My Problems with Mastodon
Even with growing pains accommodating an influx of new users, Lemmy has made it clear that a federated social media site can be nearly as good as the original thing. I joined Lemmy, and it exceeded my expectations for a Reddit alternative run by an independent team.
These expectations were originally pretty low when Mastodon, the popular federated Twitter alternative, was the only federated social media I had experience with. After using Lemmy, Mastodon seems to be missing basic features. I initially believed these were just shortcomings of federated social media.
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Likes aren’t counted by users outside your instance, and replies don’t seem to be counted at all (beyond 0, 1, 1+), leading to posts that look like they have way more boosts (retweets) than likes or replies:
This incentivizes people to just gravitate toward the biggest instance more than people already do. My guess is that self-hosting a mastodon instance would also not be ideal, since the only likes you’ll see are your own.
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There’s really only one effective ways to find popular or ‘trending’ posts. There’s the explore tab which has ‘posts’, and ‘tags’ sections.
The ‘posts’ section shows some trending posts across your instance and all the instances that it’s federated with, this is the one I use it the most.
The ‘tags’ section is a lot like the trending tab on Twitter, but it’s reserved just for hashtags, which I guess isn’t a huge deal, but it feels like a downgrade. However, I do like the trend line it shows next to each tag!
The ‘Local’ and ‘Federated’ tabs are a live feed of post from your home instance and all the other instances, respectively. I feel these are pretty useless and definitely don’t warrant their own tabs. Having a local trending tab for seeing popular posts on your instance would be more interesting.
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The search bar basically doesn’t work, is this just me???
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This one is more minor and more specific to a Twitter alternative, but when looking at a user’s follows, you’ll only see the one’s on your home instance but for some reason this rule doesn’t apply to followers.
From what I’ve heard, a lot of these issues are intentional in order to create a healthier social media experience. Things like less focus on likes, reduces a hivemind mentality, addiction, things like that (I couldn’t find a source for this, if anyone has one confirming or disproving this please lmk).
Why this is a Problem
Mastodon seems to have two goals: To be an example of how a federated alternative to Twitter can work well, and to be a healthier social media experience. It’s not obvious, but I think these goals conflict with each other. A lot of the features that are removed in the pursuit of a healthier social media will be perceived as the shortcomings of federation as a concept.
In my eyes, Mastodon’s one main goal should be proving federated social media as a whole to the public, by being a seamless, familiar, full-featured alternative to Twitter. For me, Lemmy has done that for Reddit, upvotes are counted normally, you can see trending posts locally and globally same with communities, and the search function works! All its shortcomings aren’t design flaws, and I fully expect them to be fixed down the road as it matures.
As annoying as Jack Dorsey is, I have high hopes for BlueSky.
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Hello, have you tried Akkoma or Firefish?
I think you have to factor in the ideological motivation here. Many have tried to criticise the team for being socialists or weaponise it as a means of trying to get Lemmy not to take off, but I argue that it is because Lemmy is run by ideologically committed people that it exceeded your expectations.
Lemmy’s goal is disrupting corporate control of what used to be communal spaces online. This is ideologically motivated by the socialist beliefs held by its development team.
Whether you agree with socialists or not politically, for a platform like Lemmy this motivation is very very powerful and plays a significant part.
The other side of this is that having known and occupied socialist spaces with Dessalines for close to a decade now he is one of the hardest working socialists online.
I think fundamentally Mastodon can’t work. The entire point of Twitter is for celebrities, brands and governments to have a single place to be able to send out a public message and for that message to be seen by everyone, especially those who opt in to it by following. Decentralized alternatives by definition can’t do that. Centralization is the entire point of Twitter.
Decentralization does work for Reddit/Lemmy though, because they are content centric, not person centric. I don’t care who posts content to the subreddits I follow, just that the content exists, can be easily viewed (RIP third party Reddit apps, hello Lemmy!), and is interesting. Lemmy doesn’t need hundreds of millions of people in a single place to create enough content that is interesting, and in fact having fewer people makes the content that is posted more interesting and focused. Lemmy’s decentralization is a strength because if this instance doesn’t have the interesting content I want, I can just go elsewhere.
The entire point of Twitter is for celebrities, brands and governments to have a single place to be able to send out a public message and for that message to be seen by everyone
Nothing about Mastodon or the fediverse prevents this. In fact government institutions are already using the fediverse this way: https://social.network.europa.eu/@EU_Commission https://social.overheid.nl/@belastingdienst There’s some companies who run their own instances also, and no shortage of individuals running single-user instances as a subdomain of the same website they use for their professional brand.
