Comment by solarkraft 6 days ago
Mastodon is on the right track. They’ve been doing so much right, the UX has improved considerably.
I think there’s some mainstream appeal, but there are also ecosystem issues that aren’t solved easily, as well as a lack of algorithmic curation, which a lot of people deem very important.
I tried Mastodon before Threads & Bluesky, and I can say that the lack of algo was the part I liked the least.
I tend to follow a lot of people, and like to see a mix of their posts. But on Mastodon, what I got instead was "who is posting right now?" I'm in EST, for example, which means that unless my Asian follows are up in the middle of the night, I will generally not see their posts on Mastodon.
Also some people post a lot more frequently than others, but in practice that means I want to surface every post of the infrequent posters to make sure I catch them. As another comment noted, the Quiet Posters feed in Bluesky solves for exactly this.
IMHO the pluggable algo design of Bluesky is the way to go. I already follow feeds that are based on manually-verified membership of the poster, content of individual posts, and on frequency of posts. I'm really excited to see what other algorithms people come up with.
You can make lists in Mastodon, and put the noisy people there and exclude them from your main feed.
You can put all your Asian follows in a separate list as well if you want to quickly catch up with them.
No algorithm has its down sides, but I doubt they'll put in an algorithm that I'll like more than "no algorithm".
I'll add that I think algorithms should be the responsibility of the client, and not the server. The web client is merely one client. There's not much preventing any of the numerous other clients from implementing an algorithm.
Bluesky also has a followers feed like Mastodon. I use that one sometimes, but it's easy to toggle over to one of the algorithmic feeds as well. Sort of best of both.
Worth noting that some algorithms can be done client-side, but it may not be feasible or desirable to do so. For example in the open protocol of email, some huge majority of all mail is supposedly spam. Filtering client-side would be a tremendous waste of resources. I suspect the same could become true of any open protocol like Mastodon or AT.
Either way, I think the proliferation of sites is good for the digital ecosystem.
> some huge majority of all mail is supposedly spam. Filtering client-side would be a tremendous waste of resources. I suspect the same could become true of any open protocol like Mastodon or AT.
I once had access to the Twitter Firehose.
It was, as you say, a mindbogglingly tremendous waste of resources.
> I tend to follow a lot of people, and like to see a mix of their posts. But on Mastodon, what I got instead was "who is posting right now?"
This was a big issue for me. Some people I followed would constantly post, so your feed, over time, simply becomes whatever those extremely online users post. It becomes less of a "balanced media diet" if it favors people who are always online. Of course, you can just stop following those people, but you really don't know how prolific someone is when you first follow them.
I remember seeing someone post a prototype of a view of the feed that instead treated it like a messaging app or RSS feed where you'd see a list of posters sorted by most recent post date first. That way, you could just click on a profile to see all their posts in chronological order instead of a mixed feed of everyone's posts. I thought might be a better way to go.
> Some people I followed would constantly post, so your feed, over time, simply becomes whatever those extremely online users post. It becomes less of a "balanced media diet" if it favors people who are always online.
I saw this as a feature of sorts.
If anyone starts spamming my feed: instant unfollow.
Now my feed is curated towards a slow but interesting ephemerality, and not a firehose of psychological manipulation designed to keep me hooked.
> Of course, you can just stop following those people, but you really don't know how prolific someone is when you first follow them.
Hard disagree.
Rather than following people willy-nilly, I've found I've become a lot more discerning who I allow on my feed. If I see an interesting comment / shared post / post on a hashtag I follow (e.g. #creativecoding), I'll always check their account and review their post history before choosing whether to follow them.
> I tried Mastodon before Threads & Bluesky, and I can say that the lack of algo was the part I liked the least.
It's probably the one big technical feature I like the best.
Not to say you're wrong, just that we use it differently.
I've never tried Threads (out for my disdain for Meta/FB/Zuck), but I can sort of understand why some people prefer Bluesky.
To me, Bluesy if a better alternative if you want to see (or become) "viral" things. If you secretly dream of having one of your hotcakes/zingers/memes/rants become viral and get millions of views/boosts/retweets/whatever, Mastodon isn't for you. Perhaps Bluesy is. And if you enjoy those occasional viral posts, you'll see them there and not on Mastodon (at last not without doing a lot more work curating the list of people and hashtags you follow).
