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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. The search bar basically doesn’t work, is this just me???

  4. 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.

  • woelkchen@lemmy.worldM
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • woelkchen@lemmy.worldM
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        1 year ago

        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

    • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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      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.

    • kd637_mi@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      I only found firefish the other day but 'like Mastodon but cool" is a perfect way to describe it.

  • Steve@compuverse.uk
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    1 year ago

    Mastodon doesn’t have Likes at all.

    The star you’re referring to is Favorite. Those go into your Favorite list. So you can refer back to them more easily.

    • justhach@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Oh god, Ive been using them wrong this whole time?!?!

      I guess I am so used to other social media I had assumed it was a like button.

      • tqgibtngo@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Although they differ from Twitter Likes, note that Mastodon Favorites are not private. For an example, I’ll refer to one of your toots:
        https://mastodon.social/@justhach/110696151311920356

        Viewing it in the Mastodon web interface, I see an indication that 2 people marked it as a Favorite. I can then click to see those 2 usernames, listed here:
        https://mastodon.social/@justhach/110696151311920356/favourites

        Such listings are limited though. For example, I’m viewing a toot that you boosted, and I see an indication that it has been marked as a Favorite by 816 users; but when I click to view their names, I see only 40 of them listed.

      • whofearsthenight@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        No, you haven’t. It started out this way, but now basically it’s the “tell the poster you acknowledge/like the post” but also there when you don’t want to boost the post to your timeline. You can still use it this way, but because the community (probably with one of the first twitter exoduses) started using it more like a like on twitter, they gave up and implemented bookmarks (I think might be private and not notify the poster you’ve bookmarked?)

        Ofc, there are also some of the mastodon HOA that will still insist this, but then why do bookmarks exist…?

        Anyway, just in general, you can tell by the up/down ratio and a lot of the comments that are getting upvoted in this thread that are posting things that are either just incorrect or at least misunderstand things how many people in this thread actually use mastodon, so I would take criticism with a grain of salt.

    • Talos@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I don’t see it that way. There are separate options to Favourite or Bookmark a post. To me Bookmarking something is so you can refer to it later, although nothing is stopping you using Favourites that way.

      • ttmrichter@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Favourites get put on a list so you can refer to it later … and notify the poster that you’ve done so as a form of positive feedback.

        Bookmarks get put on a list so you can refer to it later.

        That’s the big difference.

      • Steve@compuverse.uk
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        1 year ago

        Favourite and Bookmark are absolutely different things. They’re two different lists for you to use as you see fit.
        Neither of them is a Like though. I’m not sure that fact is really debatable.

        • Talos@lemmy.world
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          I’ll have to disagree there. When you Favourite a post, the person that posted it gets a notification about the fact, while if you Bookmark something no notification is sent. In effect you are telling the person that you “Liked” their post.

          Also, looking at the Explore section of Mastodon the following message is shown at the top of the feed:

          These are posts from across the social web that are gaining traction today. Newer posts with more boosts and favorites are ranked higher.

          So those Favourites are used by the algorithm to rank posts. Bookmarks are totally private and only used to save posts for your own use.

          • Steve@compuverse.uk
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            1 year ago

            Lets try it this way. Would say your favourites things, include everything you like? Do you like some things that aren’t your favorite? Do you keep a list of everything you’ve ever liked? Would it be as big as the list of your favorite things?

            Do you see the difference? It’s a mater of degree that separates them. They are not the same. That’s why they are two different words.

            • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works
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              Your getting lost in lingual semantics. It’s just called “favourites” but it’s treated, at face value and at the code level, the same way other sites/systems treat the word “like”. That’s what matters. It could be called “Flibflabs” and still be a “like” replacement.

            • planish@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              People will say stuff like “fave before replying” though. And most platforms with a like will be able to make you a list of everything you have liked.

              So I think like maps to the little Mastodon star pretty well, even though it might not be meant to be used that way.

    • PlaidBaron@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Im glad you pointed out the algorithm thing. Seems like people get fed up with social media platforms like X(?) and Reddit and then come to alternatives demanding the same features that, at least in part, led to them being fed up in the first place.

      I actually disagree with OPs assertion that these federated platforms are ‘almost as good’. Theyre better. More features doesnt mean a better platform and in my opinion often makes them worse.

        • iopq@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I don’t want a fancy algorithm, I just want to see the popular posts from the communities I follow

          Now, that’s not that simple either, since popular from a big community is different from popular from a small community, but still

        • planish@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          I have found Mastodon still does that. And it turned out to be a problem, actually. I just kept going on there for no reason and reading like 100 nothings.

        • tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk
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          1 year ago

          IRC is great, if a little underground these days. It’s also trivial to run your own although federating requires cooperation from both ends so it’s not quite as networked as lemmy or mastodon.

        • Madbrad200@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          adjusts glasses one could argue email is essentially a precursor to what we call federated services now, and it works as well as it always has. Predates IRC :)

    • moormaan@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      This is a great analysis, thanks for compiling such a comprehensive response.

