Great blog post on where mastodon is up to now, but mainly the general topic of what it means to open a social media space and make decisions about how it works or doesn’t work.
The author is on mastodon: @kissane@mas.to
A good and interesting read, and a good reminder of some of the awkward bumps those using federated platforms for awhile may take for granted when trying to invite others to join in.
Tbh some of those bumps that are specific to Mastodon (e.g. text search/Content Warning culture/quote posts) make me think it may be better to direct folks to instances run on different backends without some of those friction points (e.g. Akkoma/Firefish~Calckey/Misskey). Although those introduce their own set of quirks to deal with (particularly Misskey/Firefish being even more different in style), that’s mostly unavoidable when making the move to any different space.
Telling people to “just use Firefish” is a common thing that comes up when people talk about this, but it’s not really a solution at all with where we’re currently at. (this isn’t aimed at you, by the way, just addressing this specific point)
Whether we like it or not, Mastodon is by far the biggest player in the microblogging space (8M accounts on Mastodon vs 499K on Misskey at #2. with Mastodon being 77.9% of the entire Fediverse!), and it is going to be what the vast majority of people are using, simply due to word of mouth or mindshare. On these sorts of platforms, many features depend on the people you’re posting to also experiencing the same features you are. Quote posts are a very popular topic that’s requested for various reasons on Mastodon, but while the 3rd party apps and other microblog platforms have these implemented, it doesn’t matter if 80%+ of your followers are using Mastodon, because they won’t see the post as you intend for them to see it.
Furthermore, as we know, the “culture” of Mastodon is of the Fediverse at large, using a different platform isn’t going to fix this issue - your community is what you make of it depending on your instance really, but fact of the matter is, most people are going to be drawn to the simpler general instances “where everyone is at”, which is going to be the big Mastodon instances. Trying to divert those people to other platforms isn’t going to work, because they don’t understand how all this works, so good first impressions need to be made on Mastodon, and unfortunately due to the culture of Mastodon attracting a certain type of crowd and no mass migrations to “Eternal September” the culture, especially since Threads now exists, this is going to be a very hard barrier to overcome.
Whenever I’ve talked to people about Mastodon outside of the tech-savvy spaces, most people just see Mastodon as an app and there are “people on Mastodon”, attempting to try and introduce people to all these different platforms and how you can still talk to everyone in places unfortunately just makes their head explode, as they’re not used to the open web due to how it evolved after the rise of Facebook.
Mastodon is stuck between a rock and a hard place, where it wants to make decentralisation the norm by attracting as many people as possible, while still keeping its general culture in place and not wanting to turn into “another Twitter” which usually ends up being filled with hot takes and people dunking on people for entertainment - but unfortunately, this is how people consume social media now, it’s all about content.
Whenever I’ve talked to people about Mastodon outside of the tech-savvy spaces, most people just see Mastodon as an app and there are “people on Mastodon”, attempting to try and introduce people to all these different platforms and how you can still talk to everyone in places unfortunately just makes their head explode, as they’re not used to the open web due to how it evolved after the rise of Facebook.
Yeah, I tend to agree with the rest of your post, and I’m highlighting this part because I feel it’s probably one of the biggest missteps so many of the federated platforms have made. It helps to have a couple sort of “demo” instances to help folks understand how it works, but the flagship model that many have taken (e.g. Mastodon.social, Lemmy.ml (at least at first), Pixelfed.social, Calckey/Firefish.social, etc.) has had the unintended effect of somewhat obfuscating the basic distinctive features of the platforms, i.e. distribution/decentralization & federation.
It’s apparent no one has cracked this problem yet, otherwise we wouldn’t have this repeated “misstep” across the platforms, and in this regard I’m no different in terms of not having much of any better ideas. Imo to an extent each of these platforms is in a similar situation to Mastodon in terms of being between a rock & a hard place, but Mastodon definitely moreso than the others simply due to its popularity.
The inertial problems you cite are very real. However sometimes change is just slow, like the growth of the fediverse or mastodon has been.
People are being pulled off from the fringes of mastodon and overall I think the diversity in the fediverse is increasing, albeit at a slow pace. Momentum has started to build I think behind the idea of moving on from mastodon. There’s even words out that they are only able to work on new features rather slowly and aren’t doing so right now at all. Against the progress of new platforms, that may build into a problem. Sure non tech people won’t know about platforms outside of masto, but that’s how things get started and built.
The main impediment diversifying the fediverse, as I see it, apart from building the other platforms of course, is account lock in with a server, the lack of nomadic identity and all the things coupled together in selecting an instance. I for example like the admins of my instance but don’t like that they run mastodon. That feels like unnecessary constriction.
Nomadic identity is a bit of a weird one, because there’s no silver bullet. It’s either:
- People store their credentials and data on their own systems in a peer-to-peer like system, but people are going to be constantly losing their access to their identity if they do this, so while this is technically ideal, it isn’t going to work for those that aren’t too familiar with technology. People have gotten very used to not having to look after their data in recent years.
- The identity is handled by some sort of identity server for authorisation, but what this will most likely do is give rise to some centralised identity services that you’re going to have to trust, which arguably may be against decentralisation.
I do agree it would be way better for a single account/identity to just work everywhere on the Fediverse, but I’m not entirely sure how the details should be handled. Nostr is one implementation (it’s the first one), whereas things like SSO with Google / Microsoft is the second (kbin, for example, has this).
I have noticed that Mastodon development has slowed down considerably though, but admittedly it must be hard having requests from literally every angle about every use case and concern. It’s easy for us to say “just add quote posts”, “just add search”, but the people who have already been on Mastodon have used it knowing those don’t exist, so the Mastodon developers have to implement these things while still thinking of every use case and also still sticking to their own beliefs as to what Mastodon should be.