I mute Mastodon posts linking to Bluesy, because I very explicitly do not want "viral content", at least not until it's been vetted and reposted by someone I've chosen to follow.
The solution to this for me is lists, though there are other options.
Lists group profiles, and I tend to have 2--4 of these, mostly organised by priority / interest, and explicitly NOT organised topically. Roughly, there's A, B, C, and maybe D. This is a system I'd come up with at Google+ and Diaspora*, and find it fits Mastodon pretty well.
I try to keep A limited to 20---40 people / accounts of greatest interest. That evolves over time, in part as people join or leave Mastodon, or as my own interests / frustrations shift.
B are still generally interesting but not as interesting. C and D are filled as I find profiles really aren't bringing me joy in A or B.
Mastodon lets you pin threads (in the traditional/power-user view), so I'll usually have 1--3 of my lists pinned to the display, unpinning as I find them distracting.
Other options are to use filters, to focus on your own instance's local users (if that's sufficiently topical), or to use various group systems (Guppe is the principle tool I use, there are others: <https://a.gup.pe/>).
Note that for topical filtering you're far better off using either keyword filters or group/community systems such as Guppe. As was learnt many times over at Google+ (and its Circles feature), people don't know how you've classified them, and may have little interest in accommodating your ontologies. (People yelling at others for not conforming to how the yeller had organised the others got to be a rather amusing if cringe trope on G+, that site's equivalent of "you're holding it wrong".)
Other tools include limiting reshares by people or within lists, and of course, muting and blocking profiles. I'm of the block early and often school.
I use both Mastodon and Bluesky.
I really like Bluesky's approach, where people build their own ranking models and publish them for others to use. I use a bunch of niche algorithms that are awesome (Quiet Posters).
> Partly because algorithmic curation is a big business, tied in pretzel knots with advertising, and is marketed by major companies as a huge "improvement" or "user need" (to sell more ads)
You might have inadvertently fallen for the fallacy of composition. What to describe is only one type of algorithm; one meant to maximize engagement/revenue.
Mastodon has the potential for a user-centric "Bring your own algorithm" which may work similar block lists. Users could subscribe to algorithms matching their preferences by boosting or penalizing posts based on topics I like or don't like. This would be very valuable to me, and will reduce the need for moderation - I won't even see the random ragebait or porn spam
Mastodon simply cannot be that user centric because the user can only control the subset of the Fediverse that your instance is able and allowed to see. Given that single user instances are largely nonviable due to the abundance of blocking in the 'verse in lieu of adequate spam controls, which ActivityPub fundamentally lacks, your choice of homeserver matters more than anything. And of course, there's no good way to choose one as a new user. Most newcomers will simply give up when faced with the choice. Even with great interest I've gotten stuck at this stage multiple times, myself. No homeserver seems welcoming, and they're all a little culty.
HN looks at the federated model and thinks about how much control the homeserver operator has and imagine themselves in that position as a "user" when the truth is that each homeserver is a small fiefdom run by a dictator and users have even less control over what they see there than they do in the corporate networks
> the abundance of blocking in the 'verse in lieu of adequate spam controls, which ActivityPub fundamentally lacks
Bring your own algorithm can tackle spam (like adblocks). ActivityPub is flexible enough for Mastodon to build up references to algo-providers.
I've been frustrated by Mastodons slow movement on this, I considered approaching the popular clients to implement this. After all, ad-blockers run entirely on the client. A basic standard can be drawn up that governs how to boost or penalize toots' visibility based on keywords, author or instance, based on an updated list is viable today amd can run entirely on the user's device. Web-based clients are more complex, and require patching the standard Masto server or running in a sidecar.
> the abundance of blocking in the 'verse in lieu of adequate spam controls, which ActivityPub fundamentally lacks
Bring your own algorithm can tackle spam (like adblocks). ActivityPub is flexible enough for Mastodon to build up references to algo-providers.
I've been frustrated by Mastodons slow movement on this, I considered approaching the popular clients to implement this. After all, ad-blockers run entirely on the client. A basic standard to boost or penalize toots' visibility based on keywords, author or instance based on an updated list is viable today.
