Anil DashBleh. Just saw a friend who found out they couldn’t be followed by one of their friends because (unbeknownst to both parties) the moderators of their friend’s instance had defederated from their own instance. All of this, for people who barely know what any of these terms mean. What they experience is, “Two people you’ve never met have a beef you’ve never heard about over an issue you don’t know about, so your friend can’t see you. And there’s no fix.” It’s just terrible all around.
Glyph@anildash One of the most annoying ideas in the fediverse is the idea that we should abstract over the idea of an "instance" or automatically roulette people into different tiny instances to avoid making Mastodon gGmbH too powerful and because "instance choice" is a scary and irrelevant technical detail. The instance you're signing up for is the *service* you're signing up for. When people talk about email, they intuitively understand. You sign up for GMail, you don't sign up for "SMTP".
@anildash Similarly, Mastodon's biggest flaw is allowing a zillion "mastodon dot whatever" instances to spring up run by randos, rather than enforcing their trademark.
But the Fediverse will not actually succeed at large until there are a double-digit number of recognizable "brands" to sign up for, which have some distinctive features and branding and not just an amorphous blob of "wait, is this Mastodon?"
JonOne of several biggest flaws related to this! Also:
The combination of trying to shield people from the up-front choice and lack of a migration path
The difficulty of finding resources for people trying to choose an instance.
The failure to invest in moderation and safety, meaning that instance blocking (an incredibly blunt tool, but one that actually exists and works) is very overused.
The lack of any process and tooling around defederation when it does make sense. Best practices are to notify people on both instances so folks aren't taken by surprise (ideally in advance to give time for contingency planning)... I'm. not sure how often that happens, and even when it does, how does an admin effectively notify people?
It's a mess.
"One of the most annoying ideas in the fediverse is the idea that we should abstract over the idea of an "instance" "
Agreed!
Jeremy@jdp23 @glyph @anildash
The instance I'm on blocks most of the "mastodon" instances along with a list of others. Makes viewing threads impossible - I'm constantly hitting the "view in browser" button. (And I'm far too lazy to spin up my own instance - tried once, hit a block and gave up 🙄). I know there's lots of instances that block the "big" ones, decrying their lack of moderation.
The instance I'm on blocks most of the "mastodon" instances along with a list of others. Makes viewing threads impossible - I'm constantly hitting the "view in browser" button. (And I'm far too lazy to spin up my own instance - tried once, hit a block and gave up 🙄). I know there's lots of instances that block the "big" ones, decrying their lack of moderation.
@glyph @jdp23 @anildash
To make a short answer long: I created an account on mastodon.social in 2018, didn't really do anything w it. When twitter imploded, I got back on it, but found some compelling discussions about being on a smaller, local instance. Some folx I follow joined triangletoot.party and I jumped over also (via the broken migration 😞). I do occasionally browse the local feed and it's generally relevant. But the isolation from that list of other instances does suck.
To make a short answer long: I created an account on mastodon.social in 2018, didn't really do anything w it. When twitter imploded, I got back on it, but found some compelling discussions about being on a smaller, local instance. Some folx I follow joined triangletoot.party and I jumped over also (via the broken migration 😞). I do occasionally browse the local feed and it's generally relevant. But the isolation from that list of other instances does suck.
@jeromio @jdp23 @anildash I'm glad that the deal has at least been partially worth it for you. Personally I've been pretty angry to see fedi activists doing drive-by shaming of people on .social, telling them (especially people who don't really understand the tradeoff) tht they need to migrate to somewhere smaller; one of the reasons I'm on here is that I am stubbornly *not* taking the advice that it's somehow immoral to support a big instance