Technical Musings: Why Mastodon "Sucks", Part I

15 May, 2023

A post on the Fediverse this morning prompted me to write this, I’m going to try to elaborate on why I think that Mastodon, both as a platform as well as from an organizational standpoint, (excuse my lack of professional writing on the open web), sucks. why do I say this, you’re probably wondering; after all, you can do everything that you would want to on a microblogging server, right? Wrong. I completely understand, heck, I’m one of the administrators of an open source project myself, that development in the open community takes time, and funds are not as easily obtained as in for-profit, comercial ventures. Hence, I’m not at all surprised at some of the attitudes that I have witnessed in the fediverse community.

Current Landscape

While the current Fediverse landscape is certainly made up of a multitude of remarkable software packages, the issue here is the fact that the majority of people (techies included in a lot of cases), are unaware of the existences of half of them. So, lets circle back around to the titular heading of this post: Why, in the names of all gods on all worlds, then, does Mastodon suck?

“world” Domination

There, I said it. Gargron is poised for his software to take over the [fediverse] world. The evidence is everywhere:

Mastodon.social shows up as a sign up option during the onboarding processes of nearly every Mastodon client, and if it’s not the first option, it’s prominent in the list.
Every Fediverse-related article explaining how the Fediverse works has some form of “Mastodon” in its tutorial material.
Mastodon seems to exponentially grow without regard to any other Fediverse server
we have the ability to see the stats of the other fediverse members, but we don’t.
Mastodon is the only software to have a non profit organization behind it which acts like a corporation.
Seemingly even the most educated tech news outlets recommend Mastodon as a place to begin a Fediverse journey.

I’m sure there are more reasons that some of the more well-versed folks on this subject could come up with, and if so, then please let me know. Hopefully I was able to get my point across. Right now… Mastodon sucks.

What Can We Do about It?

Stop promoting Mastodon like it’s the only thing available on the Fediverse, for one. As a second thing, we could always actually write a proper Fediverse tutorial, rather than a “Mastodon” tutorial. I intend to assist in these efforts by providing information through both anecdotal evidence, as well as my own experiences, to help the Fediverse to grow. Mastodon is just one wonderful piece of software in a long line of others. It works, but there are fundamental issues which I shall go into in a different post on the hows and the whys, but ideally, though this should give you a basic idea of where I’m going with this.

Kat