Yeah, that does happen a lot. Also true on Bluesky. There, the “social aggression” isn’t always successful, but people try. Such disputes do happen on Tildes fairly often and the difference is...
The result is a community that defaults to social aggression for boundary maintenance
Yeah, that does happen a lot. Also true on Bluesky. There, the “social aggression” isn’t always successful, but people try.
Such disputes do happen on Tildes fairly often and the difference is that Deimos will stop them if they get too heated. But a community is still shaped by what you can talk about without starting a bitter argument.
I’d say BlueSky’s social aggression has been pretty successful at herding the range of acceptable opinion. The blocklists are a great tool for blunting the impact of certain types of posters, but...
I’d say BlueSky’s social aggression has been pretty successful at herding the range of acceptable opinion. The blocklists are a great tool for blunting the impact of certain types of posters, but I think anyone joining BlueSky today is going to encounter a lot of unhinged posting and will be disinclined to sift through it to find enough value to be worth learning about the blocklist feature or the shared moderation lists.
The shared moderation lists also have the same HOA-brained scope creep that Mastodon instances suffer from. In theory you’re just signing up for someone’s general moderation and vibe-setting decisions, but in practice the groups that maintain these start to attract highly ideological users who want to use their moderation powers to banish wrong-think and not just cull abusive users.
The most difficult part is that all the enforcement mechanisms are all-or-nothing, so the equilibrium ends up being that a lot of obnoxious and anti-social behavior is permitted to slide because it’s not quite on the level of being worthy of a ban or total disaffiliation forever. In days of online forums moderators had a lot more tools for “vibe setting.” They could directly edit the content of posts to soften language or remove a section of objectionable behavior within an otherwise okay post. They could use temporary mutes or temporary bans to encourage people to cool off. There were options for keeping people around but enforcing boundaries around behavior without needing to kick people out entirely. You could have an escalation path with off-ramps for correcting the bad behavior instead of letting people lean into their worst selves until they cross a line that requires banning. The way it’s set up you’re either a good or a bad account rather than a person who sometimes makes mistakes.
In general I think much of the Fediverse has been a failure because they seek to recreate the social model of sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. But that entire model for socializing is actually bad! There’s no salvaging it. Federation would have worked best if it was presented as just a protocol for posting your things to the internet and allowing other people to follow the things you post. Instead its most vocal supporters are pitching things as drop-in replacements for Twitter, Instagram, or whatever else only with blackjack and hookers. Just create the identity/account and the schema for syndicating posts and let other people build whatever kind of interface they want for looking at it.
Yeah. The LLM corner[^1] of Bluesky usually exists in harmony, but if a post escapes containment (i.e. one of the annoying big accounts grabs a hold of it), it usually becomes a little bit...
Yeah. The LLM corner[^1] of Bluesky usually exists in harmony, but if a post escapes containment (i.e. one of the annoying big accounts grabs a hold of it), it usually becomes a little bit insufferable as people who fundamentally do not understand what is going on get very angry and insist you're a bad human being, and simultaneously dumb for thinking LLMs are capable of doing any serious work.
It only lasts a few days, but there is definitely a chilling effect that can happen.
[^1]: I must stress here, I think very few in that corner are completely pro-LLM, without any mind to the negative side of it. Most of the discussion is technical, in any case.
Many communities are accidental in the sense that they’re just whoever happens to have made their home there. The families in a suburb might share some common demographics due to things like the...
Many communities are accidental in the sense that they’re just whoever happens to have made their home there. The families in a suburb might share some common demographics due to things like the cost of housing and what jobs are available nearby, but other than that, they might not have a lot of common goals.
There are also more intentional communities that happen due to entry requirements. Many organizations have a hiring process. There are academic conferences and conventions where people with a common interest gather. These don’t happen by accident - there are people who make it their job.
Social networks like Twitter, Bluesky and the Fediverse to some extent have always struck me as rather incoherent because every participant ends up with their own custom view of things depending on who they follow. It’s hard to find good discussions and easy to end up in dysfunctional ones. It’s a bit surprising that semi-coherent communities happen at all.
Contrast with subreddits, forums like Tildes and Hacker News, and blogs where we are at least seeing the same top-level posts for the most part. This also happens in private mailing lists and Whatsapp groups.
I personally feel like any discussion of Mastodon's numerous failures as a social media replacement[1] fall apart when you realise that nothing of any mainstream value ever happens on Mastodon....
