Some Notes on Social Media, April 2025
Mastodon Exit Interview (Hacker News)
From my Mastodon feed, a post by Rob Shearer generally bitching about Mastodon, from the perspective of someone trying to make a bunch of bots and get people to follow them.
To his main gripes:
- Federation does work, actually:
I have an account on a smaller server - just over 300 active users. Not one of the instances with a handful of users (or just one), but a far cry from mastodon.social. And honestly, I've had zero issues. I realize that's not true for everyone, but the point is, if you want to change your Fedi experience, join a different server. Or two. That's the entire point. Make a new alias on a new server. Online identity used to be a very loose thing, before the big tech companies decided we should do everything under our real names (I wonder why that was). All but a handful of the accounts I follow are from outside my instance. If my server ever becomes blocked by others en masse, I'll make another account elsewhere and move on.
As vidarh says in the HN thread,
“Federation does not give you a right to expect every instance to want to talk to you. This is the typical left- vs. right-libertarian thinking, where the right-libertarians tend to get all angry and upset when left-libertarians point out that maximising freedom includes maximising our freedom to choose who to associate with and set rules for that association.
“It's still federation if someone blocks your instance.
- Account migration isn't perfect, but it does sorta work
The thing is, there's not much to compare it to. How do you take your Facebook account and migrate it to Instagram, or Twitter, or Bluesky? That's the thing. You don't (well, Bluesky offers a migration for Twitter archives, but this is a special case). Mastodon (and Fedi generally) is the only social media technology taking any sort of serious interest in account migration. Maybe we'll get there one day with Bluesky. But I think you have to accept that although Mastodon's approach isn't perfect, it's at least something, and they're at least trying, which is more than anyone else can really say.
- DMs don't work:
No, because they're not really DMs, they're "private mentions", and expecting them to work like DMs is a byproduct of using other social media and expecting something that works like direct messages elsewhere. And this doesn't. Sorry?
I'd like actual DMs, too, but I'm not going to shit on private mentions just because they're something similar that works slightly differently.
Overall re: Mastodon: as the awfully-named INTPenis says in the HN thread, "It's miles better than what we used to have. Imho fedi is exactly where I want to be." Agreed, and likewise. I find myself using Mastodon a little more than I'm currently using Bluesky. I like it more. Something doesn't have to take over the world to be good, you know I find myself using Mastodon a little more than I'm currently using Bluesky. I like it more. Something doesn't have to take over the world to be good, you know?
A New Form of Verification on Bluesky
It looks like Bluesky is adding "traditional" verification, a la Twitter and Instagram. It's tied into the notion of a trusted verifier, an organization that can issue verifications. Which, great. But Bluesky already had verification, via domains. My own Bluesky, [redacted], uses this - you add a particular DNS record to your domain, and then voila, your Bluesky handle becomes, eg, joesmith.ca rather than joesmith.bsky.social.
So why'd they do this? I suspect it's to do with people either wanting or expecting certain traditional visual signals (blue checks). Okay, so now Bluesky has both: verification that you are who you say you are via domain ownership, as well as verification that you are the person other people say you are.
It's awkward. I understand why they're adding it. But, I don't like it. There are things to do that are more pressing than copying Twitter and Instagram features. Guardrails against misinformation/disinformation, verification of important content, banning bad actors quickly and efficiently. The last decade has shown what happens when social media grows hands-off. If democracy's going to have a chance, we're going to have to tackle the things that've made Facebook, Twitter, and others so cancerous.
