Fediverse

I think you have to factor in the ideological motivation here. Many have tried to criticise the team for being socialists or weaponise it as a means of trying to get Lemmy not to take off, but I argue that it is because Lemmy is run by ideologically committed people that it exceeded your expectations.

Lemmy's goal is disrupting corporate control of what used to be communal spaces online. This is ideologically motivated by the socialist beliefs held by its development team.

Whether you agree with socialists or not politically, for a platform like Lemmy this motivation is very very powerful and plays a significant part.

The other side of this is that having known and occupied socialist spaces with Dessalines for close to a decade now he is one of the hardest working socialists online.

I think fundamentally Mastodon can't work. The entire point of Twitter is for celebrities, brands and governments to have a single place to be able to send out a public message and for that message to be seen by everyone, especially those who opt in to it by following. Decentralized alternatives by definition can't do that. Centralization is the entire point of Twitter.

Decentralization does work for Reddit/Lemmy though, because they are content centric, not person centric. I don't care who posts content to the subreddits I follow, just that the content exists, can be easily viewed (RIP third party Reddit apps, hello Lemmy!), and is interesting. Lemmy doesn't need hundreds of millions of people in a single place to create enough content that is interesting, and in fact having fewer people makes the content that is posted more interesting and focused. Lemmy's decentralization is a strength because if this instance doesn't have the interesting content I want, I can just go elsewhere.

1. Likes aren't federated well on Lemmy either. Posts can have wildly different scores on different servers.

2. No content algorithm is kind of the point of Mastodon. That was a conscious decision. There are trending hashtags you can follow, though. There's nothing preventing someone from making a Mastodon/Misskey/Akkoma fork that will come with its own popularity system, but you'll have to find (a team of) developers that care about such things to get it off the ground.

3. The search bar works fine for me, maybe your instance is overloaded?

4. The lack of back fetching is annoying, but it's impossible to do without causing massive server load. The push-only ActivityPub implementation is a lot lighter on server resources (which are already very high for Mastodon for reasons I'm not entirely sure about). Fixing this would break or slow down Mastodon servers across the network. It should be noted that Lemmy suffers from the same problem, though it tries a little bit harder when it subscribes to a remote community for the first time.

5. I don't think Mastodon wants to be "another Twitter". I'm pretty sure they want to be better than Twitter, with their own definition of better. In my opinion, and seemingly a lot of the Fediverse's, that means getting the stuff you're subscribed to and trying to hold some kind of popularity contest.

It you do go by popularity, there is absolutely no way of detecting voting rings and boost bots. There was a recent Lemmy example of someone using their own instance to send thousands of upvotes, bringing their post about voting rings to the top of every sorting method. Popularity works with systems that are centralised because bot detection can happen in a centralised place, gatekeeping the content behind an anti abuse wall. With federated servers, you will need to choose between "whitelisting every server you federate with after vetting their bot detection" or "accepting that your popularity feeds will soon be full of spam". Neither is a great option, in my opinion.

My take on your analysis: you seem to be on a huge Lemmy server and on a small Mastodon server so you don't notice that the same class of problems exists here too.

Bluesky solves the federation problem by not being very federated. Their idea of federation is "everybody downloads a full copy of the network" which is unsustainable for any independent server. They see the future as "a bunch of Twitters talking to each other, each with their own content recommendation and filtering mechanism" rather than "something anyone can become a part of for a minimal fee".

1. This isn't just a Mastodon problem, all fediverse softwares struggle to keep an accurate tally of faves/likes/whatevers on posts from remote instances

2. It doesn't look like this anymore on mastodon.social

3. Search isn't free so it's up to the admins to decide how good/powerful they want their search bar to be.

4. It shows all followees/followers of a user if said user is local, but if the user is remote, it will only show local followees/followers of that user because knowing what remote accounts follow what remote users also isn't free.

Calckey/Firefish (forked from the Japanese software Misskey, so I assume that one is similar) is basically Mastodon but cool. It fixes many of your problems. While it's not yet perfect (same issue with followers from other servers), there seems to be more going on.

> As annoying as Jack Dorsey is, I have high hopes for BlueSky.

As long as he doesn't submit that protocol as ActivityPub 2.0 or whatever, it's not compatible with the wider fediverse, so not interesting.

Watching Mastodon-stans defend the lack of search is like watching a cult-member explain an insane belief.

So far, Lemmy feels like the least cultish corner of the fediverse. That might be due t it's external focus.

Hear hear! I thought I didn't like the fediverse because Mastodon did such an awful job selling it to me. "Oh, I can't view other instances' local timelines without making accounts on them? What's even the point of federation then?" But on Lemmy you can easily browse communities outside your own instance. So it's not the fediverse's fault, Mastodon just doesn't have a clear audience.

And yeah, I can see how a lot of Mastodon's features are "privacy-focused", but I think it does TOO good a job, it's so private that you can't find anything!

Mastodon doesn't have Likes at all.

The star you're referring to is Favorite. Those go into your Favorite list. So you can refer back to them more easily.