I personally feel like any discussion of Mastodon's numerous failures as a social media replacement[1] fall apart when you realise that nothing of any mainstream value ever happens on Mastodon. It's all theatre more than anything. The ants in the ant farm insist that it's a bold experiment in federation and free speech, but it's all just roleplay as far as I can tell.
There's no way to say this kindly as the facts here are just unkind, so don't mistake this as me hating, I'm sure to some the Mastodon experience is ideal, but... when have you ever heard "oh, did you see that viral mastodon post"? And while we're on the topic, why is Mastodon just... like that? It seems deliberately designed to be as obtuse as possible, and thus self-organises and -selects for people willing to put in a lot of effort for a very tiny increase in quality of life. I don't think that's a good starting point for a platform that - in concept - was meant to be for "living in the moment" and sharing tiny snippets of your life, like Twitter was. A platform like that demands as little friction as possible. Hell, Twitter shipped with SMS posting as a core feature because it was the easiest way to bring your thoughts on there in 2006.
Add to that the fundamental friction of the federation as a concept and having to pick an instance as your first decision, before even having learned what Mastodon is all about, and this is just feels to me like another LessWrong. As in, "if you don't want to interact with our system and its numerous designed inefficiencies, you're not the kind of person who would be welcome or at home here". You can do that, Tildes' invite system fundamentally uses the same mechanism, but if you do you can't pretend to be the next generation's online town square.
[1]: Mastodon also conceptually fails at this because its community wants high quality respectful interactions with nuance, something the interaction model of modern social media simply is incompatible with. There's a reason Tildes looks, feels and plays like a BBS or a Usenet group.
[PS]: They also have to know that nobody in their right mind would willingly use the term "toot" to describe a post. The thing you share around? Farts. Inconsequential and unpleasant. Talk about setting yourself up for failure.
Maybe only among millennials. Idk who knows what definition of "skeet" these days. But I'm not sure the song has crossed generations entirely. Bluesky is very millennial coded to me though. (Not...
Maybe only among millennials. Idk who knows what definition of "skeet" these days. But I'm not sure the song has crossed generations entirely. Bluesky is very millennial coded to me though. (Not that I don't think of the song just that I don't mind the word skeet as I don't associate it with that definition)
The word on the button was apparently originally "publish" and it changed across Mastodon because of HBomberguy who I don't think expected it to actually happen until it did. It was almost...
They also have to know that nobody in their right mind would willingly use the term "toot" to describe a post.
The word on the button was apparently originally "publish" and it changed across Mastodon because of HBomberguy who I don't think expected it to actually happen until it did. It was almost certainly suggested because of its silliness in this respect.
I don't think Mastodon ever had much shot as a Twitter replacement but I'm not sure I really buy that it's a fundamental failure at the level you seem to think it is. It's just very much only really successful on a smaller scale and in a different context from something that truly intends to compete with Twitter.
The Fediverse, particularly Mastodon, still suffers from the reputation of being “complicated.” Its key distinguishing feature — federated instances — is also its Achilles’ heel. A few years ago,...
The Fediverse, particularly Mastodon, still suffers from the reputation of being “complicated.” Its key distinguishing feature — federated instances — is also its Achilles’ heel.
A few years ago, I started recommending joining the Fediverse/Mastodon via the developers’ instance, mastodon.social, and focusing on the personal timeline. It’s simpler to explain and — I hope — to understand, but something gets lost along this easier path.
I hadn’t realized this until I read this post by Laurens Hof on the Connected Places blog. He makes a very astute distinction regarding the Fediverse experience, between the instance layer and the federation layer, and argues that most people live in the federation layer.
There's more in his article. For me, it was enlightening.
Agreed. A mass defederation of mastodon.cloud almost happened due to lack of moderator activity and running an old version of mastodon. The mod(s) showed up out of nowhere and that ended up not...
Its key distinguishing feature — federated instances — is also its Achilles’ heel.
Agreed. A mass defederation of mastodon.cloud almost happened due to lack of moderator activity and running an old version of mastodon. The mod(s) showed up out of nowhere and that ended up not happening, but if it did, you can't just expect people to move across instances.
Don't get me wrong - I've moved an account and it wasn't terribly difficult. But having that expectation for the average user, or for news organization accounts, or several other scenarios, is not some simple feat.
