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Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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His grand vision remains to leave Mastodon users in control of the social network, making their own decisions about what content is allowed or what appears in their timelines.

I don't use Mastadon cause I don't care for micro-blogging, but nevertheless, I like this.

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[–] 21 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Is this actually true? The UIs don't seem very different to me. What is it about mastodon's design that's bad?

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Just the UX rather than the UI. It’s also missing some features like quote tweets. But it can be confusing to onboard either your own instance and know that your discoverable or to join an instance and know how discoverable you are.

    Like I am a career man in IT, servers, and networking. I have no idea if I were to run my own instance, who exactly on the network would be able to see my public posts

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I think the lack of quote tweets is a feature and not a bug. They facilitate a lot of antisocial behavior on other microblogging sites as I recall.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I think Mastodon changed their mind about it due to user feedback, and "Quote Posts" is on the current Mastodon roadmap. Not sure when it will be added - maybe sometime in 2025?

    https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Oh dang. I'm sure users wanted it, but it's too effective as a mobbing tool. I don't think it'll help the protocol.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    If you block somebody that quote posts you on Bluesky, their quote post no longer has your post in it or anything pointing to you. You also can straight up delete people's replies to your posts there. Hopefully Masto's iteration on QRTs works similarly, though people always have the option to "screenshot dunk" instead.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Anyone who is on a server that houses any other user that follows you. Not that hard to find out..

    But also I don't really see how that matters in practice for most pleb users, since 95% or them will join a large server, which means the practical answer is "nearly everyone on the fediverse, if they want to".

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    That part I understand, but how can I get those first followers? And if I am just going to join the flagship instance, why wouldn’t I just join bluesky since it has more users.

    Just trying to give a reason why people might shun mastodon for blue sky, this isn’t supposed to be a real argument against Mastodon. I’m on it and love it

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Follow people and hashtags and interact with them and you'll get followers. I barely post, just a few replies a day, and I have over 800 followers. I have a pinned post on my account to that effect.

    I would join mastodon over bluesky because bluesky seems to be on the same mesh it to fixation trajectory as any other VC backed social network. But yeah, I get that most people won't see that for another couple of years... Oh well. At least people are bailing twitter. And when bluesky goes to shit mastodon will still be there, and the rationale should be a lot clearer.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Follow people and hashtags and interact with them and you'll get followers.

    That sounds like a convoluted method of self promotion, almost like SEO fake engagement, just to be discoverable. And if everyone on the network had to do this to be discoverable, how can I trust the discovery methods to find people worth following?

    And if the cross instance discoverability has these kinds of hurdles, then the promise of federation isn't going to pan out.

    At least with Lemmy the nature of the platforms, users following a smaller universe of potential communities, makes each community much more easily discoverable for people who don't necessarily want to be active posters. Mastodon's user-focused follow is much more limited in seamless federation.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You don't have to promote yourself or be fake at all. If you reply to people and they like things you say, they or others who read it may follow you. Often if you follow someone they'll follow you back--but that most likely depends on you having put some info about yourself in your profile so they can get an idea of who they would be following, and even more likely if you've interacted with them before.

    Since there's no algorithm, hashtags are big on Mastodon. By subscribing to some you'll find people to follow and interact with. Also, a common way for people to find and follow you is to write an introduction post and pin it--include the 'introduction' hashtag plus hashtags of your interests. That way when people search for hashtags they're interested in, they'll find your intro post and may follow you. And whenever you post about something you want to have more reach, put a relevant hashtag or two at the end of it.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    So if you set up on small server A, and want to be discoverable by users on server B, C, D, and E, you have to do this for many different users and hope that they follow you back just so that those servers' users can find you.

    And it basically defeats the main use case for where I actually understand microblogging, which is one-way announcements by semi-automated accounts that are widely followed that do not actually follow anyone else back.

