It's even worse than it appears..
Wednesday October 11, 2023; 9:13 AM EDT
Why Mastodon isn't The One#
  • Take a break from your busy day and study this picture. It's why Mastodon as a federated system is not going to work. #
  • Here's what happened.#
    • I decided to follow ProPublica.#
    • I clicked on the Follow button.#
    • The picture showed up with a very complicated set of instructions. It requires me to remember an address that I do not remember. #
    • Instead of following, I wrote this blog post, because it was simpler to do this and I'm tired of people ignoring this because I care about us getting this right. #
  • Why will it never work? Why is Mastodon not The One? I know, because I thought RSS should do what Twitter ended up doing and the main reason that happened is that to follow someone in Twitter is one click, and you're done, and I don't even want to write down the process for feeds because it's even worse than what it is in Mastodon today.#
  • Not that we didn't know this at the time, we did, or how to solve it at a technical level. I tried to get everyone to work with us on making subscription simple, but it didn't happen. Later I came to believe it couldn't. We could force everyone to use the same export format, that worked incredibly well. But every RSS reader developer acted as if they were the only product that did what they did and didn't want to do anything they didn't have to to make it easy for people to subscribe in other reader software. It's so convoluted and stupid, you have to figure the people making the actual decisions had never used an RSS reader and never wanted to subscribe to a feed. This, btw, is pretty common in the tech industry, product ignorance among key decision-makers. I even heard a CEO once boast that he didn't need to use the product because he's a 'market of one' as if all his customers were frankfurter meat? #
  • Here's the bottom line. If subscription isn't one-click in your federated social media system, go back to the drawing board and re-do your architecture, because it won't work. #
  • PS: After writing the post I was calmer and remembered where my account was, and it was two steps from there to follow ProPublica on Mastodon.#

© copyright 1994-2023 Dave Winer.

Last update: Wednesday October 11, 2023; 10:12 PM EDT.

You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)