Comment by tensor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tensor | Hacker News Reader

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There are a number of things I don't like about mastodon.

1. The platform is outright hostile to discovery. You generally can't even index posts in a search engine. This is not what I want, at all.

2. Moderation is awful. Letting individual servers control moderation at their whim is not what I want. In contrast, Bluesky's idea of labelling services and opt-in moderation sounds amazing.

3. After point 1, it probably goes without saying that Mastodon is outright hostile to algorithms. While I agree that algorithms can be very problematic, Bluesky's approach to opt-in algorithms is an interesting approach.

4. I think the ship has long sailed on Mastodon. It's failed time and again to gain enough critical mass for non-tech people to adopt. Clearly the combination of above issues, or even maybe the confusion of onboarding, is too much.

Overall I'm glad Mastodon exists, and perhaps Bluesky wouldn't be what it is without first seeing what worked and didn't work with Mastodon.

I'm glad that Mastodon didn't gain enough critical mass for non-tech people to adopt. I see that as a feature.

I see quite a lot of non-tech people on Mastodon. Many are academics, but many aren't.

That's my impression too. There was a flock of academics and relatively non-tech folks joining a few years ago. Most didn't stay, and a few of those who did are now flocking to Bluesky.

But the others seem to be very much at home. They are not millions. They are probably prioritizing the small communities that have formed over maximum reach.

> You generally can't even index posts in a search engine.

That's a per-instance setting in an easy to find place in the Administration section. It's not doing anything more complex than swapping ROBOTS.txt files.

If on per-instance, there are also per-user settings to opt-in. (Again, it mostly just tweaks ROBOTS.txt.)

The off-by-default nature makes it seem "hostile" if your intent is to roll your own Fediverse index, because you actually have to read ROBOTS.txt files and abide by them. On the other hand, it is nice because it sets an ecosystem norm that indexes and bots should respect ROBOTS.txt and are considered bad actors to destroy if they can't be bothered to do the simple thing of respecting a ROBOTS.txt file.

The off-by-default nature makes it a little bit harder to find an instance if you do want your posts indexed in a search engine, but that's a part of why good federation means a diversity of instances.

Also, if they are your posts you want searchable nothing is stopping you from using an API to repost them to any other website you control with search engine indexing. I've seen several bloggers include their microblog posts from ActivityPub on their blog. That's my "eventual" plan for my own ActivityPub posts; I don't want the "live feed" search indexed, but I may want to eventually curate "best of" stuff, add context, do some revisions/editing, and upgrade them to blog posts.

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