Technology Connections' thoughts on Mastodon
(bsky.app)
from hono4kami@pawb.social to fediverse@lemmy.world on 06 Dec 04:20
https://pawb.social/post/17092569
from hono4kami@pawb.social to fediverse@lemmy.world on 06 Dec 04:20
https://pawb.social/post/17092569
Context: Technology Connections is a YouTuber www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
This is his account on Mastodon mas.to/@TechConnectify
threaded - newest
im confused. is it a ghost town, or is it full of people giving him instant 'shit'?
I think he is saying that of the total interactions he gets he would expect a large amount of hostility to his opinion on Mastodon, and it is also a small population which is available to interact with on platform. Consistent, just talking about the experience and an objective measure. In my opinion Mastodon will be helped by Bluesky adding a paid membership. The worse it is the better for Mastodon, and honestly if people have already started moving out from Twitter to Bluesky they are not locked in yet so moving out again is easier, they already dropped Twitter but Bluesky is not solidified yet.
We just need to get accounts as fediverse universal and instance agnostic and thats 99% of the problems solved
"Ghost town" = Not driven to oversharing by algorithms.
"getting shit" = nobody wanting to listen to a youtuber's outrage bait.
It must be confusing to log into the fediverse straight off of Youtube, though. "Why aren't people compulsively clicking and subscribing to everything? How am I not being recommended radicalising posts by conspiracy theorists and terror organisations within five clicks?"
"Honey, this is Mastodon"
<switches to Blooskie>
"Ah, much better!"
This comment right here. This is what he’s talking about.
Good, mission accomplished 👍
You don't have to be a dick, you know. There are other ways to live.
Oh, do educate me on my life choices based on an unrelated online comment, internet stranger 🙄
FWIW, I'm living my best life, rejecting influencers and enjoying a low- to no-drama fediverse. Anybody feeling bad for a Youtuber failing to peddle their bullshit to Mastodon can kindly get in the sea.
Have a nice day
Grow up
.
The problem is the lack of auto-hiding of comments like this. Normally, on a Reddit thread, this would be buried and shunted to a “click here to read the stupid ass bullshit that one idiot wrote and got downvoted into literal Hell” link.
Please, give me that in Lemmy, instead of having to always look at the abysmal score at every comment.
I geniunely can’t understand what you’re trying to say
Perhaps the other reply was right–this comment is what he’s talking about
Could be wrong, but possibly he’s talking about this about “getting instant shit”:
mas.to/@TechConnectify/112995177480955078
(look also at the reply)
I’ve gotten an extremely similar comment on a couple posts I’ve made here on lemmy, in a video community no less.
Personally I just said something’s like “welp, sorry that’s not your preferred format.” and then just move on.
With how infrequent posts like that are, they don’t effect me at all, but It’d probably suck more if I was consistently getting negative comments like that,
My gut instinct is to think, this is just a dumb person being mean on the Internet.
But upon reflection, no one would say this on yt, twitter, Facebook, etc. because people are sharing actual bullshit on there. You would be dunked on so hard for complaining about yt videos or just ignored. There would be no point in complaining.
On one hand it’s nice that Mastodon doesn’t have ads, and people usually don’t share bullshit, but does that logically result in attracting users who shit on someone for sharing a YouTube video, because sometimes other videos on YouTube are bad?
I like that Mastodon has actual conversations but I don’t like this guy being dumb.
I have lost count the amount of times I’ve shared a YT video on Lemmy, and people bitch about the fact that they have to spend 15-60 minutes watching it, or immediately ask for some TL;DR about it. Like, I’m curating content for you, sharing a video I liked among the other videos that you probably didn’t like, and people just want to universally shit on the format because of that one bad experience from two years ago when they dared to go to the web site for 5 minutes.
People love to shit on TikTok, but secretly, that’s the length of content a majority of this audience wants, and it’s dumb. If you don’t want to devolve into a TikToker, then watch longer videos and don’t bitch when somebody asks you to watch a video for 10 minutes. If you don’t like it after a few minutes in, fine, go watch something else.
Could be wrong, or just more domain-specific, bu my experience is people don’t complain that the video is 15-30 minutes long, is that it’s a video (and that long) when the information could have been more succintly and practically displayed in a text tutorial or a blog format. Basically “this could have been an e-mail”.
Not to mention that way people avoid having to go to YT which is yet another cesspit community-wise.
You are right that people have shorter attention spans ofc, but then again when it comes to tackling it it’s largely an issue of medium: in the world of coding you can convey easily copyable or testable instructions in text format maybe with attachments, that can be verified in up to 60 seconds… or you could post a 30 minutes long video plus ads. Why would anyone expect the Fediverse, with the kind of people who are naturally attracted to it, to prefer the latter, no idea.
“You are right that people have shorter attention spans ofc”
Why do we all endlessly state this narrative as if it was a fact.
Like I get the feeling but there is very little good evidence for it.
Scientists don’t even largely consider attention span a useful concept to understand the human brain.
Because it’s true.
"Recognize that attention is task-specific. One reason it’s so difficult to definitively say whether or not attention spans are decreasing is that it depends on the task with which someone is engaged. We may be able to sit through an entire 2-hour, action-packed movie, but start to squirm within 10 minutes of a nature documentary. Infusing things with storytelling and interactivity are two evidence-backed ways of increasing the likelihood we’ll be able to sustain focus. "
The entire narrative about attention span hinges upon this fundamental distortion, you cannot separate your ability to pay attention to something into an abstract universal quantity, your capacity for attention is always intimately interwoven with the environment around you and the specific task at hand. Attention span is a pop culture concept, not a scientifically rigorous one making any science done about attention span unable to actually illuminate the unknown since the concept being studied simply comes undone with a tug on one of the founding assumptions. In popular culture attention span is defined axiomatically as decreasing because of technology, and discussion works backwards from there.
The references cited also don’t really support the conclusions the article comes to (“Challenging the the six-minute myth of online videos”), or they are links to pop-science articles talking about the topic, not actual evidence on the topic. An amusing example of this is the repeatedly, endlessly cited "McSpadden, K. (2015, May 14). You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish. Time. time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/".
Goldfish are specifically studied because they can be trained to remember things and focus on them, they do not have “short attention spans” so the entire metaphor is broken from the start.
There actually isn’t any hard evidence even in the original paper that popularized the idea… it was a white paper from microsoft not a scientific publication by academics
See this article: forbes.com/…/science-shows-humans-have-massive-ca…
It is also pretty easy to poke holes in the narrative that our attention spans are decreasing, driving a car takes an insane amount of concentration, more than arguably almost any other human activity practiced by billions of people on earth. If our attention spans were decreasing, the very first place you would see it would be in a huge increase in traffic crashes and deaths. You also wouldn’t see a vibrant world of longform youtube videos on niche topics that are made by some of the most perennially popular and watched video content makers. People wouldn’t be listening and reading to books, listening to longform podcasts, or engaging in hobbies that take significant preparation.
Further, the industry of marketing, perhaps one of the entities with the most interest in how we actually pay attention to things vs. what the popular narratives are about our attention span isn’t convinced our attention spans are decreasing either.
More things are competing for our attention, so we are more selective and discard things quicker in a fashion that is totally rational. Daily life has also become exhausting for most, if you notice you are unable to focus like you used to it is probably because you are more tired, stressed and have less free time than you did in the past. If our “attention spans” were decreasing the way everybody seems to believe they are, the impacts would be catastrophic and look like entire populations undergoing early onset dementia, and as someone who has spent years around people with dementia… that is clearly not what is happening at all.
Or it’s a lot of information to digest and an “e-mail” or blog article would have been too long and visually-unappealing to properly convey the information. Videos have words, pictures, and sounds. Even if it was in article form, they just want it so that they can skim parts of it, and pretend to read it, while not digesting a damn thing. Why bother with actually reading anything when you can shove it in an AI summarizer and get the best possible summary that takes 5 seconds to read?
It entirely depends on the channels you watch. All of the comments I read on the channels I follow are fine. I don’t know what other people are having a problem with, but maybe they shouldn’t be following Mr. Beast or Logan Paul bullshit.
Oh how much I wish people would listen to you on this…
Which is kind of interesting, considering it wasn’t that long ago that people asked for tutorials and other information in the shape of videos because they couldn’t be bothered to read shit.
I womder if “history is cyclic” applies here somehow and all that…
But I feel it’s kinda a more domain-specific thing. I’d venture and take the guess that people in some fields such as origami or other arts & crafts, as well as cooking, would actually have far better use for instructions and how-tos in video format (or at least in audio…) than in text, for one.
(I’ll be both happy and unhappy to be ackshually’d, and for the same reasons :p)
Not at all surprised.
I follow Alec on Mastodon and the vast majority of interactions over the past few months have been people aggressively "well ackshually"ing him or outright getting angry.
That isn’t to say it is all shit (I would like to think a few conversations I had with him were mutually pleasant). But his entire ethos is that he approaches problems from a practical “midwesterner” perspective. And that REALLY angers all the ideological nutjobs who are angry if anyone even suggests something that won’t advance their own pseudo-political goals.
And I’ve noticed it with a lot of other “celebrities” on Mastodon. The rest of us can have fun conversations while the shitheads stay to themselves. They are too high profile and the shitheads flock to them to make sure they understand why they are actually wrong and are a bad person for thinking something.
Honestly I feel the fediverse is like the 90s internet. It’s like school clubs centered around different interests and it takes a little bit of work to find your peer group but once you do it’s great. People that look to it as a replacement for Twitter are looking for a town square to shout at people and hock their wares. Anyone that makes money from engagement ether directly or indirectly are not looking for camaraderie but a market.
The world is driven people hocking their wares i dont thinks we should stop that. In fact a federated store based on xmr might be the next step in global fediverse dominance.
Maybe that’s why I didn’t like Bluesky it was all attention-seeking and curated accounts
It didn’t help they did the exclusive invite only launch of the service making it appealing to that kind of person and pushing kind of behavior to 11.
Maybe this is part of why I keep bouncing off Mastodon. It feels tight-knit. It’s about individuals, about relationships.
I don’t fit in such a system. I’ve nothing to offer in a relationship, I cannot be a “comrade.” Still, I want news, media, and easily accessible knowledge being shared.
So, I’m a lurker, a consumer. I tend towards anonymous forums and spaces centered around topics rather than people. Or, I seek celebrities, and sellers, and content creators.
Either sort-of give me something I want, while Mastodon doesn’t. Too focused on the people, but without big names to follow.
I had to unfollow him because discussion on my feed ended up so overwhelmingly negative I just didn’t want that in my life :/
Mastodon is more for people who like to have interactions or conversations back and forth with other people, while the big platforms are for influencers/broadcasters and consumers/viewers-- any back and forth interactions there are more between commenters than with the influencer/broadcaster. Of course there is some overlap and exceptions to that characterization, but that’s how it generally seems to me.
So IMO it’s not a competition, there’s plenty of room for both types of SM. Depending on a person’s preference they may use just Masto, just big SM, or use both, each for different reasons. The problem is when people expect Mastodon to be just like xitter/bsky/threads and get upset that it isn’t. Relax and use whichever platform(s) you like.
When I want to have back and forth between people on a regular basis, I choose chat apps. Mastodon feels like it’s trying to be a poorly designed chat app.
Kind of a combination maybe? Since Mastodon lets you find new people with similar interests by browsing what’s on your local timeline or hashtags of interest, and you can still follow people of interest without any chatting. I don’t know much about chat apps but don’t you have to already know the people beforehand, or come across them via a mutual acquaintance or invite to a chat room?
Of course, Mastodon can be and is used for broadcast/consume interactions, but not as much, since most broadcasters want a huge audience with little interaction, which means a big platform, while the ones on Mastodon are probably looking for a bit more interactive experience with a smaller audience.
I’m sorry he hasn’t liked it, but critique is how we get better. Hope Mastodon keeps growing.
I agree!!!
Speaking of critique, this reply thread on Mastodon by him is probably worth reading (regardless whether you agree or not) mas.to/@TechConnectify/113056731556590285
The link isn’t operational.
Sorry, try this one mas.to/@TechConnectify/113056731556590285
Thanks. This works. I fully agree with comments made. I still have not found Mastodon intuitive to use daily as I find Lemmy.
Honestly, this suggests to me that the ability to defederate might be a bug rather than a feature.
If my instance doesn’t talk to the instance at foobar.example, I might be unable to see (parts of) relevant discussions. This is worse for a microblog like Mastodon than it is in the threadiverse but it’s still something to keep in mind even over here. And most non-enthusiasts don’t want to have to do that.
Email is an example of a successful federated platform and it barely has defederation support. But in general all mail servers can talk to all other mail servers as long as they provide the right look-at-me-I’m-legitimate signaling. That makes email easy to use for regular people no matter if they use Gmail or their cousin’s self-hosted mail server.
