In some fields of science, such as physics and machine learning, I’m finding that Twitter has gotten only *more* important in the past few months. My principled refusal to use that platform is beginning to hurt me professionally; I’m missing out on important discussions (including about my own articles). I’ve had some great exchanges on Mastodon and value the relationships I’ve forged here, but, as much as it pains me to say this, it’s just not the same. What can we do to fix this?
@gmusser - there are currently many things about Mastodon that make it unable to serve as a Twitter substitute. They are well analyzed here:
https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/06/12/why-did-the-twittermigration-fail/
If I were a journalist I'd be in a bind. As a late-career mathematical physicist I decided to spend less time on social media and more time thinking. It's been a boon!
@johncarlosbaez @gmusser Yes, I think that article describes the problems with Mastodon pretty well. I was interested in the concept of the Fediverse for some time The Musk buyout of gave me a push to act on that interest, but it was driven more broadly by a desire to smash the walled gardens and the cycle of exploitation and betrayal of users that @pluralistic and @catvalente have written about so cogently; to get back to the roots of the Web as an open system for the free dissemination of knowledge.
But as the linked article discusses and I have come to understand through spending time here, Mastodon seems to consciously prioritize anti-discoverability (as @kdund put it elsewhere in this thread). The aversion to even opt-in search and to algorithmic feeds seems to make it unlikely that Mastodon will ever be particularly good for discovering content. And the mercurial decisions made around federation/de-federation combined with the inability to cleanly transplant one's account from one server to another also mean that one can't really count on being able to build and maintain a functional following over the long term.
For these reasons, I'm beginning to give up my initial hope that the Fediverse can replace the walled gardens. I've begun to feel about it much as I feel about using Linux a desktop OS: it works for me and I like it enough to tolerate or work around its drawbacks, but there's probably too much friction/learning curve for it to ever become broadly popular.
For now I'm hoping that some new option based on ActivityPub or the AT protocol (that underlies Bluesky), or a fork thereof, may come along with more of an eye toward being useful enough to attract a critical mass of users while still being open and interoperable. In the meantime, I will keep using Mastodon and working around its shortcomings as best I can.
@internic @johncarlosbaez @gmusser @pluralistic @catvalente @kdund actually moving servers is not that difficult after all:
https://screenrant.com/mastodon-change-servers-migrate-account-how/
...and the usability of this and other experiences is bound to improve with scale
@johncarlosbaez that's the most I've seen so far on the topic, but the topic is developing as we speak https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/z7hchs/how_do_i_migrate_a_mastodon_archive_targz_to/
@mapto - I know someone on Mathstodon who left because the people running it didn't like some of his posts, and he complained that he was unable to take his posts to another server.
@johncarlosbaez @mapto Right, the primary issues with account migration on Mastodon are a) previous posts do not migrate to the new account and b) I've read that users are actually prompted whether they want to follow the account at the new server, which implies the likelihood of considerable attrition.
Neither of these is a big deal for someone like me, who is just a using this for casual enjoyment, but they are a bigger deal for people who are using social media for professional purposes.
@johncarlosbaez @mapto I guess it is worth saying that some ActivityPub software does feature the ability to import old posts. I believe that Calckey is one such example, but not the only one.
@mapto - I thought if you changed servers you left all your old posts behind at the old server. This would be problematic for people who actually care about their old posts.