Mastodon's user base is heavily skewed towards the tech crowd, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
I am on a mastodon server that defederates with a number of other instances because of those instances' mod or user behavior and moderates itself well, and some would say, strictly. In that, yeah,...
I am on a mastodon server that defederates with a number of other instances because of those instances' mod or user behavior and moderates itself well, and some would say, strictly. In that, yeah, if you're pro certain things the community doesn't approve of, you're gone and good riddance, tbh. Sometimes the type of community we're building means your worldview isn't welcome in it, and if that's the case, deal with it and go somewhere else
And some level of de-escalation does attempt to happen but most of the time the other party refuses to participate anyway so I am okay with "socially aggressive boundaries" as necessary
Some might call this setting of boundaries too strict or whatever or limiting the range of views and discussion that happens there- and yes, that's the damn point- and I like it that way. In fact, it's the only social media I actually enjoy using.
A mastodon instance has absolutely zero need to be some "global public square" BS that other social media has at some point aspired to be and I love that. It's less of a replacement for those, to me, and more an alternative and the truly decentralized nature helps it do things differently and I like that. I am actually also okay with that causing it to have some barriers to entry that take a bit of effort to cross. I am also okay with that meaning that yeah if you're on some instances- you won't be able to connect with me on mine
But then the question is: why federate at all? Why not a private group or a standalone forum like Tildes? It seems like the boundaries would be confusing than having partially working federation...
But then the question is: why federate at all? Why not a private group or a standalone forum like Tildes? It seems like the boundaries would be confusing than having partially working federation due to policy disputes.
Because there are tons and tons of other servers that either have similar boundaries, and even if slightly looser boundaries internally, have cultivated a user base and moderation culture that...
Because there are tons and tons of other servers that either have similar boundaries, and even if slightly looser boundaries internally, have cultivated a user base and moderation culture that leave no reason to defederate from them. Selective federation is miles away from no federation. I don't think federation with all instances is some noble goal worth pursuing nor do I think it harms mastodon that selective federation exists- it's one of its biggest strengths actually
Some people still want a place somewhere in the mastodon universe, and that functions the way mastodon does, in terms of being short-form posts and reposts and such is similar but not quite equal to something like bluesky/twitter/etc, but one that is more selective and that's okay- that's the beauty of mastodon in the first place.
If you sign up to the instance I am on, the rules are very clear and very upfront about what isn't federated with, so if someone is confused it's on them. If someone outside the instance is confused why they can't reach us- too bad?
Though i should mention- our instance isn't always accepting new members either. Registration availability is controlled for various reasons and so we don't ever have a huge influx all at once of clueless users ever
I had trouble in smaller instances where admins defederated from others where I have acquaintances and this got me upset. I feel people nowadays is more intolerant with minor differences, and...
I had trouble in smaller instances where admins defederated from others where I have acquaintances and this got me upset. I feel people nowadays is more intolerant with minor differences, and defederation is a powerful, destructive tool to be used for anything. (Mastodon has lesser destructive tools, such as hide posts from profiles or whole instances without wrecking connections between two instances. Rarely used, though.)
That's why I moved to .social. It's ok-ish moderated, and since it's the biggest one, defederations are — as far as I know — rare, only in truly unacceptable cases. I wish more Mastodon admins were like them.
Yeah we just prefer our experiences in vastly different ways. If someone I am acquainted with is no longer reachable because of defederation I have become okay with that. We get a long "heads up"...
Yeah we just prefer our experiences in vastly different ways. If someone I am acquainted with is no longer reachable because of defederation I have become okay with that. We get a long "heads up" period of time prior to full defederation where I could connect with that person and let them know and connect privately in other ways or make whatever decisions are necessary (including making an alt account elsewhere as an option)
We do sometimes delist instead of fully suspending and breaking connections but I am still in full support of the latter. While I am more tolerant in a broad sense on the web (I understand the web in general is not going to be nor needs to be limited to my preferred moderation experience everywhere, etc), I personally am not "tolerant" (specifically defined in terms of wanting to share a mastodon instance or extensive conversation with) of certain differences myself (whether minor or major is in the eye of the beholder) and so that environment works for me. I am okay with powerful, destructive tools. Heck, I wish Tildes had a block feature itself. I would like more tools to tailor my experience here.
