Jerry 🦙💝🦙Apr 16, 2025

8 years on, Mastodon is still failing because it’s so hard to use https://v.cx/2025/04/mastodon-exit-interview

(For clarity, mastodon is not failing - that was my apparently bad attempt at sarcasm. Please see my response to this post for more details)

Mastodon Exit Interview

I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to Bluesky for text-centric social media.

Rob’s Posts
Show threadJerry 🦙💝🦙Apr 16, 2025
Note that I agree with a lot of this person’s complaints.
Show thread-> @haileys.quest
@jerry The one thing I disagree with is that he thinks 100 bot posts isn't "noise." If I cared to know what time the sun was rising in Tokyo I'd look it up, or add a homescreen widget or something. I don't need that in a feed of posts I expect to be from people.
Apr 16, 2025 at 4:15pmWeb
Show threadRob ShearerApr 18, 2025
@blake @jerry So don't follow the bot. The cultural problem I highlight is that conflation of "that doesn't interest me" with "that content shouldn't be available to anyone".
Show thread-> @haileys.questApr 19, 2025
@rvcx @jerry The problem is it flooding the global/local timelines, not just my home feed.
Show threadRob ShearerApr 19, 2025

@blake @jerry On an instance with 150,000 accounts, that concern is, and feel free to block me for this, idiotic.

But you got what you wanted. As soon as the admin told me they weren't acceptable, I shut them down.

Show thread-> @haileys.questApr 19, 2025
@rvcx @jerry See this is where botsin.space was really great. If you wanted to follow a bot (and I have!) it's a directory and timeline that gives you all the bots you could ever dream of. Centering that traffic on bot-specific instances also makes it easy to filter that out of other timelines, so it's there and easy to find if you look for it, out of your way when you're not.

There are possibly technological improvements -- one from Bluesky is its feeds and discovery system; you don't get the firehose, generally, it all gets filtered through various customizable feeds. But yeah, the culture here is absolutely rancid about everything. I can't say I'm an exception....