Surely there has to be another way to do this besides logging in with Twitter. Heck, they could just have you post a verification tween on your Twitter account.
You can't view an account's followers/following without being logged in. And if you try to back a service using a single bot account, you're going to get instantly banned b/c of suspicious traffic.
I find this whole situation to be incredibly depressing, especially with Musk tweeting out a fact free insinuation about Paul Pelosi (since deleted without apology.) The proverbial shit is going to hit the fan on Twitter on election night Nov 8 in America and I don't think Musk is prepared to handle it. I'd love to live in a country where we could have nice things, but apparently America is not it.
It also isn't as if Elon was just thumbing his nose at naysayers. A day earlier he pledged to advertisers Twitter would not become a "free for all hellscape."
It will be easy to switch to another platform and there will be tools to help as this post indicates. 4chan users are having fun saying the N word on Twitter and Le Bron James is complaining about it. And this is only day 2. I certainly think people should be able to exercise free speech, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to it. I can go somewhere else if Twitter gets too depressing.
The difference is that each node has its own set of moderators.
So jerks will get moderated there. And when they do that, they'll probably jump servers. And so get cordoned off into wherever federated node that they isolate themselves into.
Note that each server decides which other servers it will federate and share content with.
So eventually nodes that collect jerks will just get cut from most of the rest of the federation.
It's certainly vulnerable to abuse. But it also leaves more room for community response.
And it also doesn't have a recommendation "algorithm". You see the content you explicitly subscribe to. In chronological order. So dark patterns that arise out of feeding people rage tweets and engagement hacking and amplifying "controversial" crap for engagement... doesn't happen. So the platform isn't going to give an outsized "recommended" audience for crap just because it has high "likes" -- that's not how the platform works.
That seems likely to result in a split. Not a few isolated servers with jerks, but one big federation with free speech types like Elon Musk, and a different federation with heavy moderation.
But returning to a chronological feed would be nice.
It's already heavily federated so it wouldn't be a binary split like you describe.
Like, it wouldn't be "one federation with Musk types" vs "another with heavy moderation" but actually already a whole bunch of nodes with different types of moderation choosing to isolate away the Musk node. Or not. It would be up to each node.
Note that "Gab" and "Truth Social" are both built on Mastodon. But they're isolated from the rest of the federated nodes.
Suppose there are three servers (A, B, C), and A is federated with both, but B isn't federated with C, and there's conversation between people on A and B.
Do people on C only see the A side of the conversation?
I am not fully clear on how threads are handled, but, yes, in principle visibility of users and posts is based on who they choose to federate with. So C would not see any content that originated out of B. Which AFAIK includes replies, etc.
I'm a Mastodon newb and not an expert, I'm sure someone else more informed could give a better explanation of the subtleties.
Server A also sends messages coming from servers it federates with, so those on server C can see server B's messages, but C'ers just can't reply to them and expect B'ers to actually receive those messages.
This more or less has already happened, though there are more than two "groups" depending on how you define such things. Broadly speaking, there are free speech instances which allow edgelord teens to come in and N-word their hearts out (as well as do more mundane things like question the mainstream narrative on elections, the pandemic, and, yes, this Pelosi story) so long as they don't do anything actually illegal, and there are more regulated instances where "hate speech" is explicitly forbidden. As the instances in the latter group don't like the practices of the former group, the former insulates from the latter by defederating those instances, meaning that insances in both the former and the latter can generally only federate with each other. (Then there are the pro-MAP/CP/lolicon instances, which are generally defederated by both of the previous groups and also can largely only federate with each other.)
Whether you think this is a good thing is up to you, but it does seem that both groups of people on either side of the Great Divide get what they want from the system, so I don't really see the harm in it.
> So eventually nodes that collect jerks will just get cut from most of the rest of the federation.
Why do you assume the "jerks" wouldn't decide to federate among themselves. What's stopping them from creating a Splinternet (Splinterdon?) where they're free to say what they want?
> So the platform isn't going to give an outsized "recommended" audience for crap just because it has high "likes" -- that's not how the platform works.
You can't get rid of recommendations. Someone can easily build an easy to use page-ranked search engine for Mastodon servers, even if unofficial, and the engagement race will reinvent itself.
Nothing would stop them. That's already happened -- that's effectively what Truth Social is, for example.
And it wouldn't matter. Because the majority would be elsewhere. Or not. The point is that there's no centralized authority making this decision. And if I didn't like how the node I was on handled the moderation, and who it chose to federate with, I'd be free to move my account elsewhere.
I personally would just choose to hang out on whatever Mastodon node that had cut itself off the the Musk/Trump-ish node.
When Twitter is flooded with threats of violence and calls to form mobs will he just do nothing? Is that what you are suggesting? He can take the site dark if he wants and he may have to.
Isn't it the job of the police/FBI to do something in that situation? Why are we expecting corporations to be a private police force, judge, jury, and executioner?
If you owned Twitter and the site was suddenly flooded with calls to attack election officials and raid election offices what would you do? You'd probably meet with your lawyers and find out what kind of liability you had, then you'd field calls from advertisers saying they are all leaving unless you stop it. You'd also field calls from all your friends telling you that you need to stop it. Then you'd go for a walk and contemplate how you feel about people using your site to facilitate armed rebellion. Then you'd figure out how much money you were willing to lose over doing it your way. The most sensible thing to do at the point is pull the plug for a few weeks for "technical issues related to the purchase' and go home and get a good nights sleep.
I'd do exactly what I would do if I saw someone threatening someone in real life, call the police and give them all the information I had. Twitter has dates and IP's, in a lot of cases that's as good as an address.
Pulling the plug would be the easy way out, and would stop people incriminating themselves. Worse case scenario it drives people stupid enough to use a public un-encrypted network to plan a crime onto a secure encrypted network.
Twitter has dates and IP's, in a lot of cases that's as good as an address.
At this point, I can’t put anything past Elon.
The way the texts between Secret Service personnel went missing, even after congressional requests to preserve documents and data, if Twitter becomes the headquarters for seditionists, disinformation and threats of violence that impacts the outcome of which party controls Congress, don’t be surprised if tweets go missing…
I'd be reassured just knowing that he won't use his megacorp megaphone to amplify obvious misinformation about the results of the election, but given the last 24 hours, even that appears to be too much to hope for.
Twitter is the only platform I know where you can search for people who share your interests and then connect with them. The whole #buildinpublic community is just insanely great. Everybody is building something. Everybody is having similar issues to talk about. You can make so many great connections and help each other out.
But I feel that with Twitter becoming a private company owned by a single controversial person, Twitter lost a lot of its appeal.
It could be very unfortunate (if Twitter just goes down the drain without a replacement) or it could be the start of something new, if a new way to interact comes up.
If the community moves to another form of communication, I hope it will be something decentralized that can not be taken away from us again.
That is the reason why I am not enthusiastic about Mastodon. Mastodon is not decentralized. Unless you run your own instance, you do not own your social graph.
The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have not changed. It is a free service that needs to convert user engagement into advertising dollars. Unless Twitter moves to a paid model, that will always be true no matter who owns it. And if Twitter fails, any potential replacement will need to deal with the same incentives and solve the same problems Twitter did.
If you signed your message with "This is a reply to msg 33398198 by Timja. Signed: twblalock", then nobody could take this converstion away from us again. I could copy it and put it on any server. Owned by myself or run by some service provider. And it would always be clear to everybody that this conversation really took place between the two of us.
The interface could be just like Twitter or Hacker News.
In fact, users could use any service they like.
It would not matter what client you use to reply to me. Your reply would appear on Hacker News, because HN would follow the protocol and accept properly signed comments relayed to it.
The messages would still need to be stored somewhere, right? Is SMTP a decentralized protocol in this sense? You can send a message from any client... however most people still use centralized solutions, not their own mail servers.
In your example HN would still need to retrieve and store billions of messages, handle user authentication, discovery, aggregation, additional data handling (e.g. you want to attach a video, or go live). They will need to monetize _something_. So we are back to square one, just with a much more inconvenient client setup process (like we do right now setting up pop3/smtp/imap).
> The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have not changed.
Have they not changed? This is a genuine question.
How much control does Elon actually have? Can he decide to take the company in a direction that don't match the business incentives?
Can he tell an employee: "Do this or your fired" because it may make him feel better? Or because he misunderstood the situation and couldn't be told otherwise until he sees the results? Or both?
Does he have certain responsibilities that he is supposed to honor? What happens if he doesn't?
>>The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have not changed.
>Have they not changed? This is a genuine question.
If Musk pays back the bank loans, there shouldn't be anybody who could force him to continue the ad business and he could offer Twitter for free.
A billion users, with 10 tweets per day, that's 4T tweets per year. At 250 bytes per tweet, that's 1P data. At $20 per terabyte, that's $20,000 per year. With the same amount for transfer and servers, Musk should be able to run Twitter for $100,000 plus employees.
With those costs, Twitter could be financed by offering image and video tweets as a paid feature for $1 per year.
In contrast, most fediverse communities are run on donations or by the private funds of an individual. There aren't perverse financial incentives in the same way. This is one advantage of having many, smaller servers.
I don't know I started reusing twitter 2 months ago after years of not really using it.
My main gripe is it looks like it locked me up in a bubble full of accounts with similar interests and ideas. I don't really feel challenged and I am almost totally excluded from other subjects that could theorically interest me.
You might just be relying on the algorithm too much. Search for hashtags, follow people that show up in your feed from retweets or look at your contacts' own list of follows.
If you wait for the algorithm to feed you the content you like you will find the limits of AI.
It isn't like it was a non-profit before run by a board trying to make Twitter awesome for users or some form of cooperative that was owned democratically by its community... it was a "public" company that, by construction, could only blindly optimize for profit of its shareholders--and, even worse: almost always relatively short-term profits, which is why you see a lot of these companies right now trying to squeeze a few extra dollars out of everyone instead of just holding out for a year on cash reserves, as otherwise people will (rightfully) sell their stock and wait to re-purchase it if things ever look up again--at the almost explicit expense of its users (who frankly should have bailed as soon as the company went public, as that's the moment you knew the company no longer was even allowed to care about their interests).
