Mastodon Brought a Protocol to a Product Fight
Mastodon vs. Twitter? Come on…
Merry Christmas everyone. Tonight, sadly, I come bearing a lump of coal. Or a fossil which will eventually turn to coal. An extinct elephant-like creation. A mastodon.
I’m talking, of course, about the not-exactly-new but once-again-hot in the wake of the current Twitter chaos federated social network. I’ve somehow avoided signing up for the service up until now. Largely because signing up was and is so comically obtuse — pick your server everyone, hope you choose wisely! (More on that in a bit.) But when my friend Craig Mod posted a link to the Mastodon-run mastodon.social account creation page the other day, once such links were comically unbanned by Elon Musk, I decided I would make the jump.
Since his link was to the core project server, the rest of the sign up process was fairly straightforward. Finding people to follow was clearly not an experience that was very thought through by anyone who has had anything to do with a social network before, but whatever, I just followed a few of Mod’s folks and I was off to the races.
I tooted a few times. My god, I actually just wrote that. I tested out obvious things such as uploading an image, which was slow, but fine. And I asked for some recommendations of which apps to use to access the network (I signed up on the mobile web from within Twitter’s iOS app, sorry Elon).
A few days passed and because I didn’t yet have a native app installed with notifications, I didn’t think about Mastodon. Then tonight, with some downtime amidst the holiday cheer, I downloaded Mastodon’s own mobile app. And that was the aforementioned lump of coal. It took a half dozen times for the authentication to actually work. And again, I wasn’t using some random server, I was using one of Mastodon’s own. I kept getting error messages which made me think there was some phishing attempt happening. Nevertheless, I persisted. Eventually, I was able to log on. I didn’t do anything differently than before, it was just sheer brute force.
Then I tried to toot. It just hung there. I had to force-quit the app and lost my never tooted toot. I went to try again but Mastodon said I was offline. I wasn’t, of course. I forced-quit again and couldn’t even recall what I was trying to toot. Toot bad.
I tweeted about my tooting. People tweeted back that to toot I should try to get access to Ivory, a still in-alpha Mastodon client. Since the app is by Tapbots, which makes a few other great apps for iOS that I’ve long loved and admired — Tweetbot, Calcbot, Pastebot — I was able to secure a build of Ivory. The good news is that it looks and feels much better than Mastodon’s own app. The bad news is that there’s nothing Tapbots can do about Mastodon’s own server and auth issues.
In response to my tweets (not toots), I got a lot of messages to make sure that I signed up for a “good” server for Mastodon. Apparently, I was foolish in picking one of Mastodon’s own, thinking that was an obvious choice. Don’t I know the entire point is to be federated and to not use a server run by the company the network is named after? Duh. I should spin up my own server, actually. I should also make my own soap. This is the future, people.
Yes, yes, the network is under immense strain as people flee the Elon strain infecting Twitter. But come on, there are folks who really believe this is going to replace, or even stand alongside Twitter, as a massively scaled social network? I call bullshit. While it’s impressive that millions of users have apparently given Mastodon a try, the product is far too slapdash and clunky to keep folks engaged. A lump of coal.
But, but, it’s not a product, it’s a protocol. Yeah, that’s a nice thing to say. And to believe in. But I truly believe the ship has sadly sailed for such idealism in this space. Jack Dorsey can talk about how this should have been what Twitter was from the get go until he’s bluesky in the face. It’s just not going to happen. And he’s more to blame for that than most everyone else. As is he for the Elon element of this current equation. But that’s a different story.
For now, I’ll just say that while I fully understand why everyone wants Mastodon to be the new Twitter. Or the better Twitter. The more ideal Twitter. Or whatever. It’s just not going to happen. Mastodon brought a protocol to a product fight. Maybe Ivory or another client can iron out some of the product jank, but the protocol element — the power that so many want to believe in — is what is going to keep holding the product element back, would be my prediction.
Anyone who has been around long enough has seen this play out far too many times. Elon has created a new opening here for a new way, without question. But I have yet to see a product, including Post News and the others, that actually answer the call. A product call. Not a protocol.
Published on December 25, 2022 📆
Written from Queenstown, New Zealand 🗺
Written on a 2022 M2 iPad Pro 📱
Enjoying a Speight’s Gold Medal Ale 🍺
