It seems like it's not the UI or the usability, that get's people to leave #Mastodon nowadays but - small, yet vocal and totally not self-critical - parts of the community, that can't stop lecturing others about the #Fediverse and how to act/post/comment here or about what.
German Mastodon had the ridiculous debate about #Zoom, other parts similar stuff (scolding someone for #bw-photos... really?).
Maybe the recent update helps people get it together, otherwise it will get even quieter here.
@mho IMO a problem is that Mastodon doesn't focus on empowering users to craft their own experiences but rather centralizes the user experience, or otherwise takes it out of users' hands, so that we all have to argue about what the user experience should be like instead of simply tailoring it for ourselves.
To put it a different way, Mastodon seems to have a one size fits all mentality, so we all have to argue about what size.
This is a gripe of mine.
@volkris @mho I'm not a very active user of mastodon at the moment, so this is not a troll question but a real one.
I leaned about mastodon, that it has a decentralized structure with the different servers to register instead of one centralised system.
You talk about a centralised user experience on mastodon.
Do I see something wrong or do we talk about different aspects of mastodon?
So there are two different issues that you are bringing up.
One issue is with the platform, the behind the scenes communication protocol. That's not something Mastodon controls in the same way that your cell phone doesn't control the communications network that it operates over.
You mentioned a decentralized structure, but that's not quite right. It's more that this behind the scenes system REcentralized around many different central instances (the servers are called instances here) where all of the users on one particular instance are reliant on the functioning of that instance.
So I would emphasize that it is federated, not decentralized. It's still centralized, just among many different central instances that federate and cooperate among each other.
My user experience and yours will be shaped by the policies of the instance administrators that is beyond our control.
The second issue is with Mastodon itself. Like I said, Mastodon is like the cell phone that we use to interact with the system.
Mastodon has long had a culture where the developers behind it think they know what's best for you, so they intentionally keep features away from you, for example, and don't let you choose for yourself whether you want to use those features.
It would be like your cell phone manufacturer deciding that Bluetooth is bad and so they publicly declared that you can't have Bluetooth because it's bad for you.
I would rather put users at the center in both contexts. I would rather the power go to users instead of instance administrators, and I would rather users choose what features they want to use and not leave that to the Mastodon developers.
I hope this makes sense.
Two different levels of problem but really it's the same philosophical choice being made.
Yes, it's like how different cell phone makers can add different features to their own phones for their customers. Each instance administrator can, if he wants to, modify the version of Mastodon that he uses.
For example, the instance I'm on, qoto, has a bunch of modifications like a much increased character limit for posts and the quote post feature.
The developers of the software kept those features out, but an individual server operator can modify the official software as they wish.
But my focus is on how users are still at the mercy of the choices that different server operators make.
@volkris Thank you for your elaborative reply. I understand now better, what you meant.
You describe Mastodon as a network of different servers. The servers can be different from each other concerning rules of conduct etc. So each server acts as its own centralised system.
Can Mastodon server admins also activate or deactivate certain features of the software? That's what I understood from your comment, but I'm not sure if I got that right.
@mho