I don't twitter or mastodon. But isn't "people who share your interests and then connect with them" exactly what the different mastodon instances are for? You're kinda supposed to find a server that aligns with your interest.
twitter has a social dynamic where opposing interests feed off of each other so you need in-group + out-group. there are psychosocial elements which mastodon does not have as it's more reddit like IMHO.
edit: for clarity
And once your instance federates with it (happens automatically, just needs any user to follow any user on the other one), you can search for hashtags.
> That is the reason why I am not enthusiastic about Mastodon. Mastodon is not decentralized. Unless you run your own instance, you do not own your social graph.
That's needed for practical reasons though. Actually decentralised alternatives like for example Scuttlebutt have this common issue: "This “inital syncing” process can take up to an hour and use a fair amount of data." (https://scuttlebutt.nz/get-started/) You don't get popularity with non-tech people that way.
With mastodon, the profiles can be migrated. So effectively you can start with some main hub, move to a more interesting instance if you want to in the future, and move to your own instance if that is what you want.
Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized platform over a federated platform?
The centralized platform made it very easy to find people. Now people who are moving to a federated platform miss the value of centralization, so they are writing a tool that will leverage that value and import it into the federated platform.
Maybe if Mastodon was a centralized Twitter-style platform it would be more usable, and more popular.
Not really, no. Imagine the reversed situation: Everyone is on Mastodon, and now this cool new thing called "Twitter" comes along and some people are switching to it. "find everyones Twitter account and follow it" would still be a useful thing to have, over manually checking for every single person you follow if they have an account, if they maybe have an account with a different username, ... and following those you find.
But we all know this hypothetical isn't the case. Centralisation is more convenient in almost ALL cases, even in email (nobody except people on HN host their own email)
It proves the value of centralized search and discovery, but it says nothing about centralized hosting in moderation. There is probably quite a bit of value in a system where decentralized instances can volunteer to submit their own discovery database to a central search platform, and where individual users could opt in to being part of that database.
Okay? My point still stands and users don't want to host their own email or Mastodon instance and prefer centralised solutions when it comes to a social networking.
People do, however use multiple email providers, sometimes small ones like the small business they work for or their local/regional ISP. If federated social sharing becomes popular, the story will likely be similar: a few big providers have most of the users, but a limited ability to dictate how the system works.
That hypothetical was the case: back in 2007/2008 people of the blogosphere slowly stopped blogging and started tweeting. And if you had a good but suddenly more empty feedreader you’d then had to follow the great migration and re-find those people on Twitter.
It depends on the thing at hand. Some things have value because others use them. Chat apps tend towards monopolies because of this.
Email's just so damned old everyone uses the standard and it kind of dodges the issue.
Email's also structurally a bit different - it's a set of one-way sends to select recipients, with chats you moreso go to a place and read the place's signboard.
You could in principle just use mailing lists under the hood instead if the UI wasn't garbage.
This whole comment chain has been an interesting discussion for me, I just checked out of curiosity: Blogspot vs Twitter popularity on google trends 2004-today
Decentralization doesn't mean hosting your own instance. It's about open protocols. There are hundreds or thousands of email providers that you can use and still send an email to a Gmail user without hosting your own instance.
> + There is almost little to no one on Mastodon to talk to.
I have found that this is an accurate description of the first impression one gets; this is not true, but we're all so used to recommendation algorithms easing discovery that the impression is equivalent.
The one that can't be bothered to say "Hey what's your Mastodon handle" to like 500+ of my friend group on Twitter where is the main Mastodon instance is closed.
Email is decentralized. It's mature enough that there's a bunch of trusted providers out there and you can use it without caring about the technical details, it's basically a perfect example of a successful mature decentralized service.
many people don't care that it is decentralised, hence gmail, an open protocol is irrelevant. In mastodon's case decentralisation is a hindrance since they want centralisation back.
email isn't a social network and lots people outside of HN don't self host them as such.
This is true. My last company used fastmail, but one guy insisted on using Gmail. Sometimes fastmail didn’t arrive at Gmail. We (tech team) said, this is a problem with gmail. C-suite said this is a problem with fastmail.
And so the word comes down, we have to move to Gmail. It’s believable decision making, but that’s how it works.
Yeah, that's my experience too. Google doesn't like new domains, but at least accepts mail and delivers to spam (or to the inbox once the domain is old enough). Microsoft just refuses all mail if you host on a VPS whenever someone else on the block (NOT the same IP) misbehaves (or is accused of misbehaving, not sure).
I work for a 100-year-old company with 30k employees. Last year we moved from self-hosted Exchange to GSuite, because it's just easier to spend money on that than to spend money on an increasingly complex and hard-to-staff-properly internal service.
The issue is not self hosted versus GSuite. It rarely makes sense for any company to self host their own email. I think the parent poster was saying few use Gmail versus hosted outlook
My 40 year old company with about 12k users switched from self-hosted Exchange to Azure-hosted Office 365. I'm assuming part of the reason for this is to ease complexity, and it's working quite well for us.
People don't self host email because 1) the protocol doesn't make it easy to deal with incoming spam on a small scale, and 2) giants like gmail tend to automatically flag unique email domains as suspicious. Which is a valid criticism of the federated model, or rather the people using it.
If more people found value in decentralization, in theory they would also be more critical of their node management, opting to reject anti-competitive behavior in a democratic way. Unfortunately, for democracy to work, citizens have to be educated and fight for it. If they don't, it's easy to have centralized, ostensibly totalitarian walled gardens.
We just need to make sure fediverse accounts are easily transferable between nodes in a standardized way, something I don't think mastodon does well, and email doesn't do at all.
Email isn't truly decentralized anymore. Think I'm kidding? OK, try this: Try sending something to Gmail. Roll 3d6 and consult the oracle bones to see whether or not it magically gets caught up in the spam filters for no discernable reason.
Seriously: Transforming spam filtering into a black box service has decommoditized email and everyone knows it.
I would call the GMail situation pseudo-centralization. As it has more actual competitors who aren't just hosting but also actively developing their own platform it'd go back to decentralization.
No, it's still federated. But my account of alice@foo.com follows bob@bar.com
Bob registers his new Twitter handle so I, Alice, can find it on the central service of Twitter.
A mapping of users to users can be across any service, including centralized to centralized (ie Twitter to Facebook) or decentalized to decentralized (IE Diaspora to Mastadon). It is just saying this string registered somewhere else as that string.
Or maybe if a distributed platform embraces some additional centralization (it already does some), it becomes more like the decentralized platform everybody wants, and keeps the best aspects of the federated approach for those who mainly want those...
It's not so important to force any dichotomous perspectives on the whole here, as the situation has a lot of nuance to it in the details.
Honestly the fact that more tools are needed to make Mastodon usable shows that federation technology is "not there yet." I hope we are able to improve stuff to the point where it is usable.
Something I'm keeping an eye on is the @ protocol that is being designed specifically for the creation of federated social media applications -- it allows for portable identity and your social graph is portable, these things are not tethered to an instance of something. Hopefully that will be an upgrade so there will be less "jury-rigging" like this required to make federated applications usable
To find someone on Mastodon, I would either enter their nickname in the search bar (no need for the domain, it will search on all instances) – or simply click on their profile on a post I like. Just like a centralized network. This tool just exists to do this automatically and in bulk.
It seems to me that finding someone on a federation is as easy as on centralized systems. Do you have a use case in mind where centralization makes it easier to find someone?
a) there is no central listing of all mastodon instances, or even all public ones.
b) it would take FREAKING AGES TO COME BACK because there are so damn many, you can only make so many parallel requests at a time, and you have to process the results from all of them.
Can you expand on b)? I'm not sure I understand why this would be difficult. If you already had a list of instances, as it seems like asynchronous clients could probably handle the scale of instances (source below list about 4k, which isn't out of scope for simultaneous async tasks), and processing the results is probably fairly simple. Especially if you were to cache that list and just do an updated request every few minutes (so not a new full-network request set every query) it seems like this wouldn't be too crazy complicated. Have I missed something?
> To find someone on Mastodon, I would either enter their nickname in the search bar (no need for the domain, it will search on all instances)
Nope, It will only show accounts followed by local accounts.
Mastodon doesn't do any kind of per server search, And your "federated feed" is basically accounts on other instances followed by local accounts.
This makes hosting a private Mastodon server, for personal or family use, incredibly hard as discovery is basically impossible.
This can be fixed by using Activity pub relays, but guess what? Mastodon's official servers don't use them, which are the servers that really matter.
Its a big part of why I'm hesitant to use Activitypub, as I believe discovery is a big part of modern social media, and Mastodon absolutely sucks at it.
This is coming from someone hosting his own Matrix server.
> Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized platform over a federated platform?
Not at all. These types of centralized platforms won because they raised capital to grow fast and meet market needs before anything else. Email is still king, but if it were to be designed today, it would have been designed as some proprietary centralized system.
Distributed systems are hard.
In any case, I don't think federation goes far enough to save us from the problems we're seeing. I want a peer-to-peer social feed / social news app that doesn't depend on federation or servers at all.
Takedowns (DeCSS), takeovers (Twitter, FreeNode), shutdowns (Google+, Orkut, Digg, mastodon.technology), censorship (everywhere; should be an individual choice), maintainer-imposed spying (Apple CSAM), and maintainer-imposed changes or limits (Digg, modern Reddit, Twitter API) seem an order of magnitude harder to pull off if we have full control at the protocol and node level.
Federation would be nice for anonymity and aggregation of interest graph metadata, but at the core we should just have a swarm of content to sample and consume. It's fine if the content is naturally ephemeral as a consequence. We can use a constellation of opt-in 3rd party distributed (federated) services to provide durability, ranking, recommendation, filtering, etc. where desired.
Agreed - the fediverse is already run by little gatekeepers who want to decide who you can and cannot communicate with (if you are on their instance). That should simply not be possible on the protocol level, meaning your account must be fully separated from any kind of "instance" except your own client.
I wonder how email as private information would be different to the mastodon username, aren't both practically identical with the exception of one additional @?
The way I see it your mail is not publicly displayed on mastodon, only used to confirm/identify. Does @handle on mastodon has the email associated to my friend Peter ? If so it's a match.
Of course it's a whole other can of worms, reminds me of Linkedin/Fb that would spam me because they had access to my friend's rolodex..
