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Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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His grand vision remains to leave Mastodon users in control of the social network, making their own decisions about what content is allowed or what appears in their timelines.

I don't use Mastadon cause I don't care for micro-blogging, but nevertheless, I like this.

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[–] 1 point 2 years ago* (5 children)

Follow people and hashtags and interact with them and you'll get followers.

That sounds like a convoluted method of self promotion, almost like SEO fake engagement, just to be discoverable. And if everyone on the network had to do this to be discoverable, how can I trust the discovery methods to find people worth following?

And if the cross instance discoverability has these kinds of hurdles, then the promise of federation isn't going to pan out.

At least with Lemmy the nature of the platforms, users following a smaller universe of potential communities, makes each community much more easily discoverable for people who don't necessarily want to be active posters. Mastodon's user-focused follow is much more limited in seamless federation.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    You don't have to promote yourself or be fake at all. If you reply to people and they like things you say, they or others who read it may follow you. Often if you follow someone they'll follow you back--but that most likely depends on you having put some info about yourself in your profile so they can get an idea of who they would be following, and even more likely if you've interacted with them before.

    Since there's no algorithm, hashtags are big on Mastodon. By subscribing to some you'll find people to follow and interact with. Also, a common way for people to find and follow you is to write an introduction post and pin it--include the 'introduction' hashtag plus hashtags of your interests. That way when people search for hashtags they're interested in, they'll find your intro post and may follow you. And whenever you post about something you want to have more reach, put a relevant hashtag or two at the end of it.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    So if you set up on small server A, and want to be discoverable by users on server B, C, D, and E, you have to do this for many different users and hope that they follow you back just so that those servers' users can find you.

    And it basically defeats the main use case for where I actually understand microblogging, which is one-way announcements by semi-automated accounts that are widely followed that do not actually follow anyone else back.

    It just sounds like a bad arrangement for discoverability and search.

    hashtags are big on Mastodon

    But I can't view the posts of any users by hashtag if those users aren't already being followed by someone from my server, right? That means I'd never want to join a small server if I'm just a lurker who doesn't really want to actively interact with others, because my own feed would be limited.

    there's no algorithm

    Sounds like an algorithm that's just more complicated and has unintuitive human inputs in it.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I think you're making a much bigger deal of the federation issue than it actually matters in practice.

    Yes, some users who run their own server with very few other users do face this issue, but it can usually be dealt with without much effort. If they go and follow 200 users on 20 different instances, then they'll most likely get followed back by someone on 90% of those instances. It's not that much effort. I now and then you see one of these users making a "please boost and follow for federation" post to get them kick started.

    But also, that situation is for techy nerds anyway. Normy users are not going to be setting up their own instance, 99% of them will be joining a populous instance, and so will have good federation with most of the network immediately.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    If they go and follow 200 users on 20 different instances, then they'll most likely get followed back by someone on 90% of those instances. It's not that much effort.

    I don't know, this sounds like an unnatural way to interact with a service. Following 4000 accounts and trying to spread it out evenly between servers sounds like a terrible way to curate one's own feed and consume content on a service like this. I rarely follow more than 100 on any given service, and think it's weird when people follow more than 500.

    Following back seems like a pretty foreign concept to me on this type of service, and seems to me to be inconsistent with how people actually use Twitter or Bluesky. To me, these hiccups in user experience as either a lurker (can't find anyone in-band who another person on your instance doesn't already follow) or publisher (can't be found easily from anyone off of your server unless you actively go try to spam follows in the hopes that some will follow back) would be a dealbreaker for anything less than the biggest server.

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