I tried Mastodon two times in the past. I love the idea of federation and really want it to work. There’s just too much friction though.

First you have to choose an instance. If there isn’t a sensible default preselected when you download an app you already lost almost all non-technical people.

But I’m a technical, motivated individual, so I managed. Next I wanted to follow some creators I know. I couldn’t just look them up, I had to find them on twitter or other places and manually copy their name@instance or whatever into mastodon.

Cool. Now I can press follow and it’ll follow, right? Wrong. I press follow and nothing happens. I find out It’s pending? I’m guessing both instances have to accept federation between them?

Let’s follow some more creators I know. What do you mean I can’t follow someone because their instance is straight up blocked by my instance because their instance mods think everything anime-related is for pedos? So I can’t follow creators from both instances because they don’t like each other? So I need to find an instance which isn’t blocked by anyone, doesn’t block anyone? Or host my own one person instance and hope other instances accept my federation?

At this point you already lost 99.9% of people. I want mastodon to work, but it straight up sucks.

Time for the fediverse to reflect on this lamentable failure to capture the zeitgeist. The future could have been glorious. Instead we have infighting, defederation, owner class privilege with their delegates (moderators) as the first class citizen. And of course, hiding the structures of power has already begun in the name of harmony, so no, you can’t have frictionless account migration. Don’t step out of line if you don’t want to lose your fediverse relationships and history…