You know, if you move around the 'just' in this title, it changes the meaning of the title to almost every opinion I've seen about Mastodon and Twitter
Just Mastodon Isn’t a Replacement for Twitter
Mastodon Just Isn’t a Replacement for Twitter
Mastodon Isn’t Just a Replacement for Twitter
Mastodon Isn’t a Just Replacement for Twitter
Mastodon Isn’t a Replacement Just for Twitter
Mastodon Isn’t a Replacement for Just Twitter
Mastodon Isn’t a Replacement for Twitter Just
It's meant to convey a sense of defeat. So in this case the sentence would read as implying that the author wanted Mastodon to replace Twitter but that it's not able and that fact is causing her emotional pain.
I've taken to suggesting people read https://mastodon.help/ before they bother. It's not perfect, either, but I like to kid myself that it helps avoid the "I DEMAND THAT THIS BE LIKE TWITTER" thing.
They do that kind of gymnastics because they can't have (pawoo.net and) mstdn.jp and half of top instances[0] by post counts to be representative of the name. That will kind of push the platform into where Twitter is, just later, maybe following NovelAI.
yah, there's no instance called Mastodon, Mastodon we can consider at the meta transcendent level of the universe of instances. The union of each essentially.
I find much the same mindset among many Windows users who try to switch themselves over to Linux. They come in expecting Linux (a Unix alike) to be exactly like a "free Windows", which it simply is not and never was but that's what they think it is for some reason. I always make it a point to explain up front that Linux is an entirely different operating system, and while there will be similarities that will be immediately obvious, Linux is not a Windows-alike, and there will be learning and adapting involved. Folks who go into such changes knowing what to expect tend to cope far better with the differences than those expecting something to be an identical clone of what they're already familiar with. I assume the same likely holds true here as well. Those who go in expecting exactly Twitter, but free and distributed / decentralized are going to be sorely disappointed, but those going into it knowing to expect differences won't be caught by surprise the first time they are confronted with something that doesn't operate exactly as they thought it would.
I checked it hopefully... But it's basically a small book, or at least the huge TOC makes it look that way. I don't think I would share that with someone unless they're really interested in mastodon.
I've been meeting a lot more really cool people on Mastodon than I have in the entire 15+ years I was on Twitter. Discussions end up much more civil, everyone has been friendly so far. It's just really chill not having an algorithm push outrage topics to bump engagements.
Not to worry. There's nothing inherent in the platform that encourages to be more civil and friendly other than established cultural norms that will soon be trampled by the influx of new users if things continue on the current trajectory.
I wouldn’t call this a new community though. A lot of people I’ve talked to have been on the platform for years now. I think it has more to do with the heavier moderation and whole hateful instances being blocked.
I think non-commercial status is also an important factor.
It doesn't need to aim for hockeystick growth or guard its data to create value for investors. It doesn't need to manipulate users for high engagement metrics to impress advertisers.
Funny you say that. Now that Mastodon is gaining some popularity, people are finally starting to realize how chatty the servers are, and some popular bloggers are already complaining about being DDOS'd by the mere fact they got post with a link triggered a cascade of simultaneous requests from +1900 servers.
Personally, I started to look at nostr [0]. It gets rid of this idea of decentalization-by-federation and makes nodes mere relays of information. The architecture is infinitely simpler and it a lot easier to scale. I'm wondering how easy it would be to fork an Mastodon/ActivityPub client and make it work with a nostr relay, and I will probably take the christmas break to add a nostr relay to communick.
Diaspora came out with a lot of bravado and hype. The founders openly targeted Facebook and its data exploitation in their messaging. It was over engineered for its time, misfired on its benefits (you can install your own instance! Still a problem with fediverse devs), and when it failed, people piled on. I only found recently it was still going and was surprised.
By "successful", did you mean from a technical/engineering perspective, or do you mean that one software stack (and instances that use said software) has been able to attract more newbies?
Successful in getting the technical/engineering working in a timely manner that people would want to actually use it. It seemed to flop pretty hard when the original founder(s) (at least one) committed suicide right as they were starting.
