My Problems with Mastodon
Even with growing pains accommodating an influx of new users, Lemmy has made it clear that a federated social media site can be nearly as good as the original thing. I joined Lemmy, and it exceeded my expectations for a Reddit alternative run by an independent team.
These expectations were originally pretty low when Mastodon, the popular federated Twitter alternative, was the only federated social media I had experience with. After using Lemmy, Mastodon seems to be missing basic features. I initially believed these were just shortcomings of federated social media.
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Likes aren’t counted by users outside your instance, and replies don’t seem to be counted at all (beyond 0, 1, 1+), leading to posts that look like they have way more boosts (retweets) than likes or replies:
This incentivizes people to just gravitate toward the biggest instance more than people already do. My guess is that self-hosting a mastodon instance would also not be ideal, since the only likes you’ll see are your own.
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There’s really only one effective ways to find popular or ‘trending’ posts. There’s the explore tab which has ‘posts’, and ‘tags’ sections.
The ‘posts’ section shows some trending posts across your instance and all the instances that it’s federated with, this is the one I use it the most.
The ‘tags’ section is a lot like the trending tab on Twitter, but it’s reserved just for hashtags, which I guess isn’t a huge deal, but it feels like a downgrade. However, I do like the trend line it shows next to each tag!
The ‘Local’ and ‘Federated’ tabs are a live feed of post from your home instance and all the other instances, respectively. I feel these are pretty useless and definitely don’t warrant their own tabs. Having a local trending tab for seeing popular posts on your instance would be more interesting.
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The search bar basically doesn’t work, is this just me???
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This one is more minor and more specific to a Twitter alternative, but when looking at a user’s follows, you’ll only see the one’s on your home instance but for some reason this rule doesn’t apply to followers.
From what I’ve heard, a lot of these issues are intentional in order to create a healthier social media experience. Things like less focus on likes, reduces a hivemind mentality, addiction, things like that (I couldn’t find a source for this, if anyone has one confirming or disproving this please lmk).
Why this is a Problem
Mastodon seems to have two goals: To be an example of how a federated alternative to Twitter can work well, and to be a healthier social media experience. It’s not obvious, but I think these goals conflict with each other. A lot of the features that are removed in the pursuit of a healthier social media will be perceived as the shortcomings of federation as a concept.
In my eyes, Mastodon’s one main goal should be proving federated social media as a whole to the public, by being a seamless, familiar, full-featured alternative to Twitter. For me, Lemmy has done that for Reddit, upvotes are counted normally, you can see trending posts locally and globally same with communities, and the search function works! All its shortcomings aren’t design flaws, and I fully expect them to be fixed down the road as it matures.
As annoying as Jack Dorsey is, I have high hopes for BlueSky.
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Calckey/Firefish (forked from the Japanese software Misskey, so I assume that one is similar) is basically Mastodon but cool. It fixes many of your problems. While it’s not yet perfect (same issue with followers from other servers), there seems to be more going on.
As annoying as Jack Dorsey is, I have high hopes for BlueSky.
As long as he doesn’t submit that protocol as ActivityPub 2.0 or whatever, it’s not compatible with the wider fediverse, so not interesting.
I’d be surprised if he did submit it as activitypub, he’s already called it ATProtocol
He cannot just call something the name of an industry standard but he can submit his to the W3C who then can decide whether to adopt it or not
As long as he doesn’t submit that protocol as ActivityPub 2.0 or whatever, it’s not compatible with the wider fediverse, so not interesting.
If they get their act together and publish a real protocol / standard that a developer can read, implement, and then have a server capable of federating, then activitypub 1.0 can diaf and we can all praise our new activitypub 2.0 overlords.
I only found firefish the other day but 'like Mastodon but cool" is a perfect way to describe it.
I think fundamentally Mastodon can’t work. The entire point of Twitter is for celebrities, brands and governments to have a single place to be able to send out a public message and for that message to be seen by everyone, especially those who opt in to it by following. Decentralized alternatives by definition can’t do that. Centralization is the entire point of Twitter.
Decentralization does work for Reddit/Lemmy though, because they are content centric, not person centric. I don’t care who posts content to the subreddits I follow, just that the content exists, can be easily viewed (RIP third party Reddit apps, hello Lemmy!), and is interesting. Lemmy doesn’t need hundreds of millions of people in a single place to create enough content that is interesting, and in fact having fewer people makes the content that is posted more interesting and focused. Lemmy’s decentralization is a strength because if this instance doesn’t have the interesting content I want, I can just go elsewhere.
