I'm puzzles as to why anyone would routinely post threads to Mastodon rather than moving to an instance without a short limit.
I'm not going to make a very good case for a position I consider terribly misguided, but in short it's because trolls on other platforms search for terms related to people they want to harass.
Some people have also raised objections centered around privacy or consent to process data. I find that misguided too; ActivityPub is radically public in that it sends every action to a bunch of other peoples' computers, and there's no explicit consent to do any of the other stuff a server might do with posts.
Of course any server owner can just select * from statuses where text like '%search string%'.
Search and discovery are a big deal. It's much less effort to find people and content, and to be found on Bluesky than on Mastodon/ActivityPub. It takes work on Mastodon, and I don't think Pleroma, Misskey, and their forks are doing much better (though I believe Akkoma has a decent search function).
This is, in part because there is a very vocal contingent of ActivityPub users who do not want working search and discovery. I think that's equivalent to saying they don't want the network to gain mainstream popularity.
It does look like it's possible to independently host all the components of the ATProto network now, so I'm hoping we'll see a bunch of services pop up soon such that the network becomes more resistant to enshittification. I've seen Whitewind and Frontpage, but I don't fully understand the federation model and haven't been able to cause one to display posts from another.
It's kind of not. It does appear to be at least theoretically possible to self-host any or all of the major components. Unlike ActivityPub projects, however, it doesn't seem like anybody is doing that and offering services to the public.
I don't think that's necessarily true. What I do think is true is that there's a chance some AI thing will be a trillion dollar investment, and the most motivating thing for VCs is fear of missing out on a giant score.
A nonprofit open source profit ought to have different motivations though.
That's pretty much what I wrote in the comment box. The options for the multiple choice questions don't really acknowledge that as a preference people might have.
Yes. I use it to post pictures of birds.
Discovery built into Mastodon and ActivityPub microblogging in general isn't great (and some people claim that's a good thing). One place to look for people to follow is https://fedi.directory/
It's absolutely an issue for hobby level open source projects.
It looks like you have to have a paid Apple developer account to do it.
Probably some actual racists and a whole bunch of people who thought it would be funny to embarrass Microsoft by getting it to say the most offensive thing they could imagine.
That's interesting. This post had suggested it isn't yet possible to host an AppView. It seems the reality is more complex.
If you have millions of people on a social network, and you go looking for toxic shit there, you will find it.
Well, on Mastodon, you might not because by default it doesn't have a useful text search feature. If you're on a server running a modified version, or something else with decent text search, you might. My self-hosted server was on a relay that briefly pulled in content from a famously toxic server. At first, I didn't see it because I didn't follow those accounts, but later, I added an improved search feature and tried searching for some terms of abuse. I did find a few absolutely vile posts.
Bluesky has had a working search from early on. Turning off some of the default moderation filters and searching for terms of abuse does, in fact find people using terms of abuse.