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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I’m on glitch soc instead of mastodon and I’ve liked it a lot
it pretty much fixes most of my biggest gripes with mastodon and I hide the counters anyway because the number isn’t very important to meThe 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.
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)
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This is a great analysis, thanks for compiling such a comprehensive response.
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.
I think it makes sense. Algorithms like the ones that Reddit and 𝕏 use are what keeps users coming back. They lure you in with addictive content so you keep coming back. People have started using social media for entertainment.
This is probably why so many people are turned off by Mastodon for very vague reasons. Often they’ll say “it feels death” despite having a healthy feed of random posts and hashtags on their instance’s homepage. It’s not that there’s no content on the Fediverse, people have just started expecting social platforms to provide them with their daily dopamine hits, and alternatives that don’t do that feel weird and disappointing. That’s what I felt for a while when I started using Mastodon, anyway.
I have found Mastodon still does that. And it turned out to be a problem, actually. I just kept going on there for no reason and reading like 100 nothings.
I don’t want a fancy algorithm, I just want to see the popular posts from the communities I follow
Now, that’s not that simple either, since popular from a big community is different from popular from a small community, but still
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Or you could do the most upvoted post minus its age, like a lot of sites still do. AFAIK hacker news does nothing fancy to its “algorithm”
That’s what Lemmy does! Well, sort of. The orange reddit algorithm is very similar to the Lemmy algorithms. In my experience, Lemmy is slightly better than HN (fewer posts that end up on top without any comments), but both only work when there is much more content to rank than there are pages to fill.
I think Reddit’s algorithms are much better for tricking people into staying around (for me, anyway). That approach doesn’t work for something like Twitter/Mastodon that doesn’t really do “voting”. Almost all toots have little to no interaction, even the good ones. Twitter’s algorithm has been documented and large parts (but not the important weights) have been open sourced, but I don’t think that can be implemented well on Mastodon.
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.
adjusts glasses one could argue email is essentially a precursor to what we call federated services now, and it works as well as it always has. Predates IRC :)
I mean, you’re not wrong. The “problems” of Mastodon are features. Avoiding an algorithm to suggest toots was done on purpose. It’s why likes are simply for the author, not really for others. Boost promote toots by increasing exposure.
Likes are not the same as likes on Twitter, nor should they really matter. The intent of Mastodon is not to promote some toots over others due to popularity which many times just creates feedback loops. It’s why you would see repetitive content on Reddit and if Lemmy gets remotely the same size, it’ll suffer the same way. Algorithms are problematic in that they tend to get abused.
I can see why others might find those features useful, but I am not bothered by any of it. To me, Twitter was a (micro) blogging site, so I treated it as such. I found organizations/creators that I wanted to follow and read my feed in chronological order.
I don’t care about likes and retweets, because every tweet in my feed was coming from a source I wanted to hear from. Reply count did matter, but mostly to know that there were responses.
I never cared what was trending because it was never something I cared about.
I only used search to find specific users (though it is easy enough to find them by Googling or looking for a link on that user’s website) and,.on very rare occasions, I would search for my city or neighborhood name to see if there was a cause to be commotion I was seeing
I never cared who other users followed or were followed by. Even looking at my own followers was an exercise in who stroking.
My biggest complaint about Mastodon is that none of the users I would want to follow are on it yet. It is not a big enough issue to keep me on Twitter but there is no reason for me to join Mastodon either (as a lurker and occasional replyer).
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.
My Mastodon search has never worked either, Lemmy is a much better Reddit alternative than Mastodon is a Twitter alternative
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This is a feature, not a bug. Clout-chasing is what kills corporate/surveillance social media. Get over fantasy Internet points and start providing and consuming actual content.
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I’d like to see “trending” removed entirely from Mastodon. I don’t give a shit what people at large think is important or cool or funny or whatnot. I care what my social circle thinks is important or cool or funny or whatnot. And for that? I’ve got my feed. Get over algorithmically spoon-fed statements of what you should care about and, you know, interact. On social media.
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The search bar works, just not in the way any sane person would expect it to work. It’s badly designed, badly named, and badly implemented.
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This is an unfortunate side effect of distributed social media. Federation is already a huge bottleneck for the Fediverse. Adding social graph follows to the list of things being transmitted around willy-nilly is a bandwidth killer. Any social media that is truly distributed (read: not BlueSky) will have the same issue.
- is the reason many of us were on Twitter to begin with. I never kept to with friends there, but I really liked seeing breaking news, etc. It was useful and functional. Madstodon is not useful in this way, which breaks one of the key features many of us want in a Twitter replacement.
Sounds like I need to look at this Fish place instead.
Big agree, Twitter I previously used to see “what’s happening” in the world outside my little bubble
Follow Deutsche Welle for news.
If you wanted spoon-fed content, then yes, Twitter is the place for you! And you know what? It’s still there!
I left Twitter because of the spoon-fed content and the algorithmic attempts to “engage” me by fostering outrage and am happy that Mastodon thus far does not have this misfeature. If you want that misfeature Twitter is still there. So is BlueSky (eventually). So is Threads. So is Instagram. So is Facebook. There’s an embarrassment of choice for the pabulum crowd. Please don’t bring it here.
That’s me. Besides the ads/promotion/tracking shit pre-elon Twitter was doing pretty much exactly what I want from it. It was mostly for the parasocial relationships not for keeping up with actual friends. I’d get news and announcements straight from the source quickly and even with a verified checkmark to help ensure I wasn’t getting trolled. Now it’s trash.
