So why do people say that Mastodon is more difficult to use?
- the contents of a thread differ depending on which instance you are viewing it from. replies from users that your instance is not subscribed to are not shown, so you need to view the thread on its origin instance in order to see the full thread context. on my instance lots of federated posts appear to have no replies, while on their origin instance the posts have dozens or hundreds of replies.
- - side note: this is why i don't recommend asking a tech support question if you're on a large mastodon server, you'll get flooded with identical replies for days from helpful people who think no one else has answered your question.
- search results also differ depending on which instance you're using. hashtag search only applies to the federated timeline, so if I tell you to check out #coolthing we may have completely different results, or you may not even see any results.
- poll results, post favourite/boost counts aren't replicated in real-time between instances, so they vary between servers. when a poll ends you'll get a notification from the origin server with the final results but until then you'll just see votes that come from your instance.
- pinned posts for users from other instances don't always federate, so again you need to view user profiles on their source instance to be sure that you're seeing pinned posts.
- mastodon 4.0 introduced post editing, but replication lag across fedi can range from hours to days. it's not uncommon for someone to edit a post and get confusing replies because the edit hasn't been propagated to other instances.
- if you get linked to a mastodon post in the wild, you need to copy-paste it into your instance's search bar to interact with it.
- post deletion takes a while to propagate, and certain server implementations ignore deletion requests. this can be confusing when both you and a person on another server are discussing someone's profile.
imo mastodon makes more sense if you see it as a distributed system that achieves eventual consistency with an SLA of a few days. that is understandably confusing for most people.
Comments
- the contents of a thread differ depending on which instance you are viewing it from. replies from users that your instance is not subscribed to are not shown, so you need to view the thread on its origin instance in order to see the full thread context. on my instance lots of federated posts appear to have no replies, while on their origin instance the posts have dozens or hundreds of replies.
- - side note: this is why i don't recommend asking a tech support question if you're on a large mastodon server, you'll get flooded with identical replies for days from helpful people who think no one else has answered your question.
- search results also differ depending on which instance you're using. hashtag search only applies to the federated timeline, so if I tell you to check out #coolthing we may have completely different results, or you may not even see any results.
- poll results, post favourite/boost counts aren't replicated in real-time between instances, so they vary between servers. when a poll ends you'll get a notification from the origin server with the final results but until then you'll just see votes that come from your instance.
- pinned posts for users from other instances don't always federate, so again you need to view user profiles on their source instance to be sure that you're seeing pinned posts.
- mastodon 4.0 introduced post editing, but replication lag across fedi can range from hours to days. it's not uncommon for someone to edit a post and get confusing replies because the edit hasn't been propagated to other instances.
- if you get linked to a mastodon post in the wild, you need to copy-paste it into your instance's search bar to interact with it.
- post deletion takes a while to propagate, and certain server implementations ignore deletion requests. this can be confusing when both you and a person on another server are discussing someone's profile.
imo mastodon makes more sense if you see it as a distributed system that achieves eventual consistency with an SLA of a few days. that is understandably confusing for most people.