A Mastodon-exclusive week
I&#x27;m less than impressed by the federation model of Mastodon (though it doesn&#x27;t need too many tweaks to make it work). The main problem I have is the fact that you are pretty tied in with your instance. I think most of the problems I have <i>viewing</i> content from other instances can be solved with better clients:<p>- tag searches only cover posts  that your instance knows about (i.e. it searches the federated feed rather than querying a list of federated instances)
- You can&#x27;t customize your &quot;federated&quot; feed to merge multiple instances&#x27; local feeds (especially important on small instances and when looking at small instances).<p>The more fundamental issues that I think has to be addressed at the &quot;protocol&quot; level is that I&#x27;d really like my identity to be portable. As it is now, if I like 10 different small instances, I have to join all 10, then I might have to repeat or boost my posts from all the relevant instances to get them to show up in the local feed - plus people who want to follow me will find 10 different accounts on different instances and not know which ones to follow. If, client-side, I just create a bot that auto-posts on multiple instances, if my followers on a given instance are following different versions of my account, the federated feed on that instance will be spammed with multiple posts.<p>I think some sort of customization where an identity is at least partially independent from its instance is required here.