Comment by mschuster91
15 days ago
> What do you think is wrong about Mastodon?
The same problems as always. Allow federation and you get...
- federation wars and moderators conducting these wars using their own users as hostages - I left Mastodon years ago when some particularly dumb morons decided to do bitchfights regarding Israel / Palestine. No I'm not interested in your pointless squabble, but I do care when I suddenly don't see posts from a bunch of users without even getting a notification...
- Mastodon-specific, when you move your account from one instance to another (e.g. as response to above-mentioned BS) your followings and followers migrate - but all your posts and media do not
- spam, trolls and griefers abusing the system, up to and including sending around CSAM material that inevitably gets sucked in by your instance, making you liable in the eyes of the law
- security issues. Mastodon has been full of these, no thanks I don't have the time to be constantly on guard lest I be exploited from above-mentioned griefers.
- other instances not giving a flying fuck about moderation or abuse going out from their instances.
Sounds like you want to run your own private instance. That way you control your own moderation and federation policies
> Sounds like you want to run your own private instance.
I'd like to do so, yes, but that exposes me to a (not insignificant) financial cost, (especially in Germany) a significant legal risk from CSAM/DMCA et al., and a significant amount of effort in maintenance.
Sure, there are "Mastodon as a service" providers that take at least the legal risk and maintenance off of me, but again, these cost even more money, and now I have the risk that the hoster is a fly-by-night operation that one day decides to close up shop for whatever reason.
And if anything happens to that private instance (say, the hoster disappears, the machine disappears without a backup, or the hoster undergoes an orderly shutdown), in the best case I still may have enough preparation to migrate the followers, but the old content is lost in any case. And that is bad.
In contrast with Bluesky and to a lesser degree Twitter, I can at least be reasonably sure that the provider does not vanish over night.
I think the problem is that it's too onerous to run your own instance, but being on anything but the "default" instance means dealing with volunteer moderators imposing their worldview on the available discourse.
Creating a Mastodon account shouldn't mean supporting the particular political affiliation of the moderators, but I think it feels that way for many of the instances.
And then you are also on the hook to be a sysadmin (including all the legal aspects thereof). That's generally a bit much to ask of someone who just wants to chat with their friends online.