I've said before the answer is just Better Twitter. One with clear moderation rules that aren't reactionary or flexible based on popularity. Non-profit Twitter would be ideal. Keep ad revenue just ahead of operating costs. Publish all the financials. Open source the code.
[fill in here with an insightful texts on distinction between identity and content distribution being centralized] - I don't want to sort out which one of {prefix}username{suffix}{duplicate identifier}.{domain}.tld is the person I had been talking with just 5 minutes ago, nor he would appreciate such a situation, but I do not care who serves the content for me so long it's valid within contexts i.e. if it comes from amazonaws.com or onmicrosoft.com.
Imagine you could find me as @numpad0 anywhere, and you can validate shadydomain.shadywebsite.tld/uuid.htm with my pubkey to hold me accountable for weird things I'd say, and that /uuid.htm URL may be ephemeral, or could be more permanent for more respectable posts at non-shady venues, and either ways I wouldn't have to be perfect wrt handling of privkey, yet somehow usernames matches someone anywhere would be verifyably that someone. That would be ideal.
But I believe social media operators recognize the exploitable value in conflating both; this has to be why no one use cross-OAuth between social medias and web apps anymore, and rather focuses on own ID systems and federated signups. Consistent set of identities is a value, media is a means to monopolize on it.
even if this were true, which i'm not sure it is, it isn't a reason to make the whole platform centralized.
you could argue that there's benefit to centralized friend-finder tools, but there's no reason that has to be tied to a centralized platform. a decentralized and open-access platform allows for choice and competition amongst friend-finder tools
Also wouldn't it make sense to have different friend finder tools with different content/parts of the fediverse?
I'm thinking if I'm a Nazi I mostly care about other Nazis and would not go to the normie mastodon friend finder tool but the one which finds all my friends on our Nazi mastodon instances and vice versa.
I think it has more to do with the way Mastodon decentralised and I imagine the people who figure out to do e-mail as a platform first, will be the next twitter.
The big issue with Mastodon is that your "twitter handle" depends on the server you join, which makes it hard to find you. If it was just your e-mail address, however, then everyone would be able to find you, and keep finding you even if you decided to change servers.
Your e-mail address isn't tied to a server. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. I've had many e-mail services without changing my e-mail address.
I can use g-suite, fastmail, outlook for business and a range of other things, and the people sending me mails won't notice. I can't swap my Mastodon server.
Some hosts/domains even mirror Mastodon addresses and email addresses. There is nothing stopping an address from being both, especially if you control your own domain.
You would be able to change servers and keep your username. Mastodon isn't really decentralised, it's just twitter with more twitter companies.
SoMe should be email based, and servers should just be relays. That way you could also create private SoMes for things that you'd do in Facebook group by simply setting up a relay on something cheap.
This is in part due to Mastodon's weird style of federation which almost comes off as a second thought compared to using it as a centralized service, since to federate with others you have to either know who to follow already or need to use a relay.
This, I feel is especially notable for Western nodes since they don't really seem to bother with relays (which I think largely defeats the point of federation by creating incentives to stick to large nodes). A lot of the relay lists are either super sanitized/focused on uninteresting topics or are dead.
In comparison, in the Japanese community there are several fairly active open relays (with some moderation to prevent abuse) and thus it's pretty easy to setup a custom node and have it populated with some basic content to build off of. As a result of which, ~75% of the traffic to my node comes from Japan, ~20% from the US and ~5% from Europe.
You know, I think Reddit is actually the best positioned Twitter alternative. You can use your real name, or anonymous account. You go there to follow particular subreddits, but there no reason why I shouldn't also be able to follow people and see their non-topic (ie, not part of any subreddit) microblogs interweaved with posts from subreddits. They deal with spam and trolls reasonably well.
They have all the pieces, they just have to put them together tastefully.
Not really. There's a centralized committee that will blacklist or even dump your subreddit down the memory hole if it doesn't meet its standards of moderation.
Comrade, don't forget about the satirical news by the Babylon Bee. They are a danger after all, because if a subject thinks you are funny, you cannot control them.
I find it pretty depressing that Telegram links are banned across Reddit because it makes moderators' jobs easier. There's no nuance just an enormous hammer. That's an example of censorship without sufficient cause.
cool idea except that would require using reddit. twitter is full of retards, but reddit is full of insufferable retards who think they're very intellectual and will let you know it. it's an entire site full of IFL Science type bozos.
also didn't reddit proudly make a blogpost earlier this year that they now censor more speech than the bird site and calling on it to do the same?
(oh and i've been linked normal, SFW stuff where reddit now tries to make me create an account to see it because it's "18+". no, i am not "becoming a redditor" especially not to view one link. if they kill old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com it will be literally unusable.)
Someone should build an app like this that is integrated with all the social networks. Give it a sexy UI, and a catchy feature or two to keep people checking in. Eventually, it could serve as a federated contacts hub that links people between networks. A vital piece of infrastructure to support mandated interoperability.
We had Trillian back in the day, but then the messaging services locked down their protocols. I don't expect such an app would survive the cat&mouse with major players for long.
I'm not sure about your standard social media, but for direct messaging, several Matrix-based companies have popped up that allow for service interoperability.
The European Union is also working on breaking open the messenger space, forcing tech companies to either leave the EU or work on an interoperable standard. I believe an IEEE working group is already developing a protocol to serve this purpose, even with encryption available if I recall correctly.
Edit: I should add that as far as I know, the working group hasn't done much as of yet. I heard about this on Matrix because some of the Matrix folks are trying to get (parts of) the federated Matrix protocol into the standard, or probably at least parts of it.
The draft doesn't mention Matrix, but it's nice to see that they consider standardization even if the use case for their protocol is probably already covered by the existing XMPP standard.
The messaging services never opened their protocols. Trillian (& pidgin etc) has always played catch-up. It was just more difficult for the "major players" of the time because for a protocol update, you needed to release a new version of your software, and somehow have all your users seamlessly migrate to it before releasing breaking changes.
MSN/WLM, AIM, YIM, ICQ, Gadu-Gadu, Skype… all of them were reverse-engineered. The only open protocols it supported were IRC and Jabber.
Unfortunately, I’m sure this is probably against the ToS of every social media service, even those that might still provide a client API. :( Otherwise someone would have done this. OTOH, I think there are services that companies use to manage and post to all their social media accounts.
I'm oretty sure Twitter still allows this, but the API is crippled and this reflects the poor experience in custom clients. I used to use Twidere extensively, but it's been very limited for the last ~8 years or so.
You could make it use private APIs by copying OAuth client id|secret from an official application. This would enable some features (notifications and polls, and higher rate limits). Later Twitter fixed that and also sent a DMCA, so Twidere had to remove the code that worked with said APIs.
> Looking for Mastodon users progress, scanned 867 of 867 users you follow on Twitter. Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon who have previously linked their Twitter and Mastodon accounts by logging into Twitodon.
WHO HAVE PREVIOUSLY LINKED ACCOUNTS... BY LOGGING IN TO TWITODON
the odds of that having happened for any notable subset are so low as to make this useless.
I mean, that's something you can say about any tool or social network at its beginning. Imagine downdetector with 5 users being considered useless forever.
I was skeptical on Mastodon. But I'm actually realling enjoying it. It's having a surge in popularity the last few days. When I checked it out a couple years ago it didn't click with me. But now I'm liking it, and I think there's potential there.
It won't "replace" Twitter. But a good crowd of people has collected around there, and there's quite a bit of enjoyable content coming through.
Is there a non-niche general Mastodon instance that's really popular? That would be the easiest way for me personally to embrace it. I checked a few instances and it's all very niche and very empty.
(To clarify, I don't mind niche instances, just at this stage there isn't enough discussion or interesting profiles to follow.)
mastodon.social is by far the largest, but
the recommendation is generally to find the one that has interests & people on it you find interesting to start. you'll get content from people on mastodon.social anyways.
You can be a part of a large or small instance and your consumption/conversation is not limited to users on that instance. You can follow people from other instances as well as scroll through a timeline that is posts/toots from across the fediverse (not just your local instance)
Got it. Does it make any difference where I register first? E.g. if that instance disappears overnight, will I be able to recover my account or not? I understand that I can access posts from all instances in the instance I use, but not sure how account handling/ownership works.
There are migration tools to move your followers and your followings between nodes. But no way to move your posts. And so, yes, your identity partially/kind-of doesn't move. But mostly sort of does?
At first this bugged me, but then it was pointed out that if you could just move your posts you could also potentially violate the moderation rules of the host you were moving to. So it makes some sense.
Thanks. I am more worried about the identity than the posts. If my identity belongs to the host, then in that sense this is no better than a centralized Twitter. Just theoretically speaking (I have not been banned from anything ever), if a mastodon.art user is banned from mastodon.art - everyone who followed them will have to find them on another instance and subscribe again? If exporting data is a process that depends on the host instance, when they ban you - that's it, your identity is not recoverable.
The migration tool automatically moves your followers. It's a bit janky, it took an hour or two for it do its thing for me (there must be some batch component, I dunno). I don't know how it works between banned instances, or what your options are for when a server goes down fully.
But all the of the follower/following data is available via CSV export any time, too. And there's obviously an open API as well.
And honestly, you could also just run your own server if you're that concerned.
How are permissions managed so that you can change your followers configuration to point at your new account if you move, but otherwise not allow anybody else to pull that same stunt against your wishes?
I agree. The idealist in me wants all of these aspects to be completely independent from the host I choose to use. But realistically I am not that worried about losing data, the social graph is far more valuable. Even if I have 100 followers, I would still really want to preserve their connection to me if I am banned.
I understand that I can do this by hosting my own instance - that's a good enough solution (for me).
IMO the bigger issue isn't getting banned, it seems the more likely scenario is having the operator of the server decide for whatever reason to shut it down. This isn't likely to happen with Twitter.
It's perhaps less likely for Twitter than any one given Fediverse server/Mastodon instance. But the impact on the whole ecosystem is very different too. A single Fediverse instance shutting down could be annoying/sad, but it would only affect a subset of users, and those users could still, if need be, create a new account on another instance. Twitter shutting down closes everything for everyone.
Relatedly, Twitter isn't going to throw a bake sale to try to stop from shutting down, it will get devoured as quickly as it files Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 and debt holders descend like vultures.
