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

@jerry

The message (paraphrasing) of "I'm annoyed my bot posting things 99.99% of users find useless and didn't sign up to follow isn't propagating to servers where nobody has expressed an interest in seeing them" is a weird flex.

@tbortels @jerry I find a bizarre contradiction between "virality is bad" and "any content that appeals to only very small populations is bad", both of which are pretty central to Mastodon culture.

@rvcx @jerry

Another weird take.

Virality isn't bad - but it's not a goal. The need to be popular and feel seen isn't a mastodon design goal. Places you can go and be popular already exist.

The second is even weirder. I'm on a server that focuses on infosec. It's dry and mostly boring and we don't feel the need to force anyone to see it - which is why we're not polluting mastodon.social with that content. It's not that the content is bad - it's actually quite useful - we're just realistic about who it has utility for. Anyone seeking it out can join the server or follow individuals, but to push it on an uninterested population would be rude.

I'm sorry mastodon isn't what you expected it would be, and I'm happy you decided going to another service is best for you. But I am unconvinced this represents some sort of flaw in design or implementation. Nor am I asking to be enlightened.

@tbortels @jerry But in what way is the mere existence of something "pushing it" on anyone? I simply don't understand the mindset. You really believe that on a server with 150,000 users, every user is obliged to make everything they post of wide interest to everyone else on that instance?

You're worried that hosting your infosec account on mastodon.social would "pollute" that instance's timeline?

This is insane!