I see plenty of user behavior I don't like from the big instances when publicly browsing other instances outside of mine that federate more broadly and it just makes me even more glad we are as strict as we are. I see "what it's like" to be on a less strict server and would never want that experience. We err on the side of strictness and in doing so avoid a lot of annoying behavior (whether that be "bad faith techbro contrarian reply guy" or AI evangelist or something else)
It's rare that I form close enough relationships with anyone off-instance that it would matter anyway. It does add some friction and I get not everyone wants that experience- but again the strength of mastodon in this case is we both can have the experience we want. You find the instance with the policy and moderation/admin style you want and I will do the same- and those will clearly be very different. I am glad both can exist and I don't think your admins need to act like mine
IMO it's a middle ground between the "town square" concept of sites like twitter (a concept that has failed if you ask me) and the highly siloed nature of apps like discord and WhatsApp.
IMO it's a middle ground between the "town square" concept of sites like twitter (a concept that has failed if you ask me) and the highly siloed nature of apps like discord and WhatsApp.
I tried mastodon pretty early on, but I had the same problems with it that I had with Twitter, which eventually led to me closing down my account and deleting my data even though I was on the...
I tried mastodon pretty early on, but I had the same problems with it that I had with Twitter, which eventually led to me closing down my account and deleting my data even though I was on the relatively tame server run by a community member of Loading Ready Run. The issue was that I can’t express myself in short pithy comments, I have nothing to shill, and I don’t care about what most other people are interested in despite me curating heavily to only feed me stuff relevant to my own interests.
Now I have a Bluesky account, but I look at the app an average of once a month for about five minutes, or whenever a friend links some political skeet or whatever they’re called there. It’s a worse version of an RSS feed.
Mastodon shares the same issue with other federation attempts: The UI is high friction. Or to put it less charitably, it's just bad. I saw the comparison to Tildes' invite only gate in other posts...
Mastodon shares the same issue with other federation attempts: The UI is high friction. Or to put it less charitably, it's just bad.
I saw the comparison to Tildes' invite only gate in other posts in this thread. The thing is, in the case of Tildes, it's friction that's very easy to understand. You don't get dropped into unfamiliar territory with the expectation that you make decisions which you can't possibly have sufficient context to make in an informed way (unless you're following a tutorial or have someone walking you through it).
It's easy to underestimate how much of a barrier that is. People have a lot to deal with in their lives, UX that doesn't account for that usually fails with general audiences. It's not even about whether it's difficult or complex, it's about whether it feels difficult or complex.
Having spent time thinking about UX in practical application, I find the design of something like Mastodon anti-social. It says "we're not going to care about how this feels to an average person". But the tool is for humans! Have empathy for them.
So that kind of design, one which doesn't respect the average person, sends a strong message that it's not a platform for the average person. Fediverse solutions were never going to replace, or even be a viable alternative to, mainstream solutions because they never really tried. They're tech solutions for tech people, and not even most of them.
I had no problem wasting some time finding in invite for Tildes. It was friction but it was immediately apparent what Tildes was and how to participate. It didn't feel unfamiliar.
I also wasted time figuring out Mastodon and Lemmy, but in that case it was because I'm a tech person and I want to understand the landscape. It felt unfamiliar and therefore unwelcoming. At no point in the process could I imagine an average person feeling good about it.
Still, if the quality of the content or conversation I'd encountered was significantly better than what you find elsewhere, I could imagine word of mouth slowly driving adoption until a theoretical critical mass created enough interest that people who understand UI/UX would be motivated to make it less bad. But the problem is that the average content on fediverse platforms isn't better at all. If anything it's a little worse, possibly because the experience tells a lot of great people with full lives that "this isn't for you".
Not to say that Mastodon isn't great for the people that like it. It only stops making sense when you compare it to something else. It's a category of its own, it won't be replacing anything any time soon.
I feel the UX bumps go a bit beyond friction into plain it doesn't work territory. Why can't I see all the toots of someone on another instance, sometimes? Why can't I see all the replies to some...
I feel the UX bumps go a bit beyond friction into plain it doesn't work territory. Why can't I see all the toots of someone on another instance, sometimes? Why can't I see all the replies to some toots, sometimes? It's capricious to use, not just difficult. It's often likened to email in order to get people to understand the instance thing but if email was that unreliable it would never have taken off.
I have some tangential thoughts, but I figure this is a good a place as any to put them down. After having left Twitter and spending some time on both Mastodon (via the .social instance) and...
