Mastodon

Love the point about activitypub compliance. True activitypub compliance needs to become the standard ASAP. None of the major fediverse networks seem to be fully compliant and it's such a low barrier to a lot of functionality that's very core to how the fediverse should function.

Regarding:

Full-Text Search: Mastodon doesn’t offer full-text search, because it could be a vector for abuse! A harasser could just look up whatever public statuses their victims post. Removing this protects users.

I've never seen anyone argue that particular point (wouldn't you just go to their profile? If they've hidden that, wouldn't their posts be excluded from search?).

The claim I've seen is that without it, you can write "Elon Musk" or "Trump" or "Tesla" or the name of whichever celebrity has caused a scandal this week, without a whole army of their fans searching for any post that mentions them and starting a war in the replies, as is pretty standard practice on Twitter.

Whereas if you do want it to be publicly discussed, you'd use a #HashTag and that's how post discovery is "meant to work" - as an opt-in mechanism.

If you have to censor those terms to avoid this, then you destroy other people's ability to add them to a filter list in their timeline.

As for the argument about quote re-tweets, though, I was skeptical about that one when I first heard it, but then I looked at my Twitter feed and I didn't find a single one that wasn't in the context of "hey followers of mine, look at this moron and how dumb he is!".

I do see the point that maybe you should reply to them personally and tell them why you disagree - but does arguing on the internet ever actually work that way?

Sean, this article is really reaching.

• "#10 Mastodon doesn’t have algorithms" this is pedantry. Of course chronological sorting is technically an algorithm, but we don't mean basic sorting when we say algorithm. When people refer to social algorithms they mean sorting based on algorithms that change the order from the chronological order based on any number of factors such as a post's virality, who posted it, its topic, if someone's paid for it to be boosted, and so on. So no, Mastodon's main feeds do not have algorithms in the colloquial usage of the word.
• "Myth #6: Mastodon respects your privacy, and is ideal for secure communication" woah hold up, privacy and security are two very different things. Mastodon does respect my privacy in some ways far more than other social sites, in that my data and actions are not being tracked and monetised, but yes it's not secure.
• "Myth #5: If you’re on a bad server, you can easily move to a good one" strongly agree with this one, but it also misses a major reason that this is a myth: you can't migrate your post history.
• "Myth #4: Mastodon Federation basically works like email." jesus, this is massive pedantry. Of course it doesn't work the same on a technical level. All the email metaphor is for is telling people that you're on one provider but you can talk to everybody on all other providers. The metaphor ends there. And "the metaphor is closer to Usenet groups than it is to the kind of email communication most people are familiar with"? Please don't use Usenet as an example unless your audience is 40+ and techy. Barely anybody knows what that is.
• "Myth #3: Mastodon is so much nicer than other places! The problem is a confusion of cause and effect." What? No. The cause is people, on average, in comparison to other major social sites, genuinely being nicer. There are plenty of other places on the internet just as nice as Mastodon, but Mastodon is far nicer in comparison to the other major social networks. People are generally comparing to Twitter when they make that comparison, and that comparison is 100% true.
• "Myth #1: Mastodon is Easy to Use!" lol this is not a myth, at all. I don't think anybody using Mastodon is unaware of its UX and UI flaws.

Ew, The Bad Space

Article is terrible, actually. Enough I don't really care to bother responding to anything else after already writing that