I've been trying out Mastodon for the past 2 days. I like it, but it honestly has some problems that will prevent it from growing outside of niches. The main one being discoverability. There's simply no easy way to discover other users on the platform. And from what I understand, this is by design.
You can search hashtags, but not everyone uses hashtags. And the results that appear seem to be most recent, and not most liked or most boosted. It requires a lot of "work" to find interesting people and/or friends on the platform. And most people don't have time for that extra "work."
I'd like it more if I could see what's trending, but only if I specifically seek out what's trending.
Also on my Galaxy Tab S7 in portrait mode, a breakpoint is preventing the search field from appearing. I have to shrink Firefox a bit for the search field to appear. Took me a day before I figured that one out.
Outside of those issues, it has potential. I love everyone having a chronological feed.
> There's simply no easy way to discover other users on the platform. And from what I understand, this is by design.
It also feels fragmented. An account can be on any servers, anywhere, controlled by... someone? Users can move around. Communities can just shutdown or lock people out. Etc.
It's a weird solution to a problem that I agree exists.
More seriously, there is a large niche for smaller communities of like-minded people. I suspect that Mastodon gives an easy tool to form them. They don't want to be discovered too easily, and prefer existing social links pull new members in, instead of chance encounters. Compare this to obscure subreddits.
Opposite to that, Twitter is global and total. It's one colossal room. No wonder that celebrities dominate it: drawing attention and talking to huge audiences is what they do for a living. It's also an obvious place for official broadcasting. Mastodon is not.
I have no interest in the things you state, FWIW. The issue I have is that--apparently, based on this and other threads on the software--it matters what server you are on for even basic things like "can I follow another user I actively know about?" or "can I reply to a post from another user I already know about?". I have almost never had issues replying to emails from people I have received, receiving emails from people who intended to send me an email, or being able to send email to someone random I have heard about. These issues DO happen, but they are so rare I can't remember the last time it happened to me, and it has always been to the discredit of one of the two party's email servers... but with Mastadon, people are making it sound like all of this fragmentation is a feature?
> The issue I have is that--apparently, based on this and other threads on the software--it matters what server you are on for even basic things like "can I follow another user I actively know about?" or "can I reply to a post from another user I already know about?".
And yet, email addresses for external users are usually discovered outside of the sender's email system. I'm not sure I understand how this poses a problem for Mastodon. Heck, even when I was on Twitter, I rarely discovered people's usernames on Twitter.
People in various threads here are reporting issues even when you know of the other user or the other content, whether it be issues replying to posts or seeing mentions.
In contrast to the other comments, this is actually one I 100% agree with... and is part of the downfall of federated systems (which I have given short talks on before <- not to advocate for centralized ones, like Moxie does, but to advocate for fully distributed ones): they tend to end up with a small number of heavy instances designed to provide better moderation, security, or discovery with the result that you end up with little fiefdoms with peering agreements instead of a system where anyone can actually talk to anyone else. And yet, the status quo with email is nowhere near as bad as it is sounding like with Mastadon.
It's definitely fragmented. Something like mastodon.social is probably perfectly fine for the general population though. And as users become more comfortable with the platform, they can transfer to other instances if they want.
I just don't see it growing because of lack of discoverability. I'm betting most new users will hop on, not know who to follow or what to do, and never sign in again.
You discover other users by slowly walking the graph from the people you know and you find the first users in the communities you like through hashtags. It's slow but you eventually build up a pretty good list of people to follow.
Also you generally join a server oriented around the subject(s) you like so you can check the local toot stream for people to follow.
There's a hidden misunderstanding here. Phrasing Mastodon as "the platform" implies you (probably subconscious) perceive it as a "classic" single, centralized, authoritative service managed by a single (legal) entity.
As you've learned: it's the exact opposite. It's not a service: it's just software.
Mastodon fits in between (self)hosted solutions like Matrix, Postfix, IRC, XMMP/Jabber. It would be the odd one out between Twitter, Slack or Discord.
> The main one being discoverability.
And that's a valid concern to have as a dealbreaker. It's also an advantage that's innate to centralized, authoritative services. Storing millions of users in a single telephone directory vastly lowers the bar for discovery compared to a distributed system of telephone directories.
Then again, it's also a chicken and egg discussion. Centralization is a key driver that prompted hundreds of millions of users to flock together. Aspects such as ease of use, convenience and discovery are key conditions as well...
... but let's not pretend this is a net positive: we also experience the many downsides of having millions of people on a single platform that provides common denominator interfaces and policies for governing interaction.
In a federated environment with many instances, agency over governance is delegated again to the countless of small communities and tribes that generally tend to emerge organically in any social context.
Remember, back in the early days, between BBS'es, Usenet, online fora, IRC communities,... the fragmented nature of online communities in itself wasn't seen as problematic. On the contrary, if anything, the freedom to be able to start your own IRC channel or host your own forum was seen as a boon.
In that regard, I don't think that discovery should be treated as a zero sum game where the only logical conclusion is a silver bullet solution e.g. either a single centralized authority or a distributed ledger that acts as a single source of truth. Discovery is massively complex and relies on innate heuristics people have used since forever to find and interact with others. It's never a "solved problem".
That doesn't mean throwing up arms not investing in discovery tools. But rather acknowledging that discovery isn't necessarily worth a trade off against other key aspects of complex interpersonal relationships such as having agency to build your own community space, and self-reliance to implement your own set of policies allowing for governance
The same handle can be used on multiple servers within a federation. Search for @NASA and you'll find at least 4 accounts under that name on different servers making discernment as to which to follow quite a challenge.
On federated sites, you have to think of domain names as part of the username. The account isn't just @NASA. It is @NASA@mastodon.social, for example. This isn't even a new concept. NASA@gmail.com and NASA@outlook.com can co-exist. We just have to get used to it outside of Email.
I'm not sure but who really has lack of random contacts?
Maybe those vibrant meeting places could/should be a click away from my profile. In a walled garden that means in the same garden, behind the same wall. But in a free world it can be somewhere else. And as Ronald Reagan said: tear down this wall!
Strongly agreed. Also: no lists to be easily followed?
I found some account which creates curated lists for specific interests, but then you have to go through the list one by one to click follow... surreal.
They've recently added this to the iOS app. You can browse posts, hashtags, news articles and users. It shows users and posts from people you haven't followed in a seperate style of timeline. Not sure how they figure out who to show.
I hope Elon opens up the Twitter API and lets fully-powered 3rd party clients flourish.
Ideally, moderation policies and enforcement actions can be client-specific to some degree. Ultra woke or righty twitter can implement their own policies without losing out on the network effect of the greater network.
Ben Thompson has been crusading for this direction and it’s gain traction in free-speech circles
Twitter already works that way, the block feature is available to everyone. It doesn't make any difference to any small groups or to the greater network, moderation from the platform itself still has to happen to prevent damage to it.
You can just ignore what's being said in "free speech circles", those people have no idea what they're talking about. If they were actually trying to solve these problems they wouldn't be pursuing a solution that we already know doesn't work.
> You can just ignore what’s being said in “free speech circles”
The irony here is hilarious. This is the exact point people arguing against social media censorship are pointing out: if you don’t like it and the speech is protected under law, use your little block button and ignore it (rather than asking a social media company to ban it because it hurts your feelings).
I fail to see why. If you get your way, and all the "free speech" people get blocked because everyone else finds them insufferable, then that's exactly what you asked for. It's also incredibly bad taste and rude to suggest that blocking happens because things "hurt your feelings", please never utter that phrase in this context again. That's an extremely trollish way to approach conversation and you need to stop. Disagreement happens for other reasons besides "hurt feelings".
I think you do actually understand though that "just block it" is a bad strategy because this is fundamentally not how humans interact in a large group. Every person can't go through the trouble of vetting every single thing that's being said all the time. At some point you have to trust someone to tell you if someone else is being a jerk or not a jerk. And that's why it's weak to somehow try to turn this into an issue of "social media censorship". If blocking isn't censorship then this isn't censorship either.
> and all the "free speech" people get blocked because everyone else finds them insufferable
No actually. The problem with the pro-censorship people is that they don't just try to block people. Instead they try to get them kicked off of platforms.
The "free speech" circles just want to have the ability to be on the same platform, and talk to other people within that circle. If you don't want to listen to them, thats fine. They just want the ability to be on the same platform, and talk to the people who don't block them.
> Every person can't go through the trouble
That is why someone suggested allowing voluntary, 3rd parties tools. That way, everyone can get what they want. You can choose to use 3rd parties tools. And those who don't like those tools are free to not do so.
> At some point you have to trust someone
It is fine for you to personally trust someone to handling blocking for you. The issue is when you try to force everyone else to accept that same 3rd party.
If you can choose to use that censor, but other people can be on the same platform and choose to not do so, then everyone gets what they want.
You call the “free speech people” insufferable and say they have no idea what they’re talking about, yet say I’m the one being rude referring to offended people crying to Twitter to ban people because they can’t just ignore (as you suggested you’d do) the tweet they didn’t like?
If I don't like it, I don't want to use the platform, and I want the platform to know about it so they can decide whether it's speech they want to go shouting to the world. Social media companies have a right to speech too.
If you want the block button to be the way, everyone should start blocked from each other, with no option to start seeing each other's posts without both paying $100 to the platform, per relationship.
Discovery is the company's speech, and unrelated to the posters' protections. If you want one that doesn't have a company's speech involved, get the government to build a social media system, or just the one they already have: the post office
How do you handle this for yourself in the physical world? What do you do when you come across someone on a street corner with a megaphone shouting some insane nonsense?
"Ignore it/ mute it" is about what you read. "Censor it/report it" is about what others read.
For a silly example: you may block people who talk about moon landing not happening, but you censor people who suggests we should kill all the <insert group>.
You may be against or in favor of either but they are different things.
The argument is whether Twitter should be a public square. It's pretty ironic people are obsessed with the public square metaphor when American try their damned hardest to eliminate any public square via zoning.
