Cable tv providers pay for content from networks/channels who themselves put ads. Cable TV providers could only block ads by not buying channels with ads.
Possibly in response to their tweet about the @elonjet account on Mastodon. Banning someone for talking about or linking to something that would break rules if it were on Twitter seems contrary to the variant of free speech Elon Musk claimed to support pre-Twitter purchase.
The tweet linked to the account on mastodon, it didn't simply link to a mastodon instance which happened to host elonjet's account. Presumably direct links to the subreddit would be banned, whereas reddit as a whole would be fine.
Twitter faces no real threat from Mastodon until they streamline their sign up process and mask the "decentralized server" nonsense. I understand that the people here don't see it as nonsense, but the millions of less tech savvy users needed to make it a true Twitter alternative do see it that way and it will prevent Mastodon from ever being more than a niche service. It's a baffling process to the everyday user who has signed up for dozens of different services over the years with a simple email and password (if not single sign on).
You can run your own server if you want to, or join one that has the same level of moderation as you'd like. As for defederation that's just freedom of association
I'm not sure I would describe them as "barely-working". Have you used any of them lately? They work very well in my experience.
The improvement I think is you can jump to a different instance, and being all your followers and following with you. Whereas if you're the subject of an arbitrary decision by the Twitter overlord, all you can really do is post about it online and try to stir up enough bad PR for the company that they reverse their decision.
Are you kidding? The vast majority just use Gmail now, or perhaps an institutional account they were enrolled in “automatically” and have a strong motive to check regularly for school/work purposes.
Users think of Mastodon as analogous to Twitter. You can tell them they are wrong. But telling new and eager users they are wrong, and then offering an elaborate explanation as to why they are wrong and then requiring them to make a confusing choice with unclear consequences before they can even use the service is not a great strategy for growth.
In practice we don't see situations arising where Yahoo users can't send email to Gmail users because the boss of Gmail doesn't like that that the boss of Yahoo allows Fastmail users to send email to Yahoo users
This right here is my primary problem with Mastodon. Its ripe for drama like this. The amount of glee I saw in the older users their about defedrating felt really unsettling. "If X company comes we will defedarate them" "If X celebrity comes we will defedarate them".
Exactly this, it's like the most emotionally immature people on Twitter have been given an even more powerful blocklist to play with. Like thousands of mini-Musks with their own volatility problems.
Well, for the most part they don't, they use either their ISP e-mail, their work e-mail, or Gmail. iCloud might be a distant runner up. I rarely see anybody using even Yahoo or hotmail anymore.
That's fine. Mastodon's goal isn't to replace Twitter, but the way Twitter is heading I wouldn't blame people who use it as a replacement.
Mastodon's real problem is that it doesn't have sex appeal. It's not a Game of Thrones celebrity throwdown like Twitter, and it lacks the marketing of successful viral platforms like TikTok or Instagram. It was a conscious decision too - calling posts toots and designing the entire network to be distributed - making it less social was part of making it more healthy. Even now, Mastodon maintainers waffle at the idea of making the platform more Twitter-like because it dilutes the balance the platform has cultivated over the past few years.
It's like saying that Discord doesn't face any threat from IRC. You might be right from a financial perspective, but the communities around them are completely different things. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
So how many layers deep does the ban-hammer strike? The Seven-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-esque game being played here seems like it'll only end with Twitter having zero users.
Funny, isn't it? Please excuse my non-essential comment, but this shit-show is so funny. Watching it from the sidelines makes me think of some systemic cures for all of that, which I find none. Elon lost it completely. Psychological factors regarding single human start to play crucial role when we talk about overpower. TBD. You know, like simple, human energy of fear (scared of loosing power) makes a dictator to slash 8M people (examples abound) or childlike nature of Elon makes him go funny with Twitter.
If you're thinking of trying Mastodon, I would recommend joining an interest-specific or locality-specific server rather than one of the general purpose servers, because the local community is likely to be stronger and more engaged. You can always jump ship later if you find it's not your thing
I really like the idea of different organizations running their own instances. You don't need an overbearing, exhaustive and centralized system of verification for journalists when something like WAPO or NY Times can run an instance for their employees, much like how email works.