Yoo, people who say "oh my, mastodon doesn't have likes and algo and that's what makes it perfect", are you nuts? Good suggestion algorithms are the only thing we need in our services be it music, video streaming or social networks. I just came to mastodon, how do you expect me to find people to follow? It would be so much easier to select from somewhat relevant posts than to google who to follow on mastodon because its search engine works like crap. Lemmy is getting good now because of communities migrating from reddit, but huge accounts from twitter don't sway so easily as mastodon is not so good as a twitter alternative

This post was at the top of Mastodon's explore page yesterday: https://mas.to/@kissane/110793942888550843

I feel it perfectly encapsulates the issues I see others and I face with Mastodon. Since it was #1 trending, it probably resonated with many more too.

The technical issues can eventually solved. The cultural ones? That's the big question.

Lemmy seems far more approachable. It has its issues, but at least it has a working search.

Yeah you are spot on, the big problem with Mastodon is that they have all these ideas about how to be better than twitter that actually just break what people are looking for from the twitter experience.

Mastodon has a feature that allows you to migrate from one instance to another within Mastodon. Lemmy does not, and I think this is an important feature to have

> Mastodon seems to have two goals: To be an example of how a federated alternative to Twitter can work well, and to be a healthier social media experience. It’s not obvious, but I think these goals conflict with each other. A lot of the features that are removed in the pursuit of a healthier social media will be perceived as the shortcomings of federation as a concept.

Basically this all over.

IMO, Mastodon is a paradox that the fediverse needs to move on from. It is not an alternative to Twitter, but, its popularity rests on this very perception. And so we have a dominant platform, that most consider to actually just be the whole fediverse, whose dominance is in many ways arbitrary or luck of circumstance. Which is fine ... that's how things happen. But the sooner we move on from Mastodon dominating the fediverse the better.

The way I've put it previously is that Mastodon is an awkward middle ground that actually doesn't work too well for many people. It's neither particularly safe/healthy or particularly engaging or interesting. And so many BIPOC avoid it while there are LGBTQ folks who openly consider it problematic and are ready to jump ship whenever necessary, while journalists and anyone who's looking to form wide networks (without being influencers or doing anything for-profit) don't see the point. In many ways, it's the white/western suburbia of social media ... and while that's a nice place to visit or be sometimes, there's a good reason to not live there or be there all the time, especially when online.

On top of all that, it's actually a pretty simple/brutalist take on what social media can be, to the point of being unnecessarily backward. And yet, by the numbers, it is basically the fediverse (like literally ~88% of active users are on mastodon!).

The fediverse can do better. Will do better, and already has.

• There's firefish (and Misskey too, from which it was forked, and Iceshrimp and Hajkey which are forks of firefish)
  • see firefish.social, nice examples: lead devs personal page
  • Or, how far the special form of markdown can be taken, collected in another feature called Clips which are collections of posts: Clips of cool MFM(misskey flavoured markdown).
• There's Akkoma
• Then there's Lemmy and kbin.

Mastodon's search not applying to all posts is 'a feature, not a bug', as mentioned in the documentation:

Admins may optionally install full-text search. Mastodon’s full-text search allows logged-in users to find results from their own posts, their favourites, their bookmarks and their mentions. It deliberately does not allow searching for arbitrary strings in the entire database, in order to reduce the risk of abuse by people searching for controversial terms to find people to dogpile.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/network/#search

I do understand the rationale behind it in that it makes it safer for people to share personal or political things to their followers without the risk of abuse from strangers, and the recommended alternative is to hashtag any post that's okay to be publicly found.

The problem with this is that there is no agreement on which hashtags to use consistently, and that people are not used to, or feel a stigma about, adding hashtags to the end of each post.

Personally, I’m happy with both. Lemmy and Mastodon are far from perfect and both feel sorta beta, though Mastodon is further along.

Search is weak on both platforms, imo, but I expect it will improve eventually.

You mention favorite counts only being your instance, but same is true for community subscribers here.

Also landing on other instances from outside links can be confusing to find the same content in your instance (Mastodon and Lemmy).

Federation does make things more complicated. But it beats centralization.

In the end, it comes down to your personal end use and preferences.

Personally, I like Mastodon for conversations and I like Lemmy for community building - I mod !alternativenation@lemmy.world - and that works for me. 💕

(Though I’d kill for some consistent performance from Lemmy after trying to comment 3 times)

Essentially the main issue I have with Mastodon is that it's UI is confusing AF.

This reads like it was written by someone who wants to be an influencer on Mastodon and is frustrated that its designed so that can't happen.

I think this is very much a YMMV situation. I moved from twitter to mastodon and brands aside, all of the interesting people I followed are here. granted, I follow a very developer centric crowd so it might be a bit self-selecting. I am enjoying Mastodon way more than twitter and I get more engagement on average.

I’m using Mammoth to interact with Mastodon and other than the likes, reposting difference that’s made to diminish the echo chamber, it works very much like Twitter. Searching is great and the app works really well and looks great. Oh and the content is of much higher quality on the regular.

Oh, so that explains why the ratio of favorites/boosts is so low on mastodon. I thought it was just a culture thing, where people rarely left likes on posts.

Turns out it was just a software quirk.

Huh I thought people on Mastodon just tended to prefer “retweets” over Likes haha