Most Mastodon instances are community run, and when they hit some rough straits in paying for their hosting some of them will have a (metaphorical) bake sale encouraging users to contribute to the hosting fund Patreon or will ask around if someone wants to take over the admin hot seat for a while.
For those concerned about the longevity of specific instances that's generally the answer: ask the community how the admin pays for things, look for their Patreon, consider chipping in what you can each month.
> At first this bugged me, but then it was pointed out that if you could just move your posts you could also potentially violate the moderation rules of the host you were moving to. So it makes some sense.
So moderate it the same as if you reposted everything? I don't understand.
To start, you should choose an instance that had been around for a while and isn't too small. Instances do shutdown occasionally but the admin(s) will give you plenty of time to migrate to a new instance. Mastodon has built-in tools to migrate your whole account (and content) to another instance if needed. I'm currently having to do that because a large well-established instance (mastodon.technology) is shutting down the end of the year.
This seems like a big weak point. I went to check it out just now and it's like "pick a server" and... I don't know, which one is best? Can I change later? Seems confusing, pass for now.
It's federated. Much like email. You can follow people on other servers and it pulls their feed. If you want to switch servers, you just make a new account (and just like email you'll need to tell your followers where you are going)
How feasible is it to have a username at a custom domain? In case the server you sign up on goes out of service. Do you have to set up your own instance in order to do that? Is there a barrier from setting up a new instance and then participating immediately in the wider federated network?
I was just investigating this. You can run your own Mastodon instance on your custom domain (e.g. masto.host), but due to how Mastodon federation works, your instance will 1. host all your content 2. handle a ton of requests when people interact with you or your content: follow, favorite, boost, etc.
Also every time a user follows you from an instance not federated with your instance it's a whole complicated process because federation has to be established between your instance and their instance (and, I think, every instance that they follow users from).
So if I understand your question correctly: there is no way to separate your identity from your content. If you want to own your identity you will need to self-host.
I am realizing now that the solution to these concerns is likely going to emerge from matrix.org, not Mastodon.
Seems like there must be some sort of possibility for someone to create some sort of "lightweight hosting" option here. Where you get your own bespoke "host" where you own all the data and identity, etc. but it is actually physically managed on someone else's infra (something higher level than a vhost). Pay a small fee, get a subdomain, get your own masto node, get your own data, all encrypted, but someone else handles all the legwork of setting it up, federating it, etc.
> "host" where you own all the data and identity, etc. but it is actually physically managed on someone else's infra (something higher level than a vhost)
Isn’t this just a normal Mastadon instance but with custom domain support just like email providers?
Yes, you are describing a hosted instance. Masto.host looks good, and the cheapest option is only $6/month. The problem with this federated approach is that the actual federation features can become pretty expensive. Hosting is cheap but if you have thousands of followers from different instances federation processes will become very expensive.
As far as I know, this is all cached at an instance level. So only the first person to pull something from your instance actually hits your instance's resources. I can still see posts and users from dead instances because it's all cached on my instance. There's a rake task to wipe it, but people are advised not to since those caches have been what saved at least one instance whose name I can't remember.
Feasible, but I don't think everyone having their own individual server was the intent of the design. Yes to question 2. I'm not sure about question 3, if there is a barrier, it isn't large.
Because you can move between different domains without losing your subscriptions and subscribers, there is no real need to use your custom domain. But because it's not possible to move your old content (I assume because moving files is difficult), I still am self-hosting so I can own my own content.
Another way of doing it is if you're already posting your notes, pictures, etc. on your own website, you can make it ActivityPub aware and use your website instead of Mastodon.
> Another way of doing it is if you're already posting your notes, pictures, etc. on your own website, you can make it ActivityPub aware and use your website instead of Mastodon.
I quite like the sound of this, do you have any references you can suggest?
It's different because feature-wise all Mastodon instances are quite similar (some might have bigger character limit etc.)
Generally it's best to choose a niche instance so you inherit a community of people with common interests instantly which makes onboarding much easier. For example, I'm on fosstodon.org for free software and photog.social for photography.
photog.social is an example of where it being independent is both good and bad. Good, because independent. Bad, because it's just someone else's expensive computer.
>Does it make any difference where I register first?
Yes; Each instance has its own posting rules and an instance may suspend (block) another instance for different reasons. Mastodon.social has suspended quite a few instances, for example. Always read the about page of the instance before registering.
It’s also pretty easy to have alts. Most good clients can log onto and track several accounts. You can then flip between various communities; post about work stuff on one, alt for your hobbies or shitposting.
I wrote about the differences and advantages of both networks here after using them for several years. Will probably be useful for people considering Mastodon.
Obligatory reminder that Mastodon is a user interface for a defederated network commonly called the Fediverse, and that referring to the Fediverse as "Mastodon" is like referring to the web as Chrome.
Spitting into the wind at this point, I know, but it still bothers me.
Think of Fediverse as akin to the email system, where there are thousands if not millions of different servers out there hosting email and exchanging them to each other.
Now consider Mastodon as an email client which is hosted on a web site, like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail. That web site gives you an interface with which to interact with the network of email servers, but people using other servers with other interfaces can still see messages from each other; someone using Yahoo! Mail can send and receive messages with someone using Gmail.
The difference is that Mastodon is open source, so that anyone can download the code and run their own Mastodon instance (whereas nobody can download and run their own Gmail instance), but that instance can still exchange messages with instances running any of the several other Fediverse interfaces there are out there, such as Pleroma, Misskey, Soapbox, etc. (Unless an instance at either end has "defederated" the other; that is, the administrators have configured it to not exchange messages with the other server.)
E-mail, although it has different clients, is still fundamentally the same thing — you send a message with a subject, body and attachments. However, it seems that social networks built on ActivityPub are fundamentally different — Mastodon is an imitation of Twitter, with short low-effort posts, Friendica is an imitation of Facebook, then there are ways to link blogs… So what I don't understand is, how does this all work together when the formats are completely different?
I don't have an answer for that since I'm not an expert with the protocol and I've really only used the microblogging/"Twitter-like" aspect of it. But at least in terms of that, the front ends are compatible with each other when it comes to sending and receiving messages.
I'm not an expert on the details of the protocol, so I can't give you a good answer to that. I believe it's just a matter of Mastodon not accepting messages that it knows it won't be able to display correctly. But other "microblog"-oriented Fediverse instances can exchange messages with Mastodon instances just fine.
Another new tool in this vein is Fedifinder. It works by scanning Twitter bios of accounts you follow for strings that look like Mastodon addresses: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
5 years ago there was a neat tool called Mastodon Bridge that did what Twitodon says it does but much better, I think because it didn't require everyone opt in. It stopped working because of some change Twitter made to their API terms of use. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-bridge
There's also Moa Party, but it's so complicated I have never used it. https://moa.party/
On the topic of Twiter, Mastodon, and the Fediverse, why do federated FOSS alternatives to popular platforms not offer a read-only version of said platform as one of its instances to augment its lack of content?
In the example of Twitter, Nitter already exists as an alternative front-end. Now what if there's a Mastodon instance that uses Nitter to wrap official Twitter content and serve it as if it where the twitter.com mastodon instance? Again it would need to be a read-only version as Twitter is not Mastodon but it would help fill the content gap for sure.
Now Mastodon might not have a content issue but PeerTube for example very well has and in that case masquerading YouTube as a PeerTube instance would become very interesting.
There is a lot of Twitter content out there. Too much for a single instance to proxy. I believe there are projects to mirror specific Twitter accounts to a (personal) Mastodon server so you can switch apps without needing two apps. I'm not sure what the implication would be for privacy/data usage regulations if you open those messages to the public, though; blindly reposting everything may actually violate data privacy laws (yes, even if that information is publicly available).
Engagement with the audience also is a significant factor for making social media enjoyable. A read-only mirror of Twitter would be very boring, because you can respond/tag/whatever you want for all eternity, but the Twitter authors would never notice.
Such a system would work for people primarily using Mastodon that cross-post to Twitter; you could add Twitter replies to the Mastodon replies and get a mixed content stream (that Twitter users might miss half of when discussions respond to as-of-yet unproxied messages).
Nitter exists and it is open source. Why not add a mastodon API to it?
The existence of such a thing in no way has anything to do with existing mastodon instances TOS / acceptable use relationship with twitter (if such a relationship even exists).0
Interestingly I started using Twitter as a write only medium, which means I didn't have any interactions there with anyone. This led to the subscribers stagnating, everyone who already was subscribed stayed subscribed but no new people would subscribe for years.
There was a world and a life before Twitter, and there is one without Twitter as well.
I deleted my Twitter account about a year ago and have not missed anything. People and topics I am interested in I can updated on by many different means.
I don't think Mastodon is meant to be a replacement for Twitter, or will ever be that. It would be a mistake to treat it that way.
It's more like this place than Twitter, in a way.
Or, it's kind of similar to how Usenet was in the early 90s.
It's a simple linear feed of who've subscribed to, or what the people you've subscribed to have "boosted". So you find the interest groups you're into and join a node that matches that, then find the people you like on various nodes, and follow them. There's no recommendations really. There's hashtags, but few ways to "discover" them and they don't seem to get heavily used right now.
It's maybe like Twitter when it first launched. Certainly not what it became (which I never personally participated in).
It certainly doesn't have the level of "action" or "engagement" you'd find on Twitter. And that's probably a good thing.
I follow various scientists, authors and so forth and I like to read their thoughts or see their recommended reading. And as silly as it sounds, it's wild to see eg William Gibson and Gerry Conway, two guys responsible for some of my formative adolescent reading, interact with one another at random.
Peer reviewed work has a much higher bar for people to say stuff. If you want to know what academics think, as opposed to what they are motivated to write and get past a reviewer, you need something like twitter.
Plus, some academics are interesting people and say stuff of interest away from the specialism.
> Heresy: Why do we need a replacement for Twitter? There was a world and a life before Twitter, and there is one without Twitter as well.
Yes, and it was much harder to shill newsletters, courses, conspiracies and cryptocoins back then on the back of minor internet blogger fame.
There is significant money to be made in all of the above, which is why a replacement for Twitter (holding people in a dopamine cage) is inevitable, whether we need it or not.
This maybe a noob question - does Mastodon allow replies? The few profiles referenced in this thread that I visited look like announcement boards, with no way to comment or start a discussion.