Edit: A lot of journalists just learned about the value of owning their distribution platform now too lol
This assumes one cares about the local community aspect of Mastodon. Granted many people do in which case your advice is spot on. But if you're just looking for a pure Twitter replacement, it doesn't matter. In fact you might be better off on one of the big players as they're probably less likely to be fly-by-night.
It would be nice if new users were simply assigned a big, generic server (like in many MMOs) and then later had the option to seek out and find a niche server. The vast, vast majority of new users wouldn't know or care either way.
I can confirm this is what I did. I started on mastodon.social, then eventually moved to a smaller instance when I got jealous of their local timeline. Then I'm now hosting my own server in the closet.
> In fact you might be better off on one of the big players as they're probably less likely to be fly-by-night.
The biggest advantage of a big instance like mastodon.social is that account discovery and following are much easier when the accounts are on the same instance of you. Otherwise, you have to do a lot of copy and paste into search fields.
> Please consider joining @mastodon.acm.org, a community for #computing researchers & practitioners to connect & exchange ideas with each other, whether you are an ACM member or not.
Im very surprised that, among techies, there aren't more people running their own instance as a solo user, so that they can own the entire username including the domain name.
"Notice: due to the recent influx of traffic, new subscriptions are closed." https://masto.host/
"hi! there's been a huge wave of new members and new instances recently, and that's a Lot of work.
i am tired and especially won't be very available in the next months for health reasons, so i won't be accepting new instances for a while." https://fedi.monster/
A lot of users on these are opening up public instances, rather than their own. I don't see a huge amount of "host mastodon for yourself on your own domain" people.
I too self host my instance. I opted to use Pleroma (https://pleroma.social/) for a backend to interact with the fediverse because of the easier setup and lower hosting requirements.
It’s been working for a few years now and (luckily) I never had major incidents.
It’s very refreshing to be in full control of one’s data (compared to the centralised experience with other socials like Twitter and Facebook).
Speaking from three years’ experience on a single-user instance, Mastodon just isn’t designed with this use in mind. Having the custom domain is neat but for now comes at the cost of an awkward and isolated experience.
Some of that could be improved with UI changes but to address it satisfactorily probably requires the server to do some proactive crawling beyond what’s dropped in your inbox.
For just ownership of identity keep an eye on this issue:
One's own or a small instance with a few friends is suitable for people who are high profile who post challenging content. People will follow them from anywhere and visibility will be gained that way. Some high profile people do not want to be subject to the whims of moderators. Examples include every politician and many journalists. If you are not a high profile publisher, you will likely experience a bit of isolation with your own instance.
Last time I looked into Mastodon (a couple years ago), I found a small, specific community that piqued my interest. Months later, the owner of the instance lost interest and closed it. In the end I never registered, but, what would have happened if I did and started to use it in my day to day? Would I wake up one day to find out that I no longer have a Mastodon account?
I feel the response might be something akin to "what would happen if you have a fastmail account and then fastmail closes?". If that's the case, I see absolutely no reason to choose a small instance, just for the sake of reliability and trust in its continued operation.
I agree with you. Mastodon does make it easier to migrate between users. ActivityPub (or is it Mastodon-specific?) has something built in to broadcast account migration announcements, supports account aliases, carry followers over, etc.
Any techie on HN could run a one-person instance. Mastodon itself is fat, but Pleroma/Akkoma and Misskey are smaller, for instance. I know someone who's writing software for a one-person server in Rust that is intended to deploy as a single binary file.
The problem you describe is real, though, and it's the least friendly thing about Mastodon for new users.
I'd pick a large instance to start with, and move at your leisure.
I'm camped out on a friend's server right now, he said it was strictly for amusement but he's having a whale of a time being a Mastodon admin. When he says he'll definitely give us 2mo notice if he gets sick of it, I know I can trust him on that. That sort of thing.
Fosstodon was just banned from Twitter too, but that should not stop you from joining it. It looks like Twitter will be playing a game of whack a mole as we launch more instances.
My main problem with Mastodon is it's such a tiresome monoculture of opinion. So many people with the pretty much the same politics, biases, grievances as everyone else. Any server that dissents too much from this gets a fediverse block.
