Mastodon is, like, fine, but it has one gaping flaw that makes it utterly unusable for me.
Basically, the issue is you cannot be assured that any particular instance contains the entire conversation thread/replies, because they’re not necessarily sent to every server participating in the conversation.
Bluesky fixes that by the ‘firehose’ feeds federating out to the PDSes and providing complete reply chains, which just flat out makes it a better experience since you can actually see what everyone is saying, not just what people on servers you might be following already are saying.
It’s a giant stupid flaw in Mastodon (since other AP based platforms such as, for example, Lemmy don’t have it) and really should be addressed since it makes the platform darn near useless since why am I following people to only get half of what might be a useful thread?
that sounds crazy. that makes the idea of federation pointless imo… thank you for the response
Yeah, it makes federation, especially if you run your own server and don’t have a large user base, largely broken.
You’ll end up getting a shockingly small amount of replies to people you follow’s posts, which (for me) is the whole reason I’m here.
It almost forces you onto a larger server if you want a reasonable experience (or you have to start ingesting huge amounts of data via relays), but I mean, at that point why not just use bluesky instead?
They don’t like algorithms. They want you to select which content you see.
That’s all I’ve got. Mastodon is a better, more open tech. And it’s pretty easy to get set up, relatively. It’s insane that companies haven’t jumped on it.
You don’t even have to quit Twitter. You can just post to more than one place and give people the option.
Threads (for better or worse) demonstrates that that’s not a fundamental obstacle for fediverse microblogging.
If someone wanted to launch a Mastodon fork with algorithm-driven content discovery, they could do. Just as with Lemmy/kbin/mbin, the beauty of the fediverse is that different servers can take quite different approaches to use experience design whilst still maintaining compatibility with the rest of the community.
