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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.

Kronusdark ,
@Kronusdark@lemmy.world avatar

I think this is very much a YMMV situation. I moved from twitter to mastodon and brands aside, all of the interesting people I followed are here. granted, I follow a very developer centric crowd so it might be a bit self-selecting. I am enjoying Mastodon way more than twitter and I get more engagement on average.

norambna ,
@norambna@programming.dev avatar

I’m having a similar experience. Almost all developers (mostly Python/Django) I was following on Twitter are on Mastodon and being able to follow hashtags is great. The servers are stable and I kept the very first android client I tried (Tusky).

whofearsthenight ,

I’m a nerdy white guy that I’m guessing follows similar circles, and I also haven’t really had trouble finding a community there, but tbf I don’t think it’s just exclusive to this demo either. Someone up somewhere in this thread said that mastodon is more hostile to LGBTQ, and that doesn’t match what I’ve seen at all. I mean, my timeline through no real effort on my part is way gayer than it ever was on twitter, and I follow a lot more queer people than I did on twitter and they’re usually posting how much they prefer mastodon to twitter.

That said, I have seen POC saying that mastodon is a lot whiter and a lot more hostile, so idk. I’ve definitely noticed that the POC I followed on twitter really haven’t come over. I really don’t know what to ascribe that to. On twitter, I saw casual racism like all of the time even as a white dude, and only like a couple of times on mastodon. I mean, I’m not disagreeing because the few POC I am following have echoed this sentiment so idk what’s actually going on, but yeah, I do think this is a very YMMV situation.

ivy ,
@ivy@fedi196.gay avatar

I'm on glitch soc instead of mastodon and I've liked it a lot
it pretty much fixes most of my biggest gripes with mastodon and I hide the counters anyway because the number isn't very important to me

Zak ,
@Zak@lemmy.world avatar
  1. It actually does appear that Mastodon doesn’t know how many replies there are until it loads them for display. Glitch, a Mastodon fork with some UI enhancements has an option to display an estimate of the number of replies. Lemmy obviously displays an exact comment count while using the same protocol. There may be a performance/efficiency motivation for this.
  2. A trending feature should probably have the option to include federated content, as some instances are very small, even single-user.
  3. I find the stance taken by Mastodon’s developer and many users… I’ll be charitable and say unreasonable. It’s about a dozen lines of code to add a proper search and there are two ways to do it (Postgres text search is easy, Elasticsearch may be better for big servers). Some server admins have implemented this.
  4. I’m seeing that for both follows and followers.

There are other ActivityPub Twitter-alikes that may meet your needs better, such as Akkoma. Akkoma has reasonable search, can show remote follows and followers, and seems to keep accurate reply counts. It’s not as polished looking though.

ShittyKopper ,

There may be a performance/efficiency motivation for this.

Lemmy communities work by having a psuedo-user that “boosts” all posts and comments it receives to all it’s subscribers, meaning all instances are aware of all comments (as long as at least one user is subscribed, and barring any defederation). I’m not entirely sure on what the “reply fetching algorithm” of Masto is, but it doesn’t go out of it’s way to fill everything.

TAG ,
@TAG@lemmy.world avatar

I can see why others might find those features useful, but I am not bothered by any of it. To me, Twitter was a (micro) blogging site, so I treated it as such. I found organizations/creators that I wanted to follow and read my feed in chronological order.

I don’t care about likes and retweets, because every tweet in my feed was coming from a source I wanted to hear from. Reply count did matter, but mostly to know that there were responses.

I never cared what was trending because it was never something I cared about.

I only used search to find specific users (though it is easy enough to find them by Googling or looking for a link on that user’s website) and,.on very rare occasions, I would search for my city or neighborhood name to see if there was a cause to be commotion I was seeing

I never cared who other users followed or were followed by. Even looking at my own followers was an exercise in who stroking.

My biggest complaint about Mastodon is that none of the users I would want to follow are on it yet. It is not a big enough issue to keep me on Twitter but there is no reason for me to join Mastodon either (as a lurker and occasional replyer).

ShittyKopper ,

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.

I might agree with you on federated, but the local timeline on smaller or tight knit instances tend to be really nice. I’m on this instance’s Hajkey (slightly customized Firefish fork) and spend most of my time on the local timeline. It’s only when you get to the size of .social, .online and whatnot that it loses it’s usefulness. And that seems to be the direction website boy wants to take Mastodon given he took the local timeline out from the official Mastodon mobile app.