I have some tangential thoughts, but I figure this is a good a place as any to put them down. After having left Twitter and spending some time on both Mastodon (via the .social instance) and Bluesky, I've been coming to the conclusion that the microblog format is just cursed. Twitter was the most egregious, even well before the Musk era, with its algorithmic insistence on showing inflammatory crap that would ruin my day, so I initially thought the greater control offered by Mastodon and Bluesky would be what was needed to make things work for me.
Yet, even after having spent some time curating my feeds on both platforms, there's still a lingering "Twitter-ness" about the posts I read that disappoints. Most people's short-form, pithy postings are simply not worth reading at best or actively detrimental to the mental state at worst, even if I've been more choosy with who I follow. The "defaulting to social aggression for boundary maintenance" this post touches on seems evident in every microblog platform I have been on, which ensures a general veneer of hostility that discourages good-faith participation, exasperating the structural problems even more.
Perhaps more time spent curating my feeds could curtail these issues to my satisfaction, but there's other online spaces where the time investment seems much more fruitful. Community-oriented discussion forums like this one, where conversations are topic-based, have a signal-to-noise ratio so many orders of magnitude higher than any Twitter-like could ever hope to achieve. Then there's old-school full-size blogs, which scratch the itch of following a person while giving space for a deeper exploration of ideas and a richer reflection of the writer's personality. Compared to those, the microblogs just really aren't worth the effort.
Yeah, that does happen a lot. Also true on Bluesky. There, the “social aggression” isn’t always successful, but people try.
Such disputes do happen on Tildes fairly often and the difference is that Deimos will stop them if they get too heated. But a community is still shaped by what you can talk about without starting a bitter argument.
I’d say BlueSky’s social aggression has been pretty successful at herding the range of acceptable opinion. The blocklists are a great tool for blunting the impact of certain types of posters, but I think anyone joining BlueSky today is going to encounter a lot of unhinged posting and will be disinclined to sift through it to find enough value to be worth learning about the blocklist feature or the shared moderation lists.
The shared moderation lists also have the same HOA-brained scope creep that Mastodon instances suffer from. In theory you’re just signing up for someone’s general moderation and vibe-setting decisions, but in practice the groups that maintain these start to attract highly ideological users who want to use their moderation powers to banish wrong-think and not just cull abusive users.
The most difficult part is that all the enforcement mechanisms are all-or-nothing, so the equilibrium ends up being that a lot of obnoxious and anti-social behavior is permitted to slide because it’s not quite on the level of being worthy of a ban or total disaffiliation forever. In days of online forums moderators had a lot more tools for “vibe setting.” They could directly edit the content of posts to soften language or remove a section of objectionable behavior within an otherwise okay post. They could use temporary mutes or temporary bans to encourage people to cool off. There were options for keeping people around but enforcing boundaries around behavior without needing to kick people out entirely. You could have an escalation path with off-ramps for correcting the bad behavior instead of letting people lean into their worst selves until they cross a line that requires banning. The way it’s set up you’re either a good or a bad account rather than a person who sometimes makes mistakes.
In general I think much of the Fediverse has been a failure because they seek to recreate the social model of sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. But that entire model for socializing is actually bad! There’s no salvaging it. Federation would have worked best if it was presented as just a protocol for posting your things to the internet and allowing other people to follow the things you post. Instead its most vocal supporters are pitching things as drop-in replacements for Twitter, Instagram, or whatever else only with blackjack and hookers. Just create the identity/account and the schema for syndicating posts and let other people build whatever kind of interface they want for looking at it.
Yeah. The LLM corner[^1] of Bluesky usually exists in harmony, but if a post escapes containment (i.e. one of the annoying big accounts grabs a hold of it), it usually becomes a little bit insufferable as people who fundamentally do not understand what is going on get very angry and insist you're a bad human being, and simultaneously dumb for thinking LLMs are capable of doing any serious work.
It only lasts a few days, but there is definitely a chilling effect that can happen.
[^1]: I must stress here, I think very few in that corner are completely pro-LLM, without any mind to the negative side of it. Most of the discussion is technical, in any case.
Many communities are accidental in the sense that they’re just whoever happens to have made their home there. The families in a suburb might share some common demographics due to things like the cost of housing and what jobs are available nearby, but other than that, they might not have a lot of common goals.
