Re: Why I don’t use the Fediverse

LittlePrince explains why he doesn’t use fedi.

> The technology sucks. Activity Pub is half baked, and was rolled out prematurely to create Mastodon.

Correct. Under the hood things are not good.

> Mastodon is a Twitter clone and Lemmy is a Reddit clone. I hate the originals. Why would the clones be better?

Yeah, the clones do have a lot of the same problems. Mastodon is akin to tinylogs, and Lemmy is like a discussion site or Usenet type thing. (Although with more bugs.) For example, there is a currently defunct app that makes Lemmy look and feel like a phpBB site (except you get access to all of Lemmy).

I guess my typical approach to this stuff is trying to think back at what worked? Email, discussion sites, mailing lists. If something works like it did in that era it might be fine, if it works differently then there might be some risks.

And fedi is like email.

> Mastodon doesn’t work at all without Javascript. Lemmy barely works without it.

Not true if you use client apps. There are TUI client apps, for Mastodon at least.

> The people there are not nicer than Twitter or Reddit. Their mobs just have different political motivations. Never forget how

…and then he uses a specific example that I’ve elided here because I don’t wanna be arsed to read up on what happened. But there are many similar examples.

Yeah.

I feel the new “bubble timeline” system has improved things so much. But people can still world-readably see everything you write. (Gemlogs and BBS has the same issue.) World-readable casual conversation has a lot of problems.

> No account freedom. You are stuck on your instance, and if they boot you, you have to start over.

Yes, that’s a problem, but email has the same problem.

The Gemini BBS has the same problem but worse since there is only one instance and no-one can spin up new instances and the instances don’t integrate tinylogs and gemlogs from off-site.

> In this limited respect Nostr is superior.

Yeah, under the hood Nostr’s tech is more scaleable and accounts are more easily transferable. Culturally Nostr has other issues, at least in these early days—a focus on cryptocurrencies, and on censorship resilience (meaning it’s even more difficult to moderate), so I’m holding off on it for now.