I doubt, and not really concerned that Twitter will become a den for Nazis. If you look at the actions of the Twitter moderation team, you will find that they don't do all that much and in fact Twitter is pretty much self moderated. You get cancelled by the mob, not Jack Dorsey. It's this fact that should be watched - will Elon enforce free speech by silencing the mob of dissenting opinion?
This is how public squares actually operate. If I begin hollering at the top of my lungs in the middle of a public square either (1) everyone leaves or (2) I'm violently removed. I don't know what free speech haven people are looking for; even 4chan has rules.
There never were "public squares" on the internet. Every site has always been someone's private fiefdom. Every social media platform has always been a business, and no matter how big it is, it doesn't automatically become public property.
Also freedom of speech doesn't guarantee the right to a platform.
All this used to be common knowledge until a few years ago.
Nazi's rallying to kill Jews, or Jihadi to behead infidels, is not something that is normally allowed on a public square either. Does that make the entire public space in Western countries a Disneyland in your opinion?
Nazis rallying to kill Jews and Jews rallying to kill Nazis are allowed in different countries in different time periods and forbidden at different times or places.
Disneyworld not Disneyland or euro Disney. Disneyworld has a corporate vision of family, happiness which is at odds with the way they are run internally.
The problem is everyone has been burnt by this before. The moment you build a 3rd party solution, then they pull the API away from you 1-x years from now, your dead in the water. Thats not to say people wont give it a go, but I wonder how viable you can build an eco system onto of someone else's API?
The problem of third-party clients has always been more complicated than optimism of the will can solve IMO. Client specific moderation sounds like fodder for another set of messy congressional hearings. It can be done well of course. It would be interesting to hear the blockers the team sees internally and what is higher priority in their opinion.
Filter bubbles should just be a platform-wide thing applied to your experience. Everyone gets a mandatory set of filters for illegal things in their geo. Then you can add whatever you want and share the filter set with other like-minded people. “No conservatives” can be one filter pack, “no liberals” another. “No politics at all” could be yet another. Filters can be as simple as grep, could include ML stuff, or even have moderators.
> It's mainstream news outlets which amplified his every word
They do more than that…they intentionally feed him to keep him in the spotlight . I have seen certain “left leaning” news outlets actually try and prompt commentary out of him on topics he hasn’t really fixated on yet just to try and manufacture news and more controversy.
If you keep saying his name he’ll never go away. Maybe that’s what they want.
Normal people who dislike harmful propaganda that could as a side effect destroy their social media business along with the rest of the economy instead of an army of paid trolls trying to fill western governments with corrupt officials.
So a new wave of people can see how unusuable it is. I guess I'm not shocked that Mastodon has improved so little since I joined 6 years ago.
- The very first instance I joined within a few weeks of launch stopped existing within a year
- Maintainers of instances got into weird internet fights and started banning entire instances
- DMs can be read by practically anyone
- in 2022, still zero discovery
- in 2022, fairly poor UX on a variety of web UIs, terrible UX on mobile clients
Mastodon really isn't worth your time unless you prioritize true decentralization. Unfortunately that appears to work against the concept of "community" and good software design.
Mastodon's onboarding UX is an absolute fail... I just didn't have the patience for it do I doubt the casual users won't either. Once I had an account it got even worse, so it's very unlikely I'll login ever again. If that's supposed to be a twitter alternative I now understand there's no competition
I've been using mastodon over the last few days and the difference between tech twitter and mastodon tech instances are dramatic. People engaging with my content has gone way up compared to twitter. I feel like unless you have a ton of followers on twitter, you get completely lost in the shuffle. Joining smaller instances increases the chances that your post will get noticed.
Also, joining tech focused instances means the content you are reading is almost exclusively about tech. Twitter has mechanisms to filter the content you want, but it feels totally different and a little forced.
For example, my sidebar has entertainment news articles on Twitter. I don't want to see that crap on my page.
"Tech Twitter" has been heading towards lowest-common-denominator content targeted at beginners and wantrepreneurs, for a few years now. Those audiences engage a lot more. And it's easier to throw in click bait content or low-density information threads, because the audience cannot yet tell the difference.
How does one find the bigger Mastadon instances? They aren't even listed on this joinmastodon website. I know it is intentionally decentralized, but it seems like it can never catch on because it feels like 100s of separate websites. You have to make logins for every single one.
You don't. You join one - or host your own - and your mastodon instance is connected to the others. You can follow users on any other public mastodon instance.
unfortunately it is not like email. they don't block for spam, they block for things they don't like. i don't know if it is a cultural problem, or an consequence of the fact that mastodon started in the mid-2010s vs email which is ancient
And that would be fine if everyone ran their own servers. For a new user looking to create an account on someone else's server, it means that which one you pick matters and you need to know the admin policy, which makes "shopping" more difficult.
If Mastodon ever takes off for real, I expect that professionally run servers will be pretty popular.
