Mastodon flaws

A while back, as Twitter lay dying and rotting, I went out and staked new accounts in other social media sites, gambling on which one, if any, would eventually succeed. One was Mastodon; I have an account at octodon.social/@pzmyers. The appeal of Mastodon was that it’s a distributed network, one that isn’t strictly controlled by a central authority. Unfortunately, that means it’s made up of thousands of interconnected instances, all your access to the wider federation, is through the instance you choose, and you’re at the mercy of whoever set up your particular instance. Back in August, I learned that the instance I had chosen was shutting down.

this is it. the ship is sinking. on 2025-04-03, in 8 months, on its 8 years anniversary, the octodon will be permanently shut down. use this time to slowly migrate your accounts and download your post archives. tell your local friends who might miss the instance announcement. the first reply will contain a small list of instances to consider; the second a personal note for my followers.

thanks to everyone who supported us, to our crew and members. i am glad to have built and shared this with you over the years. it was a beautiful horrible adventure. i hope you will remember it as a good place that united so many people for quite a while.

it always had to end eventually. for an impulsive little social website, 8 years is a good run. we have witnessed and remember so many friends who are gone. the octodon, too, gets to live impermanence and have a good end while we still can take care of it.

It was a good run, but this is a huge weakness in the service. The volunteers who run individual instances are allowed to just quit? Of course they are allowed, but there’s no automatic fallback to support individual users? Whoops. That’s not good. Do I need to go instance-shopping now, and figure out how to back up my posts there? Then there’s the personal note by the instance host about Mastodon in general:

i’ve had this moment on my mind for many years. 5 years, 10 years? one more, one less? Eight, of course. of course. i barely remember who created it. everything has an end and everyone needs to move on.

personally, i will soon move to a tiny gotosocial instance, and trim down relationships again. i am tired of asking myself if ppl talk to me as an admin or as a friend, let’s find out.

if you need more Whys, unordered:

• it hasnt been fun for so long. i really do not want to do this for the rest of my life. passing it on has limits and is itself tremendous work and trust.
• it knows too much. this database is huge, which is a technical feat to keep available at all times and fast already; and full of forgotten accounts and things that are long offline and should be let go of. yes it’s haunted
• i do not believe in mastodon. i have been less and less comfortable with the software, its direction, technical choices, and maintenance. even with the federated topology entirely. it was built like a twitter clone and requires the same work and has the same flaws
• it’s such a massive amount of personal data to care for, and concentrated for so many people i know. security patches are applied so fast bc it’s genuinely terrifying. it’s not healthy i can tell you, but i know what we all risk and did everything i could. i don’t want to any more. let’s burn it all
• one must imagine sisyphus letting the boulder roll and just sitting there, content and chilling. today i let eugen’s damned rock go down the hill, and i feel fine

i have so little energy left. such short time to use. all this mess grew until it became a main occupation and i have so much more to do

hit me up if you want the exported blocklist, or the emoji collection. i might publish them later as well

Well, that just went from an “oops” to a “yikes!” Maybe I’ll just let my Mastodon account whither and die, unless someone wants to suggest a more stable instance. Maybe.

I also have a Threads account. I don’t care for it and have neglected using it. Threads too often feels like one of those subreddits full of people telling long stories about some trivial annoyance that they recently experienced, or worse, that they experienced 11 years ago and have been waiting for the opportunity to tell everyone about it. There are a lot of good people on there who are happy with it, I just feel vaguely uncomfortable with it. Also, it’s by Meta, so it’s got Zuckerberg’s undead cyborg fingers all over it.

Doubly also LGBT and Marginalized Voices Are Not Welcome on Threads.

Bluesky is taking off right now, and of course I have an account there. I worry that it could meet the fate of Twitter — some rich weirdo could buy it and use it for their public masturbation sessions — but it’s working out well so far, especially given how they’re dealing with the wingnuts.

“Conservatives Join Bluesky, Face Abuse and Censorship.” Yeah, right.

So maybe I’ll just commit to Bluesky from now on, until it gets corrupted and wrecked, as happens to so many things nowadays.