Context: Technology Connections is a YouTuber https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
This is his account on Mastodon https://mas.to/@TechConnectify
Context: Technology Connections is a YouTuber https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
This is his account on Mastodon https://mas.to/@TechConnectify
I’m sorry he hasn’t liked it, but critique is how we get better. Hope Mastodon keeps growing.
It’s frustrating, because a lot of the interesting people to follow and engage with on Mastodon have also jumped to Bluesky, and the fedi crowd continues to crow about algorithms and brain rot, when the biggest reason people bounce off of Mastodon is the other people on Mastodon.
There’s a deep undercurrent of “angry, hostile nerd”. When people started flooding Mastodon in 2022, you could see the binary reaction of “Finally, the recognition we deserve!” and also “you’re in my house now, you fucking normie, and you’d better start acting like it”.
Unsurprisingly, the “fucking normies” noped out, either immediately, or as soon as they had another option that satisfied their objections with Twitter.
But we’re going to wring our hands and bitch about onboarding flows and the great sin of defederation, because it let’s us ignore that we are the problem.
I don’t know how to word it, but what I really hate about mastodon is that the cancel culture is like 10x every other platform. As soon as you have a slight disagreement on something it’s because you’re a homophobe and a racist and an ableist and you hate autistic people and whatnot. If the word woke wasn’t so used by trump to mean not being a fascist, it would be reserved for this kind of people. Idk I don’t like that mastodon is basically full of self diagnosed neuro divergent people. There are two extremes on the political spectrum, there’s the facist and mastodonists. I understand why someone wouldnt want to stay on there, it’s genuinely not a good place to have discussions on
It’s got a lot of untreated, traumatized people, and frustrated power nerds on it, and both groups let you know it with haste.
The kicker is, the population is still small enough that they could be easily overwhelmed and put in their place, but you need a real mass of semi-tightly networked people to come over and take over the space, and that’s… just not the way community migrations work. So they can fairly safely gatekeep the space.
Well, until Threads washes over everything. I don’t want to give shit to Zucks, but Threads will fundamentally change the makeup of the fedi microblog space in an instant, and that instant is growing ever closer.
You don’t understand why or how platforms like these got made, don’t you?
If enough people came in to “put them in their place”, the way you describe, this place would basically become Threads (or Twitter) anyway.
I do know. I just don’t care. I believe in an open internet, not a place set aside for people to live out their Revenge of the Nerds fantasies. ActivityPub allows people to have their sheltered spaces, and also not attack the public square.
They’re choosing to attack the public square anyway, because they don’t want their shelters, they want the whole fucking world. And they can’t have it.
Decentralisation could very well lead to specialised instances for niche interests or fringe groups. I mean, exactly this has popped up during the first two Twitter migration wave.
And still, you’ve got countless people who want mastodon.social to be exactly the way they want it to be, regardless of what anyone else may want, or what’s possible on such a big instance. Because that’s where they are, and they are not going to move elsewhere.
This is the best way of putting it, the whole thing about people complaining about defederation. Honestly fuck the people who are like this, who do you think you are asking for the whole world when you weren’t entitled to it in the first place. You weren’t entitled access to Facebook content from Reddit or vice versa. It’s the same here.
I know that part of the reason people like that came her in the first place was because Mastodon and the OG fediverse services made that empty promise to them in the beginning (also saying a lot of shit about freedom and free speech) so those are the people that have been attracted. It really needs to be said loud and clear that this isn’t the case or intention, and catering to people who want the world when they don’t deserve it, is not the goal of the Fediverse or decentralization.
I agree!!!
Speaking of critique, this reply thread on Mastodon by him is probably worth reading (regardless whether you agree or not) https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/113056731556590285
The link isn’t operational.
Sorry, try this one https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/113056731556590285
Thanks. This works. I fully agree with comments made. I still have not found Mastodon intuitive to use daily as I find Lemmy.
Honestly, this suggests to me that the ability to defederate might be a bug rather than a feature.
