I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to Bluesky for text-centric social media.

I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to Bluesky for text-centric social media

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Federation does not work I’m not saying federation “won’t” work or “can’t” work. Merely that in 2025, nine years after deployment, federation does not work for the Mastodon use case.

I could opine at length about possible federated architectures and what I think the ActivityPub people clearly got wrong in hindsight.1 But the proof is in the pudding: Mastodon simply doesn’t show users the posts they ask to see, as I quickly

  • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
    1·
    14 days ago

    How many of these bots existed on Twitter and were used to illustrate the point that the API being open was important to have a thriving ecosystem?

    But this is not even why I am calling out the parent. I just find it ridiculous that OP brings a whole list of more-than-reasonable issues with Mastodon (and by extension the Fediverse):

    1. Federation does not work (Federation is the wrong governance structure for decentralized social media)
    2. Account migration does not work (Coupling of identity to server)
    3. Direct messaging does not work (Messages are not really private, and Mastodon pretends to make them so)
    4. Content moderation does not work (Relates to #1)
    5. Live feeds do not work (Much like “browsing by all” in Lemmy, it’s a really bad execution to try to solve the issue of content discovery)
    6. Mastodon development does not work (Slow, opinionated on the “wrong” things, failing to respond to user’s requests)
    7. Mastodon culture does not work (The stereotypical user is just anti-everything, most instances are full of school-hall monitors, reject anything that resembles mainstream and end up becoming incredibly reactionary, boring people cross-playing as armchair revolutionaries)

    And to all of that, the first response that we find here is some completely irrelevant pontification about how one “shouldn’t be using a microblog to send notifications”?

    Like, really? This is the type of things that we should be concerned about? What’s next? People shouldn’t write a match threader bot because “following sports updates is not the place for a discussion forum”?

    For crying out loud, have we completely forgotten how to have fun here?