  • krakenx@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • petunia@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
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      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.

      • whofearsthenight@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • w2qw@aussie.zone
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            1 year ago

            I don’t think necessarily have a few large instances is problematic. It’s fine as long as people can move to other instances, the issue would be if those instances leverage their size to force incompatibilities or defederation.

  • Move to lemm.ee@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • BeardedPip@lemmy.world
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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.

  • sure@lemmy.ml
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    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.

  • petunia@lemmy.world
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    1. 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

    2. It doesn’t look like this anymore on mastodon.social

    3. Search isn’t free so it’s up to the admins to decide how good/powerful they want their search bar to be.

    4. 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.

    • Zak@lemmy.world
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      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.

  • Fez@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    So users viewing this post on another instance will see the same exact comments and upvotes?

    • Nevoic@lemmy.world
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      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).

    • sunbunman@lemm.ee
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      My understanding is yes, but only if the instances have federated with each other.

    • russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net
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      Yes, on my instance for example your comment has 10 upvotes and 7 replies - the same counts are reflected on the origin instance lemmy.world.

  • WidowsFavoriteSon@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This reads like it was written by someone who wants to be an influencer on Mastodon and is frustrated that its designed so that can’t happen.

    • Quacksalber@sh.itjust.works
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      And that’s a bad thing. While you may think of Instagram- or OF models when thinking about influencers, there are also many artists and other content creators that rely on reach provided to them by large, easy to search through content platforms. If Mastodon by design hampers those people’s reach, they won’t join and with them all their followers won’t either.

      • jerkface@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        So, there are commercial networks for people who want to do commercial things with corporations and sponsors. Mastodon doesn’t want to be that. If someone wants to use Mastodon for that, they are fighting the stream.

        • Wollff@lemm.ee
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          And there are small independent artists who want to display their latest artwork to an audience of followers on a social media platform, with the potential of broader reach and impact. And there are activists, who aim to raise awareness by doing the same thing.

          What you seem to be saying, is that social networks like Mastodon are not for that. No artists. No activism.

          So, what’s Mastodon for?

          • jerkface@lemmy.ca
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            If by activism you mean paying money to the platform to force people to be exposed to your message even though they aren’t looking for it or interested, then no, you will have to stay in places where users are manipulated and exploited.

            But if you wish to have meaningful conversations with people one-on-one about subjects that are important to you, then you can do that kind of activism very effectively.

            If you just want Twitter, then friggin use Twitter, or Insta, or Threads, or whatever the corporate darling of the day is. They have that bullshit on lock. There is no point in just building the same thing again, and anyway, they’d do it better than us.

            • Wollff@lemm.ee
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              I see! Thank you for clarifying!

              So let me see if I understand you correctly. I asked what Mastodon is for. You answered that Mastodon is for having meaningful conversations with people one on one about subjects important to you.

              That would mean Mastodon is not in any way comparable to twitter, or any other social media platform of the like. To me it seems that, by this description you provide, it is best compared to a chat room, where you are together with a hand full of friends you already know, and can have a conversation. Just in a timeline that is a bit slower, and a bit more permanent than a chat room, but not quite as bloated as a classical internet forum.

              That means Mastodon is not “social media”. The purpose of you being there is not to easily discover new stuff which might interest you. And likewise you also can’t easily reach out to new people with stuff that interests you, and which you think might interest other people. Mastodon doesn’t want you to be able to do that easily. Because Mastodon is an internet forum with people you already know, just with an added word limit.

              So it seems I have misunderstood Mastodon. It doesn’t intend to be social media. It intends to be an early 2010s internet forum with a word limit. Now that I know what it is, and that this is what it is supposed to be, it makes a lot more sense to me.

              • clgoh@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                I don’t know about that. I use Mastodon almost exactly like I was using Twitter.

                I’m on a smallish instance (around 2K accounts), and I don’t have trouble finding interesting stuff.

            • clgoh@lemmy.world
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              Mastodon definitely isn’t built or designed for one-in-one conversations.

              It’s a microblogging platform for diffusing content, opinions or anything else people want to use it for, somewhat like Twitter, with some variations.

          • jerkface@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            That’s a good thing for us. They will draw off all the crap, allowing our communities to breathe easily.

            • Quacksalber@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              That is a recurring, moronic take. If you want a small community, go choose a small, defederated instance. Don’t declare that Mastodon/the Fediverse should by design be hostile to people reliant on discoverability.

    • Maxxy@lemmy.zip
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      I agree. The thing I like about Mastodon is that I made friends and met other people with similar interests. Nobody is trying to make interaction bait, it’s great.

  • TAG@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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).

  • geolaw@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    Mastodon has a feature that allows you to migrate from one instance to another within Mastodon. Lemmy does not, and I think this is an important feature to have

  • klay@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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!

  • Kronusdark@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Luis Norambuena@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      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).

      • whofearsthenight@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • ttmrichter@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago
    1. This is a feature, not a bug. Clout-chasing is what kills corporate/surveillance social media. Get over fantasy Internet points and start providing and consuming actual content.

