I'm still not so sure about Mastodon
I ignored Mastodon for a long time, but eventually I had to stop. Now that I stopped ignoring it and started using it, I feel like I’m either going to lose interest or (ugh) get involved.
Mastodon is built on ActivityPub, a standard for pub/sub of stuff. I think it’s fair to say Mastodon is “what if we used ActivityPub to build a federated Twitter-alike”. This is okay, but so far I feel like everything is a big step backwards in the realm of “just making sense”, and there are probably some places where the Twitter metaphor of a single continuous timeline will just break down in Mastodon and papering over it won’t make sense. The various servers are not synchronized (that is, you don’t get one server’s posts strictly serialized relative to another’s), which means there isn’t one timeline. How will this be resolved? My guess is “well, it won’t.”
In many ways, ActivityPub makes more sense as a much, much richer form of RSS feeds, but you wouldn’t (I think!) want to read RSS feeds in a single-scrolling timeline. I think Julia Evans’ Reddit-like interface is interesting, but of course has its own problems. (Also, let’s be clear: she did not post it as a panacea for all users, it was a very cool own-itch-scratching.) Still, the Mastodon clients that are most compelling right now are very Twitter-like, because that (I think) is what everybody is aiming for.
Meanwhile, I’m not sure I’m crazy about Mastodon as software. It seems pretty well optimized to host a community, which is fine, and I like being in communities, but sometimes I want to have my own totally-just-my voice or place, and I want to know I own it entirely, and I don’t think Mastodon scales down well, so far. There is no self-hosted micromastodon optimized for one person. The protocol is too interactive to be a static site, but I think a very very small server could exist. Or, a service that hosted your microblog as a standalone thing, rather than as part of a community, might be really appealing. As it is, I’ve now got my own Mastodon instance running, with one user and signups disabled. “Do you want to see what other users on your local server are posting?” it asks me.
I’m not running my own Mastodon, really. I did that for an hour or two, a while ago, and then realized it was going to be a real drag, so I found a running server I liked. I picked “public.garden”, which worked great until it didn’t. Last week, it turned out that the Ivory client wouldn’t work on it, because it ran Pleroma rather than Mastodon. Okay, no big deal! This week… it just failed. The timeline wasn’t updating, I couldn’t really check my notifications. What happened? I have no idea. See, it’s not a paid service, it’s just some random thing I grabbed. So, I don’t demand stability, but I did (foolishly) take it for granted. I know I’ll get a better end result by paying, so today I set up a server hosted by Mastohost, which I reckon I’ll use for the foreseeable future.
During !!Con 2022, I spent a few hours standing up my own basic ActivityPub server. From a Mastodon server, I could type in my personal server’s username and subscribe to its posts. I know I could’ve taken it further, but eventually I would’ve gotten to needing to make it work with a nice client on my phone, and just thinking about that, I gave up in advance. I know this is a problem with me, rather than Mastodon, but nonetheless it’s there. I don’t want to implement OAuth again.
Finally, I’m not enthusiastic about the way that Mastodon pushes users to have
a domain just for their Mastodon identity. I’ll elaborate. I’m a big email
wonk, and like email a lot, and one of the good things about it is that there’s
a nice layer of indirection between your domain name and your email service.
You can say “mail for example.net goes to example.mx” and later change that
relationship without significant service disruption. With Mastodon, that
relationship isn’t in the DNS, but is instead in a service that perforce runs
on the host found at the name example.net. You can’t delegate activity
services to another host, you can only provide a service there that redirects
individual users. (Yes, you can also issue a generic redirect on the target
domain, but this still means interfering with your web service.) This could
have been solved with a SRV record or, probably, other things.
I guess I should admit that while I know a lot more about how this all works than the average person on the street, I am not an extremely well-read ActivityPub and Mastodon expert yet, so possibly my opinions are all junk. It all seems promising as a starting point, but needs some nudging. And that’s what I mean: I’m worried I might want to get involved in showing alternate ways to do things. The good news for me is that I’m probably too busy (and maybe too wrong) to actually do this.
Anyway, until I invent some mostly-not-compatible system that I like and nobody else can use, you can find me at @rjbs@social.semiotic.systems.