Having long been on both Diaspora* (since 2011) and Mastodon (2016), some observations:
- Both are useful. They serve different use-cases. There are elements of each I like and ... am frustrated by.
- Mastodon is mostly short-form content analagous to Twitter, and strongly favours media (images, video). Other thread participants are not notified of new replies unless specifically tagged within it.
- Diaspora* supports longer-form, formatted (Markdown) posts, with a single time-ordered discussion below which can be moderated by the post's author. Participants are notified of additional comments within a thread, and can return to it, even after years.
- Those two distinct formats already strongly shape the type and nature of discussions found on each.
- Mastodon has seen vastly more development, including addressing several issues I've long had both specific to Mastodon (CW behaviour is ... improving, though I've still got concerns) and both platforms (Mastodon now supports edits to existing toots, Diaspora* ... does not). By comparison, Diaspora*'s development is all but moribund.
- Mastodon's developers have been far more responsive, and empathetic, than Diaspora*'s. How much of this is just green-behind-the-ears freshness I'm not sure.
- Mastodon presents non-members with useful information. Visit an instance and you can actually see activity and discussion on that instance. Hit up a Diaspora* instance and ... you're given a big Fuck You with a registration sign-up.
- Neither platform is especially search-friendly, either on-platform (both support only Hashtag search) nor through third-party general Web search. Diaspora* seems all but entirely opaque on that point, Mastodon ... at least surfaces some content.
- Diaspora*'s original, oldest, and largest instance went titsup.com earlier this year, after years and years of all-but-absent management and oversight. Even the contact emails and forms were offline for years before the instance died. Another large instance, created by and for refugees from Google+, ceased active operations after its administrator died unexpectedly (also after a long period of radio silence). Mind I've had a couple of Mastodon instances fold under me and/or show sketchy management as well. Bus factor and continuity planning are major issues on both platforms, and seem almost entirely unconsidered.
- Diaspora*'s total MAU is a small fraction of Mastodon's. There are a number of people I appreciate greatly on Diaspora*, but it's ludicrous to suggest that there's a substantial community of any sort.
- Diaspora*'s abuse tools are if anything even more rudimentary than Mastodon's. One of the principle mechanisms are private lists of abusive / spamming profiles maintained and privately posted by individuals within their own groups. Admins can do some instance blocking, but ordinary members cannot. An "ignored" profile still sees content posted by the ignoring party, and the ignored's comments on third-party posts are still visible to the ignoring party. (There may be reasons and arguments in favour of this, but the functionality is unexpected and confusing to many.)
what is the incentive for anyone but the technology adopter or politically inclined to move from Twitter to Mastodon? For almost all users, Twitter is free, and has all the users?
The only reason I've heard someone suggest to move from Twitter is because the new owner opened his mouth about political views.
- No opaque algorithm that can not be tuned by the user. Okay, Mastodon has only one "algorithm" (aka reverse chronological order) but there is nothing stopping us from developing clients (user-agents) that filter the timeline according to what we think it's important. [0]
- Who cares about "all the users"? The important thing is that the you can connect, follow and interact with a large-enough group of interesting people. Even if the whole network has "only" 8M people, my timeline on Mastodon has certainly become more interesting than the twitter one.
Most of the interesting data mining happens at the client, not the server.
- I can not put tracking cookies on other people's clients. Twitter puts tracking cookies, can collect location data, can get your contact list...
- If any instance starts manipulating messages from its users to add tracking redirections, people would immediately lose trust over it and drop it. With twitter, there is absolutely nothing you can do and people treat t.co as an inevitable necessity.
- Even if someone went on to analyze the data and tried to use in the messages to give people personalized ads in some custom client, what would be the incentive for people to stick to it? If the publisher wants to have a business model where they want to share ad revenue with the users, they might as well go with something like Brave.
At the server level, nothing. What they're not getting though is the tracker data from all the _other_ places that the users of that instance go to. It really is refreshing to pull up uBlock, and see... zero. Just nothing at all that needs to be blocked.