Perhaps that is how at least the non-threaded fediverse should work… However, that would also mean that some instance hosting heinous shit would keep being visible to everyone. It’s a tricky problem.
This is what I have been thinking!!! Defederation is THE WORST feature of fediverse, and trust me, it will keep people away from joining the fediverse.
I just remembered that a year ago some artist I really liked joined Mastodon. I tried following it through my old account on kbin.social but somehow it doesn’t work, no clear error message. After asking around I figured it out: turns out said Mastodon instance defederated from kbin.social, with no valid reason given!!
Because of shit like this, no wonder people–including tech-savvy person like me–are confused of choosing the right instance of Mastodon/Lemmy/etc. It’s what makes the onboarding experience of Mastodon awful. It’s what makes Mastodon losing users, IMO.
I’ve been looking for a new instance to join due to various reasons. Ended up setting up and account somewhere and spending 2 hours manually copying over various settings only to find my Moshidon client won’t even connect with that new instance. Normal people are just going to quit when that happens.
Lemmy.World (LW) is a nice place: ~80% of the entire Fediverse is there, and it has some of the best communities and least trouble connecting with those communities of all instances.
On the other hand, using LW goes against the entire spirit of decentralization that is one of the primary hallmarks of the Fediverse. So I definitely agree that you may want to explore some additional options. If you are adamant about being defederated from nothing, some instances to look at include Lemm.ee (the #3 largest instance after LW and lemmynsfw.com, see lemmy.fediverse.observer/list for more, and for best results sort by Active Users) or lemmy.today. The #4 instance sh.itjust.works is also quite nice I hear. #6 Hexbear.net is a troll instance and while #5 lemmy.ml pretends to be leftist it is actually tankie (I hate that term as it is pejorative, but they really truly do deny that the Tiananmen Square massacre actually happened, as in that anyone actually died in it, so it does fit). You may want to find a regional instance, like Discuss.Online is in the USA, or a language one like feddit.org is a German/English mix, or a themed one like Lemmy.zip is for “tech, PCs, and gaming”. Pay attention to the uptime stats, that’s an important one for me. Maybe for an app that can grab content in a manner that doesn’t always have to be live it could be less so?
Btw in the future, while I have never heard of that app name, in the webpage UI you can go to Settings -> Import/Export Settings “Import and export your account settings as JSON”. Choose Export, and then wherever you want to set up a new (perhaps an Alt?) account choose Import and give it that file. Messages sent to your old account will not follow you, i.e. there is no way to set up forwarding yet, but at least your community subscriptions and block lists will be transferred. Even if you have to do this once from the web UI, this will definitely affect whatever app you use after that.:-)
Oh wow this is a lot. I should have just made a post about this - maybe I will!?:-P
While this is a great writeup on Lemmy instances, the thread was specifically about Mastodon and it’s numerous forks. I believe they use the same tech but are vastly different things. The instance I found wasn’t quite Mastodon apparently, even though it works very similar and the app designed to connect to a Mastodon instance wouldn’t connect to it.
It does get all manner of interconnected doesn’t it?:-)
Your account is on Lemmy.World, this community is on Lemmy.World, and pawb.social is a Lemmy instance, so I thought we were talking Lemmy.
I don’t know much about Mastodon specifically, although I do know that Mbin servers - primarily fedia.io - can connect to both Lemmy and Mastodon instances.
Changing the software in the drop-down to Mbin shows similar stats for instances running that: mbin.fediverse.observer/list shows those, and sorting by Active Users reveals that fedia.io contains ~82% of all users on instances running Mbin.
In contrast, virtually nobody is still running Kbin: kbin.fediverse.observer/list - just one instance with 48 active users.
Btw the newer Lemmy alternative “PieFed” is growing: piefed.fediverse.observer/list, though fewer than 200 users total world-wide, so more something that we keep eagerly anticipating than something currently and fully “here”:-).
Anyway, perhaps the app just needs some time to be able to connect to that new instance? Rather than wait though, you may want to contact the developers - they could potentially add it right away and rather than resent the contact even appreciate your feedback and interest, maybe? :-)
Defederation all by itself isn’t bad.
Immature and irresponsible instance admins who use it as a tool to act out their personal conflicts are.