    2. I’d like to see “trending” removed entirely from Mastodon. I don’t give a shit what people at large think is important or cool or funny or whatnot. I care what my social circle thinks is important or cool or funny or whatnot. And for that? I’ve got my feed. Get over algorithmically spoon-fed statements of what you should care about and, you know, interact. On social media.

    3. The search bar works, just not in the way any sane person would expect it to work. It’s badly designed, badly named, and badly implemented.

    4. This is an unfortunate side effect of distributed social media. Federation is already a huge bottleneck for the Fediverse. Adding social graph follows to the list of things being transmitted around willy-nilly is a bandwidth killer. Any social media that is truly distributed (read: not BlueSky) will have the same issue.

    • jennwiththesea@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago
      1. is the reason many of us were on Twitter to begin with. I never kept to with friends there, but I really liked seeing breaking news, etc. It was useful and functional. Madstodon is not useful in this way, which breaks one of the key features many of us want in a Twitter replacement.

      Sounds like I need to look at this Fish place instead.

      • 2pt_perversion@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That’s me. Besides the ads/promotion/tracking shit pre-elon Twitter was doing pretty much exactly what I want from it. It was mostly for the parasocial relationships not for keeping up with actual friends. I’d get news and announcements straight from the source quickly and even with a verified checkmark to help ensure I wasn’t getting trolled. Now it’s trash.

      • alizard@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Big agree, Twitter I previously used to see “what’s happening” in the world outside my little bubble

      • thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        That’s what makes threads like this so interesting to me. I never got into Twitter(despite many attempts literally since it was first released) but absolutely love Mastodon. And sometimes I read these threads and just think…what?

        But in reality it just comes down to your individual use case and whether the specific thing that Mastodon is actually fits that use case.

        Until this thread, for example, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a trending tab and I didn’t know there was a problem seeing people’s follows because it would never have occurred to me to look.

        I use the advanced interface and, while I do follow people, very very rarely pull up the home feed. My columns are all crafting hashtags and my local feed because I’m on a crafting-focused server.

        If you’re into following topics, Mastodon is a great time. If you’re into following people or you want to to kept up to date with the outside world then I can definitely understand not being a fan.

        • Matt@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I think this disconnect here on Lemmy comes from why people use the platforms they did before (Reddit vs Twitter).

          Reddit was always purely content focused, and I feel people trying out Mastodon from Lemmy are expecting the same thing - where Mastodon is about content, and not people you want to follow.

          I also love Mastodon as well and I don’t think the issues people are posting about in here are issues at all either, as Mastodon being about directly connecting with people and a purely chronological feed is why I like it - if I want to search content relating to a topic, I browse Lemmy instances instead.

        • iopq@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I tried following #ukraine on Mastodon, but I got spammed by repost bots so it just completely clogged my feed

      • ttmrichter@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        If you wanted spoon-fed content, then yes, Twitter is the place for you! And you know what? It’s still there!

        I left Twitter because of the spoon-fed content and the algorithmic attempts to “engage” me by fostering outrage and am happy that Mastodon thus far does not have this misfeature. If you want that misfeature Twitter is still there. So is BlueSky (eventually). So is Threads. So is Instagram. So is Facebook. There’s an embarrassment of choice for the pabulum crowd. Please don’t bring it here.

    • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago
      1. Seeing upvotes on posts is literally why you’re using Lemmy right now. Advertising / engagement driven media can exploit our desire to get feedback on what we say but getting feedback on what we say is not a new or novel phenomena, it’s a fundamental part of human nature and why we converse. It’s literally the exact same reason why doing a zoom presentation with cameras on, so that you can read body language, is better than cameras off, where you feel like you’re talking to an empty uncaring void.

      2. If you want to catch up with you family and friends go outside and talk to them or call them, or hell, set up your instance and only allow their posts to come through. The rest of the world users twitter to connect with the Twitterverse not their neighbours.

      3. I see no reason it would be any harder than Lemmy syncing upvotes acros ls thousands and thousands of comments.

      • ttmrichter@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago
        1. First, I don’t give a shit at all about the upvote counts (and even less of a shit about the downvote counts) on Lemmy. To the point I have them concealed. Second, so you’re saying a different piece of software with different goals does things differently? WOW WHAT AN OBSERVATION! YOU SHOULD GO APPLY FOR A NOBEL PRIZE, GOOD SIR!

        2. Please point to where I said “family”? (Hint: this is not possible.)

        3. You see no reason, ergo there is no reason, Q.E.D. You, sir, are also a consummate logician.

        • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago
          1. It’s a different piece of software with the same user facing goals, fostering online discussion in community run communities centered around different topics.

          2. Please look up what a semantic argument is, and then realize you’re missing the point.

          3. Sooooo…

          • You claimed something was impossible,

          • I pointed to an instance of it being possible that we’re using right now

          • you mocked me for being too logical? Ok.