastodon, fediverse - on contrary, it's an amazing idea. I had really nice conversations there for a while - till people drop their masks.
I strongly urge you to stick to the latter.
I get nothing like what you describe, but I ensure the local/federated timeline stays out of my feed.
Maybe that's why this discussion is so split between "I read my follows and love it" || "I read the open feeds and hate the stream of trash"
Not sure what can be done when there's such an adversarial environment for open social media - everything you need for a federated environment can be misused by bad actors or neglected by naive well-intentioned ones :/
Or, more cynical, reversed: I am convinced Mastodon will be a horrible platform if it grows to a size of e.g. twitter, reddit, and far, far worse if it grows to sizes of insta, tiktok, facebook etc.
The reason I am convinced the low number of people makes the place overall nice is that its a niche, like HN is a niche. That its not an interesting target for phishers, spammers, scammers or attackers: the ROI is too low. And that the low number of people keeps influencers and other commercial entities, like brands or news-agencies away: not much to make money off.
The thing is Mastodon isn't a platform like twitter, reddit, etc, it's a decentralized network of platforms. A few instances might become popular (like mastodon.social) and become a default for newcomers but there will always be smaller instances doing their own thing.
So "doing their own thing" is very limited. Do "too much of it" and you'll be fediblocked. Too little of your own thing and you're essentially getting what the large instances dictate. Sure, your instance can e.g. block meta instances because it dislikes Facebook. But that doesn't isolate you from meta content completely - or even at all - it depends. If your instance wants that, it'll have to also block all instances that don't block meta. Basically defederating almost entirely.
And this doesn't even consider the numerous malicious practices that one can do, but aren't interesting currently due to the limited reach of this fediverse. Like scooping up expired domains of previous instances and using that to spam. Or like impersonating famous people and scamming users that way. Or like taking over accounts and spamming or scamming that way. Or even taking over entire instances by hacking the server or social engineering access. Etc. etc.
The fediverse has nothing technical that protects it against the real and expensive threats that "common social media platforms" face on a daily basis. Federation doesn't suddenly make any of these attacks more difficult. If anything, it makes it easier, because the instances themselves are ran by volunteers who in many cases will not have security budgets to protect against such attacks. The only thing that the fediverse has going for it, in this regard, is that the blast radius is smaller. The attack easier, the result contained. But it's not unthinkable that malware, fake news, or other malicious content can easily be spread this way.
>And this doesn't even consider the numerous malicious practices that one can do (...)
Your argument here seems to be that because most instances are small, that makes them more prone to security issues. And that's true, but nothing you mention here is unique to the fediverse, and all of those risks are still greater with mainstream platforms even with their bigger security budgets and resources. People hack Facebook and Twitter all the time, and millions of people get their data stolen, and misinformation spreads like wildfire. In this regard being decentralized, smaller and able to defederate from malicious instances are features rather than flaws.
It is definitely a flaw in the fediverse that identity is tied to a url and so there's no way to validate an identity across instances, and it is trivial to impersonate someone by simply using their username elsewhere. I think Nostr got it more correct in this regard, and I don't know what could be done to mitigate this at a technical level.
But even then I think that at least the fediverse is a necessary step in the right direction.
You mean like HN?
Boost will also do it, but it has more side effects.
Another friend tells you a super funny story. You then go and tell other friends this same funny story. (that's a boost).
Different real life things, that are captured by digital tools.
What I have a problem with are quote tweets, which are like talking about someone in front of them, without including them in the conversation.
People shouldn't be posting to get the endorphine rush from clicks or to satisfy metrics. They should post whatever they want, whenever they want. If you like what someone posts, you can follow their account, or better yet the hashtags they use. That should be sufficient.
Not having a like button seems like a good design choice TBH.
No, this is the digital analogue of a non-verbal expression. Basic table stakes - unless you categorize human behavior as "addiction-reinforcing".
In the context of social media most human behavior is addiction-reinforcing, because that is the behavior that those platforms are designed to reinforce. The medium is the message.
https://atproto.com has more of the developer mindshare now
tradeoffs are acceptable to help our social fabric to take a step in a better direction and away from corporate silos and the attention economy
Everyone who’s both email and Twitter already understands all the basic concepts.
User handles are unique in ATProto because of the domain, just like email. Not sure what the "except" part is about. Can you clarify? In ATProto, they are not "bare"
ActivityPub is the same, except they are tied to the server you join. In ATProto, they are decoupled from your data host so you can move your data and server without changing your handle. You can also change your handle without moving anything else, because handle points to a DID behind the scenes
How’s ATProto work for the 99.9% of people who don’t own domains?
For a concrete example, I tagged a Lemmy community in a Mastodon post today. Lemmy is Reddit-like and Mastodon is Twitter-like, but it displays reasonable on Lemmy using the first line of the post as a title and expanding to the attached image when clicked in the default Lemmy UI. I can also post a long-form article on Wordpress (with a plugin) and have it show up in Mastodon even though it has a short character limit by default.
Lexicon schema are not enforced, they are a tool for social coordination, and most implementations are very liberal in what they accept
https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/lexicon-guidance
> isTool: true; isRule: false; meaning: undefined
ActivityPub by contrast lacks such social coordination and many apps are reusing the same schema for very different concepts, leading to its own form of over-complexity
Generally the first point is server selection. That's too complicated for most users
People are capable of selecting phones, phone network providers, e-mail providers, Internet providers, but selecting a server for mastodon is too complicated?
Don't buy it
Not listening to users is when learning stops
You are making bad analogies, instead compare AP to other social media networks and what users expect when signing up
I don't. I make these analogies, because they show that almost everyone is able to deal with the complexity of selecting a service provider.
I acknowledge that it is not their expected sign up flow, though, because they you can only expect what you already know.
But for mastodon, even if it technically "doesn't matter" nobody stops there. You see things written like "The hardest part of getting started on Mastodon is the first step,"[1]
They talk about chosing a server based on region, language, topics of interest, or which ones your friends use. I've even some mention that your server choice can signal your political leanings.
I don't worry about any of those things when I choose an email provider or ISP.
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-pick-a-mastodon-server
The Mastodon community actively pushes back against federating with other networks, discoverability features (having content indexed for search), or sane security mechanisms (like signing your content). This is IMHO what is holding back Mastodon. It could be better but people push back against improving it and therefore it stays a bit niche and meh.
It's basically open source twitter but minus all the loud mouths using that to self promote, spam, troll, attack each other, etc. Twitter was really nice too before the masses showed up.
Bluesky basically adds content signing, discoverability, and a few other things a to the mix. It's similarly free from all the nasty things on Twitter.
It's less federated than it could be (it was designed as a federated protocol but effectively is centralized) because big company reflexes seem to be taking over there. That's an interesting dynamic. But there's enough open source stuff there that a mastodon bridge would be feasible. And IMHO stronger crypto would be good for Mastodon. I don't see the logic of defaulting to publishing content unsigned. How is that a thing in 2025?
Then again it's disappointing to see how many people with fuck you money don't say "fuck you".