You have to find a host that accepts content for all other nodes you care about. TheFoss server probably isn't carrying anthing adult. So you do need to host your own
It is federated like email so if you have an email (@gmail, @yahoo, @custom.domain, etc) they are all interoperable. (Modulo moderation / spam filters)
You don't have nor would be able to create an email address in all public email servers. (Without mentioning private/non-public email servers or personal/family ones of others)
I login to my old Mastadon account on some specific server then try to reply to someone on another one. It asks me for the domain I want to act from so I type it in. Click Proceed to reply and am greeted with an error screen saying something went wrong. I really want an alternative to Twitter, but using this site feels very abrasive.
The reply page is hosted on the remote instance often so they can show anything including an error page. I think qoto.org has some extra changes that make this a little more well behaved by hosting it locally (depending on which button you push.)
looks that there are some issues with the huge wave of new users. I have the same problem trying to reply or follow accounts from another few instances.
That depends on the nature of the problem. Solutions we've seen so far to problems of discoverability in massive amounts of content have been to use an algorithm of some sort to provide results either through searching, recommendations or both.
It seems like Mastadon or a 3rd party would have to come up with a novel, effective solution to the issue of content discover that no one else has found yet. It's not just about providing search results, but in general showing users what they might be interested. Right now that can be done via lists and directories that are still relatively small enough to browse a lot of it and get a general sense of a lot of what is there to choose from.
But maybe it doesn't have to solve that problem better than others have to avoid their pitfalls. The second link up in this thread is at least an open source search engine so the algorithm can be scrutinized. Even if they converge on similar content discovery solutions, as long as the search engines that pop up are open source then people can at least know how the results are weighted.
> It seems like Mastadon or a 3rd party would have to come up with a novel, effective solution to the issue of content discover that no one else has found yet
No ty!
Very happy with my home timeline and 'local' timeline, don't need anyone trying to get me addicted to something else.
While I certainly see the utility in truly global search / discovery systems (they're great!), all the big ones turn deeply abusive and manipulative in time, because they are all ranking systems of some kind, which can be gamed[1]. Nothing has ever fixed that issue, and I'm not sure it's possible to. Small communities can more reasonably deal with it by hand when necessary, so they can get closer to what they meant rather than what they said, which is what I think most people want/need.
[1]: "Closest text match" ranks in favor of both precise words and phrases, and commonly used ones (you can game it by being predictably-niche or by using the most used things). "Most recent" ranks heavily on frequency (game it by doing things a million times per day). "Page rank" is literally just a popularity contest, easily swayed by money and connections like all popularity. It doesn't matter what you're doing, you're promoting something and thus providing a way to control your promotion to determined parties.
Someday a tech giant will mainstream Mastndon by recentralizing it, either by (1) running a large enough instance that its gravity sucks in everyone else, or by (2) creating a service/client on top of Mastodon that creates a unified Mastodoniverse. Decentralized services don't become mainstream without restoring the user conveniences of centralization.
I have it open on another tab, I use it pretty much every day. I've built incredible friendships in there; And when I started I knew nobody on the protocol. A lot of the people I am mutuals with aren't even on the same instance as me; and yet, somehow I was able to find and connect with them. When they post things, I see it. When I post things they see it.
Like, what you are saying is so nonsensical as to be not even wrong.
I /think/ you are trying to say something about discoverability, but like, it's not really that hard. You can just watch the local or federated tabs, and if you see anything interesting check it out. If someone seems alright you might even reply to something they post. Pretty soon you are having conversations, and the people you follow are boosting other nice, interesting people onto your home tab. Next thing you know, you are part of a community. It's great!
And all of this happens without the need for some weird corporate overlord to try and mediate the experience
by way of manipulating you in order to keep you online longer so they can steal your data and shove ads down your optic nerves.
I think I'd prefer a website that is decentralized by being hosted in multiple places, but still a single instance. No single entity would control it, but everyone would go to a single location to view it.
Micro.blog works in a way somewhat similar to that. A very Twitter-like timeline is effectively centralized, but behind the scenes everything is built on open standards like Atom, webmentions, etc., and your "account" is actually just your own blog -- although that blog can be hosted (for $5/month) on Micro.blog itself. It has a web interface a lot like Twitter's, a first-party client and several third-party clients, and in most respects just a much nicer user experience than Mastodon.
On the flip side, Micro.blog has a very different culture than Mastodon seems to[1], makes some very opinionated choices that many people might not agree with (e.g., there's not only nothing like retweets, but likes and even followers aren't public information), and of course, the easiest way to use it costs money.
[1]: Yes, I know there are lots of instances with different cultures, but there really is a kind of left-wing anarchist vibe across a lot of Mastodon; it's hard to explain if you haven't experienced it. Micro.blog comes across as generally more gentle, very conversational, and more Gen-X than millennial, if that makes any sense. (If it doesn't, sorry. Again, hard to explain if you haven't experienced it.)
I've been on Mastodon since ~2016, and actively use it on a daily basis. I've seen how it works in detail. I've had numerous exchanges with developers and instance administrators.
I think your concern is highly valid. Mastodon is a protocol-based network, much as SMTP email, NNTP Usenet, HTML+HTTP Web, IRC-based chat, and others are and have been. It's susceptible to the same types of challenges which have either centralised or killed off those platforms.
