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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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.
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.
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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/110696151311920356Viewing 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/favouritesSuch 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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The original federated service is IRC and is still perfect. :)
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.
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
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.
The mastodon community is so incredibly bad, they’re the biggest downfall. They also actively push for development of harmful features that kills adoption. If you disagree, you have a “growth” mindset which is somehow bad, and must be a silicon valley tech bro that hates lgbtia. Thank god Lemmy is a good example that discoverbility doesn’t need to be broken with ActivityPub.
Also they really need an algo, I don’t care how much they preach that it’s better without. It’s just incredibly boring and hides high quality content without one.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
Basically this all over.
IMO, Mastodon is a paradox that the fediverse needs to move on from. It is not an alternative to Twitter, but, its popularity rests on this very perception. And so we have a dominant platform, that most consider to actually just be the whole fediverse, whose dominance is in many ways arbitrary or luck of circumstance. Which is fine … that’s how things happen. But the sooner we move on from Mastodon dominating the fediverse the better.
The way I’ve put it previously is that Mastodon is an awkward middle ground that actually doesn’t work too well for many people. It’s neither particularly safe/healthy or particularly engaging or interesting. And so many BIPOC avoid it while there are LGBTQ folks who openly consider it problematic and are ready to jump ship whenever necessary, while journalists and anyone who’s looking to form wide networks (without being influencers or doing anything for-profit) don’t see the point. In many ways, it’s the white/western suburbia of social media … and while that’s a nice place to visit or be sometimes, there’s a good reason to not live there or be there all the time, especially when online.
On top of all that, it’s actually a pretty simple/brutalist take on what social media can be, to the point of being unnecessarily backward. And yet, by the numbers, it is basically the fediverse (like literally
of active usersare on mastodon!).The fediverse can do better. Will do better, and already has.
- There’s firefish (and Misskey too, from which it was forked, and Iceshrimp and Hajkey which are forks of firefish)
- see firefish.social, nice examples: lead devs personal page
- Or, how far the special form of markdown can be taken, collected in another feature called
Clipswhich are collections of posts: Clips of cool MFM(misskey flavoured markdown).
- There’s Akkoma
- Then there’s Lemmy and kbin.
- There’s firefish (and Misskey too, from which it was forked, and Iceshrimp and Hajkey which are forks of firefish)
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.
Huh I thought people on Mastodon just tended to prefer “retweets” over Likes haha
Personally, I’m happy with both. Lemmy and Mastodon are far from perfect and both feel sorta beta, though Mastodon is further along.
Search is weak on both platforms, imo, but I expect it will improve eventually.
You mention favorite counts only being your instance, but same is true for community subscribers here.
Also landing on other instances from outside links can be confusing to find the same content in your instance (Mastodon and Lemmy).
Federation does make things more complicated. But it beats centralization.
In the end, it comes down to your personal end use and preferences.
Personally, I like Mastodon for conversations and I like Lemmy for community building - I mod !alternativenation@lemmy.world - and that works for me. 💕
(Though I’d kill for some consistent performance from Lemmy after trying to comment 3 times)
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!
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.
I’m on kbin. Much better than lemmy.
My issue with Kbin is that it’s missing some of the communities from Lemmy. For example, h3h3productions@lemmy.world isn’t available on Kbin and I can’t add it. Also, it annoys me seeing empty image placeholders on every post. Last time that I used Kbin, it also kept showing error messages every couple minutes. Kbin just isn’t ready for mainstream adoption. Lemmy is.
Uh… You should be able to add it. You might need to search on:
@h3h3productions@lemmy.world. Which is the whole point of federation, right?There is a 20-character limit. I tried.
how do i remove random posts that appear on the side on kbin?
