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
Note that I agree with a lot of this person’s complaints.

@jerry There are bits that seem to have written in anger. Understandable anger, perhaps, but when he writes

"but apparently its very open speech policy led to an association with Nazis (or something) and many other instances blocked it."

Come the fuck on, "Eh, nazis, maybe, but nothing to do with me, the actual problem is that I lost my posts" certainly a way to describe that situation *when you're talking about global moderation*.

@jerry I will say that getting to see my posts as ephemeral (in many more ways than just 'they don't follow you if you move instances') is something that in my case has been a net positive, but I understand people who don't want that.