Decentralized =/= Federated. In a federated model, data is still siloed in 24/7 servers that are controlled by people or institutions.
I think it’s not that Mastodon couldn’t do it, it’s that it will end up just being an essentially centralized instance as people will want to be in the same instance as the people/companies they want to follow. How users would want to use Mastodon is counter-intuitive to how the fediverse should work. Lemmy is focused on content (posts and comments) which means there’s less somebody to follow and the focus is on the communities.
This is a semi serious question - do people not realize that you can follow across instances and it makes literally no difference?
This is the one reason why some of us were sort of hoping that Threads would federate. Because the celebs and other normies are likely to gravitate there, and there are a few that some of us would still like to follow/interact with.
If anything, this is my criticism against the way that Lemmy handles this. For example, my previous reddit habit was to follow a bunch of subs for TV shows that I watched. So last night when I was watching ST: Strange New Worlds, I really didn’t enjoy the experience of digging through 10 communities that each had the episode posts with the same 15 comments, and the occasional new thought. This isn’t even a criticism of the posters, if you came to the comments there would be some things that would be wild not to call out. I think ultimately I’d almost rather see the federation model for reddit-like services move down in the stack, and federate the communities rather than the whole instance. EG: there is a major ST collective community assimilating the smaller ones and becoming greater than the sum of their parts. Of course, this is also probably partially just because Lemmy/Kbin are still in their infancy, and I have a feeling that as time goes, things are more or less going to centralize in this way anyway, in the same way you could have multiple subs on reddit, but there was usually 1-2 big ones at most.
This isn’t a problem for mastodon, because when someone like Jeri Ryan joins, it doesn’t matter on what instance, I can still follow her in one place, see who she follows and follows her for other like-minded individuals, see all of her posts and re-posts, etc. What instance you’re on makes very little difference after the first five minutes or so and you’re acquainted with how it works.
You’re looking at it from the perspective of someone who already has a general understanding of fediverse. If Jeri Ryan joins an instance, which instance do you his followers will join? Most likely the same instance, because they’re here to follow Jeri and they don’t know what instance to choose so they choose the most familiar one, the one Jeri is on. New users will congregate on instances that have people they want to follow and the followees most likely join whichever instance is the biggest or has someone they want to follow (because it’s not like they know any better how to pick an instance), which means people will centralize on either one or a handful of instances.
You can even see this happening in with Lemmy. Most people don’t know which instance to pick so they picked the biggest one, lemmy.world.
I don’t think necessarily have a few large instances is problematic. It’s fine as long as people can move to other instances, the issue would be if those instances leverage their size to force incompatibilities or defederation.
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Likes aren’t federated well on Lemmy either. Posts can have wildly different scores on different servers.
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No content algorithm is kind of the point of Mastodon. That was a conscious decision. There are trending hashtags you can follow, though. There’s nothing preventing someone from making a Mastodon/Misskey/Akkoma fork that will come with its own popularity system, but you’ll have to find (a team of) developers that care about such things to get it off the ground.
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The search bar works fine for me, maybe your instance is overloaded?
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The lack of back fetching is annoying, but it’s impossible to do without causing massive server load. The push-only ActivityPub implementation is a lot lighter on server resources (which are already very high for Mastodon for reasons I’m not entirely sure about). Fixing this would break or slow down Mastodon servers across the network. It should be noted that Lemmy suffers from the same problem, though it tries a little bit harder when it subscribes to a remote community for the first time.
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I don’t think Mastodon wants to be “another Twitter”. I’m pretty sure they want to be better than Twitter, with their own definition of better. In my opinion, and seemingly a lot of the Fediverse’s, that means getting the stuff you’re subscribed to and trying to hold some kind of popularity contest.
It you do go by popularity, there is absolutely no way of detecting voting rings and boost bots. There was a recent Lemmy example of someone using their own instance to send thousands of upvotes, bringing their post about voting rings to the top of every sorting method. Popularity works with systems that are centralised because bot detection can happen in a centralised place, gatekeeping the content behind an anti abuse wall. With federated servers, you will need to choose between “whitelisting every server you federate with after vetting their bot detection” or “accepting that your popularity feeds will soon be full of spam”. Neither is a great option, in my opinion.
My take on your analysis: you seem to be on a huge Lemmy server and on a small Mastodon server so you don’t notice that the same class of problems exists here too.
