I wanted to like Mastodon. I appreciate the movement to more open systems. I want people to be able to own and control their data. I want people to be able to control who can interact with them. I like the idea of federation and, in general, having more types of services that are federated. (putting aside for the moment that even having this term in play is just fallout from everything getting slurped into walled gardens from "web 2.0", etc).

But Mastodon, while currently the most visible part of that story, doesn't seem to land squarely on any identifiable type of service (or fun). It's not exactly for blog posting, it's not exactly for sharing images or videos, and it barely qualifies a social network.

Search and trends for people you already follow is basically non-functional insofar as basic user expectations go. Basic discovery essentially doesn't exist. It's federated yet misses all of the basic stuff we had back in the BBS days. There's kind of this confused idea about how to let people "post on the internet" while somehow also not really be on the internet. It seems to come from trying to limit abuse, but it breaks a lot of expecations and yet still doesn't limit abuse in the right ways. The rest of my complaints are more or less covered in @jwz 's post https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/08/mastodons-mastodonts/

On top of the basic (data) model of the thing, there's the software itself. Self-hosting a single-user instance, one in which that single user neither follows a ton of people nor is followed by a ton of people, has been just ridiculous (and I'm a dorky nerd who likes to self-host things). I know this stuff is actually pretty hard (I worked at pre-IPO twitter, I've seen some shit, ok) and I appreciate the effort being put into it...but simply put, it runs way too hot and needs too much maintenance for what you get out of it.