scratchpad

Started using Mastodon in around 2018. Still having two accounts on there, https://social.tchncs.de/@z428 and https://social.lol/@z428, the latter one being my primary Fediverse hangout as of today.

• (+) By far the most consistent experience in terms of web interface and mobile apps. Maybe also the federated platform with the most well-polished user experience.
• (+) Easy to use without too many bells and whistles that might get into ones way.
• (+) Rather widespread and able to even reach mainstream channels that seem inaccessible to other federated services.
• (+) Built and - “flagship instances” - run by an organizational structure that doesn't solely depend on unpaid volunteers work.
• (+) Even though being all but undisputed, it's safe to say Mastodon, from a structural perspective (driven by an organization with budget, goal and vision) it seems closest to my idea of how a sustainable social network platform beyond the usual “free-beer” fallacy should be.

• (-) Limited in feature set, compared to other platforms. In some cases, this is okay from a “less-is-more” perspective, in some cases (like that four-pics-per-post limit) it's annoying. Too, it's a rather difficult decision not to display the software used to create a remote post; this would help predicting quite some interoperability quirks in the current Fediverse.
• (-) Rather than using ActivityPub Client API, Mastodon introduced and still maintains a proprietary interface for attaching mobile clients and other applications, making Mastodon-specific tools tied to Mastodon rather than available to a wider Fediverse audience.
• (-) Sometimes it feels just as if the Mastodon team also is a bit off when it comes to aligning implementation and design choices with those made by other communities in the Fediverse, even knowing that this is quite a tough thing to handle.
• (-) As per November 2025, Gargron as lead developer and inventor of Mastodon has dropped out of the project, apparently by receiving a solid revenue for that, which is not a bad thing in itself but feels a bit shady in some ways.

Stopped using this in February 2025 and haven't touched it ever since. So state of information dates back to this. Things might have changed in the meantime.

• (+) Very polished user interface specifically for the image sharing use case.
• (+) Portfolio screen is a rather nice feature to present your works.
• (+) Supports locations and license for posts.
• (+) Some good client apps are available for mobile platforms.

• (-) Features sometimes tend to disappear without too much ado or annoucement (see the “memories” functionality that just got lost somewhere down the line).
• (-) A lot of features are available but half-baked and/or broken. Even basic ones, such as direct messages, federation of comments on comments, … .
• (-) Development has been rather fast initially but at some point seems to have slowed down. Some longstanding bugs haven't been addressed in more than five years.
• (-) Export of data is somewhere in between broken and disabled. No way to take all your images elsewhere. Not even talking about re-importing these.
• (-) The main developer is a … difficult person, mildly put. Won't go into much more details here but safe to say this makes me stay away from everything he did or does for the time being.

Used to be my main vehicle on the Fediverse until 02/2026. Still fancy the platform and still keep that old single-user instance of mine around for … reasons, but parted ways with it in day-to-day use.

• (+) Connects not just to ActivityPub but also to Tumblr, Bluesky, Diaspora - and a couple of others I don't use. This includes even odd use cases such as posting messages retrieved from e-mail systems / IMAP servers and likewise sharing articles to e-mail recipients.
• (+) Mostly supports Mastodon client API so there's a chance of re-using mobile apps like tusky, moshidon or fedilab on here.
• (+) Channels allow for providing pretty fine-grained sorting and filtering of posts, similar more to custom feeds in Bluesky than to mere “contact lists” in other platforms.
• (+) Community support in most cases is fast and helpful, both talking about instance admins and developers.
• (+) Timeline view, user interface, … are much more capable of handling vast loads of communication specifically also longer posts, threads and forum-like conversations. This is macroblogging much more than microblogging and it's definitely good this way.