    It just sounds like a bad arrangement for discoverability and search.

    hashtags are big on Mastodon

    But I can't view the posts of any users by hashtag if those users aren't already being followed by someone from my server, right? That means I'd never want to join a small server if I'm just a lurker who doesn't really want to actively interact with others, because my own feed would be limited.

    there's no algorithm

    Sounds like an algorithm that's just more complicated and has unintuitive human inputs in it.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I think you're making a much bigger deal of the federation issue than it actually matters in practice.

    Yes, some users who run their own server with very few other users do face this issue, but it can usually be dealt with without much effort. If they go and follow 200 users on 20 different instances, then they'll most likely get followed back by someone on 90% of those instances. It's not that much effort. I now and then you see one of these users making a "please boost and follow for federation" post to get them kick started.

    But also, that situation is for techy nerds anyway. Normy users are not going to be setting up their own instance, 99% of them will be joining a populous instance, and so will have good federation with most of the network immediately.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    If they go and follow 200 users on 20 different instances, then they'll most likely get followed back by someone on 90% of those instances. It's not that much effort.

    I don't know, this sounds like an unnatural way to interact with a service. Following 4000 accounts and trying to spread it out evenly between servers sounds like a terrible way to curate one's own feed and consume content on a service like this. I rarely follow more than 100 on any given service, and think it's weird when people follow more than 500.

    Following back seems like a pretty foreign concept to me on this type of service, and seems to me to be inconsistent with how people actually use Twitter or Bluesky. To me, these hiccups in user experience as either a lurker (can't find anyone in-band who another person on your instance doesn't already follow) or publisher (can't be found easily from anyone off of your server unless you actively go try to spam follows in the hopes that some will follow back) would be a dealbreaker for anything less than the biggest server.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    An app I use for Mastodon (Called Mona) allows quote toots.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Thats a good example of the UX issues, when only 1 specific app supports a feature.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

    That is called freedom of choice, apparently people are used to totalitarian system where everything should look the same and perfect for masses.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Bluesky literally allows people to finetune controls on things like allowing quote posts and replies. Thats way more freedom that the average social media platform gives to a user.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Yes, but it also makes the experience worse for people that aren't invested in the ecosystem because of privacy or similar reasons.

    If I'm using an app that allows quotes, but my friend isn't and wants to quote a post, they're going to be annoyed.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    As someone who had never used corporate social media like FB and Twitter (for my own reasons), when I found out about Mastodon back in 2017-18, I decided to join it because of its philosophy and it not being a corporate-owned walled garden. It has its flaws of course. But since I didn't have any preconceptions, I mostly liked Mastodon as it was and didn't find it confusing at all. That's probably because I read up on Mastodon first to decide whether I'd want to try it, so I knew what to expect.

    So I can understand how people who had been using Twitter and had their expectations shaped by it would assume that Mastodon was just a Twitter clone, not having learned anything about it beforehand. That's why they were confused and disappointed to find that it was its own thing with its own philosophy, and had existing communities aligned with that philosophy.

    Some (not all) of those who saw the differences as flaws, complained that Mastodon was crap for not having certain Twitter features, and some (not all) existing communities didn't take kindly to demands that Mastodon abandon its philosophy and transform itself into a Twitter clone, so there were conflicts as well, and those new people didn't stick around.

    OTOH, many other new people found that they liked the different philosophy and those people did stick around, so Mastodon has grown. But IMO since most people like the Twitter-style algorithms and "broadcast/consume" culture (as opposed to Mastodon's more personal interaction culture), Mastodon will always be a much smaller thing. But its existence is an important and good thing, like the quiet room away from the riotous street party, where you can hear each other speak.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    I also joined around 2017, but I was using twitter beforehand. Totally agree with everything you've said.

    I do think that mastodon could benefit from some simple, transparent/open algos (not black box ad-focused ones), such as the ability to sort replies based on favourites, and a per-hashtag recently popular view. Some of those are already requested and maybe on the cards.

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