On the off chance that you are not joking (or worse, trolling), that is very much the fault of Ernst, the Kbin.social instance admin, for having abandoned the instance that he created for months at a time and allowing spam to flood the entire Fediverse through that server. He had multiple extenuating circumstances, which he profusely apologized for, but aside from that I don’t blame other instances from defederating with it in the slightest. I also still have an account there, and I too have not been able to access the website in about a year, and I too have blocked the entire instance, bc it was virtually the sole source of all of the spam that I was getting across all of Lemmy.
You can read more about it here: pawb.social/post/2658114 (original).
I did not downvote your comment here, but I will say please don’t be so eager to spread misinformation on the Fediverse. I found the above link simply by clicking the circle button and searching for the phrase “Kbin.social”, and I even confirmed that you are able to do so on your instance. Leaving the default sorting options in place, this was the 4th hit and the 1st one that immediately jumps out upon human inspection of the titles as being the most highly relevant.
You will do as you please ofc, and people will learn to ignore / block you as a result if necessary, and only very very rarely someone may attempt to correct you (at least in a gentle manner:-) as I’m trying to do here, and as I would have wanted done for me. But if you correct yourself before speaking, then others don’t have to go to that trouble, and your words will carry more weight. I offer this as food for thought anyway.:-)
I wasn’t trolling, my response was geniune and I was disappointed. My comment wasn’t clear, please don’t take it the wrong way.
This was when kbin.social was REALLY active. IIRC probably around June 2023? When Ernest was still active maintaining the kbin.social instance. The Mastodon instance I was talking about is mastodon.art. And if I search around, I’m still right that the instance seems to REALLY like to defederate without valid reason, I will link some thread that talks about this below [^1].
I wrote about the detail of this in kbin.social, but kbin.social is no longer active so I’ll admit I kind of forgot the detail.
As far as I remember the reasoning stated in mastodon.art federation status is that “right wing” or something along that, at the time. I knew at that time that was wrong. I don’t really care about right wing or left wing (I am just a Southeast Asian, that dichotomy of politics is kinda unrelatable to me, but that’s topic for another time). But kbin.social was definitely not “right wing”, in fact it was one of the “leftist” place I’ve seen on the internet.
Even then, the reasoning feels kinda off to me, other than the fact that it wasn’t true, why would you defederate instance over difference of opinion? If the instance was spamming your agenda to your instance then it’s probably justifiable. But it clearly wasn’t at the time. [^2]
And regarding “keeping people away from fediverse”, I was talking about the UX of fediverse.
That time, I wanted to follow someone from mastodon.art as said person is an artist I really like that was disappointed with Twitter and trying out several alternative social medias. Somehow they chose to join mastodon.art. I was happy and wanted to follow said artist. I tried following them but I remember I had a hard time doing so.
Turns out my instance was defederated.
At this point, I’m sure most non-tech-savvy user would have given up. But I still tried following it anyway. I tried creating mastodon.art account, and, it turns out, mastodon.art sign up requires approval. At that point, I kinda given up. It’s gonna take lots of time until it gets approved, so why bother?
The admin behavior somehow actually made me doubt that I will get approved too (though to be fair, it ended up being approved). And then, why would I use the mastodon.art account, when the instance is defederate-happy, making it actually hard to discover another artist to follow (in an app that already have some problem with discoverability)?
Since then I started using less and less fediverse. I was kind of annoyed by this experience.
Defederation perhaps is necessary.
But it is prone to abuse by admins. And that degrades user’s experience.
[^1]: beehaw.org/post/6853561 , lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/4695219
[^2]: Going off topic for a minute, this is yet another part that I don’t like about some folks in the fediverse. It seems similar to my observation of US domestic politics. They just want to stay in their own bubble and doesn’t want to compromise and hang out with people with different opinion. That isn’t how I was taught to live. I hang out with people with different beliefs–be it religion, politics, ethnics groups, etc-- all the time. These kinds of behavior made it hard to have some actual discussion. Those people lacks nuance.
