ElectroVagrant

Nah, I get that normal people wouldn't, but I can dream. It's so much better than making Yet Another Account. Plus I know in set up we're talkin' people pulling the feed into a reader, but also for content creators making sites, loads of sitebuilding software already has RSS baked in, so it's not even that big an ask from them.

If there's another more convenient no-sign-up method of keeping up with sites and stuff online, I'd love to know, 'cause I know many aren't about to use RSS.

Hmm, if so, it wasn't clear in the documentation I read. I was of the impression it was still passing posts through the relay to enable others' discovery & interaction.

But apparently what they actually meant was, “users of Mastodon instances rarely explore outward”? The instances would auto-federate, but in practice, the “crawlers” (the users) aren’t leaving their bubbles often enough to create a critical mass of interconnectedness across the Fediverse?

It's more along the lines of, as Mastodon's been one of the more popular ActivityPub platforms for awhile longer, there's a longer history of federation faffery, i.e. instance admins/people not getting along leading to defederations leading to a somewhat more fragmented network. Lemmy's only grown in adoption more recently and hasn't had as much time for that faffery to crop up as much, and has a different style and audience to it anyway, so it may be less prone to that, time will tell.

Regardless, your conclusion is basically on point for many folks. Federation stuff is no better to them than the erratic moderation/management of larger platforms that's driving them elsewhere. Of course problem is, moderation/management's not really something tech can solve (as Bsky's already run into with its attempts at enabling third-party moderation).

They're supposed to be able to, true, but I've not come across any examples of that in action yet. If you know of any I'd be interested in seeing them, as I've been trying to keep up with AuthTransfer's developments.

It can be, yeah. However, similar may be said of responsible social media setup.

Relay (backend albeit rumored to be expensive)

Not even rumored, so much as explicitly expected.

The federation architecture allows anyone to host a Relay, though it’s a fairly resource-demanding service. In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers, and then a long tail of partial-network providers.

I just assumed Mastodon was like Lemmy, where every instance federates with every other instance basically by default and there’s only some high-profile defed exceptions.

That's...Not how Lemmy works either. In fact, and someone may correct me if I'm mistaken here, your hell is sort of how it works as I understand it. Instances don't have any built-in crawlers to seek out others running on ActivityPub with the same software, e.g. Lemmy or Mastodon or the like. That's genuinely been one of the biggest stumbling blocks with the whole protocol, as discovery is largely a manual affair. The only crawlers we have are the people using the service and following remote people or communities or channels from other instances to let the one we're on see them.

One of the basic reasons for this that I've read is that it's related to handling scaling, as each instance trying to handle all of the data of all the people on each other instance right away would bog down the servers and probably crash them. It also arguably works out, to a degree, that there's a good chance not everyone on each instance is of interest to each other anyway, so you may not want or need each server to know about every other server's people/channels/communities/etc.

But I'm going to stop before I get too much further into the weeds of all this. The irony is that the simplest solution to discovery issues with all of this presently is to invite those you want to have a similar experience to you, or want to connect to with the fewest jumps, to the same instance as you to mitigate any of those issues. Does that tend to undermine many of the benefits of it all? In a lot of ways, yeah, but that's where many ActivityPub platforms are at currently, at least the more popular ones as I understand them.

I'm still on the fence about that...I think it'd make more sense for many to drop social media and opt for their own site with RSS feeds. A lot of social media for some is little more than a noisier RSS reader. Sometimes even literally with those with auto-playing videos. 😬

I think a better title & question would be, "Why is Mastodon struggling to thrive?"

It's surviving no problem, but it's not thriving for a multitude of reasons. Some are pretty well covered across comments here & in the linked discussion, and are more or less reiterations of prior discussions on the matter.

Ultimately I think as much as many of those reasons are correct, the biggest reason is the same as ever: network effects. All the jank and technical details could be endured and adjusted to if there was sufficient value to be had in doing so, i.e. following accounts of interest/entertainment, connecting with friends, etc. That's proven to varying degrees by those that have stuck with Mastodon. In turn, however, it's also clear by how many bounce off that for many there's still insufficient value to be found across Mastodon instances to justify dealing with all the rough edges.

If Mastodon had enough broadly appealing/interesting people/accounts across its instances, people might deal with the various technical and cultural rough spots the same way they deal with similar on other social networks they may complain about yet won't leave. There still aren't enough of those sorts on there for many though, so Mastodon simply survives but doesn't thrive.

Yes but no. Due to architectural differences, federation under AuthTransfer protocol is simply different compared to ActivityPub. In its own terms it is federated as individuals' data is stored in personal data servers (PDSs) connected to a relay, which currently is only the Bluesky relay, that roughly speaking connects them to other personal data servers.

You can technically operate your own personal data server apart from those operated by Bluesky, but I think it's fair to say the vast majority on there don't. It's not clear yet, apart from fully holding your own data, how useful it is to operate your own given you only have one relay to use anyway at the moment.

So even in its own terms Bluesky really isn't federated in much of a meaningful sense yet. The problems are twofold: a major part of their pitch is making federation Just Work™, keeping the underlying tech out of mind to mitigate confusion, but you can't have your cake and eat it too here. Eventually, if you're really committed to meaningful federation, you have to teach people about the value of operating their own personal data servers, at minimum, otherwise what was the point in separating it out in the architecture?

Problem is, that goes against their pitch to their audience and spoils the appeal. It's telling a good joke only to kill it by explaining to the one person that went, "I don't get it."

Secondly, they've already upfront said that relays may be cost prohibitive for many people to operate, resulting in only a few ever being spun up. If that remains the case and is true, then even if a few were spun up, that's not any more federated or distributed than the rather consolidated web we see now. How much of a difference would it make if the social web was running on AuthTransfer and the major relays were owned and run by Meta/Facebook, Twitter/X, and Google?

Congrats you have your own data in a personal data server...But are you really the one running it, or did you just opt into the PDS entryway offered by Facebook/Twitter/Google/etc. because sorry, what's that about a server?

Walnut a.k.a. Nutcracker

A variation on the game on the internet would arguably be avoiding sharing clickbait, wannabe viral posts, e.g. LinkedInLunatics' absurd posts promoting a business or work expectations, and other variations of attention grabbing nonsense, i.e. mis/disinformation.

Not sharing attention bait at all, and not giving it further attention, is a way to successfully play this form of the game. However, by its very nature, many often can't help but occasionally share content of this form, wittingly or not, and in turn are frequently losing this game.