FOSSDLE PieFedTechnology Connections' thoughts on Mastodon
submitted by
hono4kami
edited
bsky.app/profile/techconnectify.bsky.social/pos…
Context: Technology Connections is a YouTuber https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
This is his account on Mastodon https://mas.to/@TechConnectify
I'm sorry he hasn't liked it, but critique is how we get better. Hope Mastodon keeps growing.
I agree!!!
Speaking of critique, this reply thread on Mastodon by him is probably worth reading (regardless whether you agree or not) https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/113056731556590285
The link isn’t operational.
Sorry, try this one https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/113056731556590285
Thanks. This works. I fully agree with comments made. I still have not found Mastodon intuitive to use daily as I find Lemmy.
Honestly, this suggests to me that the ability to defederate might be a bug rather than a feature.
If my instance doesn't talk to the instance at foobar.example, I might be unable to see (parts of) relevant discussions. This is worse for a microblog like Mastodon than it is in the threadiverse but it's still something to keep in mind even over here. And most non-enthusiasts don't want to have to do that.
Email is an example of a successful federated platform and it *barely* has defederation support. But in general all mail servers can talk to all other mail servers as long as they provide the right look-at-me-I'm-legitimate signaling. That makes email easy to use for regular people no matter if they use Gmail or their cousin's self-hosted mail server.
Perhaps that is how at least the non-threaded fediverse should work... However, that would also mean that some instance hosting heinous shit would keep being visible to everyone. It's a tricky problem.
Couldn't disagree more.
The simple fact of the matter is, the fediverse is local. Everything you interact with is locally hosted on whichever website you're using. That means, if I'm running Mastodon or Lemmy on my website, I'm platforming everyone who has contact with my website.
And I'm not going to want to platform a lot of people. I'm not going to want to pay to host their posts. I'm not going to want to deal with dealing with other websites who refuse to moderate their instance, and who refuse to take out their trash. Suggesting that people should be forced to is how you ensure that people don't run ActivityPub enabled websites at all, and you reduce the fediverse to a semi-centralized family of, like, 5 big websites, and a thousand Nazi troll instances that become too much work to deal with.
Couldn't disagree with you more, the thing about federation is that it isn't viewing the content on the server it was posted on, it is crossposting it to all other federated servers. That means you are when federating remote content you are literally platforming it. That also means you are liable for it if it's objectionable or illegal content. So being able to not accept those crossposts is important. Honestly defederation and limited federation are not as big of issues as you and others think they are, you can ignore the majority of the defederated servers and it'll be fine, the issue comes when people want the world and aren't entitles to have it, like I said in my other comment.
You are insanely naive for saying this. If you'd used non-corporate email servers, like the much smaller email providers out there (which are basically extinct at this point) you'd know just how wrong this actually is. Most smaller email providers out there are blocked or limited by the big ones and the ones that are blocked your mail will never reach the inboxes of people on the big servers, not even the spam folders on those servers. They won't bounce it back to you either, so it'll just go into the void.
Most email these days is used primarily by the all mighty trinity: Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo, and a Few on Hotmail and AOL and while there are a few smaller companies out there like Proton, when it comes to something that isn't a company or is self-hosted you can expect a lot of problems with domains being blacklisted, IPs being blacklisted, or both. And it's actually much worse than defederation.
You're beginning to realize why the decision to limit spam and illegal shit was chosen over catering to the people who want the whole federated world instead of what they're allowed access to. Ultimately it is better for everyone if the depraved shit and spam gets blocked, than it is for the people who want the whole world to have their way. If you want the world, go to Nostr, you'll learn why most people do not want the world.
There is less of defederation in the email network, because mail has been build to reach its destination no matter the path or the time, message must arrives even partially. (this was a premise of the US military, at ARPAnet). Even if a mailadmin blocks one server, mail could go another route. This is also the base of the internet, path is not the most straight forward direct link between source and destination (companies are usually against this structure)
AT or Mastodon don't have this freedom or constraint (depend of one point of view).
This is what I have been thinking!!!! Defederation is THE WORST feature of fediverse, and trust me, it will keep people away from joining the fediverse.