Oh I hear you. Back on Reddit, I was not liking the idea of joining a place made for and run by supporters of Russa, China, and North Korea (I mean, software is just code, but still…), so I was ALL ABOUT Kbin!:-) Ernst let himself down - and with good reason, due to his job and his family and his overall life - and thereby all of us, by not sharing his instance admin duties with anyone else who could take over. Especially when he announced that he was going to the hospital (and then did not respond to anyone for weeks afterwards), THAT is when the spam started, I noticed, from communities where the mods had abandonded them. The big waves did not happen until later, but I noticed earlier waves even then. That much at least might not the fault of Ernst, but it became his duty at that point to shut those communities down, and yet he refused (or was unable to, either way), and so the spammers had a field day with his negligence. (Also, to be honest, the mods abandoning it really was his fault as well - I myself could not log into the server for multiple WEEKS at a time, and when we did get in it was so slow as to be practically even if not wholly non-functional. Mods only abandoned an already sinking ship at that point. And yes it did rally back a bit, and then sunk again, repeating a few more times before it finally went down and just never came back up again.)
It actually serves as quite the lesson for us all. Too bad it is at Ernst’s feet, but it is what it is - the guy was somewhat heroic I thought, for taking on the project of starting up an entire alternative codebase to Lemmy, and Mbin today is somewhat fantastic still! And yet… he was not perfect, nobody is:-|.
I am aware of quite a few examples of defederation - just go to any instance and search for that word and you’ll see many:-). But I’ve never seen one that did not cite a very specific reason, that without researching further I thought at least naively sounded reasonable to me. Also I’ve actually caused an example of defederation: see my Petition to defederate from hexbear.net, which also offers several links to other petitions from instances that did the same quite awhile ago. Here’s an interesting one from Beehaw to Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works: beehaw.org/post/567170 (and then their response in return: sh.itjust.works/post/129725).
But yeah, Mastodon has been going stronger than Lemmy for longer iirc, and I’ve heard that it it plagued by defederations, so I definitely need to preemptively agree with you that defederations for no reason are bad. It might be like talking about divorce: always bad, yet other things are worse sometimes, so sometimes the least worst choice, while other times perhaps done too readily, and either way a very very serious issue that should be given the most serious of thought. I’m with you there.
I also agree that Kbin.social was not right-wing: on the other hand I can kinda understand that one better, having heard similar thoughts before. The USA as a whole is more right-oriented than e.g. the EU that is more left-oriented, so e.g. for myself inside the USA, Bernie Sanders seems quite the leftist compared to every other politician I’ve even heard of here, and yet compared to those in the EU he would be considered centrist or even right-wing. i.e., much like introvert vs. extrovert, the standard of comparison is relative to where someone is located at, currently.
Even so, why should one instance defederate from another instance purely due to personal preferences like that? (precisely as you said) Reasons to defederate that are fully valid, imho, are when one side is not engaging in good faith argumentation. Which I don’t recall ever happening on Kbin.social. Therefore, the side defederating from it was likely to have been engaging not in good faith? So perhaps good for you to have gotten away from it then? (Though to be clear: conversely, the fact that Kbin.social later was sending out spam all across the fediverse is a perfect reason to defederate from it.)
The UX of the Fediverse is really quite poor, which is part of why so many are flocking to the likes of BlueSky even as they leave Reddit + X + Facebook, rather than Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed(/Sublinks?) + Mastodon + Friendica. A major part of the reason where Lemmy at least is concerned is the lack of cross-instance moderation ability, which severely hinders people who are not all lumped together onto one single giant instance (one Lemmy dev, Nutomic, put this onto the roadmap, but not until software version ~0.20, whereas the most recent version is currently only 0.19.7, so this won’t be for perhaps another half
Couldn’t disagree more.
The simple fact of the matter is, the fediverse is local. Everything you interact with is locally hosted on whichever website you’re using. That means, if I’m running Mastodon or Lemmy on my website, I’m platforming everyone who has contact with my website.
And I’m not going to want to platform a lot of people. I’m not going to want to pay to host their posts. I’m not going to want to deal with dealing with other websites who refuse to moderate their instance, and who refuse to take out their trash. Suggesting that people should be forced to is how you ensure that people don’t run ActivityPub enabled websites at all, and you reduce the fediverse to a semi-centralized family of, like, 5 big websites, and a thousand Nazi troll instances that become too much work to deal with.
There is less of defederation in the email network, because mail has been build to reach its destination no matter the path or the time, message must arrives even partially. (this was a premise of the US military, at ARPAnet). Even if a mailadmin blocks one server, mail could go another route. This is also the base of the internet, path is not the most straight forward direct link between source and destination (companies are usually against this structure)
AT or Mastodon don’t have this freedom or constraint (depend of one point of view).
