Similar experience here. I have a nicely curated list of people I follow on twitter, they often retweet other users that are similar and I have a nice feed of good content that slowly grows without ever running into toxic assholes. On mastodon I couldn’t get anywhere close to that no matter how much I tried.
I have a mastodon account, I still check it occasionally and I’ve tried making it work a year ago, being active on it and following either people or hashtags. I also tried other networks like bsky and cara, or mastodon through kbin integration. None of them really worked out.
I didn’t have an issue with the technical side as much as with the community and its mentality. They all have this persecution complex where everyone is out to get them and destroy their way of living. They simultaneously claim it’s better and more morally superior than twitter while also responding to any questions or feedback with “if you don’t like it GTFO”. Most of the posts I’ve seen on mastodon seemed masturbatory and/or talking about other social networks and why are they bad than why is mastodon actually good. In many ways it was more toxic and negative than my carefully curated twitter feed. There’s also as much doom and gloom as on twitter, if not more, when it comes to politics (or at least, it’s harder to hide it).
The content in general was bad and boring but I don’t know if this is because of the type of people that are on it or just because the lack of algorithm means I will see any random person’s ramblings next to the biggest breaking news that I’m actually interested in. There is a lack of innovation in this area and it makes discoverability and content curation terrible, I don’t need an algorithm to read my mind but at the very least I wish it could separate trash from actual popular topics.
I found some interesting niches when it comes to FOSS developers and tech but I found next to no actual game devs, artists or content creators on it and even the usual “copy content from twitter” bots were unreliable and uncommon.
TL;DR Mastodon seems very very niche and is not currently viable as a general replacement for other social networks, and IMHO due to the community culture there it’s never going to grow into anything else either.
If our content gets federated to threads then it just means that google results will point to it first rather than to us, they will probably have better indexing and search features than the fediverse. People will also probably think the content originated on threads too (since that’s where they see it and threads could easily obfuscate info like that) instead of who actually made it.
It could increase the short term engagement but in the long run, it will just serve to make threads better.
I was really hoping there was something like hamachi/xfire/garena from the old days but modernized and more stable 😅 I just assumed it’d be a solved problem by now.
I’m not giving up on tailscale yet, I’ll try the funnel feature but yeah… seems a bit troublesome for sure
Thanks for linking that, seems like a great resource! Seems like there’s a few that support UDP although I’m not sure if they will work with a CGNAT setup, also their setup seems a bit more complicated and technical than expected but I need to look more into it tomorrow. If everyone else needs to have this installed then that might be an issue
🤷♂️ Downvotes are meaningless, I’d rather see them give an actual counterargument if they have one but im used to it from reddit
That’s not really a good solution although it is a temporary workaround.
Besides, at the end of the day, shouldn’t the admins and mods here curate the content according to the community’s guidelines and spirit? If someone started spamming undesired content on a forum you’re administrating, the answer wouldn’t be “all the users can just block it if it’s an issue”. I don’t think it should be the answer here either
This whole fediverse feels very shaky tbh, we have this issue now but as someone who is usually on kbin there’s been issues like these from the start - posts not getting propagated to other instances, mod actions not being sent or updated, missing entire domains because of the bugs in the filter, etc. Add to that legitimate choices like defederation and domain blocking, it just feels fractured and nonfunctional because I still need a separate account on every instance to actually participate on it.
I know it’s a FOSS project with no guarantees and everything these people do is in their free time but I really wish stability and basic functionality was the first thing they focused on, otherwise everything else is in vain since it’s on top of an unstable foundation.
If I do all that then my feed is going to be even emptier than it is now