The whole thing is just so tedious. I don't know about the rest of you, but I enjoy reading opinions from people I have nothing in common with in terms of world view, and whom I vehemently disagree with.
On Twitter, you get that easily. On Mastodon, meh. Same old shit repeated everywhere. Boring and sanctimonious.
I'm not saying it's easy but you could probably run your own instance and subscribe to multiple different servers that have the diversity you're looking for.
That's interesting, is it possible to subscribe to servers secretly so other servers don't know you've done so? Otherwise, I imagine my own hypothetical instance would get swiftly blocked.
Can't read it. But I'm assuming it isn't arguing that the government needs to nationalize all social media platforms, repeal Section 230 protections and make content moderation illegal, like half of Hacker News was until Elon took over Twitter, when suddenly they became stalwart supporters of free enterprise.
Whoa, you can't post like this to HN. Worse, it looks like you've been using this site primarily for flamewar and ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're for or against. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I don't want to ban you because you've been here for 7 years, but if you keep this up, we'll end up having to—so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting, we'd appreciate it.
I don't think I said anything about your motives? I'm sure they're good; we just need you to read the rules and follow them. It's not a borderline call to say you've been breaking them.
Nobody is leaving, lol. The most vocal about "leaving Twitter" are coincidently the most addicted. They try Mastodon for two days, don't get it/get bored and come back.
I hate to invoke the "literally 1984" meme, but "restricting free speech is good for free speech, actually" is some rather blatant doublespeak. The solution to media bias is not to overcorrect and introduce bias in the opposite direction.
The cartoon image would be of Elon scrolling through Twitter and spite-banning and spite-unbanning accounts in real time and according to his whim. This cartoon image is also the one that feels increasingly more likely to be true.
Twitter just banned Mastodon's official Twitter account @joinmastodon with 174,000 followers, probably because it tweeted a link to @ElonJet's Mastodon account. Twitter is now censoring posting the link, but the user is @elonjet@maston.social
"Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info."
While you did not embed the link itself, that nuance is a distinction without a difference as the intent was still to share the location to a site with real-time location information, which as stated, will result in suspension/ban.
We figured out that we’re not allowed to encourage stalking, but if we call it “press coverage” of stalking then we can pretend it’s not stalking. The analogy doesn’t hold anywhere, child porn, drug sales, anything. This is a honeypot for the very lowest-performing flies. The traditional press may be gleefully rubbing its tiny legs together but the logic doesn’t survive first-order scrutiny.
If you post stalking on mastodon on twitter, apparently you get banned. Not all that complicated. I am sure you can share child porn on mastodon too, doesn’t have much to do with Twitter either as far as anyone can tell.
117 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadThe improvement I think is you can jump to a different instance, and being all your followers and following with you. Whereas if you're the subject of an arbitrary decision by the Twitter overlord, all you can really do is post about it online and try to stir up enough bad PR for the company that they reverse their decision.
If you present people with a list of 30 email providers they've never heard of before, it's going to throw them for a loop.
https://www.google.com/search?q=why+is+gmail+blocking+my+ema...
Mastodon's real problem is that it doesn't have sex appeal. It's not a Game of Thrones celebrity throwdown like Twitter, and it lacks the marketing of successful viral platforms like TikTok or Instagram. It was a conscious decision too - calling posts toots and designing the entire network to be distributed - making it less social was part of making it more healthy. Even now, Mastodon maintainers waffle at the idea of making the platform more Twitter-like because it dilutes the balance the platform has cultivated over the past few years.
It's like saying that Discord doesn't face any threat from IRC. You might be right from a financial perspective, but the communities around them are completely different things. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221215174053/https://twitter.c...
> Uh oh — ban in 3... 2... :grimace:
https://mobile.twitter.com/TexasObserver/status/160354905128...
Seems like a pretty mixed message tbh.
Some examples:
- https://fosstodon.org for FOSS - https://infosec.exchange for infosec - https://sfba.social for the bay area
There's a map of locality-specific instances here: https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/mastodon-near-me_828094
I really like the idea of different organizations running their own instances. You don't need an overbearing, exhaustive and centralized system of verification for journalists when something like WAPO or NY Times can run an instance for their employees, much like how email works.
