I have found Mastodon very hard to get into. Every guide that I've read always stresses, "Choosing the right instance is the most important part!" and yet… that rather requires you to already be familiar with a number of instances, which you're probably not if you're only just signing up!
It is basically like Twitter, but it's true that your experience is highly dependent on the instance you join (despite how unfriendly this is to new people). Different instances have different rules, so some are swamped by pornbots, others allow Nazis, and then you have some that actually expect their users to be real people who adhere to certain standards of behaviour. Many instances refuse to federate with Nazi/pornbot instances, but then sometimes instances refuse to federate for petty reasons… like just recently one stopped federating with the flagship instance because they felt it was too big and popular. If you were a user on that instance who DOESN'T want everyone on the largest instance to be blocked from your content, now you have to migrate… and while you can migrate your past toots over, I don't think you can bring your followers over with you. So people are reluctant to do that.
I feel like I like the idea of decentralisation and federation in theory, for similar reasons as – way back when – I liked that DW let users crosspost to other LJ-based sites and users of other sites could use OpenID to be granted access and post comments here. Just that the more things are federated, the fewer parallel accounts you'd have to maintain to talk to people – and it's also a nice escape from the advertiser-beholden major platforms of today. And yet, the actual experience of using it hasn't exactly grabbed me. Discovery is really hard, and I still haven't found enough users whose toots I enjoy to keep me coming back reliably. And while decentralisation certainly solves some problems, the moderation issues are definitely a new one being introduced.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2019-02-04 12:48 am (UTC)It is basically like Twitter, but it's true that your experience is highly dependent on the instance you join (despite how unfriendly this is to new people). Different instances have different rules, so some are swamped by pornbots, others allow Nazis, and then you have some that actually expect their users to be real people who adhere to certain standards of behaviour. Many instances refuse to federate with Nazi/pornbot instances, but then sometimes instances refuse to federate for petty reasons… like just recently one stopped federating with the flagship instance because they felt it was too big and popular. If you were a user on that instance who DOESN'T want everyone on the largest instance to be blocked from your content, now you have to migrate… and while you can migrate your past toots over, I don't think you can bring your followers over with you. So people are reluctant to do that.
I feel like I like the idea of decentralisation and federation in theory, for similar reasons as – way back when – I liked that DW let users crosspost to other LJ-based sites and users of other sites could use OpenID to be granted access and post comments here. Just that the more things are federated, the fewer parallel accounts you'd have to maintain to talk to people – and it's also a nice escape from the advertiser-beholden major platforms of today. And yet, the actual experience of using it hasn't exactly grabbed me. Discovery is really hard, and I still haven't found enough users whose toots I enjoy to keep me coming back reliably. And while decentralisation certainly solves some problems, the moderation issues are definitely a new one being introduced.