Bluesky solves the federation problem by not being very federated. Their idea of federation is “everybody downloads a full copy of the network” which is unsustainable for any independent server. They see the future as “a bunch of Twitters talking to each other, each with their own content recommendation and filtering mechanism” rather than “something anyone can become a part of for a minimal fee”.
Im glad you pointed out the algorithm thing. Seems like people get fed up with social media platforms like X(?) and Reddit and then come to alternatives demanding the same features that, at least in part, led to them being fed up in the first place.
I actually disagree with OPs assertion that these federated platforms are ‘almost as good’. Theyre better. More features doesnt mean a better platform and in my opinion often makes them worse.
I think it makes sense. Algorithms like the ones that Reddit and 𝕏 use are what keeps users coming back. They lure you in with addictive content so you keep coming back. People have started using social media for entertainment.
This is probably why so many people are turned off by Mastodon for very vague reasons. Often they’ll say “it feels death” despite having a healthy feed of random posts and hashtags on their instance’s homepage. It’s not that there’s no content on the Fediverse, people have just started expecting social platforms to provide them with their daily dopamine hits, and alternatives that don’t do that feel weird and disappointing. That’s what I felt for a while when I started using Mastodon, anyway.
I don’t want a fancy algorithm, I just want to see the popular posts from the communities I follow
Now, that’s not that simple either, since popular from a big community is different from popular from a small community, but still
Honestly, Lemmy and Kbin are better set up for that purpose. Determining popularity in a way that’s not easy to game requires a fancy algorithm. Bots and voting rings are easy to set up. Lemmy’s sorting has been criticised for pushing ancient posts to the front page and preventing that is very hard (especially without making the server software expensive to run).
Everyone has a different definition of “popular”. You probably don’t want stuff that gets loads of replies because it’s offensive or a terrible take to pop up everywhere, so to make sure you only get good posts, you need to do things like sentiment analysis of replies you base your popularity algorithm on. You probably also don’t want to hide outcries/controversy about important people and topics, so you need to match that with the sentiment of the topic at large, and from there the list goes on.
As a workaround, you can browse hashtags. Hashtags will usually get you accounts you can follow (and add to one of your topic specific lists). Get a few active accounts on a topic and the network effect will get you tons of popular posts through boosts and replies, and suddenly you’ve created your own algorithm!
Or you could do the most upvoted post minus its age, like a lot of sites still do. AFAIK hacker news does nothing fancy to its “algorithm”
That’s what Lemmy does! Well, sort of. The orange reddit algorithm is very similar to the Lemmy algorithms. In my experience, Lemmy is slightly better than HN (fewer posts that end up on top without any comments), but both only work when there is much more content to rank than there are pages to fill.
I think Reddit’s algorithms are much better for tricking people into staying around (for me, anyway). That approach doesn’t work for something like Twitter/Mastodon that doesn’t really do “voting”. Almost all toots have little to no interaction, even the good ones. Twitter’s algorithm has been documented and large parts (but not the important weights) have been open sourced, but I don’t think that can be implemented well on Mastodon.
I have found Mastodon still does that. And it turned out to be a problem, actually. I just kept going on there for no reason and reading like 100 nothings.
The original federated service is IRC and is still perfect. :)
IRC is great, if a little underground these days. It’s also trivial to run your own although federating requires cooperation from both ends so it’s not quite as networked as lemmy or mastodon.
adjusts glasses one could argue email is essentially a precursor to what we call federated services now, and it works as well as it always has. Predates IRC :)
This is a great analysis, thanks for compiling such a comprehensive response.
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This isn’t just a Mastodon problem, all fediverse softwares struggle to keep an accurate tally of faves/likes/whatevers on posts from remote instances
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It doesn’t look like this anymore on mastodon.social
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Search isn’t free so it’s up to the admins to decide how good/powerful they want their search bar to be.
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It shows all followees/followers of a user if said user is local, but if the user is remote, it will only show local followees/followers of that user because knowing what remote accounts follow what remote users also isn’t free.
Search isn’t free
This isn’t the primary reason most Mastodon servers lack full text search. Gargron is opposed to its inclusion in Mastodon because he believes it results in harmful social dynamics.
Implementing Elasticsearch, which Mastodon has some support for is somewhat resource-intensive, and making it available for all posts a user is able to view takes a code change (there’s a patch). A text search using PostgreSQL’s built-in text search is not very resource-intensive, and implementing that is about a dozen lines of code.
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Calckey/Firefish (forked from the Japanese software Misskey, so I assume that one is similar) is basically Mastodon but cool. It fixes many of your problems. While it’s not yet perfect (same issue with followers from other servers), there seems to be more going on.