I just remembered that a year ago some artist I really liked joined Mastodon. I tried following it through my old account on kbin.social but somehow it doesn't work, no clear error message. After asking around I figured it out: turns out said Mastodon instance defederated from kbin.social, with no valid reason given!!
Because of shit like this, no wonder people--including tech-savvy person like me--are confused of choosing the right instance of Mastodon/Lemmy/etc. It's what makes the onboarding experience of Mastodon awful. It's what makes Mastodon losing users, IMO.
It's frustrating, because a lot of the interesting people to follow and engage with on Mastodon have also jumped to Bluesky, and the fedi crowd continues to crow about algorithms and brain rot, when the biggest reason people bounce off of Mastodon is *the other people on Mastodon*.
There's a deep undercurrent of "angry, hostile nerd". When people started flooding Mastodon in 2022, you could see the binary reaction of "Finally, the recognition we deserve!" and also "you're in my house now, you fucking normie, and you'd better start acting like it".
Unsurprisingly, the "fucking normies" noped out, either immediately, or as soon as they had another option that satisfied their objections with Twitter.
But we're going to wring our hands and bitch about onboarding flows and the great sin of defederation, because it let's us ignore that *we* are the problem.
I don't know how to word it, but what I really hate about mastodon is that the cancel culture is like 10x every other platform. As soon as you have a slight disagreement on something it's because you're a homophobe and a racist and an ableist and you hate autistic people and whatnot. If the word woke wasn't so used by trump to mean not being a fascist, it would be reserved for this kind of people. Idk I don't like that mastodon is basically full of self diagnosed neuro divergent people. There are two extremes on the political spectrum, there's the facist and mastodonists. I understand why someone wouldnt want to stay on there, it's genuinely not a good place to have discussions on
It's got a lot of untreated, traumatized people, and frustrated power nerds on it, and both groups let you know it with haste.
The kicker is, the population is still small enough that they could be easily overwhelmed and put in their place, but you need a real mass of semi-tightly networked people to come over and take over the space, and that's.... just not the way community migrations work. So they can fairly safely gatekeep the space.
Well, until Threads washes over everything. I don't want to give shit to Zucks, but Threads will fundamentally change the makeup of the fedi microblog space in an instant, and that instant is growing ever closer.
You don't understand why or how platforms like these got made, don't you?
If enough people came in to "put them in their place", the way you describe, this place would basically become Threads (or Twitter) anyway.
I do know. I just don't care. I believe in an open internet, not a place set aside for people to live out their Revenge of the Nerds fantasies. ActivityPub allows people to have their sheltered spaces, and also not attack the public square.
They're choosing to attack the public square anyway, because they don't want their shelters, they want *the whole fucking world*. And they can't have it.
Honestly I feel the fediverse is like the 90s internet. It's like school clubs centered around different interests and it takes a little bit of work to find your peer group but once you do it's great. People that look to it as a replacement for Twitter are looking for a town square to shout at people and hock their wares. Anyone that makes money from engagement ether directly or indirectly are not looking for camaraderie but a market.
Maybe this is part of why I keep bouncing off Mastodon. It feels tight-knit. It's about individuals, about relationships.
I don't fit in such a system. I've nothing to offer in a relationship, I cannot be a "comrade." Still, I want news, media, and easily accessible knowledge being shared.
So, I'm a lurker, a consumer. I tend towards anonymous forums and spaces centered around topics rather than people. Or, I seek celebrities, and sellers, and *content creators.*
Either sort-of give me something I want, while Mastodon doesn't. Too focused on the people, but without big names to follow.
Maybe that's why I didn't like Bluesky it was all attention-seeking and curated accounts
It didn't help they did the exclusive invite only launch of the service making it appealing to that kind of person and pushing kind of behavior to 11.
The world is driven people hocking their wares i dont thinks we should stop that. In fact a federated store based on xmr might be the next step in global fediverse dominance.
When you compare Alec's recent videos with his early ones, it's pretty clear that the negativity he receives has been wearing him down. Like many YouTubers, even when he's sharing information about something he loves, he's very bitter and sarcastic about it. Like, half of each video is trying to pre-argue with his trolls.