The entire point of Twitter is for celebrities, brands and governments to have a single place to be able to send out a public message and for that message to be seen by everyone
Nothing about Mastodon or the fediverse prevents this. In fact government institutions are already using the fediverse this way: https://social.network.europa.eu/@EU_Commission https://social.overheid.nl/@belastingdienst There’s some companies who run their own instances also, and no shortage of individuals running single-user instances as a subdomain of the same website they use for their professional brand.
Decentralized =/= Federated. In a federated model, data is still siloed in 24/7 servers that are controlled by people or institutions.
I think it’s not that Mastodon couldn’t do it, it’s that it will end up just being an essentially centralized instance as people will want to be in the same instance as the people/companies they want to follow. How users would want to use Mastodon is counter-intuitive to how the fediverse should work. Lemmy is focused on content (posts and comments) which means there’s less somebody to follow and the focus is on the communities.
This is a semi serious question - do people not realize that you can follow across instances and it makes literally no difference?
This is the one reason why some of us were sort of hoping that Threads would federate. Because the celebs and other normies are likely to gravitate there, and there are a few that some of us would still like to follow/interact with.
If anything, this is my criticism against the way that Lemmy handles this. For example, my previous reddit habit was to follow a bunch of subs for TV shows that I watched. So last night when I was watching ST: Strange New Worlds, I really didn’t enjoy the experience of digging through 10 communities that each had the episode posts with the same 15 comments, and the occasional new thought. This isn’t even a criticism of the posters, if you came to the comments there would be some things that would be wild not to call out. I think ultimately I’d almost rather see the federation model for reddit-like services move down in the stack, and federate the communities rather than the whole instance. EG: there is a major ST collective community assimilating the smaller ones and becoming greater than the sum of their parts. Of course, this is also probably partially just because Lemmy/Kbin are still in their infancy, and I have a feeling that as time goes, things are more or less going to centralize in this way anyway, in the same way you could have multiple subs on reddit, but there was usually 1-2 big ones at most.
This isn’t a problem for mastodon, because when someone like Jeri Ryan joins, it doesn’t matter on what instance, I can still follow her in one place, see who she follows and follows her for other like-minded individuals, see all of her posts and re-posts, etc. What instance you’re on makes very little difference after the first five minutes or so and you’re acquainted with how it works.
You’re looking at it from the perspective of someone who already has a general understanding of fediverse. If Jeri Ryan joins an instance, which instance do you his followers will join? Most likely the same instance, because they’re here to follow Jeri and they don’t know what instance to choose so they choose the most familiar one, the one Jeri is on. New users will congregate on instances that have people they want to follow and the followees most likely join whichever instance is the biggest or has someone they want to follow (because it’s not like they know any better how to pick an instance), which means people will centralize on either one or a handful of instances.
You can even see this happening in with Lemmy. Most people don’t know which instance to pick so they picked the biggest one, lemmy.world.
I think you have to factor in the ideological motivation here. Many have tried to criticise the team for being socialists or weaponise it as a means of trying to get Lemmy not to take off, but I argue that it is because Lemmy is run by ideologically committed people that it exceeded your expectations.
Lemmy’s goal is disrupting corporate control of what used to be communal spaces online. This is ideologically motivated by the socialist beliefs held by its development team.
Whether you agree with socialists or not politically, for a platform like Lemmy this motivation is very very powerful and plays a significant part.
The other side of this is that having known and occupied socialist spaces with Dessalines for close to a decade now he is one of the hardest working socialists online.
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This isn’t just a Mastodon problem, all fediverse softwares struggle to keep an accurate tally of faves/likes/whatevers on posts from remote instances
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It doesn’t look like this anymore on mastodon.social
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Search isn’t free so it’s up to the admins to decide how good/powerful they want their search bar to be.
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It shows all followees/followers of a user if said user is local, but if the user is remote, it will only show local followees/followers of that user because knowing what remote accounts follow what remote users also isn’t free.
Search isn’t free
This isn’t the primary reason most Mastodon servers lack full text search. Gargron is opposed to its inclusion in Mastodon because he believes it results in harmful social dynamics.