You mention sheer size. That's only one option.
There's the old Triple-E: Extend, Embrace, Extinguish. Applied successfully by Microsoft to DOS, the Office Suite, and Web browsers. By Google to Web Search and Web Browsers, to email, and increasingly to Web design and hosting. By Slack to Web Messaging. By Facebook to social media.
There's the risk of small instances fading away (happened to me with Mastodon.cafe) or large ones being bought (Mastodon.cloud). There's the prospect of admins going rogue (witches.town). Or, from the Diaspora* world, of admins dying with no succession plan in place (pluspora.com).
There are the Four Horsement of the Infopocalypse: drug-dealers, money-launderers, terrorists, and pedophiles. That's largely what killed off Usenet: the inability to defend against either malicious use of networks or those who made hay of that use to advocate for the shutting down of those networks. (This was combined with the lack of a compelling business argument for keeping them operating.)
There may simply be the staling of the protocol and paradigm. Mastodon is fun and interesting, yes, but lacks robust search, filtering, and privacy-management tools (e.g., auto-expiring posts), as well as obvious issues in scaling. If, say, a manageable instance size is 10,000 users, and Mastodon is to scale to serve an appreciable fraction of the roughly 10 billion people worldwide --- each instance administrator needs to at least consider 10^(10-5) or 10^6 other server relationships. It's one thing to keep track of reputations of a few thousand other servers, it's another to deal with millions, absent some robust tools for management, reputation, appeal, and similar factors. (My suspicion is that some degree of hierarchy with intermediate "hub" servers would emerge at some point.)
That said: Mastodon has proved robust and resilient beyond the predictions of numerous early critics. Not without flaws and issues, but those have to date been surmounted.
If that 30,000 is mostly the kind of people that like to be shouty about their worldview being so correct while gloating at the removal of voices they don't like or won't tolerate, then I'm sorry for your gain.
Curious to see if this holds or if there's a deficit of ~30,000 in three months time...
Imho mastodon's got an onboarding problem since before you even start you have to decide where to make an account, a decision with unclear ramifications. That'll scare a lot of people off at step 1.
Unpopular opinion but here goes 1. UX is hopeless (menu on the right, post on the left? ) and different to be different (use common design patterns, don't re-invent the wheel to be different. User have expectations from other sites they use, don't violate them)
2. Onboarding unclear
3. Non-existent discoverability
4. Tons of different domains joinmastodon.org, mastodon.social, mstdn.social doesn't work nicely with password managers and difficult to remember which to go to login...
Sadly, it will enjoy a bump for a few weeks...and then float back into obscurity. In my eyes this is DOA in its current state.
It seems some people find this federation aspect "complicated" . To explain it simply, just think of it like email account. I might have a zoho account, you might have gmail, we can still talk to each other. A federated system is sort of like that. We all can get account(s) on various servers/service providers. We can talk to each other by using each other's "handle" (like email address). It's really that simply for a user.
If you want to selfhost, cloudron and yunohost have 1-click apps. Could not get any simpler with either of them.
I've also commented before as to why I don't believe decentralization is a solution to the problems of current social media and instead introduces problems of its own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513
> Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat.
This is correct. Communities grow around "something". Create an utility, a game, or anything, and you have a community form around it. It's impossible to replace facebook with a new facebook because people are already in facebook.
Mastodon , Matrix etc are missing this key feature: Make it dead-simple to integrate with an existing community. Let every wordpress site easily integrate their users with mastodon or matrix, and you will see adoption. As it stands right now, people don't have a real incentive to run a server, maintain a community, and possibly be legally liable for that community. So only the typical ideologues of OSS will run instances, and they will be extra cautious because for them it is only a hobby.
Yes to all of those. The only issue is some smaller instances with limited admin bandwidth might only federate automatically with larger, well moderated instances to help reduce their own moderation burden.
If you want to be well federated even with the smaller instances, you need to hang around for a while; build connections within the larger communities; then ask to federate with any smaller instances you want to connect directly with.
It seems like there's a lot of friction involved with connecting to the wider ecosystem. You can sign up to a smaller instance but then federating with others may be problematic. Or you can sign up to a larger one, but it seems like network effects might eventually have things evolve to just a few massive instances, somewhat defeating the purpose of decentralization. Or you can host your own, which would be a technical hurdle for many and come with its own burdens.
Twitter's censorship created the problem of echo chambers. Twitter was never full on hostile toward conservatives, it was more to do with specific issues/narratives.
Conservatives looked at mastodon. Mastodon was worse than twitter, conservatives never made it to mastodon. Mastodon was hostile toward conservatives and this was an unfortunate large mistake.
Conservatives built alternatives like parler or gab. But they failed because they were echo chambers.
>We’ve been steadily working towards the ultimate goal of providing a viable alternative to Twitter since 2016, and have proven the scalability and resilience of the platform through organic growth over the years.