> As annoying as Jack Dorsey is, I have high hopes for BlueSky.
As long as he doesn’t submit that protocol as ActivityPub 2.0 or whatever, it’s not compatible with the wider fediverse, so not interesting.
I’d be surprised if he did submit it as activitypub, he’s already called it ATProtocol
He cannot just call something the name of an industry standard but he can submit his to the W3C who then can decide whether to adopt it or not
>As long as he doesn’t submit that protocol as ActivityPub 2.0 or whatever, it’s not compatible with the wider fediverse, so not interesting.
If they get their act together and publish a real protocol / standard that a developer can read, implement, and then have a server capable of federating, then activitypub 1.0 can diaf and we can all praise our new activitypub 2.0 overlords.
I only found firefish the other day but 'like Mastodon but cool" is a perfect way to describe it.
Watching Mastodon-stans defend the lack of search is like watching a cult-member explain an insane belief.
So far, Lemmy feels like the least cultish corner of the fediverse. That might be due t it’s external focus.
Hear hear! I thought I didn’t like the fediverse because Mastodon did such an awful job selling it to me. “Oh, I can’t view other instances’ local timelines without making accounts on them? What’s even the point of federation then?” But on Lemmy you can easily browse communities outside your own instance. So it’s not the fediverse’s fault, Mastodon just doesn’t have a clear audience.
And yeah, I can see how a lot of Mastodon’s features are “privacy-focused”, but I think it does TOO good a job, it’s so private that you can’t find anything!
Mastodon doesn’t have Likes at all.
The star you’re referring to is Favorite. Those go into your Favorite list. So you can refer back to them more easily.
Oh god, Ive been using them wrong this whole time?!?!
I guess I am so used to other social media I had assumed it was a like button.
I think most people use the star button the same way you do, as an alternative to Twitter likes.
There’s a separate button for favoriting (bookmarking) a post. Where it is and what it looks like differs per app, but that’s probably what people use to actually favorite toots.
No, you haven’t. It started out this way, but now basically it’s the “tell the poster you acknowledge/like the post” but also there when you don’t want to boost the post to your timeline. You can still use it this way, but because the community (probably with one of the first twitter exoduses) started using it more like a like on twitter, they gave up and implemented bookmarks (I think might be private and not notify the poster you’ve bookmarked?)
Ofc, there are also some of the mastodon HOA that will still insist this, but then why do bookmarks exist…?
Anyway, just in general, you can tell by the up/down ratio and a lot of the comments that are getting upvoted in this thread that are posting things that are either just incorrect or at least misunderstand things how many people in this thread actually use mastodon, so I would take criticism with a grain of salt.
Although they differ from Twitter Likes, note that Mastodon Favorites are not private. For an example, I’ll refer to one of your toots:
https://mastodon.social/@justhach/110696151311920356Viewing it in the Mastodon web interface, I see an indication that 2 people marked it as a Favorite. I can then click to see those 2 usernames, listed here:
https://mastodon.social/@justhach/110696151311920356/favouritesSuch listings are limited though. For example, I’m viewing a toot that you boosted, and I see an indication that it has been marked as a Favorite by 816 users; but when I click to view their names, I see only 40 of them listed.
The Mastodon API only returns 40 boosted accounts by default, but will allow a client to query up to 80. When federation gets involved, more information becomes available to external servers that federate with your account, so don’t rely on that number for any privacy reasons.
I don’t see it that way. There are separate options to Favourite or Bookmark a post. To me Bookmarking something is so you can refer to it later, although nothing is stopping you using Favourites that way.
Favourites get put on a list so you can refer to it later … and notify the poster that you’ve done so as a form of positive feedback.
Bookmarks get put on a list so you can refer to it later.
That’s the big difference.
Favourite and Bookmark are absolutely different things. They’re two different lists for you to use as you see fit.
Neither of them is a Like though. I’m not sure that fact is really debatable.I’ll have to disagree there. When you Favourite a post, the person that posted it gets a notification about the fact, while if you Bookmark something no notification is sent. In effect you are telling the person that you “Liked” their post.
Also, looking at the Explore section of Mastodon the following message is shown at the top of the feed:
>These are posts from across the social web that are gaining traction today. Newer posts with more boosts and favorites are ranked higher.
So those Favourites are used by the algorithm to rank posts. Bookmarks are totally private and only used to save posts for your own use.
Lets try it this way. Would say your favourites things, include everything you like? Do you like some things that aren’t your favorite? Do you keep a list of everything you’ve ever liked? Would it be as big as the list of your favorite things?
