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.

  • petunia@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago
    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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      1 year ago

      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.