I wanted to see the current status of group actor support in #Mastodon.

This feature has been requested all the way back in 2016. It’s a feature request that is so old, it’s the 139th ticket. After it was made, @[email protected] stated shortly after:

I made a decision not to implement groups. They offer little benefit over a cost of added complexity, and the bangtag syntax personally irks me too.

A year later, he re-opened the feature request and said:

Reopening, but not high priority.

No further update since then. Nearly a decade after this feature had been requested, group support has not been added and it’s still not a high priority.

Now the intent of this post isn’t to wag my finger at Mastodon and say, “How dare they!” It’s clear that Mastodon is in a transitional state right now, and their focus is on other things – like quote posts and search.

But it is to say that the development of this feature is so completely out of Mastodon’s control that it now represents an opportunity loss for the platform. Because the truth is – whether or not Mastodon supports group actors – many Mastodon users are using it anyway even though this causes quite a few UI/UX problems along the way. Namely, the common Mastodon user cannot differentiate between a single user account and a group actor.

So now we have two groups of Mastodon users: those who want to make use of services like #Lemmy, #Piefed, #NodeBB, and those who are completely unaware of those services and ask, “Why the hell is Mastodon acting like this when I try to interact with that account?”

More to the point, group actors should be embraced because not only is this a valuable feature, but they’re also critical for community safety. No one can moderate a hashtag, but they can certainly moderate a Lemmy community.

Like I said, though, development of Mastodon is ongoing – whether Mastodon participates or not. And that specific element of the #Fediverse continues to grow, despite the fact that the most used Fediverse service (sans Threads) regards it as “low priority”. As long as Reddit and Facebook Groups users seek out an open, federated alternative, there will be demand for group actors.

Why am I saying all this? Because this is my plea for better interoperability. It is certainly within Mastodon’s right to be picky about what features they implement. However, the Fediverse would be plainly better if Mastodon finally supported this important ActivityPub standard.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/139

@[email protected]

    • Chris Trottier@atomicpoet.orgOP
      1·
      1 day ago

      @[email protected] Hopefully! I tend to look at that road map with a grain of salt. Again, this is not me wagging my finger at Mastodon. I’m certain that once Mastodon transitions to a non-profit it will have a more transparent governance structure.

      • breakfastmtn
        4·
        1 day ago

        I love Mastodon but I think a little polite wagging is justified! Groups are already being used on Mastodon but in a way that kind of sucks and is inconvenient for services with groups support. You basically have to trick Mastodon into thinking that a group is a user. As I noticed yesterday, using the user tag (“@”) for a group causes Friendica to fail because it’s not a user. If I click that userified group link in Lemmy, I get: “Error! Failed to fetch data for that user”. So now Mastodon has a standard for group tags that screws over everyone with native support for groups. Rude! ;)

        That isn’t, like, an end-of-the-world problem. It’s really just a minor annoyance – I follow this group from both Lemmy and Friendica without a problem – but if your users are working around absent features en masse in ways that cause QoL issues for others in the Fediverse, it would be nice if you took some action on it. Your users are doing this with or without you and we’re all better off if it’s with you. And to be fair to Mastodon, they are doing that, however slowly.

        Similarly, it’ll be great when 4.5 drops and the global feed on Pixelfed stops being a wall of Mastodon users using screenshots of text to “quote”…