Edit: A lot of journalists just learned about the value of owning their distribution platform now too lol
The biggest advantage of a big instance like mastodon.social is that account discovery and following are much easier when the accounts are on the same instance of you. Otherwise, you have to do a lot of copy and paste into search fields.
> Please consider joining @mastodon.acm.org, a community for #computing researchers & practitioners to connect & exchange ideas with each other, whether you are an ACM member or not.
https://mastodon.acm.org/invite/FbXaxAHg
It's what I did for myself (Follow me! @jerome@leclan.ch), following Simon Willison's post: https://til.simonwillison.net/mastodon/custom-domain-mastodo...
"hi! there's been a huge wave of new members and new instances recently, and that's a Lot of work. i am tired and especially won't be very available in the next months for health reasons, so i won't be accepting new instances for a while." https://fedi.monster/
"Due to overwhelming demand, registrations are currently closed." https://cloudplane.org/
I went this route (via https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/mastodon - I would have used masto.host otherwise). Im keeping an eye on Takahe (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33731739) as hosting mastodon is kind of expensive, for the type of use I make of it.
It’s been working for a few years now and (luckily) I never had major incidents.
It’s very refreshing to be in full control of one’s data (compared to the centralised experience with other socials like Twitter and Facebook).
I will likely switch to Takahe (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33731739) as soon as it's a little more ready, for the reasons you describe.
Some of that could be improved with UI changes but to address it satisfactorily probably requires the server to do some proactive crawling beyond what’s dropped in your inbox.
For just ownership of identity keep an eye on this issue:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668
I feel the response might be something akin to "what would happen if you have a fastmail account and then fastmail closes?". If that's the case, I see absolutely no reason to choose a small instance, just for the sake of reliability and trust in its continued operation.
It's better than email in that regard.
The Covenant includes a commitment from server admins to give users at least 3 months of advance warning in case of shutting down
You can also use a paid instance like https://cloudisland.nz/ or set up your own using a hosted service like masto.host
The problem you describe is real, though, and it's the least friendly thing about Mastodon for new users.
I'd pick a large instance to start with, and move at your leisure.
I'm camped out on a friend's server right now, he said it was strictly for amusement but he's having a whale of a time being a Mastodon admin. When he says he'll definitely give us 2mo notice if he gets sick of it, I know I can trust him on that. That sort of thing.
The whole thing is just so tedious. I don't know about the rest of you, but I enjoy reading opinions from people I have nothing in common with in terms of world view, and whom I vehemently disagree with.
On Twitter, you get that easily. On Mastodon, meh. Same old shit repeated everywhere. Boring and sanctimonious.
And no one is claiming the government needs to repeal or change any laws and force Elon to do anything, either. They're just leaving.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-04-28/elon-musk-t...
I don't want to ban you because you've been here for 7 years, but if you keep this up, we'll end up having to—so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting, we'd appreciate it.
So you can attack my motives at will and I can't protest or I get banned, but if I criticize someone then it's "ideological battle" and "flamewar".
As Mel Brooks says, "It's good to be the King."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(p.s. I didn't flag your comment. I did unkill it.)
https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1603557011114889216
This is getting crazy!
Keith Olbermann, and others https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34008305
Hard to see how the remaining advertisers don't flee Twitter after tonight's slaughter.
He's confirmed from Mastodon: <https://infosec.exchange/@micahflee/109520663450858280>
Advertisers care if their advert shows up to something illegal or bad for the brand.
https://twitter.com/drewharwell
https://twitter.com/RMac18
https://twitter.com/donie
This journalist has not been suspended yet: https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy
This is not a good look for Twitter or for Musk.
Here's what Musk said in April (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1518623997054918657): "I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means"
I think you all need to make up your minds.
https://mobile.twitter.com/JoshuaPHilll/status/1597614237093...
Could you post a screenshot of the suspension notice you got from Twitter? Does it say which "rule" was allegedly broken?
Twitter just banned Mastodon's official Twitter account @joinmastodon with 174,000 followers, probably because it tweeted a link to @ElonJet's Mastodon account. Twitter is now censoring posting the link, but the user is @elonjet@maston.social
"Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info."
While you did not embed the link itself, that nuance is a distinction without a difference as the intent was still to share the location to a site with real-time location information, which as stated, will result in suspension/ban.