So just so I'm clear you're suggesting that a person should log in/out of multiple accounts depending on the topic one wants to discuss/read about, on the same app?
I keep a browser tab open for each of my two Mastodon accounts (fulfilling different roles); they are on different servers. It's easy. I don't even run an app. I also use the 'personal' Mastodon account from my phone, as a link. Very very easy. No logging in and out at all.
I have a third party client manage all of my accounts, and it's relatively seamless. I also have them as a list of browser bookmarks.
If course there's no reason to log in, read and log out of every account, every time you read, that would be silly when most people never bother logging out of any of their accounts to begin with.
Also, it's entirely feasible to just follow people on other accounts from whatever account you're on.
Mastodon isn't an app, it has apps, but isn't one.
In your parlance, each Mastodon instance is "an app". The real apps, however, many of them can log into multiple accounts and change which account you're posting from.
The problem is... who cares what this ambiguous "people" want? Mastodon was created by and for its intended userbase, as in, people who want a federated Twitter-like interface to ActivityPub.
Don't like it? You just excluded yourself as part of the intended userbase: Mastodon is not for people who don't grok federated service, and Mastodon doesn't want people who can't grok federated services.
Think of understanding simple concepts like this as sort of a "you have to be this tall to ride this ride" skill check gate. Either you get it, or you don't get in.
It's hard not to read your posts as hailing from the Linux-on-the-desktop mindset: "either you love it or you don't understand it". I understand federated services just fine. I use several, both personally and professionally. And I even understand ActivityPub, I've written code in the ecosystem before. Because ActivityPub makes a lot of sense in some contexts; I think it is a worthy successor to pingbacks/trackbacks for blogs, for example. That doesn't make Mastodon's conception of federation fit-for-purpose for the people Mastodon likers themselves evangelize at--again, much like Linux-on-the-desktoppers. "Just cope with the community/identity conflation by using multiple separate identities on different frontends with different affordances updated at different cadences, what's the problem??" is right up there with "just edit xorg.conf."
This is a big reason why I'm excited for Bluesky and ATProto: theirs includes many more touchpoints for federation and for control of the user experience without falling into the "server federation is so point to point that the entire thing feels like an empty landscape" problem encountered by many of the folks I know (myself included) who tried Mastodon and then bailed. Bluesky right now is pretty good, and when graph systems and personal data stores are federated along with the existing feed creators (which are a really awesome feature to use even in an early form), it'll be an interesting thing to witness.
Whats weird is, what you accuse me of is how I read most comments on HN: The argument against Mastodon is literally "I don't understand federation, so it's bad, and my feelings somehow control if Mastodon has failed or not; I don't want multiple identities because I don't understand the use-case, so I don't want anyone else to have them either, and I want the feature removed". You seem to be one of the few people on HN who may understand the benefits.
Trying to conflate that with "xorg.conf sucks" misses the fact that Twitter is basically the X here (literally and figuratively), while Mastodon is the Wayland. A lot of X-lovers spend their time shitting on Wayland in HN comments because they don't understand the problem Wayland is solving, and don't understand it successfully solved it and is becoming the default, and it just makes them angry.
Also, I don't see the point of Bluesky. If their specifications prove to be useful, then federated services will start using those protocols. Anything they can do, Mastodon can do, too.
> Trying to conflate that with "xorg.conf sucks" misses the fact that Twitter is basically the X here (literally and figuratively), while Mastodon is the Wayland.
That's not true, though. Twitter offers valuable affordances that Mastodon does not support, and I don't mean quote tweets--I mean the ability to organically encounter conversations between people, one of whom you follow and one you maybe don't, and drift in and out of interesting conversations.
(On Twitter that is largely facilitated by quote tweets; Bluesky does support quotes, but also always surfaces replies from people you follow even if you don't follow the person to whom they were replying. This "overhearing effect" is awesome and helps gradually expand your social graph and find more neat people.)
> A lot of X-lovers spend their time shitting on Wayland in HN comments because they don't understand the problem Wayland is solving, and don't understand it successfully solved it and is becoming the default, and it just makes them angry.
What I mean is that there has been a ton of Mastodon evangelization, followed by fairly predictable and understandable user problems, followed by "well just edit xorg.conf" (or in our case here, "have multiple accounts on multiple servers and juggle all that"). It's the You Don't Need That, or the This Workaround Is Fine For Me And So It Must Be For You, or the Pull Requests Accepted thing.
There is a trap in consumer-facing OSS, where the evangelists don't realize that to compete you do have to be better in terms of the things that the evangelized care about, and because they've evaluated it doesn't mean that they're ready to contribute back, and that's the vibe I still get a lot here.
> Also, I don't see the point of Bluesky. If their specifications prove to be useful, then federated services will start using those protocols.
Maybe! Mastodon could do it, but I think that they'd do it by not being recognizably what is ActivityPub today. There's a fundamental difference in how ATProto envisions the use of the (federated, run-your-own-if-you-want) Big Graph Services[0]--a vision of which accessible today, in the small, with distributed feed generators that filter down the currently extant BGS--that the point-to-point peering of ActivityPub, the "here's a giant pile of mailboxes you're all sending stuff back and forth to", just doesn't really support. Firehose and filter, not mailbox.
The "ovehearing effect" is a big differentiator and is the straw that stirs the drink for Bluesky, for me and for a lot of people. Granted, there have been attempts to do something similar with AP relays, but that still requires server-level participation and, if they moved to per-user, you could happily crush most Mastodon servers under the load of receiving AP traffic from relay sources. Also the Mastodon frontend doesn't seem to really have a good way to integrate it into your own personal timeline, and I haven't seen movement towards it happening.
Husky (android app) does support multi-account. I'm using it right now. I imagine there should be something equivalent for ios. It's not rocket science.
