Zak

I have seen that lemmy.world apparently has a very poor reputation among other instances.

It's the largest by far, with five times the monthly active population of #2. One of the main things people want out of federated systems is decentralization, and having one huge dominant server goes against that goal.

I should note .world wasn't the biggest when I signed up. I picked it because mastodon.world was a known quantity, which led me to believe the same team would run a stable server.

Most servers don't micromanage community moderation. That sort of thing could happen almost anywhere.

When I say "by default", I meant the vanilla Mastodon web client. Of course alternate clients could do just about anything.

I don't think long posts in Mastodon are a bad thing at all. I self-host and I changed the character limit to 50000.

By default, Mastodon will collapse long posts in feeds. If you don't want to see long posts, you don't have to click to expand them.

If you have millions of people on a social network, and you go looking for toxic shit there, you will find it.

Well, on Mastodon, you might not because by default it doesn't have a useful text search feature. If you're on a server running a modified version, or something else with decent text search, you might. My self-hosted server was on a relay that briefly pulled in content from a famously toxic server. At first, I didn't see it because I didn't follow those accounts, but later, I added an improved search feature and tried searching for some terms of abuse. I did find a few absolutely vile posts.

Bluesky has had a working search from early on. Turning off some of the default moderation filters and searching for terms of abuse does, in fact find people using terms of abuse.

I'm puzzles as to why anyone would routinely post threads to Mastodon rather than moving to an instance without a short limit.

It's kind of not. It does appear to be at least theoretically possible to self-host any or all of the major components. Unlike ActivityPub projects, however, it doesn't seem like anybody is doing that and offering services to the public.

Yes. I use it to post pictures of birds.

Discovery built into Mastodon and ActivityPub microblogging in general isn't great (and some people claim that's a good thing). One place to look for people to follow is https://fedi.directory/

It's absolutely an issue for hobby level open source projects.

It looks like you have to have a paid Apple developer account to do it.

Probably some actual racists and a whole bunch of people who thought it would be funny to embarrass Microsoft by getting it to say the most offensive thing they could imagine.

That's interesting. This post had suggested it isn't yet possible to host an AppView. It seems the reality is more complex.