Mastodon's weaknesses and how to fix them

https://2ality.com/2024/11/mastodon-weaknesses.html

by Vinnl • 2 years ago

16 7 2 years ago

rumori• 2 years ago

The first time I registered to Mastodon it autocapitalized my user name on the web form. Thus I ended up with a capitalized name. I didn’t like that as all my Social handles are lower case, thus deleted the account and registered again only to be alerted that the name was taken. So basically I couldn’t change it to lowercase on their interface, but when deleted I could not register it again.

And that in a nutshell is my experience with everything Mastodon :)

After years the issue is still open and makes the first impression of a lot of users pretty bad.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/20487

seba_dos13• 2 years ago

5.1 is the real weakness and a tricky one. Solving this one would move the network forward by light years. All the rest are just a matter of time and platform's maturity.

invalidname2• 2 years ago

I'm not so concerned about that. Yes, a server might go down but so can a social network. You can easily redirect to a new account in a different server (there's a builtin feature) and it's easy to export/transfer your data. If you really have an issue here you can host your own server which isn't an option on other social networks.

To me the main hassle was small UX issues like following users from different servers, search etc. It just isn't as smooth.

seba_dos13• 2 years ago

Once you can roam between servers without being punished for it, you can change UXes at whim.

Anything else from this list is relatively easily solvable by putting some care and effort. This one not only needs a considerate forward-thinking design; it also has to fight against tech debt across many existing implementations. It's the main thing that actually tangibly holds the platform's design back.

Also, a decentralized social network can't really go down. The only reason going down is a potential problem for many fediverse users is because of 5.1. Being able to export your data and perform a Move is better than nothing, but it's still just a half-measure when you can't reconstruct the relations between interactions in any meaningful way and isn't actually much better than, say, exporting your tweets from Twitter.

With Mastodon as it is right now, I can't move my account to a self-hosted instance without either losing data or relying on continued existence of my old instance, and even then the UX of browsing my older content will be subpar in most clients. I'm still locked in.

panarky• 2 years ago

It's a decentralized system that tries to hide its underlying architecture, and the abstraction is very leaky.

The UI makes it look like a centralized system. That fiction fails in many subtle and silent ways that make the experience feel off and very difficult to reason about.

Let's say there's a really insightful comment on a post and I make a comment referencing it. Then I get a bunch of bizarre replies that miss the point so badly that I wonder if they're bots. Or maybe they speak a different language and they're reading everything in Mastodon's awful translation.

But actually it's none of those things, it's really because those users aren't reading the same set of comments that I'm reading. The conversation doesn't make sense if we're not actually reading the same thread.

Why don't we all see the same thread? Because we follow different people, and we're on different servers, and not all comments exist on every server.

It might be an interesting distributed-systems design challenge, but the user interface makes it appear we're all in the same conversation when we're not.

It's nearly impossible for one user to diagnose what another user isn't seeing, or what another user is talking about but I can't see.

The UI attempts to hide this, to make it appear like we're all having the same conversation, leading to these weird and uncanny situations where the abstraction leaks and you don't know it's leaking.

Social media comments are enough of a nightmare already, and now Mastodon has added stochastic threads that are different for every participant in the conversation.

Mastodon's weaknesses and how to fix them

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