Okay, that’s his opinion. Like his opinions on many things, I feel entirely free to disagree with him.

Mastodon simply is a different thing than X/Bluesky. It’s more like RSS/Blog/IRC. It will never go mainstream unless they add (opt out) algorithms and a better search functionality. But maybe that’s just not worth it. Mastodon has already lost to Bluesky when it comes to being an open mainstream Twitter replacement.

I’m curious about if it’s even technically possible to build something federated that feels like a Twitter replacement, using the ActivityPub protocol.

I unfollowed Alec on Fedi because every other post would be him complaining about his interactions on there. Reply guys. Trolls. Lack of algorithms which raise some of the better comments out of the drek. Insufficient moderation. Etc. This got boring and depressing to read about honestly.

However I think he’s totally right. Mastodon/Fedi works well for certain kinds of people. People with limited engagement, people posting mostly uncontroversial things, and perhaps people who just don’t give a shit. But for high-visibility folks like Alec the old-school unfiltered discourse seems really uncomfortable.

It has little to do with federation itself, I think. But if Mastodon ever added the choice for users to enable “modern social media algorithms” for their view of their feed I suspect it would work a lot better for many people.

I feel like we need to unite and make Mastodon a better place instead of making drama about it. Mastodon is not perfect, but it’s a platform over which we have control, unlike Bluesky.

When you compare Alec’s recent videos with his early ones, it’s pretty clear that the negativity he receives has been wearing him down. Like many YouTubers, even when he’s sharing information about something he loves, he’s very bitter and sarcastic about it. Like, half of each video is trying to pre-argue with his trolls.

I understand why popular content creators have to set boundaries because it seems like a pretty soul-destroying job to have. If Bluesky helps him do that, more power to him. But for a nobody like me, I prefer Mastodon, largely because I’ve made friends with people on my local instance, and interacting with other servers is merely a bonus feature.