Do you see the difference? It’s a mater of degree that separates them. They are not the same. That’s why they are two different words.
Your getting lost in lingual semantics. It’s just called “favourites” but it’s treated, at face value and at the code level, the same way other sites/systems treat the word “like”. That’s what matters. It could be called “Flibflabs” and still be a “like” replacement.
People will say stuff like “fave before replying” though. And most platforms with a like will be able to make you a list of everything you have liked.
So I think like maps to the little Mastodon star pretty well, even though it might not be meant to be used that way.
lol, and I was thinking I was supporting other’s users opinions.
You are in a way. Just not only that.
Yoo, people who say “oh my, mastodon doesn’t have likes and algo and that’s what makes it perfect”, are you nuts? Good suggestion algorithms are the only thing we need in our services be it music, video streaming or social networks. I just came to mastodon, how do you expect me to find people to follow? It would be so much easier to select from somewhat relevant posts than to google who to follow on mastodon because its search engine works like crap. Lemmy is getting good now because of communities migrating from reddit, but huge accounts from twitter don’t sway so easily as mastodon is not so good as a twitter alternative
It almost feels like a generational difference. People who grew up before algorithms are used to curating everything they see, and see algorithms as a failing of the internet.
Those of us who grew up with algorithms enjoy good ones that promote content we really do want to see. The problem is that the really effective algorithms that benefit most of us also are the same ones that push right wing rhetoric because it’s successful.
I’m personally a fan of a good algorithm because I like seeing new stuff. The pre-2016 YouTube was a good example. Promoted stuff that I wanted to watch almost all the time, found a lot of new content that way
Yeah, mastodon definitely needs a better algorithm. Algorithms can be designed to promote whatever the maker wants. It doesn’t have to be designed to maximize engagement or the specific kind of engagement that tends to promote crazy conspiracy theories or fascist rhetoric. The algorithm could just be simple collaborative filtering with some randomness thrown in to pop “information bubbles,” which would be much better than what they have now.
I don’t see why having chronological feeds can’t be paired with some more generic sorting or filtering systems. Nobody would be obligated to use either, you could just pick the one you want.
I get people want to see specifically what they subscribe to, and nothing else (looking at you, facebook). But I don’t see why people hate the idea of others being able to discover new content. Reddit had default subs for a long time, Twitter has trending topics, Mastodon could really do with something similar to help noobs get on-boarded.
And no - there’s no way I’m wading through the shit fountain that is Mastodon’s all posts tab on the off chance I find one interesting post. If you don’t already have interesting follows then it feels like there’s no point.
I’m pretty sure this is it. I think mastodon leans more towards the olds (I’m ~40) in part because we did not like algorithm driven engagement, at least not as the primary vehicle, and most especially in the way that modern services do it. Like, great, I’m glad a celeb did a thing or a team won, but this is entirely irrelevant to my interests most of the time and definitely not how I want to experience things by default.
Sure, when I want to go looking for something, good algorithms that are actually designed to make me happy and not just increase my engagement on the site through morally bankrupt choices, fine, but that’s just not my default.
I’m definitely the other way, I want to see the stuff that’s there because I asked for it, and I want to ping pong around from people to the people they talk to to find new people. If I don’t already know of at least one interesting person or instance, why am I even joining the thing?
I appreciate having a list of people I could follow, but if there isn’t one I remember how to make my own fun.
I honestly really like discovering things organically as opposed to having “content” shoveled in my face. Say I follow an artist who happens to share the work of another artist I didn’t know about. There’s a connection and I can follow that person. It’s simple.
This post was at the top of Mastodon’s explore page yesterday: https://mas.to/@kissane/110793942888550843
I feel it perfectly encapsulates the issues I see others and I face with Mastodon. Since it was #1 trending, it probably resonated with many more too.
The technical issues can eventually solved. The cultural ones? That’s the big question.
Lemmy seems far more approachable. It has its issues, but at least it has a working search.
Yeah you are spot on, the big problem with Mastodon is that they have all these ideas about how to be better than twitter that actually just break what people are looking for from the twitter experience.
Mastodon has a feature that allows you to migrate from one instance to another within Mastodon. Lemmy does not, and I think this is an important feature to have
> Mastodon seems to have two goals: To be an example of how a federated alternative to Twitter can work well, and to be a healthier social media experience. It’s not obvious, but I think these goals conflict with each other. A lot of the features that are removed in the pursuit of a healthier social media will be perceived as the shortcomings of federation as a concept.