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

Full text search is an admin setting that can be turned on and off I believe. It (the way Mastodon implements it at least) takes a lot of server resources which is why most instances don’t bother.

zaros ,
@zaros@zaros.club avatar

When I was using Mastodon, the local timeline was almost exclusively what I was paying attention to. It was a really nice small community of people.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

> 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.

Basically this all over.

IMO, Mastodon is a paradox that the fediverse needs to move on from. It is not an alternative to Twitter, but, its popularity rests on this very perception. And so we have a dominant platform, that most consider to actually just be the whole fediverse, whose dominance is in many ways arbitrary or luck of circumstance. Which is fine … that’s how things happen. But the sooner we move on from Mastodon dominating the fediverse the better.

The way I’ve put it previously is that Mastodon is an awkward middle ground that actually doesn’t work too well for many people. It’s neither particularly safe/healthy or particularly engaging or interesting. And so many BIPOC avoid it while there are LGBTQ folks who openly consider it problematic and are ready to jump ship whenever necessary, while journalists and anyone who’s looking to form wide networks (without being influencers or doing anything for-profit) don’t see the point. In many ways, it’s the white/western suburbia of social media … and while that’s a nice place to visit or be sometimes, there’s a good reason to not live there or be there all the time, especially when online.

On top of all that, it’s actually a pretty simple/brutalist take on what social media can be, to the point of being unnecessarily backward. And yet, by the numbers, it is basically the fediverse (like literally ~88% of active users are on mastodon!).

The fediverse can do better. Will do better, and already has.

  • There’s firefish (and Misskey too, from which it was forked, and Iceshrimp and Hajkey which are forks of firefish)
  • There’s Akkoma
  • Then there’s Lemmy and kbin.
ikka ,

And yet, by the numbers, it is basically the fediverse (like literally ~88% of active users are on mastodon!).

I guess it must not be as bad as you make it out to be then?

aztec_dubstep ,

something being popular doesn’t mean it’s good

Wollff ,

Reddit has more users than lemmy. Can’t be that bad then!

ikka ,

deleted_by_author

    •
    Wollff ,

    Of course! How could I miss it. The argument: “User numbers are an indicator of quality”, is not valid, unless in context of the fediverse. Because…

    Wait, I don’t think me, being the dumb asshat I am, understand that: Why? Why do you think user numbers indicate that something “can’t be as bad as you make it out to be” in the fediverse, but not anywhere else?

    pastanomaly ,

    It’s older

    randint ,
    @randint@feddit.nl avatar

    I believe the 0, 1, 1+ reply counts is a setting available to your instance admins. Mine actually does count.

    geolaw ,

    Mastodon has a feature that allows you to migrate from one instance to another within Mastodon. Lemmy does not, and I think this is an important feature to have

    WidowsFavoriteSon ,

    This reads like it was written by someone who wants to be an influencer on Mastodon and is frustrated that its designed so that can’t happen.

    Quacksalber ,

    And that’s a bad thing. While you may think of Instagram- or OF models when thinking about influencers, there are also many artists and other content creators that rely on reach provided to them by large, easy to search through content platforms. If Mastodon by design hampers those people’s reach, they won’t join and with them all their followers won’t either.

    jerkface ,
    @jerkface@lemmy.ca avatar

    So, there are commercial networks for people who want to do commercial things with corporations and sponsors. Mastodon doesn’t want to be that. If someone wants to use Mastodon for that, they are fighting the stream.

    Wollff ,

    And there are small independent artists who want to display their latest artwork to an audience of followers on a social media platform, with the potential of broader reach and impact. And there are activists, who aim to raise awareness by doing the same thing.

    What you seem to be saying, is that social networks like Mastodon are not for that. No artists. No activism.

    So, what’s Mastodon for?

    jerkface ,
    @jerkface@lemmy.ca avatar

    If by activism you mean paying money to the platform to force people to be exposed to your message even though they aren’t looking for it or interested, then no, you will have to stay in places where users are manipulated and exploited.

    But if you wish to have meaningful conversations with people one-on-one about subjects that are important to you, then you can do that kind of activism very effectively.

    If you just want Twitter, then friggin use Twitter, or Insta, or Threads, or whatever the corporate darling of the day is. They have that bullshit on lock. There is no point in just building the same thing again, and anyway, they’d do it better than us.

    Wollff ,

    I see! Thank you for clarifying!