There are also more intentional communities that happen due to entry requirements. Many organizations have a hiring process. There are academic conferences and conventions where people with a common interest gather. These don’t happen by accident - there are people who make it their job.
Social networks like Twitter, Bluesky and the Fediverse to some extent have always struck me as rather incoherent because every participant ends up with their own custom view of things depending on who they follow. It’s hard to find good discussions and easy to end up in dysfunctional ones. It’s a bit surprising that semi-coherent communities happen at all.
Contrast with subreddits, forums like Tildes and Hacker News, and blogs where we are at least seeing the same top-level posts for the most part. This also happens in private mailing lists and Whatsapp groups.
I personally feel like any discussion of Mastodon's numerous failures as a social media replacement[1] fall apart when you realise that nothing of any mainstream value ever happens on Mastodon. It's all theatre more than anything. The ants in the ant farm insist that it's a bold experiment in federation and free speech, but it's all just roleplay as far as I can tell.
There's no way to say this kindly as the facts here are just unkind, so don't mistake this as me hating, I'm sure to some the Mastodon experience is ideal, but... when have you ever heard "oh, did you see that viral mastodon post"? And while we're on the topic, why is Mastodon just... like that? It seems deliberately designed to be as obtuse as possible, and thus self-organises and -selects for people willing to put in a lot of effort for a very tiny increase in quality of life. I don't think that's a good starting point for a platform that - in concept - was meant to be for "living in the moment" and sharing tiny snippets of your life, like Twitter was. A platform like that demands as little friction as possible. Hell, Twitter shipped with SMS posting as a core feature because it was the easiest way to bring your thoughts on there in 2006.
Add to that the fundamental friction of the federation as a concept and having to pick an instance as your first decision, before even having learned what Mastodon is all about, and this is just feels to me like another LessWrong. As in, "if you don't want to interact with our system and its numerous designed inefficiencies, you're not the kind of person who would be welcome or at home here". You can do that, Tildes' invite system fundamentally uses the same mechanism, but if you do you can't pretend to be the next generation's online town square.
[1]: Mastodon also conceptually fails at this because its community wants high quality respectful interactions with nuance, something the interaction model of modern social media simply is incompatible with. There's a reason Tildes looks, feels and plays like a BBS or a Usenet group.
[PS]: They also have to know that nobody in their right mind would willingly use the term "toot" to describe a post. The thing you share around? Farts. Inconsequential and unpleasant. Talk about setting yourself up for failure.
Well, you know, I say the same thing about "tildoes" and yet...
I am a fan of "skeet" (Bsky's unofficial term) though. But perhaps it's because I learned the "skeet shooting" definition first.
Making you i'm sure one of a very small and exclusive group that does not default to the Lil' John song.
Maybe only among millennials. Idk who knows what definition of "skeet" these days. But I'm not sure the song has crossed generations entirely. Bluesky is very millennial coded to me though. (Not that I don't think of the song just that I don't mind the word skeet as I don't associate it with that definition)
The word on the button was apparently originally "publish" and it changed across Mastodon because of HBomberguy who I don't think expected it to actually happen until it did. It was almost certainly suggested because of its silliness in this respect.
I don't think Mastodon ever had much shot as a Twitter replacement but I'm not sure I really buy that it's a fundamental failure at the level you seem to think it is. It's just very much only really successful on a smaller scale and in a different context from something that truly intends to compete with Twitter.
The Fediverse, particularly Mastodon, still suffers from the reputation of being “complicated.” Its key distinguishing feature — federated instances — is also its Achilles’ heel.
A few years ago, I started recommending joining the Fediverse/Mastodon via the developers’ instance, mastodon.social, and focusing on the personal timeline. It’s simpler to explain and — I hope — to understand, but something gets lost along this easier path.
I hadn’t realized this until I read this post by Laurens Hof on the Connected Places blog. He makes a very astute distinction regarding the Fediverse experience, between the instance layer and the federation layer, and argues that most people live in the federation layer.
There's more in his article. For me, it was enlightening.
Agreed. A mass defederation of mastodon.cloud almost happened due to lack of moderator activity and running an old version of mastodon. The mod(s) showed up out of nowhere and that ended up not happening, but if it did, you can't just expect people to move across instances.
Don't get me wrong - I've moved an account and it wasn't terribly difficult. But having that expectation for the average user, or for news organization accounts, or several other scenarios, is not some simple feat.
