I’m not saying federation “won’t” work or “can’t” work. Merely that in 2025, nine years after deployment, federation does not work for the Mastodon use case.

One of the big selling points of Mastodon was that you can pick which instance your account lives on, but it is easy to change your mind and switch to a different instance later on. This feature was wildly oversold.

What other social systems call “direct messaging” is called “private mentions” on Mastodon, and it is simply the worst feature design I have ever seen in a mainstream technical product.

When you “private mention” someone, only you and they can see the post. And they can reply with a “private mention” of their own. But if anyone in that “private” thread accidentally mentions any other Mastodon account by name, that is itself considered a “private mention”, and that person is invited into the thread. It is an absolutely insane UI design that makes it extremely easy to share private conversations with exactly the people you don’t want reading them.

I really enjoy Bluesky. It offers much of the best of Twitter: with a well-curated set of follows (and a chronological, not algorithmic timeline), I get to hear directly from a lot of true experts commenting in real time on current events. But I see absolutely no reason to expect the platform to avoid the problems that Twitter encountered as it grew (and Mastodon fostered as it failed to grow). Its own “federated protocol”—literally the entire reason it was built, and the main/only technical pitch in its early days—is totally irrelevant. And the platform’s main “we’re not like Twitter” features, the “nuclear block” that deletes all (direct) interactions retroactively and its support for blocklists, have led to a “block first, block often” culture that certainly reduces discomfort but also enshrines it as the most echo-chambery of the platforms, even compared with Mastodon. I’d argue that Bluesky has avoided the rancor of late-days Twitter moderation mainly because it hasn’t reached anything like the size and diversity of Twitter, and consequently doesn’t have the cultural, political, and economic significance for people to work all that hard at ruining it. We’ll see.