One might say "Federation does not work" if one got hit with FediBlock, because for that person's uses, it wouldn't work. No one sees posts, no one interacts or engages with posts. No one says "I want to see more of this, I'm going to follow". But the article explains that you didn't do the work of promoting your bots to others who might enjoy them. In this case, it wasn't federation but the sales & marketing team for your bots that wasn't working.

> Account migration does not work

> One of the big selling points of Mastodon was that you can pick which instance your account lives on, but it is easy to change your mind and switch to a different instance later on. This feature was wildly oversold.

> Mastodon allows you to post the equivalent of a web redirect: your followers are informed of your new instance and seamlessly migrated over. Your posts, however, do not move with you. Which is kind of a theme: the system simply doesn't think posts are terribly important.

There are other possible ways it could be handled, but in a server-based network, one is always going to run up against certain things, including different server rules, different admin capabilities & skills, and the need to prepare somehow BEFORE a migration from one server to another is needed. Even the RedMatrix / Hubzilla / Zot way of doing things requires one to prepare before the time it would be necessary.

> It is not hard to design mechanisms for accounts to actually "own" their posts and followers and migrate them between instances.

Try talking to someone who is currently or has in the past attempted to do this. It isn't so easy, especially if you're trying to do it right.

> When you "private mention" someone, only you and they can see the post. And they can reply with a "private mention" of their own. But if anyone in that "private" thread accidentally mentions any other Mastodon account by name, that is itself considered a "private mention", and that person is invited into the thread. It is an absolutely insane UI design that makes it extremely easy to share private conversations with exactly the people you don't want reading them.

True. I think Mastodon is working on an improved version. But even there, people should probably use a secure and encrypted messaging service (XMPP + OMEMO or OTR, Signal, Element / Matrix, Session, etc) because as with all other web-based "private messages", it is always possible for the server admin to read your messages directly from the database. But with the above private messenger systems, there's some sort of E2EE preventing the admin from seeing your PM content.

> Content moderation is the hard problem in social media, and it's been said that moderation (ie what content people see) is the product. As far as I can tell, Mastodon was designed in complete ignorance of all the actual challenges of moderation at scale, and focused only on a weird offshoot of the "federated" religion: the real problem is that people want to opt into a moderation regime based on their instance.

I know you're excited about BlueSky's pluggable content moderation. But I've had a BlueSky account on bsky.app for a while and the only moderation choice I've seen is bsky.app itself.

If you're excited about centralized moderation, you may as well go to a centralized Twitter clone. Oh, wait. You did.

Yes, federation is imperfect. Yes, with one piece of server software having many more servers & end-users than any other, improvements that might otherwise have been made and deployed are not because compatibility is necessary. But federation is an intermediate step between centralized socials and fully distributed and peer-to-peer socials. It retains some advantages of both and some disadvantages of both. One can avoid all that by choosing a network that isn't meaningfully decentralized or federated, such as BlueSky. Or one can move closer to the P2P model with Nostr. One can attempt to revive Twister (a P2P thing that was similar to an early Twitter).

> The problem that did manifest is that all of this moderation is entirely opaque to users. If you explicitly follow a particular account, you may not see posts from that account because its instance doesn't like its content, because your instance doesn't like its content, or simply because one of the two instances doesn't like the other. Which is very much a thing.3 But the only way to know what you're not seeing is that...you're not seeing it. Ie if you follow an account, you'd have to find some (outside-Mastodon) way to find out what they're posting and then compare it with what you're seeing in Mastodon.