I think there are just fewer people active on these platforms, which isn't great for interaction.
As for v.basspistol.org, that's not a Mastodon instance but a Peertube (derived) instance. Both are part of the so-called Fediverse, but Mastodon (and similar) intent to replace/extend Twitter/Facebook whereas Peertube intends to replace/extend Youtube.
Edit: perhaps worth mentioning is that both types of social media share a protocol called ActivityPub. This is how several social media systems (Twitter replacements, Reddit replacements, Youtube replacements, etc.) can all communicate with each other. NextCloud, for instance, also has an ActivityPub system integrated, which means your toots and the shared files/comments may end up in the same system, all with some manner of interoperability.
Interesting. Wonder if it could be clearer if they were still showing a comment field or a reply button to non-logged in users. Just to surface the feature.
Thanks for the info on Peertube, I heard the name before but didn't realize it's a federated app.
Reply to the edit: thanks for the pointer! Reading about ActivityPub made me feel pretty excited both about the technology and about Mastodon.
The reply button is always there: it's the left-pointing double arrow icon on the far left under each toot. (With the "sharrow" Boost icon next to that and the star icon for Like/Favorite beside that.) It even shows a count of replies sometimes (though sometimes it's things like "1+" because it isn't sure due to federation [1] or it is focused on a subset).
You can even click it when not logged in and it will give you a Federated Login popup, which is a bit confusing but even allows you to reply on a different instance from the you are looking at the public feeds of.
To see replies rather than to make a new reply you generally need to click into specific toots, in the common web UI that's by clicking the Date in the top right corner.
Some clients have nice "subway diagram" maps of reply threading rather than the straight line that the main Mastodon web client presents them as.
[1] The only instance guaranteed to see every reply is the originating instance, other instances only see a subset of replies due to vagaries in federation and who those servers follow. Sometimes even with a client that is better at threading replies it is still useful to follow toot "permalinks" to their originating instance to see deeper reply threads, especially when reading on smaller instances.
How do you expect it to work without that data? :P
Also, I'm _pretty_ sure you can point the twitter API at any user you want to scan followers and following. I did it on some twitter accounts I'm interested in when I started out to find some accounts to follow.
When are Mastodon stans going to figure out that the reason people like Twitter is that it's (nominally) flat and you can interact with anyone unless they've blocked you for some reason? It's easy to build silos, which is what most instances are. Mastodon just reinvented single sign-on.
It's not a terrible thing to build, but whenever you make a product that's just imitating someone else (Twitter has 'tweets' but Mastodon has 'toots' because the logo is an elephant!) then it needs to be way better, not just a slight improvement. Longer messages are a good thing on Mastodon, though Facebook already does that. But what else does it offer that offsets the confusion of finding target instances, or conversely not being easily findable by people you don't want to converse with?
99.9% of users do not care about federation as a principle, it's just another level of technical gabble that they don't wish to be distracted by. Virtually every decentralized service struggles with this issue. Decentralization is primarily of interest to nerds, and for online services that requires you to be a bit of a computer and a bit of a politics nerd, shrinking your already small target pool.
Twitter's original win was that it was staggeringly simple, just asking new users to post about 'what they're doing right now' and offering simple controls to reply, repeat, or express approval. They realized that people felt more connected to a scrolling ticker of headline-style status updates than a newspaper.
Even worse when Mastodons are extinct creatures. Probably tells us about the platform itself being used by little to no one, other than just techies that won't admit that they still lurk on Twitter.
The different connotations for birds and mastodons suggest that the platforms will reach entirely different user groups. If Musk doesn't push video and other technologies then Twitter has already reached its full potential market share. This leaves many opportunities to Mastodon. If the social climate gets colder, mastodons are better equipped than most birds. In a world of gene technology, extinction is only temporary.
Ok but Mastodons were not arctic/northern animals like Mammoths. They were a temperate (& subtropical? i think) climate creature.
Apart from their bones another piece of evidence of their existence is the way many of the plants in the eastern Nort American forest adapted to have spikes/thorns that seem ineffective against deer & moose etc but would be deadly against browsing with a trunk. Black locust is like this.
I would have loved to have met one.
Now, for silly analogies, I dunno, it's likely that the ancestors of today's native Americans hunted them to extinction. (They were probably delicious). Can someone build an analogy from that? :-)
I actively dislike the federation that Mastodon is using. If they would let me use somebody@gnail.com or somebody@hotmail.com, fine. Or somebody@mastodon.master-name-server. Instead, you have somebody@mastodon.technology.
Guess what? mastodon.technology is closing down. Any connections using that address are going to be lost.
It's really too bad that the idea of where you connect became conflated with what your name is.
PS: thanks to the person who was running mastodon.technology and found that it was too much to do with what else was going on in their life.
> Guess what? mastodon.technology is closing down. Any connections using that address are going to be lost.
If you want a globally unique identifier, pay for it. I hate to be "that guy" but nobody owes you DNS namespace. If you are caught on the unfortunate end of this, Mastodon explicitly offers account migration tools to mitigate the pain. That will redirect your old account to your new one, so at least confused users will be able to find you in the interim.
On the flip side, letting you use "somebody@gmail.com" as your ID just gives Google control over your identity, which I would consider a downgrade.
Free services was the best and worst thing to happen on the internet. Everyone is connected and information is free, but all information is free including yours and there’s no way to get people to make a change to something non free.
I'm not sure if, by "the federation that Mastadon is using", you mean the concept of federation (in which case, I agree) or Mastadon's specific flavor of it; but, if you mean the latter, I want to say that's just a fundamental property of the concept of federated systems (as opposed to distributed ones): e-mail is also federated, and "where you connect" is the hostname on your e-mail server... if Gmail shuts down, so to will all of the connected links of people who decided to use Gmail as their host instead of running their own. I use saurik@saurik.com for my e-mail address, and (if I were to use Mastadon) would presumably also set up my own Mastadon setup, so I wouldn't be reliant on a large Mastadon host.
(Not said enough, though, is that DNS is itself federated: .com could one day decide to shut down, or simply take away saurik.com from me for whatever reason. Given the tradeoffs involved, I feel like that's the best place for me to stake my claim--particularly as custom TLDs didn't even exist back in the late 90s, but even now with them there are too many dangerous-seeming restrictions and the cost is too high that I'd still go with a .com--and yet it means that I'm not in some ways fundamentally different than the people who attach their identities to Google, even if I would claim Google isn't trustworthy, as that's just my opinion. I will say that gmail.com is also reliant on .com, and so there is an argument of my solution being strictly better, and yet I can make counter-arguments involving Google's political influence and the such.)
The issue, though--and maybe this is what you are focusing on?--is that, as far as I've ever been able to tell (just from perusing these random conversations: I do not myself use Mastadon currently), there seem to be features of Mastadon that simply work better if you are using a large shared host (which, to me, is kind of a fundamental design trajectory of federated systems: to obtain better discoverability, security, and ease-of-use, people slowly centralize onto a handful of larger players and over time the protocol becomes corrupted or limited by these large players who want to collude "for the good of the user" rather than remaining limited by the shared protocol).
Is this not the same as email? If you ran your own you could use your own domain. If gmail ran an instance you could use @gmail.com . Otherwise you're at the whims of your host shutting down, like when google nearly pulled free google apps, or when microsoft used to reclaim accounts that didn't use the web UI often enough.
I guess what's needed here is an ecosystem of "point your DNS at us and use your own domain with your hosted service" ala fastmail and other providers for email.
I do run firstname@lastname.org I would love to be able to use that with Mastodon as my one and only identity, regardless of which server I happened to be logging into.
I like the idea of different servers as being Special Interest Groups. I use lists a lot on Twitter. But people who I put on a Mac list also talk about baseball, the war in Ukraine, etc. Google+ wanted to have each person separate out their posts by topic and that isn't the way most people seem to want to operate. For selling something, like Craigslist, OK, I'll put it in a specific category. But just things I want to write about? Unless there's a House of Dragons server, a Houston Astros server, a Rust server, etc. it's not going to happen.
There are both good sides and bad sides to that. In the same vein one could argue that the truly Verified identity should have their own domain. Why use Musks platform when they can have Bill@microsoft.com or Elon@tesla.com?
stupid question but I guess having a central ID would go against the whole idea of Mastodon? I like the idea of "self hosted discord servers" but it seems weird to have a different identity for each "server" at that point. Is there any difference between Mastodon and forums at that point? Consistent UX?
Consistent UX I guess is part of it (tho not necessarily), but I think the bigger thing is that they're all federated by protocol, so activity from one is viewable by the others (assuming they're federated) it's a bit like FidoNet or even UUCP of old.
Is there a hosted Mastodon solution, where you can bring your own domain name and they do the rest, like how I can bring my domain name to any number of email providers?
You can definitely set up your own Mastodon server. I don't know how hard it is to get other servers to federate with you because I don't want to take on the overhead of running a server.
Discussions of running your own mail server make it sound like it's difficult because you have to get Microsoft and Google to accept your mail and they tend to let it go into the spam folder and not respond to you.
Will mastodon.social federate with HellsMaddy.social? Maybe. Can you use me@hellsmaddy.com? No.
> 99.9% of users do not care about federation as a principle
Decentralization as a principle is currently responsible for at least some part of the enormous market capitalization of cryptocurrencies.
Nowadays everything is politics and identity politics. Especially on twitter which is the favorite hangout spot for the crypto crowd, journalists and political junkies....I mean twitter for sure is not the social media for pushing commerce and e-commerce, that ship has sailed long ago. They only have politics.
Given the preponderance of politics on twitter, Musk is the worst owner for the platform as he's alienating all left wing people in the US (and potentially abroad) and also right wing people who don't fall for cults and are still against subsidies.
> Twitter's original win was that it was staggeringly simple, just asking new users to post about 'what they're doing right now' and offering simple controls to reply, repeat, or express approval
Twitter originally was even simpler than that! Replies were just new tweets prefixed with “@user” and retweets were just copies of the source tweet prefixed with “RT: “. As these conventions arose Twitter eventually turned them into first class features. Also it was originally named “Twttr”, though that didn’t last too long.
Edit: and you mainly searched on hash tags (#tags) since full-text search wasn't very far along. Amusingly their search index on hash tags worked a bit like hash tables! Though I assume that’s entirely a coincidence.
