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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.

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.

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

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.

semidetached ,
@semidetached@geddit.social avatar

I’ve been on and off mastodon since 2019 and I’ve really wanted to like it, however the lack of a usable search kills it for me. I guess when your the main dev and you have half of mastodon following you a usable search isn’t really necessary. Someone did try to work on a way to scrape and make mastodon searchable but they got hounded off mastodon I believe?

I tried to use hashtags but the ones I followed seemed to have a large number of terminally online/bots posting links making finding anything useful practically useless. In the end I got fed up of the feeling I was shouting into the void. I want to use and like Mastodon but I felt like I was fighting the system.

I’m just glad Lemmy seems to have taken off it’s not perfect but it’s certainly on the way

elbarto777 ,

You’re*

semidetached ,
@semidetached@geddit.social avatar

I swear I read through my post before hitting post. Thanks stranger

elbarto777 ,

You’re welcome! Have an awesome day!

kratoz29 ,

I have barely ever used Twitter and yet I tried Mastodon, but it is uninteresting to me, maybe I just don’t like microblogging social media, Reddit/Lemmy in other part is easier for me to get addicted lol.

melroy ,
@melroy@kbin.melroy.org avatar

I'm on kbin. Much better than lemmy.

EdherJr ,

how do i remove random posts that appear on the side on kbin?

Fish ,

My issue with Kbin is that it’s missing some of the communities from Lemmy. For example, [email protected] isn’t available on Kbin and I can’t add it. Also, it annoys me seeing empty image placeholders on every post. Last time that I used Kbin, it also kept showing error messages every couple minutes. Kbin just isn’t ready for mainstream adoption. Lemmy is.

melroy ,
@melroy@kbin.melroy.org avatar

Uh.. You should be able to add it. You might need to search on: @[email protected]. Which is the whole point of federation, right?

Fish ,

There is a 20-character limit. I tried.

melroy ,
@melroy@kbin.melroy.org avatar

owh? Let me try to increase that..

melroy ,
@melroy@kbin.melroy.org avatar

Update: There is actually a 25 limit character is on the name: #[AssertLength(min: 2, max: 25)]

However I did notice it's just here on kbin.social: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]

MaxVoltage ,
@MaxVoltage@lemmy.world avatar

its exactly like twitter except not as dank

theothermatt_b ,
@theothermatt_b@lemmy.ml avatar

Pretty sure that thing about likes, boosts, and favorites not showing up as a count is just a setting. I see full counts.

Steve ,
@Steve@compuverse.uk avatar

Mastodon doesn’t have Likes at all.

The star you’re referring to is Favorite. Those go into your Favorite list. So you can refer back to them more easily.

justhach ,
@justhach@lemmy.world avatar

Oh god, Ive been using them wrong this whole time?!?!

I guess I am so used to other social media I had assumed it was a like button.

tqgibtngo ,
@tqgibtngo@kbin.social avatar

Although they differ from Twitter Likes, note that Mastodon Favorites are not private. For an example, I'll refer to one of your toots:
https://mastodon.social/@justhach/110696151311920356

Viewing it in the Mastodon web interface, I see an indication that 2 people marked it as a Favorite. I can then click to see those 2 usernames, listed here:
https://mastodon.social/@justhach/110696151311920356/favourites

Such listings are limited though. For example, I'm viewing a toot that you boosted, and I see an indication that it has been marked as a Favorite by 816 users; but when I click to view their names, I see only 40 of them listed.

whofearsthenight ,

No, you haven’t. It started out this way, but now basically it’s the “tell the poster you acknowledge/like the post” but also there when you don’t want to boost the post to your timeline. You can still use it this way, but because the community (probably with one of the first twitter exoduses) started using it more like a like on twitter, they gave up and implemented bookmarks (I think might be private and not notify the poster you’ve bookmarked?)

Ofc, there are also some of the mastodon HOA that will still insist this, but then why do bookmarks exist…?

Anyway, just in general, you can tell by the up/down ratio and a lot of the comments that are getting upvoted in this thread that are posting things that are either just incorrect or at least misunderstand things how many people in this thread actually use mastodon, so I would take criticism with a grain of salt.

kratoz29 ,

lol, and I was thinking I was supporting other’s users opinions.

Steve ,
@Steve@compuverse.uk avatar

You are in a way. Just not only that.

talos ,
@talos@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t see it that way. There are separate options to Favourite or Bookmark a post. To me Bookmarking something is so you can refer to it later, although nothing is stopping you using Favourites that way.

Steve , (edited )
@Steve@compuverse.uk avatar

Favourite and Bookmark are absolutely different things. They’re two different lists for you to use as you see fit.
Neither of them is a Like though. I’m not sure that fact is really debatable.

talos ,
@talos@lemmy.world avatar

I’ll have to disagree there. When you Favourite a post, the person that posted it gets a notification about the fact, while if you Bookmark something no notification is sent. In effect you are telling the person that you “Liked” their post.