Couldn’t disagree with you more, the thing about federation is that it isn’t viewing the content on the server it was posted on, it is crossposting it to all other federated servers. That means you are when federating remote content you are literally platforming it. That also means you are liable for it if it’s objectionable or illegal content. So being able to not accept those crossposts is important. Honestly defederation and limited federation are not as big of issues as you and others think they are, you can ignore the majority of the defederated servers and it’ll be fine, the issue comes when people want the world and aren’t entitles to have it, like I said in my other comment.
You are insanely naive for saying this. If you’d used non-corporate email servers, like the much smaller email providers out there (which are basically extinct at this point) you’d know just how wrong this actually is. Most smaller email providers out there are blocked or limited by the big ones and the ones that are blocked your mail will never reach the inboxes of people on the big servers, not even the spam folders on those servers. They won’t bounce it back to you either, so it’ll just go into the void.
Most email these days is used primarily by the all mighty trinity: Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo, and a Few on Hotmail and AOL and while there are a few smaller companies out there like Proton, when it comes to something that isn’t a company or is self-hosted you can expect a lot of problems with domains being blacklisted, IPs being blacklisted, or both. And it’s actually much worse than defederation.
You’re beginning to realize why the decision to limit spam and illegal shit was chosen over catering to the people who want the whole federated world instead of what they’re allowed access to. Ultimately it is better for everyone if the depraved shit and spam gets blocked, than it is for the people who want the whole world to have their way. If you want the world, go to Nostr, you’ll learn why most people do not want the world.
I’ve been using a self-administered mail server (running on a root server at a major hosting provider) as my main email provider for well over a decade. I think I’ve encountered one website where that actually led to issues. Heck, the server once got on Spamhaus’s bad side for a week and once we were off the list everything was back to normal.
Self-hosted mail works very well one you’ve jumped through all of the appropriate hoops (DKIM, SPF, etc.). Sure, running a mail server out of your bedroom probably won’t work very well but if you’re with any kind of reputable hosting provider you should be fine.
The problem is that defederation leads to confusing situations. Being told about a response to your post/comment/toot and then finding nothing when you look is bad UX. Better UX would be a notice that what you’re looking for comes from a defederated instance and can’t be viewed – but that’s obviously impossible because your instance doesn’t even know anything is there.
Not wanting all the content on your instance is perfectly reasonable. But the way defederation works exposes details of the underlying technology to the user in a way many users don’t want to have to deal with, serving as an impediment to growing the fediverse.
It’s not easy to keep unwanted stuff off your instance while also being user-friendly about it. That’s why I called it tricky.
It’s frustrating, because a lot of the interesting people to follow and engage with on Mastodon have also jumped to Bluesky, and the fedi crowd continues to crow about algorithms and brain rot, when the biggest reason people bounce off of Mastodon is the other people on Mastodon.
There’s a deep undercurrent of “angry, hostile nerd”. When people started flooding Mastodon in 2022, you could see the binary reaction of “Finally, the recognition we deserve!” and also “you’re in my house now, you fucking normie, and you’d better start acting like it”.
Unsurprisingly, the “fucking normies” noped out, either immediately, or as soon as they had another option that satisfied their objections with Twitter.
But we’re going to wring our hands and bitch about onboarding flows and the great sin of defederation, because it let’s us ignore that we are the problem.
I don’t know how to word it, but what I really hate about mastodon is that the cancel culture is like 10x every other platform. As soon as you have a slight disagreement on something it’s because you’re a homophobe and a racist and an ableist and you hate autistic people and whatnot. If the word woke wasn’t so used by trump to mean not being a fascist, it would be reserved for this kind of people. Idk I don’t like that mastodon is basically full of self diagnosed neuro divergent people. There are two extremes on the political spectrum, there’s the facist and mastodonists. I understand why someone wouldnt want to stay on there, it’s genuinely not a good place to have discussions on
It’s got a lot of untreated, traumatized people, and frustrated power nerds on it, and both groups let you know it with haste.
The kicker is, the population is still small enough that they could be easily overwhelmed and put in their place, but you need a real mass of semi-tightly networked people to come over and take over the space, and that’s… just not the way community migrations work. So they can fairly safely gatekeep the space.
Well, until Threads washes over everything. I don’t want to give shit to Zucks, but Threads will fundamentally change the makeup of the fedi microblog space in an instant, and that instant is growing ever closer.
