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Seeing how good Lemmy is makes me frustrated with Mastodon

My Problems with Mastodon

Even with growing pains accommodating an influx of new users, Lemmy has made it clear that a federated social media site can be nearly as good as the original thing. I joined Lemmy, and it exceeded my expectations for a Reddit alternative run by an independent team.

These expectations were originally pretty low when Mastodon, the popular federated Twitter alternative, was the only federated social media I had experience with. After using Lemmy, Mastodon seems to be missing basic features. I initially believed these were just shortcomings of federated social media.

  1. Likes aren’t counted by users outside your instance, and replies don’t seem to be counted at all (beyond 0, 1, 1+), leading to posts that look like they have way more boosts (retweets) than likes or replies:

    https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/9d1c9c89-650b-4988-bf24-6762a5ac5cf1.webp

    This incentivizes people to just gravitate toward the biggest instance more than people already do. My guess is that self-hosting a mastodon instance would also not be ideal, since the only likes you’ll see are your own.

  2. There’s really only one effective ways to find popular or ‘trending’ posts. There’s the explore tab which has ‘posts’, and ‘tags’ sections.

    The ‘posts’ section shows some trending posts across your instance and all the instances that it’s federated with, this is the one I use it the most.

    The ‘tags’ section is a lot like the trending tab on Twitter, but it’s reserved just for hashtags, which I guess isn’t a huge deal, but it feels like a downgrade. However, I do like the trend line it shows next to each tag!

    The ‘Local’ and ‘Federated’ tabs are a live feed of post from your home instance and all the other instances, respectively. I feel these are pretty useless and definitely don’t warrant their own tabs. Having a local trending tab for seeing popular posts on your instance would be more interesting.

    https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/272bf41f-75c4-4424-a388-b0151104ffaa.webp

  3. The search bar basically doesn’t work, is this just me???

  4. This one is more minor and more specific to a Twitter alternative, but when looking at a user’s follows, you’ll only see the one’s on your home instance but for some reason this rule doesn’t apply to followers.

    https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/9df7fa8a-59a6-446f-9820-25caaed69ab2.webp

From what I’ve heard, a lot of these issues are intentional in order to create a healthier social media experience. Things like less focus on likes, reduces a hivemind mentality, addiction, things like that (I couldn’t find a source for this, if anyone has one confirming or disproving this please lmk).

Why this is a Problem

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.

In my eyes, Mastodon’s one main goal should be proving federated social media as a whole to the public, by being a seamless, familiar, full-featured alternative to Twitter. For me, Lemmy has done that for Reddit, upvotes are counted normally, you can see trending posts locally and globally same with communities, and the search function works! All its shortcomings aren’t design flaws, and I fully expect them to be fixed down the road as it matures.

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

mojo ,

The mastodon community is so incredibly bad, they’re the biggest downfall. They also actively push for development of harmful features that kills adoption. If you disagree, you have a “growth” mindset which is somehow bad, and must be a silicon valley tech bro that hates lgbtia. Thank god Lemmy is a good example that discoverbility doesn’t need to be broken with ActivityPub.

Also they really need an algo, I don’t care how much they preach that it’s better without. It’s just incredibly boring and hides high quality content without one.

Vub ,

I don’t have any issues with it. I use Ice Cubes, it’s awesome.

fne8w2ah ,

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

lazycouchpotato ,
@lazycouchpotato@lemmy.world avatar

This post was at the top of Mastodon’s explore page yesterday: mas.to/

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.

ren ,
@ren@lemmy.world avatar

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 - and that works for me. 💕

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

BeardedPip ,

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.

salient_one ,
@salient_one@lemmy.villa-straylight.social avatar

To me they’re two different things, to be used in different ways, which is a good thing, I suppose.

moitoi ,

I don’t have your issues with it. I have a ton of interactions on Mastodon and everything is clear.

The problem people have with mastodon is how they see it. You wrote all your rant about mastodon being a copy of Twitter with the Twitter terminology. Mastodon is not Twitter.

I did the same mistake at the beginning. I thought it was a federate Twitter. It made it empty and frustrating to use. I didn’t understand what people do there.

I give it a second try. This time, I took another way to understand it. Instead of comparing to Twitter and thinking at a federated Twitter, I took it like a new experience.

After that, I discover the philosophy behind mastodon and it’s completely different. It’s not Twitter or a Twitter like. People are nice and really active.

The number of reply doesn’t matter that much. What is important are the boosts. People need to find groups boosting the toots. You need to mention the group when you toot and you need to follow groups. The second is hashtags to follow and search for. But hashtags aren’t the primary thing to follow.

Then, you begin to find accounts to follow. But keep in mind the philosophy is different and you won’t use it as Twitter.

carbunkie ,
@carbunkie@kbin.social avatar

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.

Spzi ,

I never used any bird app, curious: what’s the social stigma about adding hashtags? I thought it was seen as cool or at least normal.

carbunkie ,
@carbunkie@kbin.social avatar

Some people consider it an overly attention-seeking behaviour, because overusing hashtags is associated with marketing and influencers trying desperately to gain maximum reach on platforms like Twitter and Instagram.

Meanwhile, on Mastodon it's more of a thing to hashtag posts with like or #[name_of_videogame] when sharing things, so other people with the same interests can find them.

BeardedPip ,

Aside from any stigma, some people just don’t use them. Some don’t understand how they work, sometimes people forget.