That’s what makes threads like this so interesting to me. I never got into Twitter(despite many attempts literally since it was first released) but absolutely love Mastodon. And sometimes I read these threads and just think…what?
But in reality it just comes down to your individual use case and whether the specific thing that Mastodon is actually fits that use case.
Until this thread, for example, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a trending tab and I didn’t know there was a problem seeing people’s follows because it would never have occurred to me to look.
I use the advanced interface and, while I do follow people, very very rarely pull up the home feed. My columns are all crafting hashtags and my local feed because I’m on a crafting-focused server.
If you’re into following topics, Mastodon is a great time. If you’re into following people or you want to to kept up to date with the outside world then I can definitely understand not being a fan.
I tried following #ukraine on Mastodon, but I got spammed by repost bots so it just completely clogged my feed
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Seeing upvotes on posts is literally why you’re using Lemmy right now. Advertising / engagement driven media can exploit our desire to get feedback on what we say but getting feedback on what we say is not a new or novel phenomena, it’s a fundamental part of human nature and why we converse. It’s literally the exact same reason why doing a zoom presentation with cameras on, so that you can read body language, is better than cameras off, where you feel like you’re talking to an empty uncaring void.
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If you want to catch up with you family and friends go outside and talk to them or call them, or hell, set up your instance and only allow their posts to come through. The rest of the world users twitter to connect with the Twitterverse not their neighbours.
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I see no reason it would be any harder than Lemmy syncing upvotes acros ls thousands and thousands of comments.
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First, I don’t give a shit at all about the upvote counts (and even less of a shit about the downvote counts) on Lemmy. To the point I have them concealed. Second, so you’re saying a different piece of software with different goals does things differently? WOW WHAT AN OBSERVATION! YOU SHOULD GO APPLY FOR A NOBEL PRIZE, GOOD SIR!
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Please point to where I said “family”? (Hint: this is not possible.)
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You see no reason, ergo there is no reason, Q.E.D. You, sir, are also a consummate logician.
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It’s a different piece of software with the same user facing goals, fostering online discussion in community run communities centered around different topics.
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Please look up what a semantic argument is, and then realize you’re missing the point.
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Sooooo…
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You claimed something was impossible,
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I pointed to an instance of it being possible that we’re using right now
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you mocked me for being too logical? Ok.
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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.
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.I’ll have to disagree there. When you Favourite a post, the person that posted it gets a notification about the fact, while if you Bookmark something no notification is sent. In effect you are telling the person that you “Liked” their post.
Also, looking at the Explore section of Mastodon the following message is shown at the top of the feed:
These are posts from across the social web that are gaining traction today. Newer posts with more boosts and favorites are ranked higher.
So those Favourites are used by the algorithm to rank posts. Bookmarks are totally private and only used to save posts for your own use.
Lets try it this way. Would say your favourites things, include everything you like? Do you like some things that aren’t your favorite? Do you keep a list of everything you’ve ever liked? Would it be as big as the list of your favorite things?
Do you see the difference? It’s a mater of degree that separates them. They are not the same. That’s why they are two different words.
People will say stuff like “fave before replying” though. And most platforms with a like will be able to make you a list of everything you have liked.
So I think like maps to the little Mastodon star pretty well, even though it might not be meant to be used that way.
Your getting lost in lingual semantics. It’s just called “favourites” but it’s treated, at face value and at the code level, the same way other sites/systems treat the word “like”. That’s what matters. It could be called “Flibflabs” and still be a “like” replacement.
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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No, you haven’t. It started out this way, but now basically it’s the “tell the poster you acknowledge/like the post” but also there when you don’t want to boost the post to your timeline. You can still use it this way, but because the community (probably with one of the first twitter exoduses) started using it more like a like on twitter, they gave up and implemented bookmarks (I think might be private and not notify the poster you’ve bookmarked?)
Ofc, there are also some of the mastodon HOA that will still insist this, but then why do bookmarks exist…?
Anyway, just in general, you can tell by the up/down ratio and a lot of the comments that are getting upvoted in this thread that are posting things that are either just incorrect or at least misunderstand things how many people in this thread actually use mastodon, so I would take criticism with a grain of salt.
lol, and I was thinking I was supporting other’s users opinions.
You are in a way. Just not only that.
> 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.
And yet, by the numbers, it is basically the fediverse (like literally ~88% of active users are on mastodon!).
I guess it must not be as bad as you make it out to be then?
something being popular doesn’t mean it’s good
Reddit has more users than lemmy. Can’t be that bad then!
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Of course! How could I miss it. The argument: “User numbers are an indicator of quality”, is not valid, unless in context of the fediverse. Because…
Wait, I don’t think me, being the dumb asshat I am, understand that: Why? Why do you think user numbers indicate that something “can’t be as bad as you make it out to be” in the fediverse, but not anywhere else?
It’s older
- There’s firefish (and Misskey too, from which it was forked, and Iceshrimp and Hajkey which are forks of firefish)
I’m using Mammoth to interact with Mastodon and other than the likes, reposting difference that’s made to diminish the echo chamber, it works very much like Twitter. Searching is great and the app works really well and looks great. Oh and the content is of much higher quality on the regular.
I like it as a concept but it’s got some growing to do.
So, you’re not so much interested in ‘social’ media as you are ‘attention seeking’ media.
It’s becoming apparent to me that all the complaints I see people posting about the fediverse are exactly the things that I like about it.
I love mastodon and it’s funny little brother Lemmy. Both are great.
Care to elaborate? Do you agree or disagree with the op on any of their takes?
