As you may be aware I’ve been Mastodon for a while - I actually run two small instances, one will be closing shortly, hence this post. The Fediverse has much promise and still does, despite an ever-increasing tendency to larger and larger instances, made all the worse by the Mastodon app strongly encouraging you to sign up on the largest instance mastodon dot social.
Back over two years ago I made a post, looking at some non-mainstream political accounts on the largest instance mastodon dot social, 75% were hidden or blocked. These were all identifiably left-wing with an anti-war, anti-NATO stance - I didn’t bother checking right-wing accounts as I think universally everyone will acknowledge they won’t last 10 minutes on Mastodon.
Anyway this is the main reason I’m binning one of my instances off - the culture of Mastodon is just not suitable for any sort of political discussion outside of a very narrow bourgeois-liberal spectrum, X is actually much better for this nowadays.
This is without addressing all the other issues:
- Fediblock wars where whole instances just get blocked by other instances. Their users left wondering why they can’t communicate with people they were talking to yesterday.
- Or Mastodon dot lol shutting down, with over seventy three thousand users, because a bunch of trans-activists were harassing people who wanted to play the computer game Hogwarts Legacy.
The list is almost endless.
Anyway I’ve used various Nostr applications for a while, I used to run a relay for it a couple of years ago. I think as it and the applications for it matures it offers a lot of potential. And technically, unlike ActivityPub where your identify is tied to a server and can get nuked or blocked for a variety of reasons.
Or we just go back in time to twenty years ago and go on the blogosphere 🙌.