I ran across this rant posted 5 months ago by "jwz" (Jamie Zawinski):
Mastodon's Mastodon'tsSome excerpts:
There are a few fundamentally broken things about how Mastodon posts work that are terrible vectors for abuse, as well as being bad for basic usability. ... To be clear: I am a fan of Mastodon. ... However, it is not ideal. It needs fixin'.- When you block someone, they don't necessarily stop seeing your posts. Maybe they do, maybe not. "They stop seeing them on X but if they go to Y they can still see it, oh, but they can still see it on X if they follow someone who" AAAUUGHH STOP, NO. Blocking on Mastodon does not work the way anyone understands or expects blocking to work.
- There is no way to delete a reply to your post. Let's say I post a zinger and then someone replies with a racism. I can block that person, and I won't see it any more, but the 10,000 people who follow me will still see it when they click on my post. It means that I have given that terrible person a boost in reach that I cannot revoke. It's like having dogshit on your shoe that everyone at the party can smell but you.
- Everybody sees a completely different subset of replies to your post, depending on weather and the phase of the moon. For others, this is weird and terrible because they are reading a book with half of the pages missing; for the poster, this is bad because you will get the same reply from many different people, and it's not because they didn't read the other replies before commenting, it's because they were unable to see them.
- Because of the asinine way that link previews are handled, every post triggers a DDoS, as I've covered before.
The fundamental flaw underlying all of these problems is that Mastodon sees each post and reply as its own independent thing. There's no difference between a post and a reply. That one has an "In-Reply-To" relation to another is just sort of an afterthought. There's nothing structural about it, and that's the problem. The top-level post should have primacy. ...
In other words: how it should work is, I own the replies to my post. ...
Brilliant observation.
He then goes on to invent something similar to the conversation-based "Facebook-like" model, being unaware that this model HAS BEEN IN CONTINUOUS USE SINCE LONG BEFORE MASTODON and is currently available in the Friendica/Hubzilla/Streams family tree, PeerTube, PixelFed, and other platforms.
(Pardon the capital letters. Jupiter Rowland tried to educate jwz about this, but unfortunately they had a failure to communicate.)
Anyway... If you are using Mastodon, or other similar post-oriented "Twitter-like" platforms, and you have the same frustrations as jwz, please be aware that
you have other options that will spare you a lot of grief.