>Given that single user instances are largely nonviable due to the abundance of blocking in the 'verse
Yeah, that's nonsense. I've been running my own single-user instance since 2018 and server blocks by other instance administrators have never caused any problems for my use of the Fediverse.
I also follow a bunch of other people who run their own and never see any comments suggesting it's a problem for them either.
> no good way to choose one as a new user.
I agree, lots of things I have just never gotten around to because I had do chose something, choice can sometimes be a bad thing.
Not too long ago IG removed the notice that would appear that "you're all caught up" when you had scrolled down to the end of the posts of those you follow; now it just continues to show you "algorithmically suggested posts" so you can't even tell
How long ago do you mean? I tested right now and still got the "You're all caught up, the rest of the posts you see will be suggested" notice. Could it be in A/B testing...?
I noticed it about 3 months ago. I never see it anymore. But yeah could be testing with a subset of users.
I think there's not much inherently wrong with algorithmic curation; the problem is more that the algorithms that make up your average social media feed aren't set up to favor the most enjoyable experience for the user, but as you say, for the platform. It's to appeal to advertisers and to keep you engaged first, showing you interesting posts is fairly low on the list of goals[0].
Another problem is how opaque they tend to be; people have a mental model of how a feed should look like (not gonna describe the entirety of it, but a basic example would be "only the people I follow"), and most of the pushback tends to come from when an algorithm decides to break that mental model. (Such as for example showing you a random person you don't follow because the algorithm thinks you might like them, since someone you actually followed has engaged with their posts, to piggyback from the previous example.)
I think a really basic "no more than the X highest engagement posts from each followed user from the past 24 hours" option could do a lot as a basic heuristic to prevent people who no-life their social media from taking over the feed of someone who also wants to see what other people they follow are posting. (X can be any number but should probably go down the more people you follow.)
For a global feed, you don't need an algorithm, mostly because no amount of algorithmic curation can fix what's essentially looking into a firehose of posts - you'll probably find something you either like or conclude that it's not worth looking at to begin with.
[0]: Because anger and outrage is way easier for people to spread organically, algorithmic social media tends to overfocus on spreading it even more as that's what drives up engagement the best and that's what advertisers want. The fact that this creates a paradox where ads (that want lots of engagement) often risk ending up next to really heinous shit on those social media (what actually gets engagement) is an interesting side effect.
Twitter in its early years didn't compete against algorithmic curation.
It's like trying to sell Blackberrys in 2025.
I've said this for a while too. People got mad when their chronological feeds disappeared, and I think it should be kept around as a separate view you can pop into (and this does exist on twitter), but people follow so many accounts, and those accounts post so much, chances are when you go into the chronological feed, you won't see anything that really interests you. That's my experience any time I go into the Following tab on twitter.
It seems much wiser to seed out a new post from someone to a few people's feeds, see if it gets their interest, and if so, boost it to more people that would be interested.
When did Twitter hit it's viral growth curve? And what was the user count before and after? To be clear, it's not necessarily the case that a platform needs to optimize for growth, but I wonder what can be expected without the sticky features that "addict" the most users to a given platform.
When it was new. There are no excited early adopters to something that is 2 decades old.
There are fundamental problems with their model resulting from their architecture that I don't see them tackle at all.
The most important one is that both your identity and your data are tied to whichever instance you pick (and picking is not easy). The latter is forgivable, but the former (i.e. the fact that you can't "port out" from an uncooperating server) really isn't, in my view.
Discoverability is another big one, and while I generally don't care much for algorithmically curated feeds myself, not being able to do a handle or keyword search is a dealbreaker for me.
Compared to Bluesky, which makes efforts to modularize/federate all essential components of a social network, Mastodon's approach is firmly stuck in a past where sysadmins completely rule their respective kingdoms, and that distinction runs deep to the core protocol level and is, I'd argue, not fixable.
> The most important one is that both your identity and your data are tied to whichever instance you pick [...] (i.e. the fact that you can't "port out" from an uncooperating server) really isn't [forgivable], in my view.
You can "soft-migrate" to another Mastodon account and server my creating your new account, then pointing your old account to your new account.
All the old content remains on the old account/server, and all the new content/notifications appear on the new account/server.
