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by crocodiletears 1964 days ago
The wonderful part is also its Achilles heel. Mastodon is advertised as an alternative to social networks, but since your identity is tied to your node, its much closer to joining a web forum structured like twitter with the possibility (but not guarantee) of interacting with similar forums. From that perspective it's great. When people offer it as an alternative to conventional social media, it comes up massively short for anyone not trying to live in a bubble.

Contrasted with facebook (or a twitter with groups), if you join a group of motorcyclists, there's little to no risk that you'll be excluded from the Scooter group of-which you're already a member because a few bikers got into a spat with scoot-gang, nor will you be excluded from any of the groups that get along well with scoot-gang.
1 comments
gargron 1964 days ago
> Contrasted with facebook (or a twitter with groups), if you join a group of motorcyclists, there's little to no risk that you'll be excluded from the Scooter group of-which you're already a member because a few bikers got into a spat with scoot-gang, nor will you be excluded from any of the groups that get along well with scoot-gang.

Are you sure? On Reddit, membership of one subreddit often results in bans from others, and Reddit is centralized.

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crocodiletears 1964 days ago
I consider those kinds of bans petty, but hardly a platform issue.

Reddit exposes group affiliation by default through public post histories. One can lurk in any public subreddit without consequence. Even banned, you can still consume public subs, though you can't interact with them.

The simple act of account creation (choosing the wrong node) is enough to exclude you from otherwise public content in the fediverse.

Joining Mastodon is often described as joining 'mastodon the network', when in reality there is no cohesive network (though there may be a canonical network). You're joining your instance + an opaque number of unknown nodes, with much of the content arbitrarily disappeared for any number of historical reasons to-which you may not be privy.

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