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Mastodon isn't really a company. It's more like one instance inside a federated network of tweets (the "Fediverse"), similar to how you can start your own email server with your own domain but anyone can send and receive emails from you.
For all the posturing from everyone about how they're fleeing to the Fediverse because of big bad Elon firing the mods and Twitter will soon stop working, the reality is that Mastodon is basically worse in every other way. Almost by definition, Mastodon is comprised of people who are so outcast they either don't like Twitter, or were banned from Twitter (many here recognize this as the "seven zillion witches and approximately three principled civil libertarians" problem). So already you have selection effects for a population of users that are worse than Twitter users.
Then there's the fact that moderation is harder, because while you can ban someone from your own instance, you cannot ban someone from another instance. However what you can do is defederate the instance - in effect, banning the entire instance because it's full of witches or whatever. But even this isn't a panacea, because spinning up an instance is so easy (after all, that's the point of the Fediverse) that people can just evade the defed anyway. Most people will just want a Twitter, a centralized platform that can simply ban the offending persons and be done with it. They don't want moderation taken into their own hands, they want someone else to do it.
Lastly there's also the simple fact that Mastodon and the Fediverse were simply never built to accommodate the huge influx of users from the Twitter exodus. For all the doomerism that Musk firing half the employees will result in the site simply failing to stay up, along with claims that this will happen during the World Cup (no similar claims have been made about Meta who did a huge round of layoffs shortly after Elon did), Mastodon keeps dying under user loads that are a fraction of the users Twitter has. Even other exodus destinations like Cohost haven't stayed up as well. Meanwhile I've never seen Twitter go down at any point. Sure there were sometimes a couple glitches here and there but nothing major.
I haven't used Mastodon (well, or Twitter except for following people manually / via RSS), but it sounds like the moderation support is pretty bad. It's really weird that they have decentralized hosting of accounts/feeds but not decentralized moderation. I understand individual instances may want to ban users, but it seems like there's no moderation mechanism for posts on other instances more fine-grained than banning an entire instance that won't moderate in a way you like. Which seems like it defeats a large part of the purpose of having separate instances if they effectively need to clump into groups that agree on moderation policies.
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Yes, one of the largest instances just defederated entirely to shed load.
I can't remember what it was, but back when I was figuring out how mastodon worked there was something about content serving that made me think "boy, that wouldn't scale well at all if a post goes viral across multiple instances."
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