I understand why popular content creators have to set boundaries because it seems like a pretty soul-destroying job to have. If Bluesky helps him do that, more power to him. But for a nobody like me, I prefer Mastodon, largely because I've made friends with people on my local instance, and interacting with other servers is merely a bonus feature.
How low do you have to be to criticise Alec? He's funny, informative, and I love the presentation of his videos. One of the last remaining great YouTubers. Apparently, being a pedophile is more acceptable on YouTube than being a good person. Now, why did I leave again..
Agreed. Technology Connections is one of my favorite channels -- it's always a good day when Alec posts a new video. I wish people would treat him better, he certainly deserves it.
It's a joy to watch someone passionate and well-researched talk about something they enjoy. His videos do nothing but make me happy and interested in a thing. I can't imagine someone watching him and getting mad about it.
Aww man, who is being mean to Alec? The guy is a YouTube gem.
Not at all surprised.
I follow Alec on Mastodon and the vast majority of interactions over the past few months have been people aggressively "well ackshually"ing him or outright getting angry.
That isn't to say it is all shit (I would like to think a few conversations I had with him were mutually pleasant). But his entire ethos is that he approaches problems from a practical "midwesterner" perspective. And that REALLY angers all the ideological nutjobs who are angry if anyone even suggests something that won't advance their own pseudo-political goals.
And I've noticed it with a lot of other "celebrities" on Mastodon. The rest of us can have fun conversations while the shitheads stay to themselves. They are too high profile and the shitheads flock to them to make sure they understand why they are actually wrong and are a bad person for thinking something.
I feel like we need to unite and make Mastodon a better place instead of making drama about it. Mastodon is not perfect, but it's a platform over which we have control, unlike Bluesky.
I had to unfollow him because discussion on my feed ended up so overwhelmingly negative I just didn't want that in my life :/
The amount of negativity on that thread alone is enough for me to realise that bluesky is not for me. I enjoy the positivity I find on the fedi and decided I wouldn't use a platform that algorithmically rewards negativity when I was harassed off facebook. I am glad that others are finding it nicer than twitter but for me it seems much the same but without Elon Musk
im confused. is it a ghost town, or is it full of people giving him instant 'shit'?
I think he is saying that of the total interactions he gets he would expect a large amount of hostility to his opinion on Mastodon, and it is also a small population which is available to interact with on platform. Consistent, just talking about the experience and an objective measure. In my opinion Mastodon will be helped by Bluesky adding a paid membership. The worse it is the better for Mastodon, and honestly if people have already started moving out from Twitter to Bluesky they are not locked in yet so moving out again is easier, they already dropped Twitter but Bluesky is not solidified yet.
We just need to get accounts as fediverse universal and instance agnostic and thats 99% of the problems solved
Could be wrong, but possibly he's talking about this about "getting instant shit":
https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/112995177480955078
(look also at the reply)
I've gotten an extremely similar comment on a couple posts I've made here on lemmy, *in a video community* no less.
Personally I just said something's like "welp, sorry that's not your preferred format." and then just move on.
With how infrequent posts like that are, they don't effect me at all, but It'd probably suck more if I was consistently getting negative comments like that,
My gut instinct is to think, this is just a dumb person being mean on the Internet.
But upon reflection, no one would say this on yt, twitter, Facebook, etc. because people are sharing actual bullshit on there. You would be dunked on so hard for complaining about yt videos or just ignored. There would be no point in complaining.
On one hand it's nice that Mastodon doesn't have ads, and people usually don't share bullshit, but does that logically result in attracting users who shit on someone for sharing a YouTube video, because sometimes other videos on YouTube are bad?
I like that Mastodon has actual conversations but I don't like this guy being dumb.
I have lost count the amount of times I've shared a YT video on Lemmy, and people bitch about the fact that they have to spend 15-60 minutes watching it, or immediately ask for some TL;DR about it. Like, I'm curating content for you, sharing a video I liked among the other videos that you probably didn't like, and people just want to universally shit on the format because of that one bad experience from two years ago when they dared to go to the web site for 5 minutes.