> When are Mastodon stans going to figure out that the reason people like Twitter is that it's (nominally) flat and you can interact with anyone unless they've blocked you for some reason
this is largely the same for the public instances. Mastodon/Pleroma/etc servers default to open/automatic federation when you install them. unless you're joining a community with a very specific theme -- say freespeechextremist -- you're likely to be able to @ >95% of other users who signed up to a public server. if you joined a public server that's been blacklisted by a significant portion of the network, you'll find out about that soon enough that ditching that instance and registering at a more "neutral" site isn't any cost. Poast is maybe the most edge-case to this, where a new user might be attracted to the internal meme-driven aspects, and not notice until a couple days of use the relatively smaller patterns of harassment which would lead other (large) instances to de-federate with them.
hmm, that's the example that made it click for me: my identity has little or nothing to do with my topic, in email, twitter, blogging - having an identity that's related to a themed server doesn't feel like the right layer at all.
You can't log in before you sign up. I think bringing up complexity of the sign-up is fair, but I don't understand how you can be "turned off" by the second step before you looked into the first step.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 325 ms ] threadNow that's the new tagline.
Would that be different on Mastodon? I've never used it, but as a decentralized service, I assume it won't have a central authority banning users?
So jerks will get moderated there. And when they do that, they'll probably jump servers. And so get cordoned off into wherever federated node that they isolate themselves into.
Note that each server decides which other servers it will federate and share content with.
So eventually nodes that collect jerks will just get cut from most of the rest of the federation.
It's certainly vulnerable to abuse. But it also leaves more room for community response.
And it also doesn't have a recommendation "algorithm". You see the content you explicitly subscribe to. In chronological order. So dark patterns that arise out of feeding people rage tweets and engagement hacking and amplifying "controversial" crap for engagement... doesn't happen. So the platform isn't going to give an outsized "recommended" audience for crap just because it has high "likes" -- that's not how the platform works.
But returning to a chronological feed would be nice.
Like, it wouldn't be "one federation with Musk types" vs "another with heavy moderation" but actually already a whole bunch of nodes with different types of moderation choosing to isolate away the Musk node. Or not. It would be up to each node.
Note that "Gab" and "Truth Social" are both built on Mastodon. But they're isolated from the rest of the federated nodes.
Suppose there are three servers (A, B, C), and A is federated with both, but B isn't federated with C, and there's conversation between people on A and B.
Do people on C only see the A side of the conversation?
I'm a Mastodon newb and not an expert, I'm sure someone else more informed could give a better explanation of the subtleties.
Server A also sends messages coming from servers it federates with, so those on server C can see server B's messages, but C'ers just can't reply to them and expect B'ers to actually receive those messages.
Wouldn't A also forward those replies to B?
It is, IMO a good indicator that neither actually care about free speech, since they are basically "censoring" the rest of the fediverse.
Whether you think this is a good thing is up to you, but it does seem that both groups of people on either side of the Great Divide get what they want from the system, so I don't really see the harm in it.
Why do you assume the "jerks" wouldn't decide to federate among themselves. What's stopping them from creating a Splinternet (Splinterdon?) where they're free to say what they want?
> So the platform isn't going to give an outsized "recommended" audience for crap just because it has high "likes" -- that's not how the platform works.
You can't get rid of recommendations. Someone can easily build an easy to use page-ranked search engine for Mastodon servers, even if unofficial, and the engagement race will reinvent itself.
And it wouldn't matter. Because the majority would be elsewhere. Or not. The point is that there's no centralized authority making this decision. And if I didn't like how the node I was on handled the moderation, and who it chose to federate with, I'd be free to move my account elsewhere.
I personally would just choose to hang out on whatever Mastodon node that had cut itself off the the Musk/Trump-ish node.
There are some people who may decide to not vote due to what they’re seeing on Twitter in places where it may matter.
What exactly is he supposed to do? I don't see how Nov 8 is megacorp's business.
When Twitter is flooded with threats of violence and calls to form mobs will he just do nothing? Is that what you are suggesting? He can take the site dark if he wants and he may have to.
Pulling the plug would be the easy way out, and would stop people incriminating themselves. Worse case scenario it drives people stupid enough to use a public un-encrypted network to plan a crime onto a secure encrypted network.
At this point, I can’t put anything past Elon.
The way the texts between Secret Service personnel went missing, even after congressional requests to preserve documents and data, if Twitter becomes the headquarters for seditionists, disinformation and threats of violence that impacts the outcome of which party controls Congress, don’t be surprised if tweets go missing…
When you see someone getting robbed on the street, you can chose to do nothing.
But a lot of people would think you're morally deficient for doing nothing.
And a lot of people would do something in that situation.
But I feel that with Twitter becoming a private company owned by a single controversial person, Twitter lost a lot of its appeal.
It could be very unfortunate (if Twitter just goes down the drain without a replacement) or it could be the start of something new, if a new way to interact comes up.
If the community moves to another form of communication, I hope it will be something decentralized that can not be taken away from us again.
That is the reason why I am not enthusiastic about Mastodon. Mastodon is not decentralized. Unless you run your own instance, you do not own your social graph.
The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have not changed. It is a free service that needs to convert user engagement into advertising dollars. Unless Twitter moves to a paid model, that will always be true no matter who owns it. And if Twitter fails, any potential replacement will need to deal with the same incentives and solve the same problems Twitter did.
If you signed your message with "This is a reply to msg 33398198 by Timja. Signed: twblalock", then nobody could take this converstion away from us again. I could copy it and put it on any server. Owned by myself or run by some service provider. And it would always be clear to everybody that this conversation really took place between the two of us.
In fact, users could use any service they like.
It would not matter what client you use to reply to me. Your reply would appear on Hacker News, because HN would follow the protocol and accept properly signed comments relayed to it.
In your example HN would still need to retrieve and store billions of messages, handle user authentication, discovery, aggregation, additional data handling (e.g. you want to attach a video, or go live). They will need to monetize _something_. So we are back to square one, just with a much more inconvenient client setup process (like we do right now setting up pop3/smtp/imap).
Have they not changed? This is a genuine question.
How much control does Elon actually have? Can he decide to take the company in a direction that don't match the business incentives?
Can he tell an employee: "Do this or your fired" because it may make him feel better? Or because he misunderstood the situation and couldn't be told otherwise until he sees the results? Or both?
Does he have certain responsibilities that he is supposed to honor? What happens if he doesn't?
It’s clear from his recent announcements that he understands how much Twitter depends on advertisers.
>Have they not changed? This is a genuine question.
If Musk pays back the bank loans, there shouldn't be anybody who could force him to continue the ad business and he could offer Twitter for free.
A billion users, with 10 tweets per day, that's 4T tweets per year. At 250 bytes per tweet, that's 1P data. At $20 per terabyte, that's $20,000 per year. With the same amount for transfer and servers, Musk should be able to run Twitter for $100,000 plus employees.
With those costs, Twitter could be financed by offering image and video tweets as a paid feature for $1 per year.
My main gripe is it looks like it locked me up in a bubble full of accounts with similar interests and ideas. I don't really feel challenged and I am almost totally excluded from other subjects that could theorically interest me.
If you wait for the algorithm to feed you the content you like you will find the limits of AI.
You can usually browse an instance without having an account, for example: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/explore (user directory) https://mastodon.gamedev.place/public (stream)
And once your instance federates with it (happens automatically, just needs any user to follow any user on the other one), you can search for hashtags.
That's needed for practical reasons though. Actually decentralised alternatives like for example Scuttlebutt have this common issue: "This “inital syncing” process can take up to an hour and use a fair amount of data." (https://scuttlebutt.nz/get-started/) You don't get popularity with non-tech people that way.
With mastodon, the profiles can be migrated. So effectively you can start with some main hub, move to a more interesting instance if you want to in the future, and move to your own instance if that is what you want.
The centralized platform made it very easy to find people. Now people who are moving to a federated platform miss the value of centralization, so they are writing a tool that will leverage that value and import it into the federated platform.
Maybe if Mastodon was a centralized Twitter-style platform it would be more usable, and more popular.
People don't use email as social network or instant form of social communication.
>Centralisation is more convenient in almost ALL cases, even in email (nobody except people on HN host their own email)
Email's just so damned old everyone uses the standard and it kind of dodges the issue.
Email's also structurally a bit different - it's a set of one-way sends to select recipients, with chats you moreso go to a place and read the place's signboard.
You could in principle just use mailing lists under the hood instead if the UI wasn't garbage.
https://trends.google.de/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=bl...
People cannot find their friends on Mastodon because:
+ They can't search all instances across Mastodon.
+ There is almost little to no one on Mastodon to talk to.
So they just go back to a centralised service like Twitter and they definitely not use email as a social network.
I have found that this is an accurate description of the first impression one gets; this is not true, but we're all so used to recommendation algorithms easing discovery that the impression is equivalent.
Twitter is just fine and everyone knows it.
email isn't a social network and lots people outside of HN don't self host them as such.
Business email is very dependent on the fact that it’s an open protocol.
And so the word comes down, we have to move to Gmail. It’s believable decision making, but that’s how it works.
People don't self host email because 1) the protocol doesn't make it easy to deal with incoming spam on a small scale, and 2) giants like gmail tend to automatically flag unique email domains as suspicious. Which is a valid criticism of the federated model, or rather the people using it.
If more people found value in decentralization, in theory they would also be more critical of their node management, opting to reject anti-competitive behavior in a democratic way. Unfortunately, for democracy to work, citizens have to be educated and fight for it. If they don't, it's easy to have centralized, ostensibly totalitarian walled gardens.
We just need to make sure fediverse accounts are easily transferable between nodes in a standardized way, something I don't think mastodon does well, and email doesn't do at all.
Seriously: Transforming spam filtering into a black box service has decommoditized email and everyone knows it.
Bob registers his new Twitter handle so I, Alice, can find it on the central service of Twitter.
A mapping of users to users can be across any service, including centralized to centralized (ie Twitter to Facebook) or decentalized to decentralized (IE Diaspora to Mastadon). It is just saying this string registered somewhere else as that string.
It's not so important to force any dichotomous perspectives on the whole here, as the situation has a lot of nuance to it in the details.
