Re: Mastodon Exit Interview
I came across Rob's post, Mastodon Exit Interview, recently while cruising Hacker News and I have to say, some of it resonated with me.
My biggest complaint about Mastodon is that it doesn't really deliver on the idea that I'm fully in charge of my own account and content, where I get to decide the source of truth about myself. Rob summarizes:
Mastodon allows you to post the equivalent of a web redirect: your followers are informed of your new instance and seamlessly migrated over. Your posts, however, do not move with you. Which is kind of a theme: the system simply doesn’t think posts are terribly important.
But worse than that, the redirect is hosted by your old instance. If you are moving because your old instance went down, you’re stuck. If you are moving because the administrator of your old instance decided to nuke your account, you’re stuck.
People often make the comparison between email and Mastodon but I don't feel it's a very good one. In order to use my own domain for my social media endpoint, I have to run a whole instance. Can you imagine having to run your own email server if you wanted to send/receive emails at your vanity domain? This really should be easier. People a lot smarter than myself are working on these things, so I'm sure there are technical reasons why I can't pay some Fediverse version of Fastmail to host my social media endpoints and still get to use my vanity domains without having to run my own Mastodon instance.
I attempted to run my own single-user instance for a while and I was bumping into discoverability/federation issues. I followed and used hashtags, like #HomeAssistant, because I want to participate in discussions about Home Assistant. But because of how federation works, I was not seeing all posts tagged with #HomeAssistant, nor do I feel my own posts tagged as such were being seen by all the others following the same hashtag.
The perfect social media platform would work more like email, DNS, and RSS. I should control the source of truth and easily be able to move things when I decide, and all of that should work seamlessly.
Still, I think any social media platform can be good if you're following good people. Right now, I feel my Mastodon timeline is pretty good, though I don't spend nearly as much time there as I used to spend on Twitter. Who knows if I'm getting all the posts tagged as #HomeAssistant? I don't.