My Problems with Mastodon
Even with growing pains accommodating an influx of new users, Lemmy has made it clear that a federated social media site can be nearly as good as the original thing. I joined Lemmy, and it exceeded my expectations for a Reddit alternative run by an independent team.
These expectations were originally pretty low when Mastodon, the popular federated Twitter alternative, was the only federated social media I had experience with. After using Lemmy, Mastodon seems to be missing basic features. I initially believed these were just shortcomings of federated social media.
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Likes aren’t counted by users outside your instance, and replies don’t seem to be counted at all (beyond 0, 1, 1+), leading to posts that look like they have way more boosts (retweets) than likes or replies:
This incentivizes people to just gravitate toward the biggest instance more than people already do. My guess is that self-hosting a mastodon instance would also not be ideal, since the only likes you’ll see are your own.
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There’s really only one effective ways to find popular or ‘trending’ posts. There’s the explore tab which has ‘posts’, and ‘tags’ sections.
The ‘posts’ section shows some trending posts across your instance and all the instances that it’s federated with, this is the one I use it the most.
The ‘tags’ section is a lot like the trending tab on Twitter, but it’s reserved just for hashtags, which I guess isn’t a huge deal, but it feels like a downgrade. However, I do like the trend line it shows next to each tag!
The ‘Local’ and ‘Federated’ tabs are a live feed of post from your home instance and all the other instances, respectively. I feel these are pretty useless and definitely don’t warrant their own tabs. Having a local trending tab for seeing popular posts on your instance would be more interesting.
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The search bar basically doesn’t work, is this just me???
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This one is more minor and more specific to a Twitter alternative, but when looking at a user’s follows, you’ll only see the one’s on your home instance but for some reason this rule doesn’t apply to followers.
From what I’ve heard, a lot of these issues are intentional in order to create a healthier social media experience. Things like less focus on likes, reduces a hivemind mentality, addiction, things like that (I couldn’t find a source for this, if anyone has one confirming or disproving this please lmk).
Why this is a Problem
Mastodon seems to have two goals: To be an example of how a federated alternative to Twitter can work well, and to be a healthier social media experience. It’s not obvious, but I think these goals conflict with each other. A lot of the features that are removed in the pursuit of a healthier social media will be perceived as the shortcomings of federation as a concept.
In my eyes, Mastodon’s one main goal should be proving federated social media as a whole to the public, by being a seamless, familiar, full-featured alternative to Twitter. For me, Lemmy has done that for Reddit, upvotes are counted normally, you can see trending posts locally and globally same with communities, and the search function works! All its shortcomings aren’t design flaws, and I fully expect them to be fixed down the road as it matures.
As annoying as Jack Dorsey is, I have high hopes for BlueSky.
Mastodon doesn’t have Likes at all.
The star you’re referring to is Favorite. Those go into your Favorite list. So you can refer back to them more easily.
Oh god, Ive been using them wrong this whole time?!?!
I guess I am so used to other social media I had assumed it was a like button.
Although they differ from Twitter Likes, note that Mastodon Favorites are not private. For an example, I’ll refer to one of your toots:
https://mastodon.social/@justhach/110696151311920356
Viewing it in the Mastodon web interface, I see an indication that 2 people marked it as a Favorite. I can then click to see those 2 usernames, listed here:
https://mastodon.social/@justhach/110696151311920356/favourites
Such listings are limited though. For example, I’m viewing a toot that you boosted, and I see an indication that it has been marked as a Favorite by 816 users; but when I click to view their names, I see only 40 of them listed.
The Mastodon API only returns 40 boosted accounts by default, but will allow a client to query up to 80. When federation gets involved, more information becomes available to external servers that federate with your account, so don’t rely on that number for any privacy reasons.
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No, you haven’t. It started out this way, but now basically it’s the “tell the poster you acknowledge/like the post” but also there when you don’t want to boost the post to your timeline. You can still use it this way, but because the community (probably with one of the first twitter exoduses) started using it more like a like on twitter, they gave up and implemented bookmarks (I think might be private and not notify the poster you’ve bookmarked?)
Ofc, there are also some of the mastodon HOA that will still insist this, but then why do bookmarks exist…?
Anyway, just in general, you can tell by the up/down ratio and a lot of the comments that are getting upvoted in this thread that are posting things that are either just incorrect or at least misunderstand things how many people in this thread actually use mastodon, so I would take criticism with a grain of salt.
I don’t see it that way. There are separate options to Favourite or Bookmark a post. To me Bookmarking something is so you can refer to it later, although nothing is stopping you using Favourites that way.
Favourites get put on a list so you can refer to it later … and notify the poster that you’ve done so as a form of positive feedback.
Bookmarks get put on a list so you can refer to it later.
That’s the big difference.
Favourite and Bookmark are absolutely different things. They’re two different lists for you to use as you see fit.
Neither of them is a Like though. I’m not sure that fact is really debatable.
I’ll have to disagree there. When you Favourite a post, the person that posted it gets a notification about the fact, while if you Bookmark something no notification is sent. In effect you are telling the person that you “Liked” their post.
Also, looking at the Explore section of Mastodon the following message is shown at the top of the feed:
So those Favourites are used by the algorithm to rank posts. Bookmarks are totally private and only used to save posts for your own use.
Lets try it this way. Would say your favourites things, include everything you like? Do you like some things that aren’t your favorite? Do you keep a list of everything you’ve ever liked? Would it be as big as the list of your favorite things?
Do you see the difference? It’s a mater of degree that separates them. They are not the same. That’s why they are two different words.
Your getting lost in lingual semantics. It’s just called “favourites” but it’s treated, at face value and at the code level, the same way other sites/systems treat the word “like”. That’s what matters. It could be called “Flibflabs” and still be a “like” replacement.
People will say stuff like “fave before replying” though. And most platforms with a like will be able to make you a list of everything you have liked.
So I think like maps to the little Mastodon star pretty well, even though it might not be meant to be used that way.
lol, and I was thinking I was supporting other’s users opinions.
You are in a way. Just not only that.