    So let me see if I understand you correctly. I asked what Mastodon is for. You answered that Mastodon is for having meaningful conversations with people one on one about subjects important to you.

    That would mean Mastodon is not in any way comparable to twitter, or any other social media platform of the like. To me it seems that, by this description you provide, it is best compared to a chat room, where you are together with a hand full of friends you already know, and can have a conversation. Just in a timeline that is a bit slower, and a bit more permanent than a chat room, but not quite as bloated as a classical internet forum.

    That means Mastodon is not “social media”. The purpose of you being there is not to easily discover new stuff which might interest you. And likewise you also can’t easily reach out to new people with stuff that interests you, and which you think might interest other people. Mastodon doesn’t want you to be able to do that easily. Because Mastodon is an internet forum with people you already know, just with an added word limit.

    So it seems I have misunderstood Mastodon. It doesn’t intend to be social media. It intends to be an early 2010s internet forum with a word limit. Now that I know what it is, and that this is what it is supposed to be, it makes a lot more sense to me.

    clgoh ,
    @clgoh@lemmy.world avatar

    I don’t know about that. I use Mastodon almost exactly like I was using Twitter.

    I’m on a smallish instance (around 2K accounts), and I don’t have trouble finding interesting stuff.

    clgoh ,
    @clgoh@lemmy.world avatar

    Mastodon definitely isn’t built or designed for one-in-one conversations.

    It’s a microblogging platform for diffusing content, opinions or anything else people want to use it for, somewhat like Twitter, with some variations.

    Quacksalber ,

    And then people keep wondering why twitter isn’t dying.

    jerkface ,
    @jerkface@lemmy.ca avatar

    That’s a good thing for us. They will draw off all the crap, allowing our communities to breathe easily.

    Quacksalber ,

    That is a recurring, moronic take. If you want a small community, go choose a small, defederated instance. Don’t declare that Mastodon/the Fediverse should by design be hostile to people reliant on discoverability.

    ikka ,

    What’s moronic is advocating for the enshittification of a platform.

    Quacksalber ,

    How can a platform be enshittified when it is by design federated and can, as such, have defederated communities?

    ikka ,

    Changing the algorithm would probably be implemented as a version update which all instances would eventually need to adopt, or be left behind in features & security patches.

    Allowing people to game your algorithm to keep their content higher is not a good thing. It made reddit unbearable (thankfully we have Local feed on Lemmy), twitter, etc. It is why YouTube (as far as genuinely informative videos go) is circling the drain.

    Quacksalber ,

    There is no algorithm on Mastodon and it doesn’t need an algorithm to make content more discoverable. What is needed, first and foremost, is a reliable way to find and follow creators without jumping through hoops.

    Right now, there is no way to discover profiles your server isn’t already federating. People need to be findable.

    ikka ,

    I see what you’re saying, I think that other commenters are misinterpreting what it is that you are trying to say. I certainly was.

    WidowsFavoriteSon ,

    But…it doesn’t. I guess some people just can’t live without an algorithm to them what to see.

    fujiwara ,
    @fujiwara@lemmy.zip avatar

    I agree. The thing I like about Mastodon is that I made friends and met other people with similar interests. Nobody is trying to make interaction bait, it’s great.

    skullgiver , (edited )
    @skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

    deleted_by_author

    •
    moormaan ,

    This is a great analysis, thanks for compiling such a comprehensive response.

    PlaidBaron , (edited )
    @PlaidBaron@lemmy.world avatar

    Im glad you pointed out the algorithm thing. Seems like people get fed up with social media platforms like X(?) and Reddit and then come to alternatives demanding the same features that, at least in part, led to them being fed up in the first place.

    I actually disagree with OPs assertion that these federated platforms are ‘almost as good’. Theyre better. More features doesnt mean a better platform and in my opinion often makes them worse.

    skullgiver , (edited )
    @skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

    deleted_by_author

    •
    iopq ,

    I don’t want a fancy algorithm, I just want to see the popular posts from the communities I follow

    Now, that’s not that simple either, since popular from a big community is different from popular from a small community, but still

    skullgiver , (edited )
    @skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

    deleted_by_author

    •
    iopq ,

    Or you could do the most upvoted post minus its age, like a lot of sites still do. AFAIK hacker news does nothing fancy to its “algorithm”

    planish ,

    I have found Mastodon still does that. And it turned out to be a problem, actually. I just kept going on there for no reason and reading like 100 nothings.