Ironically many of these alternatives like gab stole Mastodon code to operate. Which is very interesting because why couldn't conservatives simply join the mastodon network? As an up and comer you would not only be best suited to invite anyone to your platform.
>listing only such servers that commit to standing up against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.
Mastodon will never be in the spotlight because they have fallen into the same echo chamber problems. Gab supports free speech? That must make them racist transphobes!
Looking at Gab and having your one takeaway be "free speech" is akin to looking at Russian news coverage and thinking "wow they really support the troops".
> Looking at Gab and having your one takeaway be "free speech" is akin to looking at Russian news coverage and thinking "wow they really support the troops".
Like their tag line is: A social network that champions free speech, etc etc.
Your complaint isn't that they don't support free speech but rather the echo chamber and toxicity that entails.
That's the real fear of what Elon is about to do. By allowing conversations to happen it will break the echo chambers of twitter and the left fears that greatly.
Yeah, Mastodon and most of it's clones are run by some of the worst sewage runoff from Twitter, who rampantly defederate and block any 'other' who encroaches on their echo chamber. I wish it wasn't the case, but sadly it is.
> Yeah, Mastodon and most of it's clones are run by some of the worst sewage runoff from Twitter, who rampantly defederate and block any 'other' who encroaches on their echo chamber. I wish it wasn't the case, but sadly it is.
I too wish it wasn't the case. They were uniquely capable of taking the position that Elon is now taking. They could have become a top player and decentralized social media. It could have been fantastic. How unfortunate that Mastodon was so hostile and basically eliminated their chance of being a top contender.
Mastodon reminds me of Woznaik's vision of what Apple should be and could be (in contrast to Steve's). It's totally awesome but lacks key insights of branding, marketing, and understanding users. This thing is built by geeks for other geeks.
There certainly is a role to be played by federated open-protocol communication in the future, but why limit your app to being a mere Twitter-clone? It will then always be worse than Twitter in terms of the quality of its network.
After having been reminded of Mastodon and the fediverse's existence, I decided to try setting up a server to go along with the rest of my self-hosted services. But kind of turned off from it all now, first tried using the Mastodon implementation, then Pleroma. Former was a complete non-starter behind a reverse proxy, way too heavy and not too useful documentation wise, latter at least worked enough to log in, but ran into some strange federation issue. In the end just nuked it all out of frustration.
I used to think that setting up matrix-synapse was unfriendly to users, but it's way friendlier than either of these.
This happens every time a company is acquired. I remember the “mass migration” when GitHub was acquired. In the end Gitlab did see some new users but GitHub remained on top.
Do exist some kind of blocklist services so all the bad mastodon postings and instances can be blocked easily? Mastodon is compared to email here, so it would be great to have blacklists, too.
Of course all kind of automated tools or services that helps to keep an instance clean would be very useful. Imagine "Fediverse Cleanup Service" where you can subscribe to "NSFW", "CP", "Right", "Left", "Spam", "Whatever" block lists.
Also big social networks could share their blacklists (as a service?) - selling ads and cleanup services will give them a good position in a world of decentralized platforms.
Does exist already a YC startup that does all this work?
It would be great to read about the differences to matrix.org - does anybody know a good explanation / comparison?
I can not decide which alternative to use because there are so many differences and I lost interest in researching all the details, so it would be great if somebody with knowledge would like to write about that and provide an overview.
As a user I would like to see a tool without censorship, but where I can ignore posters I do not like, where I still can find everybody, but also have private encrypted conversations with my peer groups and nobody is trying to profile me based on my interests. Ads would be ok, but no tracking (use tags for targeting, not user data).
In the US "toot" is sometimes used to mean "fart" so I can see why that might not get wide adoption. (Though it might be regional, and definitely more of a word to use with kids)
Toot is one of those words where context matters. No one confuses "toot your horn" to have anything to do with farts. It's like the words black and the word white --they can refer to color perception (though technically not colors) and they can also convey other associations, a few positive a few negative but have no relationship to the color itself. So it is with "toot". Toot may be used as a polite word substitute for fart in a specific context, but generally does not mean fart.
Also see punctuational period and menstrual period. I haven’t heard of any native speakers confusing that given context.
Only in some places is fanny associated with the buttocks. In other places it's associated with vaginas --which do "fart" in a way, but not the same way and it's not called a fart anyway.
I think we need something simpler than mastodon. Something like an extension of email, without instances acting as gatekeepers (don't they suffer the same problems as twitter when they block other instances?). There will be a lot of spam, sure, but there are creative ideas how to handle it, in fact the follower model reduces the capability to spam.
> Something like an extension of email, without instances acting as gatekeepers
Email has "instances" that act as gatekeepers. Gmail is one, Outlook is another, Fastmail is...
They are both federated systems and on these systems (email, fediverse, matrix, xmpp...) end users have accounts on servers that then connect between themselves to create the whole network.
The only difference is the underlying protocol and/or the main purpose.
and yet we rarely hear of gmail blocking accounts for political reasons , which happens all the time in mastodon. And, people switch to substack and newsletters to avoid being locked in twitter. I think the problem with mastodon is that instances want to be communities, while they should simply be a content-agnostic utility.