People love to shit on TikTok, but secretly, that's the length of content a majority of this audience wants, and it's dumb. If you don't want to devolve into a TikToker, then watch longer videos and don't bitch when somebody asks you to watch a video for 10 minutes. If you don't like it after a few minutes in, fine, go watch something else.
Could be wrong, or just more domain-specific, bu my experience is people don't complain that the video is 15-30 minutes long, is that it's a *video* (*and* that long) when the information could have been more succintly and practically displayed in a text tutorial or a blog format. Basically "this could have been an e-mail".
Not to mention that way people avoid having to go to YT which is yet another cesspit community-wise.
You are right that people have shorter attention spans ofc, but then again when it comes to tackling it it's largely an issue of medium: in the world of coding you can convey easily copyable or testable instructions in text format maybe with attachments, that can be verified in up to 60 seconds... or you could post a 30 minutes long video plus ads. Why would anyone expect the Fediverse, with the kind of people who are naturally attracted to it, to prefer the latter, no idea.
"Ghost town" = Not driven to oversharing by algorithms.
"getting shit" = nobody wanting to listen to a youtuber's outrage bait.
It must be confusing to log into the fediverse straight off of Youtube, though. "Why aren't people compulsively clicking and subscribing to everything? How am I not being recommended radicalising posts by conspiracy theorists and terror organisations within five clicks?"
"Honey, this is Mastodon"
\<switches to Blooskie>
"Ah, much better!"
This comment right here. This is what he's talking about.
Good, mission accomplished 👍
You don't *have* to be a dick, you know. There are other ways to live.
I geniunely can't understand what you're trying to say
Perhaps the other reply was right--this comment is what he's talking about
With so many opportunities presented to it, Mastodon still hasn’t found its footing with the mainstream audience.
I think its users should accept the platform will remain a niche for the foreseeable future.
Mastodon is more for people who like to have interactions or conversations back and forth with other people, while the big platforms are for influencers/broadcasters and consumers/viewers-- any back and forth interactions there are more between commenters than with the influencer/broadcaster. Of course there is some overlap and exceptions to that characterization, but that's how it generally seems to me.
So IMO it's not a competition, there's plenty of room for both types of SM. Depending on a person's preference they may use just Masto, just big SM, or use both, each for different reasons. The problem is when people expect Mastodon to be just like xitter/bsky/threads and get upset that it isn't. Relax and use whichever platform(s) you like.
When I want to have back and forth between people on a regular basis, I choose chat apps. Mastodon feels like it's trying to be a poorly designed chat app.
Kind of a combination maybe? Since Mastodon lets you find new people with similar interests by browsing what's on your local timeline or hashtags of interest, and you can still follow people of interest without any chatting. I don't know much about chat apps but don't you have to already know the people beforehand, or come across them via a mutual acquaintance or invite to a chat room?
Of course, Mastodon can be and is used for broadcast/consume interactions, but not as much, since most broadcasters want a huge audience with little interaction, which means a big platform, while the ones on Mastodon are probably looking for a bit more interactive experience with a smaller audience.
Mastodon simply is a different thing than X/Bluesky. It's more like RSS/Blog/IRC. It will never go mainstream unless they add (opt out) algorithms and a better search functionality. But maybe that's just not worth it. Mastodon has already lost to Bluesky when it comes to being an open mainstream Twitter replacement.
I'm curious about if it's even technically possible to build something federated that feels like a Twitter replacement, using the ActivityPub protocol.
Okay, that's his opinion. Like his opinions on many things, I feel entirely free to disagree with him.
I unfollowed Alec on Fedi because every other post would be him complaining about his interactions on there. Reply guys. Trolls. Lack of algorithms which raise some of the better comments out of the drek. Insufficient moderation. Etc. This got boring and depressing to read about honestly.
However I think he's totally right. Mastodon/Fedi works well for certain kinds of people. People with limited engagement, people posting mostly uncontroversial things, and perhaps people who just don't give a shit. But for high-visibility folks like Alec the old-school unfiltered discourse seems really uncomfortable.
It has little to do with federation itself, I think. But if Mastodon ever added the *choice* for users to enable "modern social media algorithms" for their view of their feed I suspect it would work a lot better for many people.