Mastodon's user base is heavily skewed towards the tech crowd, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
I am on a mastodon server that defederates with a number of other instances because of those instances' mod or user behavior and moderates itself well, and some would say, strictly. In that, yeah, if you're pro certain things the community doesn't approve of, you're gone and good riddance, tbh. Sometimes the type of community we're building means your worldview isn't welcome in it, and if that's the case, deal with it and go somewhere else
And some level of de-escalation does attempt to happen but most of the time the other party refuses to participate anyway so I am okay with "socially aggressive boundaries" as necessary
Some might call this setting of boundaries too strict or whatever or limiting the range of views and discussion that happens there- and yes, that's the damn point- and I like it that way. In fact, it's the only social media I actually enjoy using.
A mastodon instance has absolutely zero need to be some "global public square" BS that other social media has at some point aspired to be and I love that. It's less of a replacement for those, to me, and more an alternative and the truly decentralized nature helps it do things differently and I like that. I am actually also okay with that causing it to have some barriers to entry that take a bit of effort to cross. I am also okay with that meaning that yeah if you're on some instances- you won't be able to connect with me on mine
But then the question is: why federate at all? Why not a private group or a standalone forum like Tildes? It seems like the boundaries would be confusing than having partially working federation due to policy disputes.
Because there are tons and tons of other servers that either have similar boundaries, and even if slightly looser boundaries internally, have cultivated a user base and moderation culture that leave no reason to defederate from them. Selective federation is miles away from no federation. I don't think federation with all instances is some noble goal worth pursuing nor do I think it harms mastodon that selective federation exists- it's one of its biggest strengths actually
Some people still want a place somewhere in the mastodon universe, and that functions the way mastodon does, in terms of being short-form posts and reposts and such is similar but not quite equal to something like bluesky/twitter/etc, but one that is more selective and that's okay- that's the beauty of mastodon in the first place.
If you sign up to the instance I am on, the rules are very clear and very upfront about what isn't federated with, so if someone is confused it's on them. If someone outside the instance is confused why they can't reach us- too bad?
Though i should mention- our instance isn't always accepting new members either. Registration availability is controlled for various reasons and so we don't ever have a huge influx all at once of clueless users ever
I had trouble in smaller instances where admins defederated from others where I have acquaintances and this got me upset. I feel people nowadays is more intolerant with minor differences, and defederation is a powerful, destructive tool to be used for anything. (Mastodon has lesser destructive tools, such as hide posts from profiles or whole instances without wrecking connections between two instances. Rarely used, though.)
That's why I moved to .social. It's ok-ish moderated, and since it's the biggest one, defederations are — as far as I know — rare, only in truly unacceptable cases. I wish more Mastodon admins were like them.
Yeah we just prefer our experiences in vastly different ways. If someone I am acquainted with is no longer reachable because of defederation I have become okay with that. We get a long "heads up" period of time prior to full defederation where I could connect with that person and let them know and connect privately in other ways or make whatever decisions are necessary (including making an alt account elsewhere as an option)
We do sometimes delist instead of fully suspending and breaking connections but I am still in full support of the latter. While I am more tolerant in a broad sense on the web (I understand the web in general is not going to be nor needs to be limited to my preferred moderation experience everywhere, etc), I personally am not "tolerant" (specifically defined in terms of wanting to share a mastodon instance or extensive conversation with) of certain differences myself (whether minor or major is in the eye of the beholder) and so that environment works for me. I am okay with powerful, destructive tools. Heck, I wish Tildes had a block feature itself. I would like more tools to tailor my experience here.
I see plenty of user behavior I don't like from the big instances when publicly browsing other instances outside of mine that federate more broadly and it just makes me even more glad we are as strict as we are. I see "what it's like" to be on a less strict server and would never want that experience. We err on the side of strictness and in doing so avoid a lot of annoying behavior (whether that be "bad faith techbro contrarian reply guy" or AI evangelist or something else)
It's rare that I form close enough relationships with anyone off-instance that it would matter anyway. It does add some friction and I get not everyone wants that experience- but again the strength of mastodon in this case is we both can have the experience we want. You find the instance with the policy and moderation/admin style you want and I will do the same- and those will clearly be very different. I am glad both can exist and I don't think your admins need to act like mine
IMO it's a middle ground between the "town square" concept of sites like twitter (a concept that has failed if you ask me) and the highly siloed nature of apps like discord and WhatsApp.