I think we need to treat social networking as part of messaging
Possibly not for "political" reasons, but it gets increasingly harder to be an independent mail operator. I've been running my own email cluster for over a decade, privately.
Some mail providers require you to contact them to get on an allowlist to even be able to deliver email at all. Others do not formally require that, but you may have to enroll in a postmaster programme in order to track your deliverability. Yet others there's no hope at all, except running after the most recent fad in spam fighting (like DKIM/DMARC/SPF etc.), only to find that even fully and correctly configured DKIM (which I don't like on my private email for many reasons) is by far no guarantee for not getting your email marked as spam (and thus, on some providers, hidden by default), even from IPs and domains which have had no spam emitted from them for many years.
So... Yeah. It's not heard of in the public media because those affected most by this don't have any leverage. The big mail service providers (MSPs) presumably have their agreements among one another to protect their business, but if you're just doing friends&family, good luck getting anything except an autoresponder when you run into troubles.
(To offset some of the criticism here, I have had very positive experiences with contacting postmasters of some large German email providers when issues happened, so there's that.)
Why is Mastodon so uncool? Is it the name? Is it the lack of cool people on Mastodon? Was it because of things like "toots?"
I love open source software as much as the next HN reader, but there's something so unappealing about not just Mastodon, but Matrix, and all the other social software out there today.
It hit the mainstream because news outlets started reporting "Celebrity-so-and-so said such-and-such on Twitter", and the constant barrage of this free advertising eventually resulted in brand name penetration.
Meanwhile, celebrities used Twitter because they read on the news of other celebrities using it.
Ah, that's true. I also remember for a brief bit 24 hours news channels trying to fill time would report on a story and then watch the tweets & comment on user's reactions. It was very weird, but on reflection that seems about the time it exploded in popularity, and large events would urge you to tweet a specific hashtag to try to get on the front trending page.
Yep. Just like Tiktok. One day it wad mentioned in an article as something kids use, next day it's being mentioned by every journalist, next day it's mainstream.
Many of the people interested in independent communities and federation are not interested in the format of Twitter, which leaves Mastodon (and the other major Mastodon-likes) to soak up the types who want an exclusive hugbox that they can totally control and block wrongthink in.
They come after the incumbent and feel like a copycat. They also solve problems most people don't know they have, and thus are unattractive (at large scale).
When it comes to Matrix, my problem with it is that it's just too damn big and complex compared to the actual problem I want it to solve and no doubt comes with a huge attack surface. In contrast, something like IRC or SMTP is so much simpler and we have multiple battle-tested implementations.
for me it s because they are copycats not original ideas. they are trying to copy twitter, but twitter as-is can't be decentralized, if it could it would already have.
then, they are not content agnostic. my email , even gmail, won't deny delivery of messages because of its politics. Mastodon and matrix people seem to be going down the same dark path of blocking each other. that is not just unfortunate, it is a red flag to stay away
"Twitter buyout puts Mastodon into spotlight" says Mastadon in a PR piece
I dont use Twitter- quit 6-7 years ago due to the toxicity-- but I never understood the charm of "federated"-- I now have to join 22 different Mastadons, each with their own logins and rules, just to keep up with people, many of whom arent even on Mastadon?
> The news of Elon Musk buying Twitter has put Mastodon into the public spotlight as an alternative social network, rapidly exploding our growth with over 30,000 new users in just a single day.
How many users does Mastodon have in total? I don't want to sound dismissive, but based on that number it seems like they probably have like a million or so, which is kind of disappointing compared to the size of Twitter…
> Signal was downloaded by 17.8 million users over the past seven days, a 62-fold rise from the prior week, according to data from Sensor Tower. WhatsApp was downloaded by 10.6 million users during the same period, a 17% decline. (January 13, 2021)
Me and all my friends have used signal for years. What do you mean you gave up? I've never had any issues and it beats the hell out of text. Like I said, I communicate with probably 15 people at least daily consistently via IM and 3 of those are text the rest signal.
My entire family, most of my friends... I hardly ever get a regular SMS, usually it's spam or a company message.
Granted I did a little bit of work to convince them, but "you can use it on your computer and do video calls with your phone number" was good enough, even if vaguely inaccurate. It's much more functional than SMS.
But that's also in the US, I think other apps are more popular plenty of places which are just as much better than SMS anyway. Signal I think has good adoption in the US because the competitor was so terrible.
> The most common apps chosen as alternatives were Telegram and Signal, mostly because of their privacy and security features. However, almost a third of the participants that tried to switch chose to move to either Facebook Messenger or Instagram.
> 25.97% of participants wanted to switch to other apps but only 0.5% uninstalled WhatsApp ... If we translated this result to the entire population of WhatsApp users (approx. 2 billion), we’d be talking about 500 million users trying to flee from WhatsApp, and only 10k uninstalling it.
In this researcher's own words: "It looks like WhatsApp is the place to chat with anybody, making it particularly hard to leave."
For instance I switched to signal and use it regularly, but keep whatsapp on my phone for a few contacts I might need a few times per year. Whether it is uninstalled seems like the wrong metric and does not say anything about signal usage.
no chance. signal performs the same function as whatsapp. it’s nearly 1:1. mastodon and twitter are not interchangeable. there is nothing sticky about a free chat app
Add to that. I signed up years ago but have long lost my account. Furthermore, because there is no one true server, why not have multiple addresses on multiple instances, like you would with email?
I've only been on mastodon for a couple of days, but it reminds me of the early days of twitter. The old twitter that I was missing. Not having 217M users can be viewed as a feature for some of us.
Each time an exodus happens in reality the users 'said' they would leave only come back after a few months. Mastodon did not gain significant retaining users after #deleteFacebook, #deleteInstagram and #leavingTwitter trended.
It is not "early days" and anything compared to being 'A viable Twitter alternative' other than Facebook and Instagram has only shown themselves to be a complete failure. Just like how Gab (another alternative) with roughly the same number of active and registered users as Mastodon also failed to be a viable Twitter alternative since that has instead turned into another echo chamber but including the undesirables putting off many users on Twitter from moving.
Mastodon as far positioning itself as being 'A viable Twitter alternative' after 6 years of existence has failed to gain any significant amount of former Twitter users or traction. After 6 years, it isn't early days.
> like a million or so, which is kind of disappointing compared to the size of Twitter…
My first impression of mastodon is that it's a lot like the early days of twitter. I kind of miss that era of twitter and am looking forward to moving over to mastodon.
While there is a research-stage P2P effort for it[0], Matrix is federated in a conceptually similar way to ActivityPub (the federation protocol of Mastodon et al).
Isn't the entire point of Mastodon to do exactly what Elon Musk is buying Twitter to do? Like how does the buy out of Twitter push people to Mastodon, if anything it'd bring people back from Mastodon to Twitter.
About as effectively as Mastodon has prevented pedophiles from using and abusing it: through the thankless efforts and the abuse of volunteer moderators on major instances, and in no meaningful way anywhere else.
What does your comment even mean? A lot of people get angry about a lot of things but the solution is what exactly? Based on your statement I would assume your suggestion is "they shouldn't be free to have their own rules and do what they want" because...?
generally, subcultures will focus themselves on their own instances, and implement moderation policies there that support their goals. as long as nobody provides sufficient consequences, any use of any software is easily possible, including organized hate on the fediverse.
if you don't want to see them, they can be mass-ignored at the stroke of a menu, by your moderation team or yourself as a user. if you don't want them to organize their own spaces, you'll have to do something more than use software.
after that, it's important to remember anyone anywhere may still see any content you post publicly.
it's worth noting there is no accepted approach to this for corporate social media, either, and it can't be resolved given the current legal and political landscape. but at least in a federated space, you get to choose your moderators, they are generally more accountable to you in a personal sense, and your instance should remain small enough that nobody will care whose speech you suppress.
if they could prevent that then that would defeat the entire purpose. fortunately it is federated, so you can run your instance however you please with whatever rules you want.
Effectively yes, though the general perception is that this is an advantage rather than a drawback.
Networking, telecoms, and the Internet all tend to erase space and topology. Relatonships of federation, following, muting, and blocking re-impose a topology. It's not necessarily geographic, but it exists and it profoundly affects information flows through the network.
Put another way, on both Mastodon and Twitter, there is the ability to block or mute other profiles. This creates interesting dynamics about where information does and does not flow, and who has control over that.
In the case of Mastodon, there's additional refinement to that control in that individual instances can set several levels of resistance or friction between other peer instances. Posts might simply be muted on the public timeline, or an instance might be entirely blocked. What levels of moderation are enacted and which instances are affected varies by instance. One consequence is that an instance administrator bears consequences of their own actions regarding moderation and permitted / tolerated behaviour, as other instances may determine their own interactions on account of such behaviour.
In practice, what I've noticed across several social networks, having a blocking mechanism, is that the old saw holds true: friends come and go, blocks accumulate.
In the case of Google+, a network I both participated in and studied reasonably extensively, one of the greatest predictors for whether or not an account was closed or banned was how active it was. The higher the level of activity, to a large extent, the greater the odds of it later not existing. This was based on a few snapshots I'd made and/or explorations of high-profile accounts. I suspect mechanism tended both to be burnout by some high-profile users and tendency for such usage to violate site norms (spam, abuse). It was interesting to see though.
A lot of instances (specially the bigger ones) have banned alt-right and fascist instances; most instances are either with good moderation or none at all.
You can search hashtags, but not everyone uses hashtags. And the results that appear seem to be most recent, and not most liked or most boosted. It requires a lot of "work" to find interesting people and/or friends on the platform. And most people don't have time for that extra "work."
I'd like it more if I could see what's trending, but only if I specifically seek out what's trending.
Also on my Galaxy Tab S7 in portrait mode, a breakpoint is preventing the search field from appearing. I have to shrink Firefox a bit for the search field to appear. Took me a day before I figured that one out.
Outside of those issues, it has potential. I love everyone having a chronological feed.