Nothing, really, except that there's less data to mine. And, of course, if it's not part of the base software, they have to do all the coding themselves. And to what end? If they run ads, users will bail to another server, because they can.
They could also show ads in some fashion I suppose. Only thing you could do is move to another server - but at least you can do something other than leave the whole platform.
The new owner has a lot to say about Twitter being a "public square". Not just a public square, but the public square. In the real world, a public square works (in general) because it is owned and operated by the public, not by a single private, for-profit corporation run by a megalomaniac. Twitter was terrible to begin with and we should never have allowed it to happen, and I do kind of disagree with the idea that Musk's takeover has changed all that much at this point (beyond abusing thousands of employees and somehow politicizing the myth of the 10x developer). I think what it has done is provided a big enough spark that a lot of people noticed this is kind of a problem.
For people that use Twitter but care about their public square on the internet being slightly more sustainable and human-scale, Mastodon's model makes a lot of sense. Mastodon provides the tool for building your networks, making it possible for small organizations to run instances basically as utilities. I'm particularly excited for the co-ops I've seen in this space.
> a single private, for-profit corporation run by a megalomaniac
Can you be a bit more specific? This literally applies to the top 6 media corporations, Amazon, several banks, and pretty much every other large corporation.
I moved to Mastodon for political / philosophical reasons (I favor decentralized infrastructure, grass-roots initiatives, libre software, etc.) but I'm staying ... because the content is better. On Twitter I get memes, drama, crypto scams, politics, tons of content from people that I'm not following, and, did I mention memes? On Mastodon I find precisely the stuff that I was hoping to find on Twitter when I joined 10 years ago: information from experts about the things they are experts on. Is Mastodon going to replace Twitter? I hope not! I see Twitter's role as giving a home to junk content, so that people in other places like Mastodon can have a some fun.
Gab is the sink for junk content and eye-bleach-worthy content. Twitter is a distant second. Thank the lord for Gab and Twitter for taking the hit to spare the other online communities a bit.
I think the new owner has certainly been the spark here but there are real benefits to moving too that people are starting to notice. Replies here already cover a bunch of them but I’d like to echo the “algorithm” point too: so far my experience has been substantially less toxic and I put that in large part down to not being fire-hosed with content designed to enrage me every time I log in.
So far my experience is reminding me of 1990’s style connecting and chatting with interesting random people from around the world who are friendly and quirky, and I find being there a “nice” experience.
twitter is almost completely hollowed out for me already, so that's all the incentive i need. additionally, i don't want to participate in a social network where the only moderating philosophy is "is it legal or not". that's just bad community management.
Because Twitter has all the users, it is the pool that politicians, marketing consultants, and scammers can most efficiently piss in.
If they have to split their efforts among 10,000 independent groups, maybe the EV-chasers will go away and people will talk about things other than the latest scandal or movie.
With automation, targeting micro-communities is easy enough, especially when they all speak the same protocol. At the same time, you don't have a massive anti-spam team defending the platform, but instances can probably introduce small variations (like a honey-pot url-field in a contact form that immediately cuts spam frequency by 99% for most sites).
Twitter is heavily in debt. It's losing more money to interest than it has been earning, even before Elon shat on advertisers.
I don't expect Twitter to go bankrupt, but it will need desperate measures to stay afloat. When it'll come to "either we do this or we go bust", they won't stop at anything. It's likely going to be a massive sell-off of user privacy on a scale that will make people run to Facebook for safety.
For a long time, Twitter/Reddit/FB have been echo chambers of one view and banning everyone questioning even a little bit. At this point, I think everything is better than those, small communities of real people focused on intesrests. G+ had a lot of inspiring REAL people and communities and I see that Mastodon taking that place while it is not yet infected by the mass-trolling campaigns yet.
Has it still? A lot of interesting people I used to follow on Twitter either don't post much there anymore or straight out deleted their accounts when moving to Mastodon. I haven't deleted mine, but I certainly feel much less inclined to cross-post things to Twitter anymore as well.
