starseerdrgn | A few thoughts on Mastodon (Reply)

So, I wanna get this out there before anything else: I like how Mastodon has tools to stop abuse. It's a very welcome change from Twitter's allowance of abusive behavior by their moderation staff.

However, something that's really started to irk me is the community. Between blacklists that rob the users themselves of the choice to follow or block instances on a personal level, to the requirement of some members of the federation to whitelist instances before anything's seen by their users, to an outright toxic culture that's been growing out of resentment toward the developer of the software's main branch, it's really not a "safe place" like so many people would have you believe. In fact, it's not even close to being safe for those who just want a bit of peace.

Instead of a moderated, happy community, the Mastodon federation comes with a lot of hateful ranting, enough shitposting* to fill the federated timeline constantly in some cases, a lot of in-fighting, very loose enforcement of rules, and enough fragmentation to make Android jealous. Really, StatusNet never got to this level before it became GNU Social, so this is a whole new level of hell that even Twitter wouldn't know about.

(* Seriously, there's more noise than there is signal on the federated timeline that I see.)

And it's not really the fault of Mastodon itself. It's the community.

There are really great Mastodon instances, such as blimps.xyz (which I'm part of), mastodon.art, and dragon.style to name a few. But when you go out into the greater federated timeline, you run into effectively Twitter Lite. And while you have the ability to block and mute a lot of it, there's also a lot of great stuff you can't see since Mastodon doesn't show the full timeline of federated instances--only those of users it knows about.

In fact, this is one of Mastodon's biggest actual flaws: discovery of the good things.

The search box is practically useless. Searching without hashtags doesn't work, but people are encouraged not to use hashtags unless it's to get a message of some sort out there. Looking up users requires that you know what that person's username is and the instance they use...which you could just go to the profile itself and initiate a remote follow.

And there was going to be a solution to this: a trending hashtag system from the federation. But people complained in a (very toxic) way that caused the developer to pull the feature completely, simply because there was a chance of abuse.

Just... The more Mastodon's community tries to wrestle control, the more Twitter-like it becomes, and that's sad. I really think Mastodon has the chance to become something great for people, but chance is constantly worn away by the loudest people of the very community that it hosts. Sometimes even by people with legitimate problems that need addressing, who simply go too far in how they voice those issues.

Do I think Mastodon will last? Yes. I think it has a future. Do I think it's a viable alternative to Twitter? ...No. Maybe at one point in the past, before the community became so toxic, but not anymore. Not without inflicting some major damage to the Mastodon federation as a whole, and that wouldn't be right.

Will I continue to use it? ... I don't know. I honestly don't know. It depends on how the community turns out, because as it is, it's becoming more like another Twitter, and that was what I was trying to get away from.