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Comment by closewith | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I had no idea. This means migration is next to useless.

The people responding to you saying this is expected are missing the point.

> This means migration is next to useless.

Well not completely. Lots of people see microblogging as the daily rant, the cat pictures. For them, it's not a big problem.

But for people like me that use microbloging as a way to publish content, that use the search feature quite often to retrieve past thoughts, past links, etc it's a fatal flaw, like other users told it.

Not to mention search itself being fundamentally broken in Mastodon - there is no way to search all servers at once, you will always only see what the instance you're searching on has ingested into its cache. There's no trending topics or if there is, it's outdated and/or unmoderated.

On top of that... instance mods powertripping is another issue. I don't care on which side of that godforsaken war in Israel/Palestine two different instance moderators are. But I do care when one of these morons drags in their user base into this bitch fight and decides to defederate from the instance ran by the other dude and suddenly I can't interact with a follower any more, I don't even get a warning "hey, you can't see posts from XYZ any more because their instance defederated from ours".

While I'd love to see Mastodon succeed at least in survival, it suffers from a bunch of very fundamental design and concept issues.

I strongly recommend looking at something like IndieWeb's POSSE. You post to your main blog, and some automation automatically crossposts it to Mastodon (or Twitter or ...).

The biggest problem with making Mastodon better is exactly that: anyone who dares suggest the way it's always been has a flaw will quickly be shouted down by people telling them that they're an idiot who clearly doesn't understand that the shortcoming is a feature.

We are on a forum, having a discussion. Not everyone disagreeing is someone shouting you down. Nobody called each other an idiot here.

Have you expressed disagreement with a duly sworn officer of the Mastodon HOA before? Because they definitely like to yell at and call people with whom they disagree idiots.

It is, frankly, a very unwelcoming place.

But maybe for them it's a feature. It keeps the microblog content in a particular shape, like daily chat but not too-serious, long-term-valuable content.

Clearly there's a market for both. And maybe they could even be... confederated? That is, it might be possible to combine several sources in your stream, and accept identities across servers for easy commenting. Heh, this all awfully reminds me of the stuff that was already built in early 2000s, with RSS/Atom, the original OpenID, and no huge corporations interested in taking over these small potatoes.

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