Twitter has all the users but is rather manipulative and high profile users start to form a toxic pseudo-relationship with the corporate(I’m convinced it’s mutual). So like a typical future ex they tend to mention Mastodon now and then.
> The only reason I've heard someone suggest to move from Twitter is because the new owner opened his mouth about political views.
So. I've been on Twitter 15 years, since early 2007. I feel a lot of affection to it in some ways, but particularly over the decade, it has become in many ways a pretty unpleasant experience. And yet I was still there. Matt Levine on Twitter:
> My favorite might be Ben Thompson’s rather bearish post, which argues essentially that Twitter is a very unpleasant product that most people do not want to use, but is extremely appealing and addictive to a small minority of us with significant personality flaws.
He's probably not wrong.
Elon has either promised to, or already has, made the site worse in a number of ways:
- The paid checkmark thing. People who pay for this will, Musk has promised, have their tweets essentially boosted by the algorithm. Frankly, I don't particularly want to hear from the sort of person who's buying the checkmarks, and paying for attention is a corrosive design dynamic. Even dating apps, which invented it, at this point mostly realise it can only be used sparingly without destroying the experience (for instance, Grindr has a thing where you can pay a couple of euro to appear higher in the grid of people than you should for an hour or something, but not permanently, because then the grid would be permanently full of the sort of people who pay for attention, and no-one wants that.)
- He's bringing back all manner of complete monsters. There are the big high-profile ones, of course, but also thousands of local monsters. Irish twitter got a lot better a few years back when a couple of prominent local Neo-Nazis were sent on their way, say. Twitter moderation was already too lax; this is very much going the wrong direction.
- A lot of the people I liked following have either already left, or are much less active.
- I find Elon personally extremely irritating, and there's just no escaping him on Twitter right now.
After 15 years, I'm basically done. I'm keeping the account for now (you never know; there's a bit of a history of social media sites being re-sold after a bad acquisition), but Mastodon is now filling the gap for me. It's pretty good; there are some annoyances, but in general it scratches the same itch as Twitter without a lot of the irritants.
I do think one mistake Elon makes is that he seems to think everyone loves Twitter. My suspicion is that most Twitter users, or at least most heavy users, find Twitter barely tolerable, but addictive. It doesn't take much to make people in that situation say "screw this".
Isn’t Mastodon moderation similar to subreddits? I.e. the owner of the server is the one who decides what’s allowed and what not? I find it very problematic
Your handle consists of your alias and your home instance. ie, "@sohcahtoa82@nerds.social"
If I want to move to another instance, say, jocks.social, then my handle would become @sohcahtoa82@jocks.social, and that's assuming @sohcahtoa82 wasn't already taken on jocks.social.
Somewhat correct. The challenge becomes informing your followers of your new account.
Instance mods can block entire instances, making it possible for an instance (or set of instances) to become isolated from the rest of the Fediverse. At that point, those instances might as well be a completely different site, since they'll no longer communicate.
And I somewhat expect that to happen. Many instance admins will block instances that become known to be cess pools of hate speech.
Your old one doesn't go away unless you delete that account. You don't automatically get to keep your old handle on the new server because it may already be taken (handles aren't unique across the entire network), but if it isn't you can keep it by normal registration.
It's like email. You can keep your username if no one else is already using it on the new instance/mail server. The part after the username is different for each instance/mail server, like hotmail.com and gmail.com email addresses are different instances.
Nope, you can't move posts. You can redirect your followers, but only if you still have access to your old account. If your mod unfairly bans you you can't migrate away.
While we're on the topic of social media I'd like to remind everyone that Discord won't let you delete older messages without the risk of getting banned with no appeals process. So if you were considering leaving Twitter or Mastodon for Discord, DON'T.
> So if you were considering leaving Twitter or Mastodon for Discord, DON'T.
It's puzzling to me that "Discord" is even in the same sentence as Twitter or Mastodon. It serves an entirely different use case, being designed for real-time communication.