Implementing Elasticsearch, which Mastodon has some support for is somewhat resource-intensive, and making it available for all posts a user is able to view takes a code change (there’s a patch). A text search using PostgreSQL’s built-in text search is not very resource-intensive, and implementing that is about a dozen lines of code.
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Watching Mastodon-stans defend the lack of search is like watching a cult-member explain an insane belief.
So far, Lemmy feels like the least cultish corner of the fediverse. That might be due t it’s external focus.
So users viewing this post on another instance will see the same exact comments and upvotes?
Hi from lemm.ee👋
Indeed, at least that’s the idea. Viewing and posting from kbin.social.
That’s the idea, but in practice since the data exists independently on each server, it takes network time and computational time for them to align. In practice I expect comments to function as you expect, and upvotes to be slightly off depending on which instance you’re viewing from.
Things get a bit more weird when an instance gets defederated from another instance. My understanding here is that if you have instance A defederate from instance B, but instance B was listening to some of instance A’s communities, that instance B will have an independent replica of that community that doesn’t sync (this happened when beehaw defederated from open registration instances like lemmy.world).
My understanding is yes, but only if the instances have federated with each other.
Hello from kbin.social 👋
It’s aboot time something worked so well innit?
-lemmy.ca
sh.itjust.works user here :)
Hi from feddit.nl 🙌!
Oh, so that explains why the ratio of favorites/boosts is so low on mastodon. I thought it was just a culture thing, where people rarely left likes on posts.
Turns out it was just a software quirk.
Hear hear! I thought I didn’t like the fediverse because Mastodon did such an awful job selling it to me. “Oh, I can’t view other instances’ local timelines without making accounts on them? What’s even the point of federation then?” But on Lemmy you can easily browse communities outside your own instance. So it’s not the fediverse’s fault, Mastodon just doesn’t have a clear audience.
And yeah, I can see how a lot of Mastodon’s features are “privacy-focused”, but I think it does TOO good a job, it’s so private that you can’t find anything!
I can see why others might find those features useful, but I am not bothered by any of it. To me, Twitter was a (micro) blogging site, so I treated it as such. I found organizations/creators that I wanted to follow and read my feed in chronological order.
I don’t care about likes and retweets, because every tweet in my feed was coming from a source I wanted to hear from. Reply count did matter, but mostly to know that there were responses.
I never cared what was trending because it was never something I cared about.
I only used search to find specific users (though it is easy enough to find them by Googling or looking for a link on that user’s website) and,.on very rare occasions, I would search for my city or neighborhood name to see if there was a cause to be commotion I was seeing
I never cared who other users followed or were followed by. Even looking at my own followers was an exercise in who stroking.
My biggest complaint about Mastodon is that none of the users I would want to follow are on it yet. It is not a big enough issue to keep me on Twitter but there is no reason for me to join Mastodon either (as a lurker and occasional replyer).
Yoo, people who say “oh my, mastodon doesn’t have likes and algo and that’s what makes it perfect”, are you nuts? Good suggestion algorithms are the only thing we need in our services be it music, video streaming or social networks. I just came to mastodon, how do you expect me to find people to follow? It would be so much easier to select from somewhat relevant posts than to google who to follow on mastodon because its search engine works like crap. Lemmy is getting good now because of communities migrating from reddit, but huge accounts from twitter don’t sway so easily as mastodon is not so good as a twitter alternative
It almost feels like a generational difference. People who grew up before algorithms are used to curating everything they see, and see algorithms as a failing of the internet.
Those of us who grew up with algorithms enjoy good ones that promote content we really do want to see. The problem is that the really effective algorithms that benefit most of us also are the same ones that push right wing rhetoric because it’s successful.
I’m personally a fan of a good algorithm because I like seeing new stuff. The pre-2016 YouTube was a good example. Promoted stuff that I wanted to watch almost all the time, found a lot of new content that way
I don’t see why having chronological feeds can’t be paired with some more generic sorting or filtering systems. Nobody would be obligated to use either, you could just pick the one you want.
I get people want to see specifically what they subscribe to, and nothing else (looking at you, facebook). But I don’t see why people hate the idea of others being able to discover new content. Reddit had default subs for a long time, Twitter has trending topics, Mastodon could really do with something similar to help noobs get on-boarded.