They have a "soft-migrate" (as opposed to a "hard-migrate" where all your activity would be migrated across to the new server) because Mastodon is built on the ActivityPub standard which has more than just Mastodon using it. Since it's an open standard, there are already proposals underway to allow the hard-migrate behavior, but it would be able to support Mastodon and all other compatible ActivityPub apps, not just Mastodon by itself.
> Mastodon's approach is firmly stuck in a past where sysadmins completely rule their respective kingdoms, and that distinction runs deep to the core protocol level and is, I'd argue, not fixable.
I see this as a feature, not a bug.
I'd rather have a reddit (before the great '23 moderator purge and subsequent death spiral) style moderation where each fifedom (e.g. subreddit/mastodon instance) has it's own rules and moderators that actually care about the designated content (e.g. cooking, gamedev, etc...) in their fifedom where the moderators are part of the community and the community can discuss and vote on rule changes.
As opposed to:
A facebook style moderation where the mods are a faceless corporation and where reporting something equals a filling out a form of preset answers which don't allow for further explanations and having maybe 3% of anything actually getting fixed.
> You can "soft-migrate" to another Mastodon account and server my creating your new account, then pointing your old account to your new account.
Yes, on a cooperating outbound server. If it disappears, your handle is permanently gone, with no way for you to put up a redirect.
Contrast this with DNS-based handles on Bluesky, for example. All I need to do to change hosting providers there is changing a TXT record.
> I'd rather have a reddit [...] style moderation
Sure, that model works well in some situations, but why unnecessarily tangle content moderation with content and handle hosting?
> Contrast this with DNS-based handles on Bluesky, for example. All I need to do to change hosting providers there is changing a TXT record.
Mastodon has a similar external identity pointer feature. It uses a html tag on the page the A record points to (which IMHO is better since we don't want anyone with just enough information to be dangerous to break their own DNS).
But the html tag is used to verify an account as the authentic account, not to handle redirects from one account to another.
Personally, I'm not sure I'm a fan of using an external identifier to also handle redirects...
If a social media handle gets hacked, you can put a notice on your website saying "Don't trust any account except this one: <link to your new account>", and by the same token: if your website gets hacked, you can put a note on your social media.
But with the external identifier controlling redirects, if your website gets hacked (or nameserver with the dns method), then both your website and social media are compromised at the same time.
My personal experience is that I use a number of other tools (Sill, Murmel, Fediview) to add an "algorithmic curation" of sorts so that I don't miss content I might have wanted to see. I think there's something to be said for the ability to have that added externally rather than built-in to the core. I guess I see both sides of the value of that kind of curation here; I definitely don't love it when I don't have a level of control of it for myself.
> so that I don't miss content I might have wanted to see.
I think people should start by learning again that missing stuff is ok.
I sometimes spend a week or two without checking my mastodon feed, and there is no way I will try to catch up. I was much more miserable when I was addicted to content.
> lack of algorithmic curation,
in my view, this is a feature, not a bug
This is the view of many deeply in the space, but not that of the broader public. This divide needs to be crossed and this is where Bluesky is ahead of Mastodon.
Framing it as competition between mastodon and bluesky is just flatly wrong. There is no competition. Bluesky isn't "winning" because there just is no game being played.
Mastodon is just doing its own thing all by itself.
Algorithmic curation is exactly what ruined the existing social networks. They were absolutely better without it.
How has the UX improved? I just checked my Mastodon account and it's exactly as I remember it.
Some of the changes are listed here: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/10/mastodon-4.3/
I had the same experience as you. But now, if you go to preferences, there's an option to disable "advanced web interface". If you uncheck that, you get the simpler view.
Of course, the thing now being called the advanced interface used to just be the default.
A decentralized social network is an oxymoron. Centralization is the point.
> as well as a lack of algorithmic curation, which a lot of people deem very important.
Twitter ran for enough of its early years without that and it still had "mainstream appeal". (Blogs and RSS for even more years.) I'm happier without algorithmic curation. I think a lot of people over-estimate what algorithmic curation is worth to them. Partly because algorithmic curation is a big business, tied in pretzel knots with advertising, and is marketed by major companies as a huge "improvement" or "user need" (to sell more ads).