I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to BlueSky for text-centric social media.

I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to BlueSky for text-centric social media.

  • ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world
    1·
    16 days ago

    While this is focused on Mastodon in particular, a lot of these criticisms are applicable to ActivityPub as a protocol in general. What’s interesting is that you see similar, albeit quieter courtesy of voting options, behavior even around Lemmy when it comes to “complaints about noise in the feeds”.

    On Mastodon/microblogs, you could mute/block/filter accounts/content you find uninteresting, much like you can block with Lemmy, but instead some opt more often to write complaints, meanwhile with Lemmy more often the choice is downvote (sometimes coupled with writing complaints). As much as I get that curating one’s feeds can get tiresome at times, it remains strange to me that given the tools people choose not to use them.

    I wonder how much of that may be a carryover from the corporate enclosures conditioning people to not believe they’ll work, given how little effect choosing, “See less often” seems to have in the enclosures.

    All that said, I don’t think the AT protocol has much of a better solution in regards to some of this. You may get all of your data by comparison, but without anywhere else to migrate it to, that doesn’t do much. It may address discovery, but that’s at the cost of distribution by relying on a central array of relay servers, which still largely mirror all the content.

    They also talk about aspiring for “stackable moderation”, but this amounts to trying to outsource moderation and pushing people to choose moderation (or labeling) services in echoes of choosing instances based on preferred moderation. This may mitigate some of the issues of binding moderation and service/platform, but as Bluesky itself demonstrates, some binding may be either inevitable or simply reemerge.