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by jonathanstrange 1315 days ago
I've tried Mastodon for several months, using three different servers (or how these are called), and for me personally the experience ranged from useless to unpleasant. I got a horrible mixture of open source programming and pedophile manga culture in one home feed, and tons of Nazi posts with Pepe the frog memes in another. I never saw anything interesting in months, even after changing home feeds several times. Most of the discussions were about topics or memes I didn't even know. It was boring and I opened my client less and less often.

To be fair, Twitter offers essentially the same experience to me. Although you can see a glimpse of reason from time to time in between, because there are some experts on it, it's mostly about vitriol and passive aggressive trolling. I've heard you can adopt it by blocking and subscribing strategically but this never worked for me in the three months I've tried it. I've deactivated my Twitter account, too.
2 comments
lokedhs 1315 days ago
May I ask what instance you were on? A lot of guides don't talk about it, but there is a dark version of Fediverse, often references as the "freeze peach" instances.

They are generally blocked by most mainstream instances, but enough are open so that you can't still follow a majority of the mainstream content from these instances.

However, when you are on them, the content is very much like how you describe it. That's why I'm curious as to whether you (possibly accidentally) joined the one if those. If you you di, and you're not actively looking for such content, the experience can be quite terrible.

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baxuz 1315 days ago
> May I ask what instance you were on?

That's the problem with all decentralized and/or forked products.

"Oh, you're using the wrong Linux distro, that one sucks."

"You're on the wrong WoW server, that one sucks."

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infinitezest 1315 days ago
Whenever I tell people that I don't like to use Twitter I often hear that I'm just using it wrong. On the other hand, I've been really enjoying my time with Fosstodon.
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baxuz 1313 days ago
Never said that Twitter was good. It's a horrible platform created with the sole purpose of disseminating hot takes and outrage.
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krapp 1315 days ago
That's not a problem, that's literally the feature. If you don't like it, fork it or move. Can't do that with Twitter.

The problem (at least as far as Mastodon goes) is managing identity between instances. Also, clients still seem to be stuck at the "written by programmers for programmers" state of design, so UX isn't up to par to what a normal user might expect much of the time. The decentralized, federated nature of Mastodon is a big deal to programmers and people who care about censorship resistance/software freedom, etc, but all of that should be completely transparent to the end user. It should be as easy to find, join and leave instances - with a single, common identity - as it is to find and join subreddits.

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jonathanstrange 1315 days ago
That's what must have happened to me. I think one of them was called "stereophonic" (or similar) and the other one some weird Belgian with German like "absturztau.be", both were boring but the latter was worse. The third one I don't remember. They had nice descriptions, though, which didn't really match the content. I might give it another try with the biggest US main server, though it's probably not for me anyway since I can't stand Twitter's format either.
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vanderZwan 1315 days ago
> I got a horrible mixture of open source programming and pedophile manga culture in one home feed, and tons of Nazi posts with Pepe the frog memes in another

This sounds like an absolutely horrible experience, I'm so sorry to hear this.

At the same time, aside from the open source programming, which is welcome, I have not ever seen any of the other things you mentioned, but I also took the time to look for a more "quiet", dataviz-oriented server myself. My feed is more people I explicitly follow than local timeline, which makes it a much more curated experience.

Can I ask you what kind of interests you were searching for when deciding on an instance? Because my hunch is that you basically had to deal with a "search engine" kind of problem, but for fediverse instances. I wouldn't be surprised if programming, anime and manga has a ton of "4chan-esque" places that drown out the more quiet "safe spaces" unless you take some time to dig deeper before settling down somewhere.

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angio 1315 days ago
He probably picked the biggest instances and mastodon is huge in the japanese loli community.
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