And no - there’s no way I’m wading through the shit fountain that is Mastodon’s all posts tab on the off chance I find one interesting post. If you don’t already have interesting follows then it feels like there’s no point.
I’m pretty sure this is it. I think mastodon leans more towards the olds (I’m ~40) in part because we did not like algorithm driven engagement, at least not as the primary vehicle, and most especially in the way that modern services do it. Like, great, I’m glad a celeb did a thing or a team won, but this is entirely irrelevant to my interests most of the time and definitely not how I want to experience things by default.
Sure, when I want to go looking for something, good algorithms that are actually designed to make me happy and not just increase my engagement on the site through morally bankrupt choices, fine, but that’s just not my default.
Yeah, mastodon definitely needs a better algorithm. Algorithms can be designed to promote whatever the maker wants. It doesn’t have to be designed to maximize engagement or the specific kind of engagement that tends to promote crazy conspiracy theories or fascist rhetoric. The algorithm could just be simple collaborative filtering with some randomness thrown in to pop “information bubbles,” which would be much better than what they have now.
I’m definitely the other way, I want to see the stuff that’s there because I asked for it, and I want to ping pong around from people to the people they talk to to find new people. If I don’t already know of at least one interesting person or instance, why am I even joining the thing?
I appreciate having a list of people I could follow, but if there isn’t one I remember how to make my own fun.
I honestly really like discovering things organically as opposed to having “content” shoveled in my face. Say I follow an artist who happens to share the work of another artist I didn’t know about. There’s a connection and I can follow that person. It’s simple.
I think this is very much a YMMV situation. I moved from twitter to mastodon and brands aside, all of the interesting people I followed are here. granted, I follow a very developer centric crowd so it might be a bit self-selecting. I am enjoying Mastodon way more than twitter and I get more engagement on average.
I’m having a similar experience. Almost all developers (mostly Python/Django) I was following on Twitter are on Mastodon and being able to follow hashtags is great. The servers are stable and I kept the very first android client I tried (Tusky).
I’m a nerdy white guy that I’m guessing follows similar circles, and I also haven’t really had trouble finding a community there, but tbf I don’t think it’s just exclusive to this demo either. Someone up somewhere in this thread said that mastodon is more hostile to LGBTQ, and that doesn’t match what I’ve seen at all. I mean, my timeline through no real effort on my part is way gayer than it ever was on twitter, and I follow a lot more queer people than I did on twitter and they’re usually posting how much they prefer mastodon to twitter.
That said, I have seen POC saying that mastodon is a lot whiter and a lot more hostile, so idk. I’ve definitely noticed that the POC I followed on twitter really haven’t come over. I really don’t know what to ascribe that to. On twitter, I saw casual racism like all of the time even as a white dude, and only like a couple of times on mastodon. I mean, I’m not disagreeing because the few POC I am following have echoed this sentiment so idk what’s actually going on, but yeah, I do think this is a very YMMV situation.
This post was at the top of Mastodon’s explore page yesterday: https://mas.to/@kissane/110793942888550843
I feel it perfectly encapsulates the issues I see others and I face with Mastodon. Since it was #1 trending, it probably resonated with many more too.
The technical issues can eventually solved. The cultural ones? That’s the big question.
Lemmy seems far more approachable. It has its issues, but at least it has a working search.
Yeah you are spot on, the big problem with Mastodon is that they have all these ideas about how to be better than twitter that actually just break what people are looking for from the twitter experience.
- It actually does appear that Mastodon doesn’t know how many replies there are until it loads them for display. Glitch, a Mastodon fork with some UI enhancements has an option to display an estimate of the number of replies. Lemmy obviously displays an exact comment count while using the same protocol. There may be a performance/efficiency motivation for this.
- A trending feature should probably have the option to include federated content, as some instances are very small, even single-user.
- I find the stance taken by Mastodon’s developer and many users… I’ll be charitable and say unreasonable. It’s about a dozen lines of code to add a proper search and there are two ways to do it (Postgres text search is easy, Elasticsearch may be better for big servers). Some server admins have implemented this.
- I’m seeing that for both follows and followers.
There are other ActivityPub Twitter-alikes that may meet your needs better, such as Akkoma. Akkoma has reasonable search, can show remote follows and followers, and seems to keep accurate reply counts. It’s not as polished looking though.
Hello, have you tried Akkoma or Firefish?