Basically this all over.
IMO, Mastodon is a paradox that the fediverse needs to move on from. It is not an alternative to Twitter, but, its popularity rests on this very perception. And so we have a dominant platform, that most consider to actually just be the whole fediverse, whose dominance is in many ways arbitrary or luck of circumstance. Which is fine … that’s how things happen. But the sooner we move on from Mastodon dominating the fediverse the better.
The way I’ve put it previously is that Mastodon is an awkward middle ground that actually doesn’t work too well for many people. It’s neither particularly safe/healthy or particularly engaging or interesting. And so many BIPOC avoid it while there are LGBTQ folks who openly consider it problematic and are ready to jump ship whenever necessary, while journalists and anyone who’s looking to form wide networks (without being influencers or doing anything for-profit) don’t see the point. In many ways, it’s the white/western suburbia of social media … and while that’s a nice place to visit or be sometimes, there’s a good reason to not live there or be there all the time, especially when online.
On top of all that, it’s actually a pretty simple/brutalist take on what social media can be, to the point of being unnecessarily backward. And yet, by the numbers, it is basically the fediverse (like literally
of active usersare on mastodon!).The fediverse can do better. Will do better, and already has.
- There’s firefish (and Misskey too, from which it was forked, and Iceshrimp and Hajkey which are forks of firefish)
- see firefish.social, nice examples: lead devs personal page
- Or, how far the special form of markdown can be taken, collected in another feature called
Clipswhich are collections of posts: Clips of cool MFM(misskey flavoured markdown).
- There’s Akkoma
- Then there’s Lemmy and kbin.
> And yet, by the numbers, it is basically the fediverse (like literally ~88% of active users are on mastodon!).
I guess it must not be as bad as you make it out to be then?
Reddit has more users than lemmy. Can’t be that bad then!
deleted by creator
Of course! How could I miss it. The argument: “User numbers are an indicator of quality”, is not valid, unless in context of the fediverse. Because…
Wait, I don’t think me, being the dumb asshat I am, understand that: Why? Why do you think user numbers indicate that something “can’t be as bad as you make it out to be” in the fediverse, but not anywhere else?
something being popular doesn’t mean it’s good
It’s older
- There’s firefish (and Misskey too, from which it was forked, and Iceshrimp and Hajkey which are forks of firefish)
Mastodon’s search not applying to all posts is ‘a feature, not a bug’, as mentioned in the documentation:
Admins may optionally install full-text search. Mastodon’s full-text search allows logged-in users to find results from their own posts, their favourites, their bookmarks and their mentions. It deliberately does not allow searching for arbitrary strings in the entire database, in order to reduce the risk of abuse by people searching for controversial terms to find people to dogpile.
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/network/#search
I do understand the rationale behind it in that it makes it safer for people to share personal or political things to their followers without the risk of abuse from strangers, and the recommended alternative is to hashtag any post that’s okay to be publicly found.
The problem with this is that there is no agreement on which hashtags to use consistently, and that people are not used to, or feel a stigma about, adding hashtags to the end of each post.
I never used any bird app, curious: what’s the social stigma about adding hashtags? I thought it was seen as cool or at least normal. #justasking #stupidquestion
Some people consider it an overly attention-seeking behaviour, because overusing hashtags is associated with marketing and influencers trying desperately to gain maximum reach on platforms like Twitter and Instagram.
Meanwhile, on Mastodon it’s more of a thing to hashtag posts with like #photography or #[name_of_videogame] when sharing things, so other people with the same interests can find them.
They have the stigma of overflowing the content and distracting from the human, let’s have a conversation, part to focus mostly on the promotion and algorithmic sorting and advertisement part. The most egregious example being the hash walls. Tweets were the actual content is a short sentence followed by a gigantic string of hashtags in the hopes this will get more exposition. The purposes of a tag is that you want to be found by people who don’t follow you, abuse of it screams attention-seeking.
Right. Now that you point it out, it’s weird to have sorting labels embedded in the (already very short) text body.
This is the exact same issue I have about YouTube videos. If I ever see someone with 1k of terms in the description, I never watch their videos again. For example, I watched a video about a Doom mod. When I went to the description to look for the link, it was after ever doom related term. Everything from Doom Eternal (it was Doom 1993 mod) to demons, and shotgun. Just cringy.
Aside from any stigma, some people just don’t use them. Some don’t understand how they work, sometimes people forget.
Hashtags have value, but to make them essential instead of optional is a bad choice.