Mastodon isn't a replacement. You can be on both platforms at once. Yes, an outrage or drama event violating trust will be what shifts people away from a platform.
Why Mastodon isn't as large as twitter is a question by itself. Twitter's continued existence doesn't matter.
'As media scholar Victor Pickard suggests, “Hopefully Twitter’s collapse will lead to a more expansive conversation about the relationships between capitalist imperatives and the communication [and] information needs of democratic societies.”
As users begin migrating to the noncommercial fediverse, they need to reconsider their expectations for social media — and bring them in line with what we expect from other arenas of social life. We need to learn how to become more like engaged democratic citizens in the life of our networks.'
All right, running with this: corporate sponsored "public spaces" aren't really public (as they are capitalist entities). Let's add "Conway's Law" [1.] to this, and extrapolate that perhaps democracies currently are repeating the design of the communication structures that comprise it (of which there are myriad, but assume the largest/loudest have more sway). Let's pick one nation, the US, and question: is the US democracy constrained by the current corporate-sponsored public-spaces/communication structures (which have been old media, i.e. print, but seems now new media, i.e. all online). A 'fediversification' of the public mind seems really important here, the question is how far can/does it go (techno-first generations seems fine, but let's say baby-boomers perhaps not so much?).
I'm curious what others think about this, and what resources can be shared to provide more insight into this question.
[1.] Conway's Law: “Organizations, who design systems, are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
I really don't get this concern. Web hosting is cheap. Like, astonishingly cheap. Mastodon instances take up a couple GB of RAM, some storage, and relatively light bandwidth. I would be shocked if an instance cost more than $40/month to host, and I'd reckon the typical instance is less than $20/month.
That's the sort of money people happily pour into hobbies without a second thought. Collectively my Discord server of like 30 people pay more than that on their premium offering. All it takes is one person in your community to foot a relatively trivial bill. Or, orchestrate a Patreon or similar.
> I would be shocked if an instance cost more than $40/month to host, and I'd reckon the typical instance is less than $20/month.
That information is public for at least one moderately popular instance, fosstodon.org. According to https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/#current-funding the current cost is $1895.50 per month, plus $200.00 for the CDN. (And yes, last time I looked, their Patreon is going to be more than enough to cover that.)
This is something I’ve been feeling “all along”, but clearly the mental image of a typical Twitter use cases varies too much between stakeholders e.g. Mastodon backend devs, frontend Twitter app devs, casual users and heavy users. And Twitter employees, too.
To an addict like I am, Twitter timeline is something measured in tweets per second. It is a constant flow, a time synchronized operation, not something that I expect to be event based.
Mastodon devs and ActivityPub spec devs must have a complete opposite of that, that users only post content when there is something to say, and the post will be pushed when a post was made.
The latter model is certainly doable with the ActivityPub protocol, $20/month budget, and by stretch can be handled by Mastodon as it is built. But I think there is this misunderstanding, and it just seems that none of it is built to cater for those with the former model.
> Hopefully Twitter’s collapse will lead to a more expansive conversation about the relationships between capitalist imperatives and the communication [and] information needs of democratic societies.
Key word being "hopefully". People either don't understand or care about the power differentials that these mega corps perpetuate and how it affects us, especially long term. People dislike Musk as a person, they'll be happier than ever jumping in bed with any other megalomaniac billionaire as long as they have the self-restraint to hide their cynical worldview.
This doesn't mean that federation, decentralization and privacy is dead in the water, but it does mean that the stakes are high, and you need to offer a better product than what ad-tech bloat gives you today, so it's certainly not impossible. You need critical mass, ease of use, technical simplicity and resilience against abuse, and then strike at a good opportunity for mass migration.
I don't think Mastodon today fulfills any of the criteria, let alone the core privacy features that are difficult to retrofit. I also don't think it ever will, because the OSS style governance model always leads to hard-to-use products and fractured communities whenever large and difficult decisions need to be made. (That doesn't mean that the fediverse can't be an excellent refuge for geeks and certain niches, which is great both for them and an incredibly useful lesson for future projects!)
