I've been finding myself quite frustrated with Mastodon lately.
I'm hooked on the multi-column interface and genuinely like a lot of the people I engage with on here, but I'm really feeling the ways in which the all-or-none privacy levels induce low-grade nastiness and a lack of genuine social connection.
I've been thinking for a long time about bailing in favor of Friendica, but I'm realizing that even if I did that, if I wanted to continue to connect with the same people that almost all of the rest of you would still be on Mastodon and therefore writing for a public audience, with all of the social weirdness that goes along with that.
"Followers only" posts aren't really the solution I'm looking for, for a bunch of reasons.
I don't know what the answer is, but I'm feeling sad about the nature of this platform.
@dynamic I wouldn't have a problem switching platforms again. I also dislike many things about Mastodon. (Although, not always the same things you've listed before.)
What really needs to happen is the user client as an aggregator of many server feeds. Then the user is free to change clients without losing connections.
@dynamic True. You'll still have to deal with behaviors, but better clients should provide better filters, better threading, better display options, better encryption options, etc. Maybe I'm being naive; I certainly haven't explored the protocols.
Proper threading would be nice, but the problems I'm talking about at the moment have to do with privacy levels, which are not something you can just tack onto a given platform client-side.
I do get a small thrill out of the idea of end-to-end encryption tacked onto the respective clients of ActivityPub users, though. "Want my posts to not look like gibberish? You need to adopt client-side encryption."
@lwriemen
I'd be curious about what your frustrations are, and how they are different from mine.
Given the shape of the issue as I'm currently experiencing it, switching to a better client would (for me) have the same problems as switching to another ActivityPub enabled platform, i.e. everyone who didn't make the same switch would still be behaving in the same ways as before.