If my instance doesn’t talk to the instance at foobar.example, I might be unable to see (parts of) relevant discussions. This is worse for a microblog like Mastodon than it is in the threadiverse but it’s still something to keep in mind even over here. And most non-enthusiasts don’t want to have to do that.
Email is an example of a successful federated platform and it barely has defederation support. But in general all mail servers can talk to all other mail servers as long as they provide the right look-at-me-I’m-legitimate signaling. That makes email easy to use for regular people no matter if they use Gmail or their cousin’s self-hosted mail server.
Perhaps that is how at least the non-threaded fediverse should work… However, that would also mean that some instance hosting heinous shit would keep being visible to everyone. It’s a tricky problem.
Couldn’t disagree more.
The simple fact of the matter is, the fediverse is local. Everything you interact with is locally hosted on whichever website you’re using. That means, if I’m running Mastodon or Lemmy on my website, I’m platforming everyone who has contact with my website.
And I’m not going to want to platform a lot of people. I’m not going to want to pay to host their posts. I’m not going to want to deal with dealing with other websites who refuse to moderate their instance, and who refuse to take out their trash. Suggesting that people should be forced to is how you ensure that people don’t run ActivityPub enabled websites at all, and you reduce the fediverse to a semi-centralized family of, like, 5 big websites, and a thousand Nazi troll instances that become too much work to deal with.
Couldn’t disagree with you more, the thing about federation is that it isn’t viewing the content on the server it was posted on, it is crossposting it to all other federated servers. That means you are when federating remote content you are literally platforming it. That also means you are liable for it if it’s objectionable or illegal content. So being able to not accept those crossposts is important. Honestly defederation and limited federation are not as big of issues as you and others think they are, you can ignore the majority of the defederated servers and it’ll be fine, the issue comes when people want the world and aren’t entitles to have it, like I said in my other comment.
You are insanely naive for saying this. If you’d used non-corporate email servers, like the much smaller email providers out there (which are basically extinct at this point) you’d know just how wrong this actually is. Most smaller email providers out there are blocked or limited by the big ones and the ones that are blocked your mail will never reach the inboxes of people on the big servers, not even the spam folders on those servers. They won’t bounce it back to you either, so it’ll just go into the void.
Most email these days is used primarily by the all mighty trinity: Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo, and a Few on Hotmail and AOL and while there are a few smaller companies out there like Proton, when it comes to something that isn’t a company or is self-hosted you can expect a lot of problems with domains being blacklisted, IPs being blacklisted, or both. And it’s actually much worse than defederation.
You’re beginning to realize why the decision to limit spam and illegal shit was chosen over catering to the people who want the whole federated world instead of what they’re allowed access to. Ultimately it is better for everyone if the depraved shit and spam gets blocked, than it is for the people who want the whole world to have their way. If you want the world, go to Nostr, you’ll learn why most people do not want the world.
There is less of defederation in the email network, because mail has been build to reach its destination no matter the path or the time, message must arrives even partially. (this was a premise of the US military, at ARPAnet). Even if a mailadmin blocks one server, mail could go another route. This is also the base of the internet, path is not the most straight forward direct link between source and destination (companies are usually against this structure)
AT or Mastodon don’t have this freedom or constraint (depend of one point of view).
This is what I have been thinking!!! Defederation is THE WORST feature of fediverse, and trust me, it will keep people away from joining the fediverse.
I just remembered that a year ago some artist I really liked joined Mastodon. I tried following it through my old account on kbin.social but somehow it doesn’t work, no clear error message. After asking around I figured it out: turns out said Mastodon instance defederated from kbin.social, with no valid reason given!!
Because of shit like this, no wonder people–including tech-savvy person like me–are confused of choosing the right instance of Mastodon/Lemmy/etc. It’s what makes the onboarding experience of Mastodon awful. It’s what makes Mastodon losing users, IMO.
Defederation all by itself isn’t bad.
Immature and irresponsible instance admins who use it as a tool to act out their personal conflicts are.
I’ve been looking for a new instance to join due to various reasons. Ended up setting up and account somewhere and spending 2 hours manually copying over various settings only to find my Moshidon client won’t even connect with that new instance. Normal people are just going to quit when that happens.