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Mastodon Exit Interview

v.cx

Mastodon Exit Interview

I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to BlueSky for text-centric social media.

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Mastodon Exit Interview
v.cx /2025/04/mastodon-exit-interview
16 comments

  • For people using Mastodon, what is the status of the discoverability issue? I remember it being worked on, but not sure what the status it now.

    Thankfully on the Threadiverse we have https://lemmy-federate.com/ and Piefed community discovery: https://piefed.social/post/531611, so the issue is mostly solved nowadays, but it's easier to discover communities compare to each single poster

    • https://piefed.social/post/531611 is a 404 for me and https://lemmy-federate.com/ can't find the community I posted in, but even ignoring that, two external services don't solve the problem. A user shouldn't have to start a new acct, flail around trying to find others, make a post complaining about it, and then be told about these other services they're supposed to use.

      I rarely use mastodon anymore but I haven't heard of any new features that improve discoverability. Discovery across the entire fediverse is still awful and it seems like fediverse developers are still content to ignore it and let external developers try to handle it.

  • I think Mastodon is a bit rougher than Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin just because it's centered around users instead of groups

  • This is some of the best criticism I've read about Mastodon. Comprehensive, cogent, fair, accurate.

  • Public microblogging is a weird thing to start with but that's just an opinion. Mastodon is not perfect but fine as a microblogging instance. It seems to me clear, reading this line that the fediverse need as new type of fediware: one to send asynchronous ephemeral notifications to user how choose to register.

16 comments