[Krisando]

> That doesn't _really_ matter, though; Mastodon sites largely interconnect. I'm on mastodon.social because I am very lazy

Mastodon is a mess. Pawoo.net is the LARGEST userbase Mastodon node, professionally ran by a company and is one of the few that can scale appropriately to demand. You'll find that mastodon.social has limited its federation abilities with it.

Your choice of Mastodon nodes matter.

[jordemort]

Folks on pawoo.net regularly post lolicon, so, yeah. Depending on your interpretation of your local laws, you might pretty much be obligated to defederate from that sort of thing.

I think focusing on what has the biggest userbase or can give you the most reach is kind of missing the point with regard to the Fediverse. Without investors or stock prices or the need to sell ads, a lot of the motivation behind that sort of thinking evaporates. If you're looking at Mastodon and thinking "this is worthless, I can't build my brand with this," good, you're right, it's built that way on purpose.

[Krisando]

> Folks on pawoo.net regularly post lolicon

Which isn't that obvious that there is a problem as a new user. People are posting all kinds of trash on Twitter equally, you don't expect to find the entire node is blocked because some users are posting things some others disagree with.

> Depending on your interpretation of your local laws, you might pretty much be obligated to defederate from that sort of thing.

Not that I'm defending this, but because you mentioned it; I looked it up. Mastodon.social isn't obliged because it's located in Germany and so is Eugen; so this reasoning doesn't apply. Block the problem users, not the entire instance.

> I think focusing on what has the biggest userbase or can give you the most reach is kind of missing the point with regard to the Fediverse.

I looked for which node was ran with reliability and scaling built in, because I didn't want to be on a node that is ran by some hobbyist that is just going to give up one day, I also don't want to be on a server that falls over because scaling problems. Pawoo was top of the list.

This was further validated when my second account on another node disappeared one day because the owner decided they didn't want to continue running their node anymore. And further validated on other nodes where the server became so slow it was practically unusable, the server owner didn't really have any idea how to deal with the userbase.

I tried running Mastodon myself, but quickly found it awful to keep updated; at the time (I don't know if it still does), it wasn't very clean to update and was fairly manual. I eventually switched to GNU Social with the Qwitter addon because it was easier to maintain and update, only for Mastodon to decide to drop support for the federating protocol it was using one day.

You're absolutely right though, I don't get the key point of the fediverse currently.

> Without investors or stock prices or the need to sell ads, a lot of the motivation behind that sort of thinking evaporates.

If we take your logic to its ultimate conclusion, you're saying that without investors or stock prices or the need to sell ads, the motivation behind making a good and sane experience evaporates, considering the state it's been in for years. I honestly wouldn't try to disparage open source community projects like that to be honest.

> If you're looking at Mastodon and thinking "this is worthless, I can't build my brand with this," good, you're right, it's built that way on purpose.

I don't care about stock, brands. I'm looking at Mastodon and thinking that it's got serious communication, usability, data and privacy issues. It has so many basic things fundamentally broken. On Twitter, if you delete a post, it's gone. On Mastodon, delete a post, well, it's deleted on your node. But the rest of the fediverse has replicated it and it's not deleted. The other nodes aren't even keeping your data maliciously, it's just poorly designed and the fact it still won't tell you that "deleting" messages doesn't really "delete" them is plain vindinctive at this point after it has been raised as an issue repeatedly.

[jordemort]

> People are posting all kinds of trash on Twitter equally, you don't expect to find the entire node is blocked because some users are posting things some others disagree with.

No, but I do expect the owner of the site to moderate its content. Pawoo doesn't care to; as a result, many people care not to federate with them. That's fine. You can still use Pawoo if you want to, or a server that federates with it, or set up your own and federate with them.

> Block the problem users, not the entire instance.

If it's a recurring problem that the owners of the instance won't do anything about, it's a lot less work to just block the entire instance.

> I looked for which node was ran with reliability and scaling built in, because I didn't want to be on a node that is ran by some hobbyist that is just going to give up one day, I also don't want to be on a server that falls over because scaling problems.

You're thinking like you're a customer, but on the Fediverse you're generally more like a houseguest.

> I tried running Mastodon myself, but quickly found it awful to keep updated

You've got a fair point there; I'm not sure why they can't distribute a container image with the assets pre-built instead of making you build your own. It's been trouble-free for me since I got it up and running, for what it's worth.

Lots of other things speak ActivityPub, though. If you're looking for something as simple as possible, you might like https://microblog.pub/

> I eventually switched to GNU Social with the Qwitter addon because it was easier to maintain and update, only for Mastodon to decide to drop support for the federating protocol it was using one day.

I haven't used it, but for what it's worth, the documentation for GNU Social seems to indicate that it supports ActivityPub these days. OStatus never made it past the draft stage, and GNU Social seems to be the last project hanging on to it.

> If we take your logic to its ultimate conclusion, you're saying that without investors or stock prices or the need to sell ads, the motivation behind making a good and sane experience evaporates, considering the state it's been in for years.

People mostly run instances for free, for fun, for their friends. The motivation is to have fun hanging out with friends on the internet. For this purpose, it seems to be pretty good at its job to me, and gets better at it with every version. The lack of financial incentive does mean there's no drive to capture more eyeballs, though, which means there's no drive to cater to folks that would rather have something exactly like Twitter.

> I honestly wouldn't try to disparage open source community projects like that to be honest.

I'm not sure what words you're trying to put in my mouth here, but that sentence certainly doesn't give me impression that you're trying to have a good-faith discussion.

> It has so many basic things fundamentally broken. On Twitter, if you delete a post, it's gone. On Mastodon, delete a post, well, it's deleted on your node. But the rest of the fediverse has replicated it and it's not deleted.

Yes, email works this way as well. It is an unavoidable consequence of federation. ActivityPub does have a "Delete" activity, but other servers are under no obligation to honor it. Regardless of what protocol is in use, once you've sent data to someone else's server, you're not going to be able to delete it without that server's cooperation.

[MichaelZuo]

So it's not even decentralized but centralized into multiple competing blocs?

That just sounds like the worst of both worlds.

[Krisando]

From my personal experience in using Mastodon, the node operators basically have different ideas about what is acceptable or not and black/white list different nodes based on these ideas rather than leaving it up to the user to decide who they want to see posts from.

Unfortunately, a lot of this is really unclear when you're first trying to dip your toes into the fediverse and it gets really confusing in some threads when you're missing some of the messages.

I think the worst part is that they've previously advertised you have control of your data. But I can tell you that if you accidentally post something on Twitter and want to delete it, it's trivial, it's gone. On Mastodon, tough, it's been federated and now your deleted message lives on across multiple nodes and you can't delete it -- not out of maliciousness, but because of oversight in the federation protocol design.

The reason I bring the above up is, again, you can miss a lot of bits of conversations entirely dependent on which node you are because some messages are now deleted on the origin node, but not the nodes that has other people replying on.

[VectorLock]

"Let the instances choose their own moderation" that people think is a great feature seems to have serious downsides like you're describing. Before on Twitter you knew, generally speaking, what was allowed on Twitter and what wasn't. Now you have not just a whole panoply of different moderation standards, but instances making decisions on if what other people's moderation policies are acceptable to them, which ads a whole level of indirection an opaqueness to users. And forget about any ability to try to appeal...