Yikes

I have to say them setting themselves up to have "BS" as an acronym was a bad choice. Although I still hope it was intentional.

Look, it's fine. You don't need to be into successful things. But a bulletin board of hot takes is the core functionality of microblogging.

If you make a Twitter-like for "deep" conversation then... don't make that. That's why I prefer it here.

The character limit is in place because Twitter was a constant flow of headlines scrolling past your feed. You stepped into the stream and let the news and hot takes wash over you, get mad every now and then and ragetweet back, join a dogpile, whatever.

It's toxic and bad, just like all social media, but it's intended to feed you quick bites of condensed info constantly.

You want deeper, then go somewhere where you have no character limit, proper discussion threading and no focus on media posts. So... you know... here, kind of. Reddit, but by extension here.

But Twitter was successful because the flood of microhits was useful for famous people to reach out to fanbases asymmetrically while still retaining some feedback and validation and for people who needed access to those (journalists, marketers and activists, mainly) to be able to reach out and receive info from them directly and easily.

Mastodon is NOT that, and so Mastodon makes no damn sense. This does. Pixelfed does. Mastodon does not and it will never be a Twitter replacement for that reason. And since it's made to be a Twitter replacement it will never be much of anything else, either.

Well, since all the variants of a community are visible from everywhere if this ever got big you'd think users would consolidate around thing. And this does happen with some. There are many groups around gaming or tech or Linux, but there's typically a bigger one among those and as a new user you search and look for the one with the most people. And you can just follow them all and your feed just does the job of surfacing them for you together.

And there are some tools for managing reposts and the like that aggregate identical posts. It's far from perfect, I agree, but it is functional.

But for a Twitter-like the idea is that people would group in instances based on interests and instances would revolve around interests. But that's not how those work. You don't follow twenty people that only talk about one thing each. People talk about a bunch of stuff. And people don't stick to a theme within an instance in the first place, they just need an entry point to the firehose, and all entry points give you the firehose. You can host a hundred people with one thing in common, but their output won't be the same and you will also be hosting a number of randos unless you're strictly invite-only.

That means that using defederation as a moderation tool has a ton of collateral damage. People who chose an instance at random and got cut off with it. People who chose your instance and were following legit users of an instance you defederated. People who are on a solid instance but some bad actors joined it. People who disagree with a defederation choice on principle. And since Masto's instance migration tools are even worse than its moderation tools when inevitably some petty bullshit leads to federation wars you're going to end up having to migrate and rebuild a bunch of stuff. The opposite is also true, there is no guarantee that the bad actors will stay put in an instance if you cut it off defensively. And individually blocking them is pointless, since whatever new user they create will be fundmentally different and distinct despite looking the exact same because with the way accounts work across instances there is no way to prevent duplication on short handles. It's a mess.

Here you're subscribed to a subreddit thing that IS tied to an instance. If that gets really bad then sure, some of that collateral damage may also happen, but at least regrouping around a different version of the same thing is a communal process. You don't have to track down every individual user again, you just start posting on the second most popular version of that thing and go from there.

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.

Finding accounts to follow on Mastadon is fer less intuitive than finding some Lemmy communities to follow

And if people would just recommend or advertise instances, and try to grow instances rather than the network directly, there'd be no problem. But every Fedi platform falls into this ptoblem of hiding the host and championing the platform itself, rather than powering independent social websites.

It's so frustrating and sad.