The hot new thing in social media has some big problems.
checks date
Yeah, that tracks
Six reasons why I’m not reading this article.
Click bait headline
Doom premise
Random author who has no say on if a platform does or does not succeed
Its impossible for mastodon to “not survive” because it’s decentralized
Its not a hot new thing it’s been around a long time.
I’ve already read a million articles like this that always boil down to “I don’t like this therefore it will fail” or “it’s not exactly like Twitter therefore it will fail” or the one I sympathize but hate hearing is “it’s to hard”
I mean decentralized platforms can still die, it’s just somewhat more difficult.
All those reasons boil down to “I don’t feel like learning anything new at this point in my life. If it isn’t easy enough for a toddler I don’t want it.”
The author is basically going like “I registered an E-Mail address and used my usual username. I don’t know which provider I picked, I just picked one in the middle of a list. People can’t seem to find me with just my username! It’s too complicated!”
This is a clickbait headline. I think we should try to avoid these here. At the very least give the main points of the article to avoid giving unnecessary traffic to potentially meaningless articles.
For everyone’s benefit, and for the help of discussion (which is what we want here) here are the main six points from the article:
Let’s look at everything Mastodon gets wrong.
1) Terrible name
Mastodon implies large, slow, frozen, and dead for thousands of years. The logo is cute, but the service right now stinks almost as badly as a thawing woolly mammoth.
2) There is no single Mastodon
In trying to satisfy a spike of new users, Mastodon broke the cardinal rule of social media: it separated them into silos and made it hard if not impossible for them to all socialize. This unfortunate design makes Mastodon feel more like a bunch of chat rooms rather than a cohesive, growing social network. The Federated Timeline helps, but it’s not the default view.
And I get that having a decentralized social media platform, Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko’s big idea, helps create safe zones from groups and topics, but it’s really a terrible approach that will lead to a stagnant growth and way more opinion bubbles, which is the last thing we need.
3) Toots
In trying to be the anti-twitter, Mastodon’s Rochko chose the dumbest and most ridiculous post name possible: Toots. This too-cute take-off on Tweets literally hurts me every time I say and do it on Mastodon.
4) Handles are meaningless
User handles do show up in Toots (blech!) but not in the URLs for users’ Mastodon homepages. Giving users numbers (mine is 995) instead of identifiable website addresses makes Mastodon feel amateurish.
5) Where is everyone?
If you can’t find people by name, then how can you follow them on Mastodon? Someone in one local Mastodon timeline may not appear in another (Sorry, Mr. Shatner). To see everyone (at least I think you see everyone), you have to troll the Federated timeline, open a Toot (blech!) and add them there. Twitter and other social networks already have this stuff figured out. Why is Mastodon better? It’s not!
6) Apps feel like a science project
I started using Mastodon in Safari. It was not a good experience. At least there’s an app…or apps.
There is no one app called Mastodon. Instead, you can find a Github list of apps for the open-source project. Apps like the iOS-based Amaroq let you log into any of the many Mastodon “instances” by typing in the name. Nope, there’s no list of instances because I don’t think anyone knows just how many Mastodon instances are out there.
Well, that article aged well.
Written By Blank Blank on April 5, 2017
👀👀 Well, did it?!
apart from the fact that this is 6 years old , this reads like someone who didn’t understand federation and just wanted and expected the same experience as non-federated sites
like he says that the fundamental point of the platform is a flaw that needs to be rectified (read, ‘centralized’)
also a complaint he had was that it didn’t have celebrities on it, and considered this (and it not having a big userbase at the time) a flaw
I think he was looking at it as “the thing that wants to compete with/ replace Twitter”
— David Revoy, Same feeling 🍇 (2022-11-07)
Mastodon isn’t Twitter and I’m mad about it! - that guy. Probably
- Akkoma
- Firefish
- Misskey
- Pleroma …
I tried Mastodon and it was disasterous.
How can it pretend to replace Twitter when you can’t even search what/who you are looking for?
Gotta get yourself weened from those engagement algorithms. The early internet was a wild west of links and word-of-mouth and reputation. That’s what we’re going back to. The withdrawals will be worth it in the end.
The nature of venture capitalism and the demand for infinite growth is going to grind the humanity out of any corporate project over a long enough time span. We’re gonna have to learn the old ways of what the Internet is supposed to be.
Well said.