You don’t understand why or how platforms like these got made, don’t you?
If enough people came in to “put them in their place”, the way you describe, this place would basically become Threads (or Twitter) anyway.
I do know. I just don’t care. I believe in an open internet, not a place set aside for people to live out their Revenge of the Nerds fantasies. ActivityPub allows people to have their sheltered spaces, and also not attack the public square.
They’re choosing to attack the public square anyway, because they don’t want their shelters, they want the whole fucking world. And they can’t have it.
Decentralisation could very well lead to specialised instances for niche interests or fringe groups. I mean, exactly this has popped up during the first two Twitter migration wave.
And still, you’ve got countless people who want mastodon.social to be exactly the way they want it to be, regardless of what anyone else may want, or what’s possible on such a big instance. Because that’s where they are, and they are not going to move elsewhere.
This is the best way of putting it, the whole thing about people complaining about defederation. Honestly fuck the people who are like this, who do you think you are asking for the whole world when you weren’t entitled to it in the first place. You weren’t entitled access to Facebook content from Reddit or vice versa. It’s the same here.
I know that part of the reason people like that came her in the first place was because Mastodon and the OG fediverse services made that empty promise to them in the beginning (also saying a lot of shit about freedom and free speech) so those are the people that have been attracted. It really needs to be said loud and clear that this isn’t the case or intention, and catering to people who want the world when they don’t deserve it, is not the goal of the Fediverse or decentralization.
With so many opportunities presented to it, Mastodon still hasn’t found its footing with the mainstream audience.
I think its users should accept the platform will remain a niche for the foreseeable future.
The amount of negativity on that thread alone is enough for me to realise that bluesky is not for me. I enjoy the positivity I find on the fedi and decided I wouldn’t use a platform that algorithmically rewards negativity when I was harassed off facebook. I am glad that others are finding it nicer than twitter but for me it seems much the same but without Elon Musk
When you compare Alec’s recent videos with his early ones, it’s pretty clear that the negativity he receives has been wearing him down. Like many YouTubers, even when he’s sharing information about something he loves, he’s very bitter and sarcastic about it. Like, half of each video is trying to pre-argue with his trolls.
I understand why popular content creators have to set boundaries because it seems like a pretty soul-destroying job to have. If Bluesky helps him do that, more power to him. But for a nobody like me, I prefer Mastodon, largely because I’ve made friends with people on my local instance, and interacting with other servers is merely a bonus feature.
How low do you have to be to criticise Alec? He’s funny, informative, and I love the presentation of his videos. One of the last remaining great YouTubers. Apparently, being a pedophile is more acceptable on YouTube than being a good person. Now, why did I leave again…
Agreed. Technology Connections is one of my favorite channels – it’s always a good day when Alec posts a new video. I wish people would treat him better, he certainly deserves it.
It’s a joy to watch someone passionate and well-researched talk about something they enjoy. His videos do nothing but make me happy and interested in a thing. I can’t imagine someone watching him and getting mad about it.
Aww man, who is being mean to Alec? The guy is a YouTube gem.
I feel like we need to unite and make Mastodon a better place instead of making drama about it. Mastodon is not perfect, but it’s a platform over which we have control, unlike Bluesky.
I unfollowed Alec on Fedi because every other post would be him complaining about his interactions on there. Reply guys. Trolls. Lack of algorithms which raise some of the better comments out of the drek. Insufficient moderation. Etc. This got boring and depressing to read about honestly.
However I think he’s totally right. Mastodon/Fedi works well for certain kinds of people. People with limited engagement, people posting mostly uncontroversial things, and perhaps people who just don’t give a shit. But for high-visibility folks like Alec the old-school unfiltered discourse seems really uncomfortable.
It has little to do with federation itself, I think. But if Mastodon ever added the choice for users to enable “modern social media algorithms” for their view of their feed I suspect it would work a lot better for many people.
Mastodon simply is a different thing than X/Bluesky. It’s more like RSS/Blog/IRC. It will never go mainstream unless they add (opt out) algorithms and a better search functionality. But maybe that’s just not worth it. Mastodon has already lost to Bluesky when it comes to being an open mainstream Twitter replacement.
I’m curious about if it’s even technically possible to build something federated that feels like a Twitter replacement, using the ActivityPub protocol.
Okay, that's his opinion. Like his opinions on many things, I feel entirely free to disagree with him.