Realistically, I think the Signal model is our best bet, given the world today. An ideologically convinced medium sized business/foundation built on OSS tech, with decently aligned incentives, but that respects UX enough to build a product that everyone can use.
It seems like this is going in a similar direction as suburbia and HOAs to me.
You'll join a community subject to agreements that are periodically renegotiated, but those negotiations and the resulting enforcement will be done by idle members rather than those too busy to notice minor infractions. Likely a better fit with human psychology than living in a monolithic and decaying walled-garden, but also likely to result in spaces where people largely talk about what they do outside of them. Some people will still commute for business and will bring their cultural conflicts with them.
Suburbia and HOAs are at least somewhat coercive because they're tied to very expensive assets, and there's also an implication that you belong to essentially one of them.
There's no reason for that in the decentralized space. As a side effect of my oft-repeated belief on HN that I'm not convinced that a centralized single massive community of everyone is even really possible, expressed well prior to Elon buying Twitter, I have no presence on any of the major social media sites. I have many communities. HN is merely one of them. Each of them has a different social contract. Many of them are mutually contradictory in that either the implicit social mores or explicit social rules would exclude each other if taken in their totality... this is less impressive or weird than it sounds, the moreso as you take more and more restrictive views of what constitutes a "match".
This is, in my opinion, normal. It reflects the reality I live in. What is mandatory and verboten at the grocery store, the strip joint, your kid's school concert, a college classroom, etc. all differ intrinsically, and there's no getting around that. The attempt to jam the entire Internet into one walled garden was always doomed to failure, by its very nature. I think that while there are always technical pulls to centralization, and marketing/capitalistic pulls to centralization, in the end, the social pressures that make it impossible to control everyone in one space will always win out. I expect we're in a multi-decade decentralization here... not necessarily to the extreme that everyone runs their own instance, sure. But the idea that we can all agree on a very small set of social websites, and we will all agree that Silicon Valley Liberalism is the One True Social Contract is an absurd illusion brought on by too much VC money, just one more victim of the end of 0% interest rates.
So as the Twitter culture shock spreads out, I would say, the next culture shock thing to break is the idea that you have "one" social media presence or that such a thing is necessarily possible. Prepare for the Internet to spin out and once again match the reality of the real world, with different spaces for different purposes. You may not be able to have "one" identity any more than you can live in one social space in the real world. Indeed, the entire idea is kind of silly in the end.
I see famous journalists and celebrities talking about it, but not really any ordinary people. If "can be purchased by a crazed billionaire and taken over by nazis [1]" is now something we have to worry about, the financial model of Post does not seem to have any particular protection against that, where it took money from Andreessen Horowitz [2] just to get started - the same people who helped [3] Musk take over Twitter.
People on the left aren't opposed to free speech, they're opposed to hate speech.
FS is about not being jailed for, or prevented from, expressing political ideas. It's not about being able to call someone the N word without repercussions. Conflating the two is asinine
I've noticed a marked uptick in traffic on my Twitter feed over the last week or so. A couple of weeks ago my feed was a ghost town.
I haven't followed anyone new, so this traffic is coming from people who stopped posting for a bit and then returned. Some of them I know are crossposting from mastodon, but not all of them.
Could also be something behind the scenes failing at Twitter, I saw tons of horror stories in recent weeks that people found faded out friends on Twitter, who were in fact actively posting but somehow masked out of timeline and search.
Perhaps, but before everyone disappeared there were plenty of "goodbye, cruel world" type posts. I think some of it is just that people saw the whole thing didn't implode and either got back to using it and/or didn't like the alternatives much.
Personally have been splitting time between Twitter & Mastodon, although using Twitter more. Mastodon has a higher percentage of my high quality follows but a lot of them either dont post much there or are crossposting to Twitter anyways. And I prefer Twitter the application a heckuva lot more than Mastodon.
