Comment by CaptainFever

Comment by CaptainFever 2 days ago

Not parent, but I did use Mastodon for about a year. I ended up moving back to Twitter because:

1. I just couldn't vibe with the culture there. From my POV, Mastodon is made out of pearl-clutchers and politics.

2. So much drama. The FediSearch drama. The Raspberry Pi incident. It's just so tiring and you feel like you need to walk on eggshells all the time.

3. So much drama. You would just pray that your admin didn't get into a spat with another admin and get defederated. You could get a solo server, but that costs money and you might get blocked by a large server's admin anyway.

4. So much drama. Pray that your server doesn't shut down, because you can't import your posts elsewhere. Solo, yes, but costs money.

At least with Twitter, the rules are sort of well known, and you can follow anyone there unless they block you personally.

I heard BlueSky is good, though. Haven't tried it yet. Nostr was also another one, to get around the admin drama issue, but it doesn't seem very popular.

shiroiushi 2 days ago

>4. So much drama. Pray that your server doesn't shut down, because you can't import your posts elsewhere.

I would have thought a well-designed decentralized system would allow you to, for instance, download/export all your posts, and then import them all to a new server, in case you have to move servers for some reason.

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Nextgrid 2 days ago

The server-oriented aspect of Mastodon was the second-worst decision ever (the first one was the name). Mainstream social media doesn't ask you to pick a server (nor deal with the consequences of it going down), its replacement shouldn't either.

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- shiroiushi a day ago
  
  As for the server-oriented aspect, what's the alternative? There's only two ways I see to run a social media service like this: centralized and decentralized.
  The mainstream ones are centralized, of course: FB, Xitter, etc. You just connect to their web server and do everything there. Any centralized alternative would have be a well-financed corporation able to set up a huge IT infrastructure to accomplish the same task. But the whole idea of Mastodon is to not be a big, for-profit corporation, and to be in the hands of the users instead, which I don't think is possible with a centralized service.
  So the only alternative is a decentralized service. But this means you have to have multiple servers, leading to the whole "federated" approach, so users can run their own servers and control things themselves, or use accounts on servers of their choice. This of course leads to all the consequences you named, and more: servers going down, servers defederating other servers, etc.
  But again, what's the alternative? If the requirement is "not run by a single big for-profit company", I don't see one. If you think that having a decentralized service actually be competitive with a centralized one like Xitter simply isn't feasible, that's fair.
  My prior complaint still stands though: if you want users to have freedom (of which server to put their account on, etc.), then why would you not have a way of migrating their account/data to another server, and force them to lose everything if their server disappears?
  
  Reply View | 1 reply
  
  conzept a day ago
  
  "But again, what's the alternative?" Blockhain based social networks would seem the obvious choice. The onramp needs to be easier I feel though. Make the ID-management, posting and global searching easy enough.
  
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- shiroiushi 2 days ago
  
  I agree about the name: they shouldn't have stolen the name of a great metal band.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies