The Decentralized Social Media Rant

2026-03-17 · … views

I like new technology, I like the idea of owning your own data. It’s cool. What’s not cool is that none of that shit ever fucking works at all!

The Mastodon Rant.

Mastodon. I first set up an instance around the time the first twitter implosion happened, When the Musk took over the birdsite, It was… Functional. but i quickly discovered just how inefficient the protocol and implementations were. For example if you post a link to mastodon, every single instance that can see that post will individually try to fetch the metadata for that link. Posting a link from my instance (A 2-3 user instance with barely any activity) was able to get 300+ instances to request a specific URL. That’s not very swag money.

The second “issue” is moderation, as it always is. Never will we achieve nirvana where everyone agrees on how something should be moderated exactly. It’s impossible. We are too stubborn and different to ever agree on anything. So when you put moderation into the hands of untrained instance hosts like myself, It becomes a shitshow FAST. You get the “Fast and Loose” instances that just have bare rules and hope nobody does anything weird and you have the instances who try to re-inact the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA by litterally creating a federation of federated instances with its own constitution and enforced rules (what the fuck guys get into real politics maybe?) and honestly those two extremes are really funny when they interact.

Enter The Matrix

Around this same time, I also set up a matrix server. I thought it was a cool idea, thinking back to the IRC days where you just had channels on dedicated servers and stuff, but with a portable account? Seems cool.. Uh oh, it runs on the same inefficient protocol? I used it for about a week before realizing how incredibly unstable it was (I was hosting my instance on a pretty beefy server and it was actively denting the performance of the entire box) so that was a quick and merciless death.

Back to the Future

This year, 2026 i got baited into setting up a mastodon server again, and lo and behold some of the old relations re-established themselves?? (Even if on my old instance i ran the self-destruct command??). So lets say i let the domain lapse, now someone could larp as me and people wouldn’t even know cause they’d still be following… Okay.. What the fuck?

That’s honestly just a side note becuase now Discord is wanting age verification and everyones up in arms about it, ready to jump ship to something else.. to… Matrix..? (imagine a loud sigh). Oh cool, Matrix is now almost impossible to set up anymore. Who fucking cares.

Decentraslop?

Please for the love of god stop trying to push this shit onto normies. They don’t fucking care and your shitty protocols can never support the load of the masses anyways. Keep your circlejerking mastodon instances to yourself and those you care about. “Decentralization” is not something the average joe or Joanne care about, they just wanna log in and send cringy gifs to each-other. Snapchat is killing E2E encryption and have you even HEARD about that from anyone not in your privacy aware circle?