this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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I mean, if it's that big a deal you can always roll up your own instance. Isn't Truth Social just a rebranded Mastodon fork?
I'm more annoyed by the search and the front page, which forces me to switch between channels in order to put together a feed. It's poorly integrated and difficult to navigate.
That's before you get to simply Networking Effect. The people I want to follow aren't on Mastodon, so I'm not going to be on Mastodon. As soon as they all jump over, I'll join them.
First of all, if the response to moderation is "well, you can just do it yourself", then it is absolute garbage.
But on top of that the problem with Masto moderation (and moderation here, while we're at it) is that blocking doesn't go far enough and the answer from the evangelists always ends up being "you should defederate", like people were hardlocked to instances.
It's weird, it doesn't scale, there is no proper concept of blocking anyone and no way to enforce individual penalties. It's a mess.
It kinda works here because the subreddit equivalents typically ARE tied to instances, and that's something you can sorta manage, even if the individual moderation is still trash. But for a Twitter clone? Just not fit for purpose.
And I'd say while most people aren't aware of that and Masto never got popular enough for it to be a real issue, it's part of the cocktail of bad tech-to-design fit that made a bunch of people with big followings bounce. They showed up, had no existing userbase, the chronological-only firehose restricted them to followers in their timezone and they didn't have proper moderation to shut down the army of Mastosplainers that kept popping up to explain why having reach is bad, actually.
So it went back to being a residual thing for progressive tech people happy to have a small chat with the same four guys who procrastinate in their same timeframe. And for porn on main, I was suprised to find when I moved to a larger instance.
Luckily there is active work on things, both on protocol level as well as with some kind of "federated moderation system", aimed to reduce workload for mods and admins and increase consistency without weakening the strengths of a federated system (like that rules and moderation styles can differ).
In general the Mastodon gGmbh was simply overrun by demand (and they REALLY didn't make things better by funneling people towards them with that awful Mastodon app), and both them losing tax exemptions due to bad german governments as well as bad decisions by Eugen (like working with Meta / Threads) lead to Mastodon underperforming. That shit sucks.
It can get better though, and people are working on that.
I think the reaction to Threads federating was another nail in the coffin. Threads lost its spot as the leading alternative for very good, self-inflicted reasons, but if anybody who does Twitter for a living needed proof that Masto couldn't be trusted was that they saw the notion of a large participant with a critical mass of users, tons of resources and at least some version of a recommendation engine as an affront.
Everybody panicked about "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" and it turns out Meta didn't need to expand or extend anything, the temper tantrum from even the suggestion that they would use AP (whose goals were supposed to be universal interoperability in the first place) was enough to crack Masto in half and throw the entirety of it into a massive spiral of open-source style arrogant, holier-than-thou ragefest. Threads became THE subject matter of Masto for the foreseeable, after Elon and Twitter were THE subject mattter for a long time. It was positiviely stalkerish behaviour and a significant reason I left the moment Bluesky gave up the PR-ish "we're cool because we're invite only" crap.
As for the working on that part, I'll believe it when I see it. In the time they've been "working on it" Twitter died, Bluesky was made, ran under the radar for a while, then blew up and every other alternative died.
It's too late now, anyway. It's the husk of Twitter and Bluesky now. If Mastodon ever had a shot at mainstream prominence that window is now firmly closed and never coming back.
The Lemmysphere never had a shot at mainstream prominence and Reddit was never in trouble the way Twitter is, much as people around here are often in denial about that. It is more sustainable as a small thing, though. It's effectively just a mid-size forum and as long as your interest overlap with the communities that do exist it's fine being small. Probably would be nicer being a few times bigger, but hey, that may still happen over time.
Mastodon needed to be a proper social network and that is never going to happen now, new features or not.