Hashtags have value, but to make them essential instead of optional is a bad choice.

dustyData ,

They have the stigma of overflowing the content and distracting from the human, let’s have a conversation, part to focus mostly on the promotion and algorithmic sorting and advertisement part. The most egregious example being the hash walls. Tweets were the actual content is a short sentence followed by a gigantic string of hashtags in the hopes this will get more exposition. The purposes of a tag is that you want to be found by people who don’t follow you, abuse of it screams attention-seeking.

Spzi ,

Right. Now that you point it out, it’s weird to have sorting labels embedded in the (already very short) text body.

UmbrellAssassin ,

This is the exact same issue I have about YouTube videos. If I ever see someone with 1k of terms in the description, I never watch their videos again. For example, I watched a video about a Doom mod. When I went to the description to look for the link, it was after ever doom related term. Everything from Doom Eternal (it was Doom 1993 mod) to demons, and shotgun. Just cringy.

REdOG ,
@REdOG@lemmy.world avatar

Meh The modlog is so active it’s dead

petunia ,
  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.
Zak ,
@Zak@lemmy.world avatar

Search isn’t free

This isn’t the primary reason most Mastodon servers lack full text search. Gargron is opposed to its inclusion in Mastodon because he believes it results in harmful social dynamics.

Implementing Elasticsearch, which Mastodon has some support for is somewhat resource-intensive, and making it available for all posts a user is able to view takes a code change (there’s a patch). A text search using PostgreSQL’s built-in text search is not very resource-intensive, and implementing that is about a dozen lines of code.

pewgar_seemsimandroid ,

3rd party exists

CafecitoHippo ,

I have high hopes for BlueSky.

I’m really enjoying BlueSky. The only problem with it right now is just not having all the people I followed from Twitter/X on there especially official accounts for sports teams that I followed for news/content. It’s getting there though.

madcow ,

How did you get an invite? I’d love to join but the waiting list seems really long right now.

CafecitoHippo ,

Got one after 2 months of waiting on reddit in the bluesky invite thread. When I get one, I’ll circle back with you to help a lemmy homie out. Supposedly you’re supposed to get 1 per week. I joined on I think Monday.

madcow , (edited )

Thank you so much! That would be awesome. I can only offer you an invite for Tildes in return.

ddl ,
@ddl@mstdn.ca avatar

Hey buddy, if you don't mind, can you share an invitation code (privately) with me?

CafecitoHippo ,

I don’t have any yet but when I get some I’ll circle back around. Leaving this marked as unread in my inbox so I remember.

klay ,

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!

krakenx ,

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.

GoodEye8 , (edited )

I think it’s not that Mastodon couldn’t do it, it’s that it will end up just being an essentially centralized instance as people will want to be in the same instance as the people/companies they want to follow. How users would want to use Mastodon is counter-intuitive to how the fediverse should work. Lemmy is focused on content (posts and comments) which means there’s less somebody to follow and the focus is on the communities.

whofearsthenight ,

This is a semi serious question - do people not realize that you can follow across instances and it makes literally no difference?

This is the one reason why some of us were sort of hoping that Threads would federate. Because the celebs and other normies are likely to gravitate there, and there are a few that some of us would still like to follow/interact with.

If anything, this is my criticism against the way that Lemmy handles this. For example, my previous reddit habit was to follow a bunch of subs for TV shows that I watched. So last night when I was watching ST: Strange New Worlds, I really didn’t enjoy the experience of digging through 10 communities that each had the episode posts with the same 15 comments, and the occasional new thought. This isn’t even a criticism of the posters, if you came to the comments there would be some things that would be wild not to call out. I think ultimately I’d almost rather see the federation model for reddit-like services move down in the stack, and federate the communities rather than the whole instance. EG: there is a major ST collective community assimilating the smaller ones and becoming greater than the sum of their parts. Of course, this is also probably partially just because Lemmy/Kbin are still in their infancy, and I have a feeling that as time goes, things are more or less going to centralize in this way anyway, in the same way you could have multiple subs on reddit, but there was usually 1-2 big ones at most.

This isn’t a problem for mastodon, because when someone like Jeri Ryan joins, it doesn’t matter on what instance, I can still follow her in one place, see who she follows and follows her for other like-minded individuals, see all of her posts and re-posts, etc. What instance you’re on makes very little difference after the first five minutes or so and you’re acquainted with how it works.

GoodEye8 ,

You’re looking at it from the perspective of someone who already has a general understanding of fediverse. If Jeri Ryan joins an instance, which instance do you his followers will join? Most likely the same instance, because they’re here to follow Jeri and they don’t know what instance to choose so they choose the most familiar one, the one Jeri is on. New users will congregate on instances that have people they want to follow and the followees most likely join whichever instance is the biggest or has someone they want to follow (because it’s not like they know any better how to pick an instance), which means people will centralize on either one or a handful of instances.

You can even see this happening in with Lemmy. Most people don’t know which instance to pick so they picked the biggest one, lemmy.world.

w2qw ,

I don’t think necessarily have a few large instances is problematic. It’s fine as long as people can move to other instances, the issue would be if those instances leverage their size to force incompatibilities or defederation.

petunia ,

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

Nothing about Mastodon or the fediverse prevents this. In fact government institutions are already using the fediverse this way: social.network.europa.eu/social.overheid.nl/There’s some companies who run their own instances also, and no shortage of individuals running single-user instances as a subdomain of the same website they use for their professional brand.

Decentralized =/= Federated. In a federated model, data is still siloed in 24/7 servers that are controlled by people or institutions.

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