I'm less than impressed by the federation model of Mastodon (though it doesn't need too many tweaks to make it work). The main problem I have is the fact that you are pretty tied in with your instance. I think most of the problems I have <i>viewing</i> content from other instances can be solved with better clients:<p>- tag searches only cover posts that your instance knows about (i.e. it searches the federated feed rather than querying a list of federated instances)
- You can't customize your "federated" feed to merge multiple instances' local feeds (especially important on small instances and when looking at small instances).<p>The more fundamental issues that I think has to be addressed at the "protocol" level is that I'd really like my identity to be portable. As it is now, if I like 10 different small instances, I have to join all 10, then I might have to repeat or boost my posts from all the relevant instances to get them to show up in the local feed - plus people who want to follow me will find 10 different accounts on different instances and not know which ones to follow. If, client-side, I just create a bot that auto-posts on multiple instances, if my followers on a given instance are following different versions of my account, the federated feed on that instance will be spammed with multiple posts.<p>I think some sort of customization where an identity is at least partially independent from its instance is required here.
I don't like the idea of walled gardens and echo chambers, which is the major benefit Mastodon is providing over Twitter. Already this isn't morphing into a community where people have more control, its encouraging people to insulate themselves into communities where everyone thinks the same way and dissenting opinions can be squashed by the site moderators. I would like to think this kind of freedom would lead to greater exchange of ideas and open lines of communication, but everything I have seen online points in this going the opposite direction.
I'm probably going to turn this into a blog post but this is the outline of my take on what federation is good for:<p>* different people have different needs from social networks<p>* starting new social networks is hard becasue getting a critical mass of users is hard<p>* people would have social networks that are better tailored to their needs if there was a larger diversity of social networks<p>* centralized platforms target the average of everyone which doesn't serve anyone very well<p>* there are two ways to get critical mass: piggy-backing off an existing network or trying to bootstrap one from friends/family/interest groups<p>* piggy-backing is awkward because the upstart network and the established network both want to kill each other in the long run, but think they can get value out of each other in the short run<p>* federation can provide the benefits of piggy-backing without being adversarial<p>* if it's the case that each person has a social network that's right for them that isn't right for that many people, then federation can be a stable equilibrium
I run a GNU Social (Mastodon compatible) instance for Kitchener Waterloo hackers at <a href="https://kwat.chat" rel="nofollow">https://kwat.chat</a> . I know many of the people personally and consider them truly bright. You're more than welcome to join! (or follow from your instance)
I wish there were fewer references to Mastodon and more to GNU Social (since Mastodon is a particular implementation) but the more people in the ecosystem the better!
I wonder if integrating any of the gnu social twitter bridges or plugins would get the best of both worlds? Does anyone have experience implementing something like this: <a href="https://wiki.loadaverage.org/gnusocial/plugins/twitterbridge" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.loadaverage.org/gnusocial/plugins/twitterbridge</a> ?
I takes a lot of effort to create a social network that's even harder to navigate than Twitter, but, by god, they did it. As a logged out user, it's literally impossible to follow any conversations that happen on there.