Something I'm keeping an eye on is the @ protocol that is being designed specifically for the creation of federated social media applications -- it allows for portable identity and your social graph is portable, these things are not tethered to an instance of something. Hopefully that will be an upgrade so there will be less "jury-rigging" like this required to make federated applications usable
It seems to me that finding someone on a federation is as easy as on centralized systems. Do you have a use case in mind where centralization makes it easier to find someone?
It will search a subset of instances.
How do we know this to be true?
a) there is no central listing of all mastodon instances, or even all public ones.
b) it would take FREAKING AGES TO COME BACK because there are so damn many, you can only make so many parallel requests at a time, and you have to process the results from all of them.
[1] https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon/
Nope, It will only show accounts followed by local accounts.
Mastodon doesn't do any kind of per server search, And your "federated feed" is basically accounts on other instances followed by local accounts.
This makes hosting a private Mastodon server, for personal or family use, incredibly hard as discovery is basically impossible.
This can be fixed by using Activity pub relays, but guess what? Mastodon's official servers don't use them, which are the servers that really matter.
Its a big part of why I'm hesitant to use Activitypub, as I believe discovery is a big part of modern social media, and Mastodon absolutely sucks at it.
This is coming from someone hosting his own Matrix server.
Not at all. These types of centralized platforms won because they raised capital to grow fast and meet market needs before anything else. Email is still king, but if it were to be designed today, it would have been designed as some proprietary centralized system.
Distributed systems are hard.
In any case, I don't think federation goes far enough to save us from the problems we're seeing. I want a peer-to-peer social feed / social news app that doesn't depend on federation or servers at all.
Takedowns (DeCSS), takeovers (Twitter, FreeNode), shutdowns (Google+, Orkut, Digg, mastodon.technology), censorship (everywhere; should be an individual choice), maintainer-imposed spying (Apple CSAM), and maintainer-imposed changes or limits (Digg, modern Reddit, Twitter API) seem an order of magnitude harder to pull off if we have full control at the protocol and node level.
Federation would be nice for anonymity and aggregation of interest graph metadata, but at the core we should just have a swarm of content to sample and consume. It's fine if the content is naturally ephemeral as a consequence. We can use a constellation of opt-in 3rd party distributed (federated) services to provide durability, ranking, recommendation, filtering, etc. where desired.
Bittorrent, but for Twitter/Reddit/HN.
Who am I kidding, these people are looking for an audience, not their friends.
Of course it's a whole other can of worms, reminds me of Linkedin/Fb that would spam me because they had access to my friend's rolodex..
Imagine you could find me as @numpad0 anywhere, and you can validate shadydomain.shadywebsite.tld/uuid.htm with my pubkey to hold me accountable for weird things I'd say, and that /uuid.htm URL may be ephemeral, or could be more permanent for more respectable posts at non-shady venues, and either ways I wouldn't have to be perfect wrt handling of privkey, yet somehow usernames matches someone anywhere would be verifyably that someone. That would be ideal.
But I believe social media operators recognize the exploitable value in conflating both; this has to be why no one use cross-OAuth between social medias and web apps anymore, and rather focuses on own ID systems and federated signups. Consistent set of identities is a value, media is a means to monopolize on it.
you could argue that there's benefit to centralized friend-finder tools, but there's no reason that has to be tied to a centralized platform. a decentralized and open-access platform allows for choice and competition amongst friend-finder tools
I'm thinking if I'm a Nazi I mostly care about other Nazis and would not go to the normie mastodon friend finder tool but the one which finds all my friends on our Nazi mastodon instances and vice versa.
The big issue with Mastodon is that your "twitter handle" depends on the server you join, which makes it hard to find you. If it was just your e-mail address, however, then everyone would be able to find you, and keep finding you even if you decided to change servers.
I can use g-suite, fastmail, outlook for business and a range of other things, and the people sending me mails won't notice. I can't swap my Mastodon server.
SoMe should be email based, and servers should just be relays. That way you could also create private SoMes for things that you'd do in Facebook group by simply setting up a relay on something cheap.
This, I feel is especially notable for Western nodes since they don't really seem to bother with relays (which I think largely defeats the point of federation by creating incentives to stick to large nodes). A lot of the relay lists are either super sanitized/focused on uninteresting topics or are dead.
In comparison, in the Japanese community there are several fairly active open relays (with some moderation to prevent abuse) and thus it's pretty easy to setup a custom node and have it populated with some basic content to build off of. As a result of which, ~75% of the traffic to my node comes from Japan, ~20% from the US and ~5% from Europe.
They have all the pieces, they just have to put them together tastefully.
also didn't reddit proudly make a blogpost earlier this year that they now censor more speech than the bird site and calling on it to do the same?
(oh and i've been linked normal, SFW stuff where reddit now tries to make me create an account to see it because it's "18+". no, i am not "becoming a redditor" especially not to view one link. if they kill old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com it will be literally unusable.)
If they do, Elon can buy Reddit for about $44.00.
The European Union is also working on breaking open the messenger space, forcing tech companies to either leave the EU or work on an interoperable standard. I believe an IEEE working group is already developing a protocol to serve this purpose, even with encryption available if I recall correctly.
I believe this is the relevant draft: https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-mahy-mimi-identity-01.html
Edit: I should add that as far as I know, the working group hasn't done much as of yet. I heard about this on Matrix because some of the Matrix folks are trying to get (parts of) the federated Matrix protocol into the standard, or probably at least parts of it.
MSN/WLM, AIM, YIM, ICQ, Gadu-Gadu, Skype… all of them were reverse-engineered. The only open protocols it supported were IRC and Jabber.
You could make it use private APIs by copying OAuth client id|secret from an official application. This would enable some features (notifications and polls, and higher rate limits). Later Twitter fixed that and also sent a DMCA, so Twidere had to remove the code that worked with said APIs.
https://mastodon.online/@FediFollows
They've also listed all of their recommendations in a directory:
https://fedi.directory
> Looking for Mastodon users progress, scanned 867 of 867 users you follow on Twitter. Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon who have previously linked their Twitter and Mastodon accounts by logging into Twitodon.
WHO HAVE PREVIOUSLY LINKED ACCOUNTS... BY LOGGING IN TO TWITODON
the odds of that having happened for any notable subset are so low as to make this useless.
It won't "replace" Twitter. But a good crowd of people has collected around there, and there's quite a bit of enjoyable content coming through.
(To clarify, I don't mind niche instances, just at this stage there isn't enough discussion or interesting profiles to follow.)
At first this bugged me, but then it was pointed out that if you could just move your posts you could also potentially violate the moderation rules of the host you were moving to. So it makes some sense.
But all the of the follower/following data is available via CSV export any time, too. And there's obviously an open API as well.
And honestly, you could also just run your own server if you're that concerned.
To be fair, that's an improvement over, say, Twitter, where they'd just be gone.
I understand that I can do this by hosting my own instance - that's a good enough solution (for me).
Most Mastodon instances are community run, and when they hit some rough straits in paying for their hosting some of them will have a (metaphorical) bake sale encouraging users to contribute to the hosting fund Patreon or will ask around if someone wants to take over the admin hot seat for a while.
For those concerned about the longevity of specific instances that's generally the answer: ask the community how the admin pays for things, look for their Patreon, consider chipping in what you can each month.
So moderate it the same as if you reposted everything? I don't understand.
that seems like a big assumption - if I'm running an instance, what's to stop me pulling the plug with zero notice?
How feasible is it to have a username at a custom domain? In case the server you sign up on goes out of service. Do you have to set up your own instance in order to do that? Is there a barrier from setting up a new instance and then participating immediately in the wider federated network?
Also every time a user follows you from an instance not federated with your instance it's a whole complicated process because federation has to be established between your instance and their instance (and, I think, every instance that they follow users from).
So if I understand your question correctly: there is no way to separate your identity from your content. If you want to own your identity you will need to self-host.
I am realizing now that the solution to these concerns is likely going to emerge from matrix.org, not Mastodon.
Isn’t this just a normal Mastadon instance but with custom domain support just like email providers?
Another way of doing it is if you're already posting your notes, pictures, etc. on your own website, you can make it ActivityPub aware and use your website instead of Mastodon.
I quite like the sound of this, do you have any references you can suggest?
Seems like it's possible to implement just enough of ActivityPub functionality that Mastodon users will be able to follow you.
Generally it's best to choose a niche instance so you inherit a community of people with common interests instantly which makes onboarding much easier. For example, I'm on fosstodon.org for free software and photog.social for photography.
https://photog.social/@ambassador/109080532230127913
When you settle on an instance, make sure to contribute to its upkeep if you can.
Yes; Each instance has its own posting rules and an instance may suspend (block) another instance for different reasons. Mastodon.social has suspended quite a few instances, for example. Always read the about page of the instance before registering.
https://mastodon.social/about
https://boilingsteam.com/mastodon-vs-twitter/
Spitting into the wind at this point, I know, but it still bothers me.
Now consider Mastodon as an email client which is hosted on a web site, like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail. That web site gives you an interface with which to interact with the network of email servers, but people using other servers with other interfaces can still see messages from each other; someone using Yahoo! Mail can send and receive messages with someone using Gmail.
The difference is that Mastodon is open source, so that anyone can download the code and run their own Mastodon instance (whereas nobody can download and run their own Gmail instance), but that instance can still exchange messages with instances running any of the several other Fediverse interfaces there are out there, such as Pleroma, Misskey, Soapbox, etc. (Unless an instance at either end has "defederated" the other; that is, the administrators have configured it to not exchange messages with the other server.)
5 years ago there was a neat tool called Mastodon Bridge that did what Twitodon says it does but much better, I think because it didn't require everyone opt in. It stopped working because of some change Twitter made to their API terms of use. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-bridge
There's also Moa Party, but it's so complicated I have never used it. https://moa.party/
In the example of Twitter, Nitter already exists as an alternative front-end. Now what if there's a Mastodon instance that uses Nitter to wrap official Twitter content and serve it as if it where the twitter.com mastodon instance? Again it would need to be a read-only version as Twitter is not Mastodon but it would help fill the content gap for sure.
Now Mastodon might not have a content issue but PeerTube for example very well has and in that case masquerading YouTube as a PeerTube instance would become very interesting.
Engagement with the audience also is a significant factor for making social media enjoyable. A read-only mirror of Twitter would be very boring, because you can respond/tag/whatever you want for all eternity, but the Twitter authors would never notice.
Such a system would work for people primarily using Mastodon that cross-post to Twitter; you could add Twitter replies to the Mastodon replies and get a mixed content stream (that Twitter users might miss half of when discussions respond to as-of-yet unproxied messages).
Nitter exists and it is open source. Why not add a mastodon API to it?
The existence of such a thing in no way has anything to do with existing mastodon instances TOS / acceptable use relationship with twitter (if such a relationship even exists).0
Source code: https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive Official instance: https://beta.birdsite.live/
There was a world and a life before Twitter, and there is one without Twitter as well.
I deleted my Twitter account about a year ago and have not missed anything. People and topics I am interested in I can updated on by many different means.
It's more like this place than Twitter, in a way.
Or, it's kind of similar to how Usenet was in the early 90s.
It's a simple linear feed of who've subscribed to, or what the people you've subscribed to have "boosted". So you find the interest groups you're into and join a node that matches that, then find the people you like on various nodes, and follow them. There's no recommendations really. There's hashtags, but few ways to "discover" them and they don't seem to get heavily used right now.
It's maybe like Twitter when it first launched. Certainly not what it became (which I never personally participated in).
It certainly doesn't have the level of "action" or "engagement" you'd find on Twitter. And that's probably a good thing.
For authors, other communities exist as well.
Yes, and it was much harder to shill newsletters, courses, conspiracies and cryptocoins back then on the back of minor internet blogger fame.
There is significant money to be made in all of the above, which is why a replacement for Twitter (holding people in a dopamine cage) is inevitable, whether we need it or not.
I am interested in electronic music and followed several links from fedi.directory. E.g. https://mastodon.art/@merle, https://mastodon.cc/@Sevish, https://sonomu.club/@luka. Is that normal that there are no discussions? Also one of the links led to https://v.basspistol.org/a/setto/video-channels, which looks completely different, like a personal page from the 90s, not a Twitter-like app.
I thought Mastodon was a Twitter replacement, but was surprised by how uninviting and empty the entire recommended directory for electronic music is.
I think there are just fewer people active on these platforms, which isn't great for interaction.
As for v.basspistol.org, that's not a Mastodon instance but a Peertube (derived) instance. Both are part of the so-called Fediverse, but Mastodon (and similar) intent to replace/extend Twitter/Facebook whereas Peertube intends to replace/extend Youtube.
Edit: perhaps worth mentioning is that both types of social media share a protocol called ActivityPub. This is how several social media systems (Twitter replacements, Reddit replacements, Youtube replacements, etc.) can all communicate with each other. NextCloud, for instance, also has an ActivityPub system integrated, which means your toots and the shared files/comments may end up in the same system, all with some manner of interoperability.
Thanks for the info on Peertube, I heard the name before but didn't realize it's a federated app.
Reply to the edit: thanks for the pointer! Reading about ActivityPub made me feel pretty excited both about the technology and about Mastodon.
You can even click it when not logged in and it will give you a Federated Login popup, which is a bit confusing but even allows you to reply on a different instance from the you are looking at the public feeds of.
To see replies rather than to make a new reply you generally need to click into specific toots, in the common web UI that's by clicking the Date in the top right corner.
Some clients have nice "subway diagram" maps of reply threading rather than the straight line that the main Mastodon web client presents them as.
[1] The only instance guaranteed to see every reply is the originating instance, other instances only see a subset of replies due to vagaries in federation and who those servers follow. Sometimes even with a client that is better at threading replies it is still useful to follow toot "permalinks" to their originating instance to see deeper reply threads, especially when reading on smaller instances.
Things this App can view...
People who follow you and people who you follow.
All the Tweets you can view, including Tweets from protected accounts.
Any account you can view, including protected accounts.
Also, I'm _pretty_ sure you can point the twitter API at any user you want to scan followers and following. I did it on some twitter accounts I'm interested in when I started out to find some accounts to follow.
It's also possible to prevent people from following your account without your approval.
I'm not seeing why anyone should assume an internet rando is less trustworthy.
It's not a terrible thing to build, but whenever you make a product that's just imitating someone else (Twitter has 'tweets' but Mastodon has 'toots' because the logo is an elephant!) then it needs to be way better, not just a slight improvement. Longer messages are a good thing on Mastodon, though Facebook already does that. But what else does it offer that offsets the confusion of finding target instances, or conversely not being easily findable by people you don't want to converse with?
99.9% of users do not care about federation as a principle, it's just another level of technical gabble that they don't wish to be distracted by. Virtually every decentralized service struggles with this issue. Decentralization is primarily of interest to nerds, and for online services that requires you to be a bit of a computer and a bit of a politics nerd, shrinking your already small target pool.
Twitter's original win was that it was staggeringly simple, just asking new users to post about 'what they're doing right now' and offering simple controls to reply, repeat, or express approval. They realized that people felt more connected to a scrolling ticker of headline-style status updates than a newspaper.
It's a mastodon, not an elephant!!
edit: y'all are taking this exchange much too seriously.
The different connotations for birds and mastodons suggest that the platforms will reach entirely different user groups. If Musk doesn't push video and other technologies then Twitter has already reached its full potential market share. This leaves many opportunities to Mastodon. If the social climate gets colder, mastodons are better equipped than most birds. In a world of gene technology, extinction is only temporary.
Ok but Mastodons were not arctic/northern animals like Mammoths. They were a temperate (& subtropical? i think) climate creature.
Apart from their bones another piece of evidence of their existence is the way many of the plants in the eastern Nort American forest adapted to have spikes/thorns that seem ineffective against deer & moose etc but would be deadly against browsing with a trunk. Black locust is like this.
I would have loved to have met one.
Now, for silly analogies, I dunno, it's likely that the ancestors of today's native Americans hunted them to extinction. (They were probably delicious). Can someone build an analogy from that? :-)
Guess what? mastodon.technology is closing down. Any connections using that address are going to be lost.
It's really too bad that the idea of where you connect became conflated with what your name is.
PS: thanks to the person who was running mastodon.technology and found that it was too much to do with what else was going on in their life.
If you want a globally unique identifier, pay for it. I hate to be "that guy" but nobody owes you DNS namespace. If you are caught on the unfortunate end of this, Mastodon explicitly offers account migration tools to mitigate the pain. That will redirect your old account to your new one, so at least confused users will be able to find you in the interim.
On the flip side, letting you use "somebody@gmail.com" as your ID just gives Google control over your identity, which I would consider a downgrade.
(Not said enough, though, is that DNS is itself federated: .com could one day decide to shut down, or simply take away saurik.com from me for whatever reason. Given the tradeoffs involved, I feel like that's the best place for me to stake my claim--particularly as custom TLDs didn't even exist back in the late 90s, but even now with them there are too many dangerous-seeming restrictions and the cost is too high that I'd still go with a .com--and yet it means that I'm not in some ways fundamentally different than the people who attach their identities to Google, even if I would claim Google isn't trustworthy, as that's just my opinion. I will say that gmail.com is also reliant on .com, and so there is an argument of my solution being strictly better, and yet I can make counter-arguments involving Google's political influence and the such.)
The issue, though--and maybe this is what you are focusing on?--is that, as far as I've ever been able to tell (just from perusing these random conversations: I do not myself use Mastadon currently), there seem to be features of Mastadon that simply work better if you are using a large shared host (which, to me, is kind of a fundamental design trajectory of federated systems: to obtain better discoverability, security, and ease-of-use, people slowly centralize onto a handful of larger players and over time the protocol becomes corrupted or limited by these large players who want to collude "for the good of the user" rather than remaining limited by the shared protocol).
I guess what's needed here is an ecosystem of "point your DNS at us and use your own domain with your hosted service" ala fastmail and other providers for email.
I like the idea of different servers as being Special Interest Groups. I use lists a lot on Twitter. But people who I put on a Mac list also talk about baseball, the war in Ukraine, etc. Google+ wanted to have each person separate out their posts by topic and that isn't the way most people seem to want to operate. For selling something, like Craigslist, OK, I'll put it in a specific category. But just things I want to write about? Unless there's a House of Dragons server, a Houston Astros server, a Rust server, etc. it's not going to happen.
Discussions of running your own mail server make it sound like it's difficult because you have to get Microsoft and Google to accept your mail and they tend to let it go into the spam folder and not respond to you.
Will mastodon.social federate with HellsMaddy.social? Maybe. Can you use me@hellsmaddy.com? No.
Decentralization as a principle is currently responsible for at least some part of the enormous market capitalization of cryptocurrencies.
Nowadays everything is politics and identity politics. Especially on twitter which is the favorite hangout spot for the crypto crowd, journalists and political junkies....I mean twitter for sure is not the social media for pushing commerce and e-commerce, that ship has sailed long ago. They only have politics.
Given the preponderance of politics on twitter, Musk is the worst owner for the platform as he's alienating all left wing people in the US (and potentially abroad) and also right wing people who don't fall for cults and are still against subsidies.
> Twitter's original win was that it was staggeringly simple, just asking new users to post about 'what they're doing right now' and offering simple controls to reply, repeat, or express approval
Twitter originally was even simpler than that! Replies were just new tweets prefixed with “@user” and retweets were just copies of the source tweet prefixed with “RT: “. As these conventions arose Twitter eventually turned them into first class features. Also it was originally named “Twttr”, though that didn’t last too long.
Edit: and you mainly searched on hash tags (#tags) since full-text search wasn't very far along. Amusingly their search index on hash tags worked a bit like hash tables! Though I assume that’s entirely a coincidence.
this is largely the same for the public instances. Mastodon/Pleroma/etc servers default to open/automatic federation when you install them. unless you're joining a community with a very specific theme -- say freespeechextremist -- you're likely to be able to @ >95% of other users who signed up to a public server. if you joined a public server that's been blacklisted by a significant portion of the network, you'll find out about that soon enough that ditching that instance and registering at a more "neutral" site isn't any cost. Poast is maybe the most edge-case to this, where a new user might be attracted to the internal meme-driven aspects, and not notice until a couple days of use the relatively smaller patterns of harassment which would lead other (large) instances to de-federate with them.
https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2022/04/16/vampi...
What?