I tried mastodon pretty early on, but I had the same problems with it that I had with Twitter, which eventually led to me closing down my account and deleting my data even though I was on the relatively tame server run by a community member of Loading Ready Run. The issue was that I can’t express myself in short pithy comments, I have nothing to shill, and I don’t care about what most other people are interested in despite me curating heavily to only feed me stuff relevant to my own interests.
Now I have a Bluesky account, but I look at the app an average of once a month for about five minutes, or whenever a friend links some political skeet or whatever they’re called there. It’s a worse version of an RSS feed.
Mastodon shares the same issue with other federation attempts: The UI is high friction. Or to put it less charitably, it's just bad.
I saw the comparison to Tildes' invite only gate in other posts in this thread. The thing is, in the case of Tildes, it's friction that's very easy to understand. You don't get dropped into unfamiliar territory with the expectation that you make decisions which you can't possibly have sufficient context to make in an informed way (unless you're following a tutorial or have someone walking you through it).
It's easy to underestimate how much of a barrier that is. People have a lot to deal with in their lives, UX that doesn't account for that usually fails with general audiences. It's not even about whether it's difficult or complex, it's about whether it feels difficult or complex.
Having spent time thinking about UX in practical application, I find the design of something like Mastodon anti-social. It says "we're not going to care about how this feels to an average person". But the tool is for humans! Have empathy for them.
So that kind of design, one which doesn't respect the average person, sends a strong message that it's not a platform for the average person. Fediverse solutions were never going to replace, or even be a viable alternative to, mainstream solutions because they never really tried. They're tech solutions for tech people, and not even most of them.
I had no problem wasting some time finding in invite for Tildes. It was friction but it was immediately apparent what Tildes was and how to participate. It didn't feel unfamiliar.
I also wasted time figuring out Mastodon and Lemmy, but in that case it was because I'm a tech person and I want to understand the landscape. It felt unfamiliar and therefore unwelcoming. At no point in the process could I imagine an average person feeling good about it.
Still, if the quality of the content or conversation I'd encountered was significantly better than what you find elsewhere, I could imagine word of mouth slowly driving adoption until a theoretical critical mass created enough interest that people who understand UI/UX would be motivated to make it less bad. But the problem is that the average content on fediverse platforms isn't better at all. If anything it's a little worse, possibly because the experience tells a lot of great people with full lives that "this isn't for you".
Not to say that Mastodon isn't great for the people that like it. It only stops making sense when you compare it to something else. It's a category of its own, it won't be replacing anything any time soon.
I feel the UX bumps go a bit beyond friction into plain it doesn't work territory. Why can't I see all the toots of someone on another instance, sometimes? Why can't I see all the replies to some toots, sometimes? It's capricious to use, not just difficult. It's often likened to email in order to get people to understand the instance thing but if email was that unreliable it would never have taken off.
I have some tangential thoughts, but I figure this is a good a place as any to put them down. After having left Twitter and spending some time on both Mastodon (via the .social instance) and Bluesky, I've been coming to the conclusion that the microblog format is just cursed. Twitter was the most egregious, even well before the Musk era, with its algorithmic insistence on showing inflammatory crap that would ruin my day, so I initially thought the greater control offered by Mastodon and Bluesky would be what was needed to make things work for me.
Yet, even after having spent some time curating my feeds on both platforms, there's still a lingering "Twitter-ness" about the posts I read that disappoints. Most people's short-form, pithy postings are simply not worth reading at best or actively detrimental to the mental state at worst, even if I've been more choosy with who I follow. The "defaulting to social aggression for boundary maintenance" this post touches on seems evident in every microblog platform I have been on, which ensures a general veneer of hostility that discourages good-faith participation, exasperating the structural problems even more.
Perhaps more time spent curating my feeds could curtail these issues to my satisfaction, but there's other online spaces where the time investment seems much more fruitful. Community-oriented discussion forums like this one, where conversations are topic-based, have a signal-to-noise ratio so many orders of magnitude higher than any Twitter-like could ever hope to achieve. Then there's old-school full-size blogs, which scratch the itch of following a person while giving space for a deeper exploration of ideas and a richer reflection of the writer's personality. Compared to those, the microblogs just really aren't worth the effort.
To answer the question in the title, I occasionally visit Mastodon because sometimes I see threads like this one about tea.