• (-) Friendica web client, albeit quite improved throughout the last couple of releases, has a bunch of shortcomings and glitches that really feel annoying at times, especially talking use on mobile devices. Some things still are tied to mouse-hover interactions and don't work on touch screens at all.
• (-) Although Mastodon client apps are supported, obviously features related to Friendica (such as sharing just to certain connectors or circles) aren't supported in there and most likely never will be. There's as of now no mobile app fully supporting these features.
• (-) Oddly enough and then again, some “late additions” to the Friendica feature set aren't available from the Friendica web interface at all. Example here: Setting visibilities to responses to other posts. Using any Mastodon-API-Client with Friendica, this is possible and seems to work but the Friendica web interface doesn't have any way to do so.
• (-) In some cases, Friendica has glitches that are extremely hard (not to say impossible) to recover if you're not an instance administrator, such as Tumblr or Bluesky connector getting stuck, lagging behind or otherwise misbehaving. In most cases, too, “just” running an instance managed by someone else doesn't help either; it seems the best way to run Friendica is being in full control of operating system, database, filesystem, webserver too, all along with the Friendica service itself. This isn't a good starting point.
• (-) Some limitations that are there aren't obvious. Like, Tumblr posts are mirrored but not responses or messages - because the Tumblr API doesn't support that but still it's not obvious. Same way, Bluesky direct messages don't come through, and Bluesky contacts appear to be in some way different to other contacts in example when it comes to adding them to circles.
• (-) In general and unfortunately, it seems Friendica development has massively slowed down the last couple of years. The latest stable release is 2025-12, released in Dec 2025. For a while, there was a two-release-per-year strategy. Now, the current RC, as of writing this in April 2026, is dubbed 2026-04RC. In the past, more than once there have been situations of odd errors introduced with one of the releases to keep features broken for half a year or more.
• (-) A difficult side-effect of the long development cycles is: Even with issues being marked as “fixed” in github, in most cases it essentially means they make it to the RC or dev branch which leaves even relevant fixes waiting there for quite a while so you're either left living with the issue or nudging your instance admin to go for an RC release (which might be a bad idea from other points of view) or go for a single-user instance with an RC release yourself, which is obviously not a good idea unless you have plenty of time at hand or this is a service you don't really need to be around but then again why bother at all?
• (-) All along with this, it seems Friendica has serious performance issues in circumstances that are hard to reproduce. In the end, my single-user instance consumed incredibly hefty amount of system ressources, even this way got stuck more than just once and apparently no one was really able to figure out why that happened. I also managed to take down the instance I feel grateful for hosting my data in between 2021 and 2025, several times, for similar reasons, and I suffered from performance degradations in both web interface and mobile apps repeatedly, in some cases it was possible to have these reproduced, but in the end none of them really have been resolved.

Been on there for a while. Currently using it to reconnect to Diaspora* after mainly giving up on Friendica.

• (+) Immensely flexible and powerful, much more than just a social network platform. Longform blogs, photo gallery, a tremendous amount of tools for a load of purposes.
• (+) Very fine-grained security and privacy mechanisms.
• (+) Offers a bunch of features that … should just be around in every other platform. Period. Like nomadic identity, magic web authentication or delivery status overview.
• (+) Development seems rather fast and developers seem to respond quickly to inquiries and questions.
• (+) Diaspora connectivity is still here, ActivityPub can be disabled if one wants to disconnect from that part of the Fediverse.
• (+) Importing content from elsewhere using RSS feeds or other kinds of channels works amazingly well.
• (+) Support community seems both friendly and fast when it comes to fixing reported issues and making them available on instances in public access.

• (-) No import of contacts from any other platform is possible.
• (-) No mobile app for any platform, even though the mobile web view is quite sophisticated.
• (-) Stability, maturity of the different apps greatly differ.

Been on there for a while too. Cut ties with the platform over a certain controversy in early 2025.

• (+) Paid and mostly supported service.
• (+) Lightweight tooling on top of Hugo static site CMS. If you're a bit skilled with Hugo, you'll feel home there.
• (+) Supports individual / custom domains so it's easy to take your content once you decide to move. My copy still lives at https://notes.z428.eu.
• (+) Connects to Bluesky, LinkedIn, Pixelfed, Mastodon, Threads, Nostr. For some of these not just as in crossposting but also as in pulling comments and conversations back to the posts they've been attached to which is really a sweet spot.
• (+) Has a bunch of plugins and is generally quite hackable if one wants to.
• (+) Supports import and hosting of old Twitter archives for everyone and import of Instagram archive exports at least if using the MacOS micro.blog app.

• (-) Has a mixed and somewhat unclear stance towards Fediverse/ActivityPub by supporting both crossposting to existing accounts and exposing a micro.blog account via ActivityPub.
• (-) For micro.blogs very own AP implementation, generally people aim for compatibility first, foremost and exclusively with Mastodon so interactions with folks on other servers might be more or less messy and hard to fix.
• (-) micro.blog is somewhat opinionated when it comes to interactions. Coming from the Fediverse, every kind of interaction except for comments is ignored or discarded so there's no way seeing who reshared or left favourites on your posts.

One of these federated platforms I might need to take a closer look at, one day. Briefly been on two servers, one apparently Misskey, unsure which actual software the other one was running. After Misskey/Sharkey/Calckey/Firefish popping up, being around for a while, partially disappearing again and seeing contacts reconnecting from new accounts on the newest and latest server like within weekly intervals, I didn't really feel interested to deal with this part of the federated ecosystem very much. So, just listed here for completeness' sake. No real opionion on any of these. Coming from Friendica, I noticed a bunch of features missing that I actually like (connectivity to other networks) while offering a lot of bells and whistles I don't need (like custom emojis, custom sounds, drive, achievements gamification). User interface seems slick and fast but ran into broken corners then and now.