I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to BlueSky for text-centric social media.

I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to BlueSky for text-centric social media.

  • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.com
    1·
    4 days ago

    But that doesn’t matter to a new user who doesn’t know about lemmy-federate. They probably won’t be able to immediately find users/posts/communities they want to see and will have to go through that process

    No, Lemmy-federate is targeted for community mods, not regular users looking for content. Regular users can just use the search bar or !communitypromo@lemmy.ca to find communities.

    but it’s relying on a separate service and only works for PieFed. This doesn’t solve the problem.

    It only works for Piefed because for Lemmy the problem is solved by Lemmy-federate.

    • 0x1C3B00DA@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      It only works for Piefed because for Lemmy the problem is solved by Lemmy-federate.

      This is part of my complaint! Every service has to have its own solution. And each of these solutions is a centralized dependency for that service.

      No, Lemmy-federate is targeted for community mods, not regular users looking for content. Regular users can just use the search bar or !communitypromo@lemmy.ca to find communities.

      As a user, I still routinely can not find communities I’m looking for. I’m still not understanding how lemmy-federate “solves” the problem of community discovery, but it’s clear that it doesn’t do it reliably.