Also, looking at the Explore section of Mastodon the following message is shown at the top of the feed:

These are posts from across the social web that are gaining traction today. Newer posts with more boosts and favorites are ranked higher.

So those Favourites are used by the algorithm to rank posts. Bookmarks are totally private and only used to save posts for your own use.

Steve ,
@Steve@compuverse.uk avatar

Lets try it this way. Would say your favourites things, include everything you like? Do you like some things that aren’t your favorite? Do you keep a list of everything you’ve ever liked? Would it be as big as the list of your favorite things?

Do you see the difference? It’s a mater of degree that separates them. They are not the same. That’s why they are two different words.

MrScottyTay ,

Your getting lost in lingual semantics. It’s just called “favourites” but it’s treated, at face value and at the code level, the same way other sites/systems treat the word “like”. That’s what matters. It could be called “Flibflabs” and still be a “like” replacement.

planish ,

People will say stuff like “fave before replying” though. And most platforms with a like will be able to make you a list of everything you have liked.

So I think like maps to the little Mastodon star pretty well, even though it might not be meant to be used that way.

ttmrichter ,

Favourites get put on a list so you can refer to it later … and notify the poster that you’ve done so as a form of positive feedback.

Bookmarks get put on a list so you can refer to it later.

That’s the big difference.

sure ,

Oh, so that explains why the ratio of favorites/boosts is so low on mastodon. I thought it was just a culture thing, where people rarely left likes on posts.

Turns out it was just a software quirk.

pjhenry1216 ,

I mean, you're not wrong. The "problems" of Mastodon are features. Avoiding an algorithm to suggest toots was done on purpose. It's why likes are simply for the author, not really for others. Boost promote toots by increasing exposure.

Likes are not the same as likes on Twitter, nor should they really matter. The intent of Mastodon is not to promote some toots over others due to popularity which many times just creates feedback loops. It's why you would see repetitive content on Reddit and if Lemmy gets remotely the same size, it'll suffer the same way. Algorithms are problematic in that they tend to get abused.

ARO3DP ,

I’ve been in the fediverse for a few years now most of the time on Mastodon.

The missing likes and replies you are reffering to are probably a federation issue. Smaller instances tend to lack some content. There are ways for admins to cope with that though.

I haven’t really experienced this issue on any Instance with a few hundred users though and follows should work regardless. I’ve had similar issues with Misskey.

I want to make clear that this is not a design choice. Mastodon doesn’t change those numbers randomly on purpose.

You also mentioned that it was hard for you to find content you like andadmittedly its harder than on Twitter but following hashtags is a good start.

Mastodon can be very rewarding if you are into micro blogging but Lemmy offers a different kind of experience that can’t be compared imo. Both are great options to browse the fediverse.

Sorry this text turned out longer than intended. Got carried away.

Fez ,

So users viewing this post on another instance will see the same exact comments and upvotes?

vojel ,
@vojel@feddit.de avatar

Hello from feddit.de 👋

AtaKe ,

Hi from lemm.ee👋

Valdair ,

Indeed, at least that's the idea. Viewing and posting from kbin.social.

sunbunman ,

My understanding is yes, but only if the instances have federated with each other.

CynicalStoic ,

Hello from kbin.social 👋

Hanabie ,
@Hanabie@sh.itjust.works avatar

sh.itjust.works user here :)

Nevoic ,
@Nevoic@lemmy.world avatar

That’s the idea, but in practice since the data exists independently on each server, it takes network time and computational time for them to align. In practice I expect comments to function as you expect, and upvotes to be slightly off depending on which instance you’re viewing from.

Things get a bit more weird when an instance gets defederated from another instance. My understanding here is that if you have instance A defederate from instance B, but instance B was listening to some of instance A’s communities, that instance B will have an independent replica of that community that doesn’t sync (this happened when beehaw defederated from open registration instances like lemmy.world).

russjr08 ,
@russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net avatar

Yes, on my instance for example your comment has 10 upvotes and 7 replies - the same counts are reflected on the origin instance lemmy.world.

masterspace ,

It’s aboot time something worked so well innit?

