His grand vision remains to leave Mastodon users in control of the social network, making their own decisions about what content is allowed or what appears in their timelines.
I don’t use Mastadon cause I don’t care for micro-blogging, but nevertheless, I like this.
Nightmare is massively overstating it. Mastodon’s UI/UX is neither a nightmare nor difficult to use. People who say this stuff leave me scratching my head.
In my view, the only legitimate criticism of Mastodon is about the lack of an algorithm that’s constantly bubbling content to the top, but that’s a valid design choice that many people prefer over the toxic algos over at X/Twitter.
“Why can’t the algo find me better content?”
Motherfucker, it’s social media. You have to get social with people. Make a fucking friend, right?
Like, I fixed that shit by following George Takei and Mark Hamill and some reporters. The algo shouldn’t be finding things for you. You should be finding people.
Yeah, scratching my head just the same. My only problem with Mastodon is the same I had with StumbleUpon. It’s way too good about putting neat people and conversations in front of me and I feel bad not rising to the occasion more when I just want to deadbrain.
Following hashtags is also a great way to find content you’re interested in.
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Sure, this is legitimate as well, and I believe I’ve heard that they’re working on this feature.
Genie’s out of the bottle now though. The casual-attracting features needed to be in place before twitter exploded. They weren’t. Bluesky’s were. Casuals don’t care about what-ifs or principles, it’s a miracle Musk let Twitter get so terrible that the casuals even noticed. It’ll take a monumental event now to get the casuals to switch again from the blueskys they just made and got invested in.
I hear what you’re saying and think you have a good point. It’s very likely that Mastodon will stay a minor player, but I also think it will live on as a viable alternative to the major social networks. There are a lot of people dedicated to developing, running, posting, etc. to keep it lively. There is also the factor that Mastodon will always be there if (when) X or BlueSky stumble and make a mistake that will send another chunk of users over.
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I’m not sure I would go as far as saying that the trends are tipping toward smaller communities again, but we can hope.