Decentralised social media platforms are increasingly being recognised as viable alternatives to their centralised counterparts. Among these, Mastodon stands out as a popular alternative, offering a citizen-powered option distinct from larger and centralised platforms like Twitter/X. However, the future path of Mastodon remains uncertain, particularly in terms of its challenges and the long-term viability of a more citizen-powered internet. In this paper, following a pre-study survey, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 Mastodon instance administrators, including those who host instances to support marginalised and stigmatised communities, to understand their motivations and lived experiences of running decentralised social media. Our research indicates that while decentralised social media offers significant potential in supporting the safety, identity and privacy needs of marginalised and stigmatised communities, they also face considerable challenges in content moderation, community building and governance.
That’s how it starts. Nice and simple. Everyone understands.
Until
and you decide you want to recover from that situation, but you don’t want to refactor all your code.
Suddenly, catching exceptions and rerunning seems like a good idea. With that normalized, you wonder what else you can recover from.
Then you head down the rabbit hole of recovering from different things at different times with different types of exception.
Then it turns into confusing flow control.
The whole Result<ReturnValue,Error> thing from Rust is a nice alternative.