    AndrewZen ,

    The original federated service is IRC and is still perfect. :)

    tony ,

    IRC is great, if a little underground these days. It’s also trivial to run your own although federating requires cooperation from both ends so it’s not quite as networked as lemmy or mastodon.

    Madbrad200 ,
    @Madbrad200@lemmy.world avatar

    adjusts glasses one could argue email is essentially a precursor to what we call federated services now, and it works as well as it always has. Predates IRC :)

    dan ,
    @dan@sffa.community avatar

    What if I tell you all of the points you mentioned are in Lemmy too?

    QuarterSwede ,
    @QuarterSwede@lemmy.world avatar

    I’m using Mammoth to interact with Mastodon and other than the likes, reposting difference that’s made to diminish the echo chamber, it works very much like Twitter. Searching is great and the app works really well and looks great. Oh and the content is of much higher quality on the regular.

    psychothumbs , (edited )

    Yeah you are spot on, the big problem with Mastodon is that they have all these ideas about how to be better than twitter that actually just break what people are looking for from the twitter experience.

    hierophant_nihilant ,

    Yoo, people who say “oh my, mastodon doesn’t have likes and algo and that’s what makes it perfect”, are you nuts? Good suggestion algorithms are the only thing we need in our services be it music, video streaming or social networks. I just came to mastodon, how do you expect me to find people to follow? It would be so much easier to select from somewhat relevant posts than to google who to follow on mastodon because its search engine works like crap. Lemmy is getting good now because of communities migrating from reddit, but huge accounts from twitter don’t sway so easily as mastodon is not so good as a twitter alternative

    BURN ,

    It almost feels like a generational difference. People who grew up before algorithms are used to curating everything they see, and see algorithms as a failing of the internet.

    Those of us who grew up with algorithms enjoy good ones that promote content we really do want to see. The problem is that the really effective algorithms that benefit most of us also are the same ones that push right wing rhetoric because it’s successful.

    I’m personally a fan of a good algorithm because I like seeing new stuff. The pre-2016 YouTube was a good example. Promoted stuff that I wanted to watch almost all the time, found a lot of new content that way

    noodle ,
    @noodle@feddit.uk avatar

    I don’t see why having chronological feeds can’t be paired with some more generic sorting or filtering systems. Nobody would be obligated to use either, you could just pick the one you want.

    I get people want to see specifically what they subscribe to, and nothing else (looking at you, facebook). But I don’t see why people hate the idea of others being able to discover new content. Reddit had default subs for a long time, Twitter has trending topics, Mastodon could really do with something similar to help noobs get on-boarded.

    And no - there’s no way I’m wading through the shit fountain that is Mastodon’s all posts tab on the off chance I find one interesting post. If you don’t already have interesting follows then it feels like there’s no point.

    whofearsthenight ,

    I’m pretty sure this is it. I think mastodon leans more towards the olds (I’m ~40) in part because we did not like algorithm driven engagement, at least not as the primary vehicle, and most especially in the way that modern services do it. Like, great, I’m glad a celeb did a thing or a team won, but this is entirely irrelevant to my interests most of the time and definitely not how I want to experience things by default.

    Sure, when I want to go looking for something, good algorithms that are actually designed to make me happy and not just increase my engagement on the site through morally bankrupt choices, fine, but that’s just not my default.

    planish ,

    I’m definitely the other way, I want to see the stuff that’s there because I asked for it, and I want to ping pong around from people to the people they talk to to find new people. If I don’t already know of at least one interesting person or instance, why am I even joining the thing?

    I appreciate having a list of people I could follow, but if there isn’t one I remember how to make my own fun.

    80085 ,

    Yeah, mastodon definitely needs a better algorithm. Algorithms can be designed to promote whatever the maker wants. It doesn’t have to be designed to maximize engagement or the specific kind of engagement that tends to promote crazy conspiracy theories or fascist rhetoric. The algorithm could just be simple collaborative filtering with some randomness thrown in to pop “information bubbles,” which would be much better than what they have now.

    MossBear ,

    I honestly really like discovering things organically as opposed to having “content” shoveled in my face. Say I follow an artist who happens to share the work of another artist I didn’t know about. There’s a connection and I can follow that person. It’s simple.

    MyOpinion ,

    I love mastodon and it’s funny little brother Lemmy. Both are great.

    btonz ,

    Care to elaborate? Do you agree or disagree with the op on any of their takes?

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