> Even within Mastodon it’s a mess with all the various servers. It’s too confusing.

That's news to me, as a Mastodon user. I just scroll my homeserver's default feed and get stuff from all over the internet.

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al_borland 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

At one point I had 2 accounts. One was on my phone and one was on my laptop. I was in the process of moving to the one on my laptop (I know migration exists, but I'm weird and didn't want to do that). Anyway, I was on my phone and saw a post with my one account from some other federated server. When I went on my laptop I couldn't find it. I figured it might just need to propagate. I waited days... nothing. I've seen behavior like this a lot. You're not seeing a problem, because you can't know what you don't see.

If you're just scrolling a bunch of random stuff, you might not care. But what if we want this to be like old Facebook, where you follow people you actually know? Am I going to miss wedding and birth announcements? Party invitations? Other important life updates from friends and family?

You could criticize the modern algorithmic feeds on platforms like Facebook for not showing some of these things as well, if they don't think it will engage you enough, but at least the post is there and available. When I ran into that issue between my 2 accounts, I looked for the post specifically, I had the ID... it simply wasn't available to me.

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dingnuts 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

no, you get the subset your homeserver administrator decides to rehost

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thejohnconway 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think that's a good way of stating it. You get the posts from the people anyone on your server follows. An admin can block or silence accounts, or run a relay, but these are edge cases.

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ekianjo 3 days ago | parent [-]

An admin can decide to unfollow a bunch of instances and as a user you have no recourse.

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egypturnash 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

you can say "hey could you refollow those instances"

you could throw more money into the instance's tip jar to make it easier for them to decide to rehost a larger part of the data firehose - that may not be the entire reason they defederated from an instance but it may be part of it

you could move to another instance whose admin's choices are more in line with yours

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LexiMax 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Other social networks can ban people I follow and I have no recourse.

	▲	ekianjo 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		True, so it's not an improvement. I guess it is even worse because when they unfollow an instance they may ban hundreds of users just because there are a few problematic ones.

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bigyabai 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Which in my case, includes stuff from all over the internet. I don't think anyone's feed includes everything from the internet.

	▲	righthand 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		To add: not even a centralized service includes everything from the internet.