-lemmy.ca

null ,
@null@zerobytes.monster avatar

Hello from zerobytes.monster 👋

myxi ,
@myxi@feddit.nl avatar

Hi from feddit.nl 🙌!

ttmrichter ,
  1. This is a feature, not a bug. Clout-chasing is what kills corporate/surveillance social media. Get over fantasy Internet points and start providing and consuming actual content.
  2. I’d like to see “trending” removed entirely from Mastodon. I don’t give a shit what people at large think is important or cool or funny or whatnot. I care what my social circle thinks is important or cool or funny or whatnot. And for that? I’ve got my feed. Get over algorithmically spoon-fed statements of what you should care about and, you know, interact. On social media.
  3. The search bar works, just not in the way any sane person would expect it to work. It’s badly designed, badly named, and badly implemented.
  4. This is an unfortunate side effect of distributed social media. Federation is already a huge bottleneck for the Fediverse. Adding social graph follows to the list of things being transmitted around willy-nilly is a bandwidth killer. Any social media that is truly distributed (read: not BlueSky) will have the same issue.
jennwiththesea ,
@jennwiththesea@lemmy.world avatar
  1. is the reason many of us were on Twitter to begin with. I never kept to with friends there, but I really liked seeing breaking news, etc. It was useful and functional. Madstodon is not useful in this way, which breaks one of the key features many of us want in a Twitter replacement.

Sounds like I need to look at this Fish place instead.

ttmrichter ,

If you wanted spoon-fed content, then yes, Twitter is the place for you! And you know what? It’s still there!

I left Twitter because of the spoon-fed content and the algorithmic attempts to “engage” me by fostering outrage and am happy that Mastodon thus far does not have this misfeature. If you want that misfeature Twitter is still there. So is BlueSky (eventually). So is Threads. So is Instagram. So is Facebook. There’s an embarrassment of choice for the pabulum crowd. Please don’t bring it here.

2pt_perversion ,

That’s me. Besides the ads/promotion/tracking shit pre-elon Twitter was doing pretty much exactly what I want from it. It was mostly for the parasocial relationships not for keeping up with actual friends. I’d get news and announcements straight from the source quickly and even with a verified checkmark to help ensure I wasn’t getting trolled. Now it’s trash.

alizard ,
@alizard@lemmy.world avatar

Big agree, Twitter I previously used to see “what’s happening” in the world outside my little bubble

thegiddystitcher ,
@thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee avatar

That’s what makes threads like this so interesting to me. I never got into Twitter(despite many attempts literally since it was first released) but absolutely love Mastodon. And sometimes I read these threads and just think…what?

But in reality it just comes down to your individual use case and whether the specific thing that Mastodon is actually fits that use case.

Until this thread, for example, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a trending tab and I didn’t know there was a problem seeing people’s follows because it would never have occurred to me to look.

I use the advanced interface and, while I do follow people, very very rarely pull up the home feed. My columns are all crafting hashtags and my local feed because I’m on a crafting-focused server.

If you’re into following topics, Mastodon is a great time. If you’re into following people or you want to to kept up to date with the outside world then I can definitely understand not being a fan.

matt ,
@matt@lemmy.world avatar

I think this disconnect here on Lemmy comes from why people use the platforms they did before (Reddit vs Twitter).

Reddit was always purely content focused, and I feel people trying out Mastodon from Lemmy are expecting the same thing - where Mastodon is about content, and not people you want to follow.

I also love Mastodon as well and I don’t think the issues people are posting about in here are issues at all either, as Mastodon being about directly connecting with people and a purely chronological feed is why I like it - if I want to search content relating to a topic, I browse Lemmy instances instead.

iopq ,

I tried following on Mastodon, but I got spammed by repost bots so it just completely clogged my feed

starlinguk ,
@starlinguk@kbin.social avatar

Follow Deutsche Welle for news.

masterspace ,
  1. Seeing upvotes on posts is literally why you’re using Lemmy right now. Advertising / engagement driven media can exploit our desire to get feedback on what we say but getting feedback on what we say is not a new or novel phenomena, it’s a fundamental part of human nature and why we converse. It’s literally the exact same reason why doing a zoom presentation with cameras on, so that you can read body language, is better than cameras off, where you feel like you’re talking to an empty uncaring void.
  2. If you want to catch up with you family and friends go outside and talk to them or call them, or hell, set up your instance and only allow their posts to come through. The rest of the world users twitter to connect with the Twitterverse not their neighbours.
  3. I see no reason it would be any harder than Lemmy syncing upvotes acros ls thousands and thousands of comments.
ttmrichter ,
  1. First, I don’t give a shit at all about the upvote counts (and even less of a shit about the downvote counts) on Lemmy. To the point I have them concealed. Second, so you’re saying a different piece of software with different goals does things differently? WOW WHAT AN OBSERVATION! YOU SHOULD GO APPLY FOR A NOBEL PRIZE, GOOD SIR!
  2. Please point to where I said “family”? (Hint: this is not possible.)
  3. You see no reason, ergo there is no reason, Q.E.D. You, sir, are also a consummate logician.
masterspace ,
  1. It’s a different piece of software with the same user facing goals, fostering online discussion in community run communities centered around different topics.
  2. Please look up what a semantic argument is, and then realize you’re missing the point.
  3. Sooooo…
  • You claimed something was impossible,
  • I pointed to an instance of it being possible that we’re using right now
  • you mocked me for being too logical? Ok.
yoz ,

Try firefish

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