Does it matter which Mastodon instance you choose? I've seen many people claim that it doesn't matter, and moreover that you can easily switch instances. I learned the hard way that this claim is unwarranted, a disservice to new Mastodon users. Your choice of instance is important, indeed crucial. Until yesterday I was on mstdn.plus, a Mastodon instance with well over 4000 active users according to its server stats. Yesterday morning I woke to a "frozen" timeline. At some point my home timeline stopped showing new posts. I stopped receiving new notifications too. My desolate experience was the same on the web site and in several third-party Mastodon client apps that I have installed on various devices. It turned out that my own experience was far from unique: looking at the federated timeline of mstdn.plus, at a certain point all posts from other Mastodon instances stopped, leaving only posts from local users. The last post from another instance was at 07:45 UTC on January 30, 2023. In the local mstdn.plus posts that appeared afterward, I saw a number of users complaining about frozen home timelines and missing notifications. (It was difficult to have conversations with them, because we weren't getting notifications for each other's replies.) Clearly, the entire instance was now severely dysfunctional.
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.
Mastodon's Eternal September
Figure 1: A ‘joke’ t-shirt made in 1994 commemorating Eternal September, taken from The Eternal September Wikipedia page The latest round of Twitter nonsense (changing the way “blocking” works) has caused another wave of people to abandon that site for pastures new. Nearly every one of them went to Bluesky instead of Mastodon. 1.2 Million people joined Bluesky in 48 hours. I wonder why that is? I bet there’s something about where people draw the line on Twitter’s behaviour and where they choose to go next. But I bet there’s something else to it too.
Expectations and preferences around community contributions/interactions · mastodon mastodon · Discussion #36552
There is a long-running pattern of conversations on issues/PRs around some features getting quite heated and sometimes turning into personal insults, venting frustrations, borderline conspiracy acc...
Making Social Media Social
As some of you might know, I am part of a team of people moderating a Mastodon server. And as so many of those servers we’ve been having some problems with fake signups lately. This is about how we mitigated the issue and how it was beneficial beyond that. So for those who don’t know […]
Mastodon creator shares what went wrong with Threads and ponders the future of the fediverse
In a wide-ranging interview with Eugen Rochko, creator of the decentralized social network Mastodon, Rochko shared why Threads federation fell flat, why ActivityPub and ATProto will likely never merge, and what it will take to grow the fediverse.
Mastodon and the Fediverse is too noisy. Why?
Mastodon and most Fediverse platforms may be better than traditional social networks at interoperability but they don’t do much about other issues. In fact, they largely copy these issues straight from the social media giants. Most Fediverse platforms, including Mastodon, publicly display follower counts, like (favorite) counts, and share
Mastodon - Decentralized social media
Learn more about Mastodon, the radically different, free and open-source decentralized social media platform.
Openvibe – Mastodon & Bluesky - Apps on Google Play
Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr & Threads in one timeline. RSS reader & crossposting.
My top Bluesky feature requests for 2024
In 2023 my social media consumption changed dramatically after I DM'd a random mufo on what-was-then-called Twitter for a Bluesky invite. At the time, I was floating between Twitter itself and Mastodon for my primary daily social media experience. On one hand, I loathed Twitter (and
How Does Mastodon Work? - Kev Quirk
I’ve spoken about Mastodon numerous times on this blog. It is the social media platform I use more than any other, but for a new user it can be confusing because it doesn’t work like other social media sites.
So uh, apparently $288/year is not enough to run a Mastodon service for ~3 users, and this is a known issue (masto.host/mastodon-content-retention-se…) with no solution (github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions…!
mastodon.social is being DDoS right now. That's bad. It was bad when Bluesky was DDoSed. It's bad when open social platforms are attacked. status.mastodon.social
mastodon.social - Status
status.mastodon.socialSo uh, apparently $288/year is not enough to run a Mastodon service for ~3 users, and this is a known issue (masto.host/mastodon-content-retention-se…) with no solution (github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions…!
