valid reasons not to like mastodon...

phani00 (hubzilla)

...but why don't you look over the top of the well @Lauren Weinstein ?

mastodon i the biggest player in the fediverse, but far from the only one. my suggestion: https://hubzilla.org/page/info/discover

Lauren Weinstein wrote the following post Sat, 16 Nov 2024 20:09:53 +0100

Social media platforms with very limited post lengths are a major part of the misinformation/disinformation problem. They encourage posting in headlines without context, and exacerbate arguments because anything other than tiny posts (e.g., multiple "threaded" posts when available) are usually too much hassle. Bluesky is no better than X in this respect (worse, if you've fed money to Elon for longer posts, which is unforgivable) and the now utterly stale arguments that short posts are best are now little but dumpster fodder.

#Mastodon will never effectively compete for serious communications for very basic reasons, without major redesigns that are unlikely to ever be forthcoming. While it is possible to increase post lengths by recompiling (mine has a 20K character limit!) #Mastodon developers appear to have steadfastly refused to make this easily configurable by admins so as not to require rebuilds.

Even more catastrophically, the Mastodon reply topology, where any given user cannot be sure they are seeing all replies to any given post, is amateurish beyond measure, and is a stake in the heart of the Fediverse as it currently exists.

That's the reality, like it or not.

Lauren Weinstein

@phani002242 As by far the biggest, Mastodon is all that matters in the Fediverse context in the real world. Everything else related to Fediverse (a term that only a tiny fraction of the tiny fraction of people who have ever even heard of Mastodon have ever heard of) is only in the noise. Not even worth bothering with in terms of useful real world impacts.

Bill Statler

@Lauren Weinstein But "useful real world impacts" depend on personal choices. I am seeing many complaints about Mastodon, especially from people who have contributed working code and had it rejected. Mastodon's dominance is "reality" this week, but it will not continue until the end of time.

I only see three choices:

Complain about Mastodon but keep using it although it is unsatisfactory.
Fork Mastodon, or use and contribute to an already-existing fork, and improve things.
Use and contribute to one of the dozens of different projects, many of which lack Mastodon's shortcomings, or start a new one.

Lauren Weinstein

@billstatler @phani002242 My view, forged over the many, many years I've been working with public software projects, is that (as far as I personally am concerned) working on other than mainstream code is useful to the tiny fraction of individuals who will run it, but useless to the mass of ordinary users who will be running mainstream code. I am really not interested in people like me who have high technical competency levels. I want to make things better for all those users and potential users who just use systems "out of the box" in their default configurations. That's almost everybody, relatively. I've also argued this in various contexts to large firms (including #Google) over the years, with little positive results as they continue to ignore significant categories of users. But I keep trying, and my time is not unlimited.

phani00 (hubzilla)

right; just checked his timeline and that's all he sees, messages tagged with his name. pitty he didn't see mike's reply. but then, he doesn't really listen. he's here to share his wisdom, not to learn something new. he already knows everything after all.

Rollerball

What a sad situation...

Mike Macgirvin 🖥️

Provided without additional commentary...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect