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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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[–] 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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