VectorLock

Like I said, notoriety and control of users. People ran BBS servers to be sysops, IRC servers to get O:lines, open source projects to get their name out there, etc. "Pure altriusm" could also be a motivator.

I never said Mastodon was a failure because its not Twitter. I'm somewhat skeptical but I think the jury is still out on Mastodon. There is a lot of potential there. Part of me thinks the Fediverse is a great idea but it causes more problems than the value you get from it.

This is a great list, practically summed up every issue I've found in my few days of poking around.

Gmail client on Android lets you change profiles by swiping up/down on the profile icon which is probably one of the best discoveries of my week (its been a slow week)

It might be hard to quantify the positive/negative impact each of these have had but you have to agree they all had major effects on society.

You can use a service; not all of them are invite only, or you can setup your own blog software. Federation is pretty close to RSS. Yes it's trying to be microblogging.

Mastodon looks like Twitter, functions like Twitter, apes Twitter's features such as using @username, and even calls its posts "Toots." You really can't honestly argue that Mastodon isn't trying to be Twitter.

"Let the instances choose their own moderation" that people think is a great feature seems to have serious downsides like you're describing. Before on Twitter you knew, generally speaking, what was allowed on Twitter and what wasn't. Now you have not just a whole panoply of different moderation standards, but instances making decisions on if what other people's moderation policies are acceptable to them, which ads a whole level of indirection an opaqueness to users. And forget about any ability to try to appeal...

Federation really does seem more and more to be like a major shortcoming vs. its material benefits.

There is a good argument that Twitter and a whole class of other social media and related sites (HN, Reddit, YouTube, TV etc) are "time wasters."

I think if any of these disappeared, or all of them, are people suddenly going to start finding more productive uses of their time? No, they're just going to find other time wasters.

Looking at it from another perspective what is the INCENTIVE to run a Mastodon server? What are those server costs and time to setup and moderate worth?

Notoriety? Control over the users?

How do you eat an elephant?

A bite at a time.

We've had 40+ years to develop spam blocking techniques for email, hopefully it won't take that long for Mastodon.

Widespread adoption came from easier to use systems that didn't require you to go out and piece things together.

High barrier to entry systems to keep out the "normies" is already a solved, and incredibly uninteresting problem.

Although I loved LambdaMOO and thought we could see an evolution of smart contracts in that direction but cryptobro greed might have ruined or soured that potential future.

One man's bug is another man's feature I suppose.

If you don't own the instance can you follow things on instances you're not federated with?

The experience with twitodon.com is very clunky. Since people seem to be putting their mastodon tags in their Twitter "name" fields now it seems like it'd be a much more streamlined process to just scrape that.

Block each of a million individual spam bots manually. I'll wait.

Have you looked at Mastodon? Have you not noticed they're called "Toots?"

I don't think the hashtags are a great experience. Common hashtags get overloaded with junk, how do you know which hashtags to use, you need to register with some external service (and find out about it) like fediverse.info which I've found to be a pretty clunky experience. These are the kind of ergonomic wrinkles I was thinking about.

Block each of a million individual spam bots manually. I'll wait.

The obvious retort is "I just block everything by default." You have now closed yourself off and the spambots have won.

I think the thing that helped Facebook grow and survive (as long as it did) in this way was its focus on real identities.

Sounds like you're happy with a vBulletin / blog experience.

Mastodon wants to be Twitter, or at least really tries to ape Twitter.

Some people like the big commons experience of Twitter and would like to see that somewhere else.

FidoNET (got I loved FidoNET) had a central coordinating authority, you had to get on a nodelist.

With Mastodon it gets incrementally harder to just add someone. Are they on the same Mastodon instance as me? Does my Mastodon instance federate the Mastodon instance they're on? Is this handled client side with multiple identities? Now how do I handle these multiple identities, so I broadcast "toots" (cringe) to all of them?

>It seems to me the mastodon community (or parts of it) leans towards a rather weird understanding of identity and community.

I get that sense too. It feels mostly like vBulletin with Birdsite skin with some cross-forum RSS built in.

That makes Mastodon more of an attractive alternative to Discord rather than a replacement of the "digital commons" aspect of Twitter. But as some people have stated, maybe Mastodon doesn't want to _be_ that, but some people hope that there can be something that can assume that mantle.

People used to think the network effect for MySpace and Friendster were insurmountable.

I played around with Mastodon last night and I think it has some bad but not insurmountable ergonomic wrinkles, but I worry its decentralization will prevent it from ever becoming mainstream. Centralization makes it easier to deal with "bad" actors. Also Discovery is a huge problem: how do I discover people I know? How do content creators who want to build an audience (and so create content that would attract users to the platform) get discovered? I think discovery is a bigger catch 22 than "nobody is on it."

Increasing costs for spammers is one of the few effective ways you can combat spammers.

As one of the former heads of product at Twitter said they wanted to add multiple types of badges. You have a badge for verified identities, you have a badge for people who want to remain anonymous but pay to participate so they can provide a hint they're not spammer, and you provide a badge for notable personalities.

I clicked on it expecting it to be exactly that.

The internet is awash in encrypted private messaging systems, why does Mastodon need one too?