6 ms·

A Mastodon-exclusive week

57 points by blinry 9y ago

dkhenry 9y ago
I don't like the idea of walled gardens and echo chambers, which is the major benefit Mastodon is providing over Twitter. Already this isn't morphing into a community where people have more control, its encouraging people to insulate themselves into communities where everyone thinks the same way and dissenting opinions can be squashed by the site moderators. I would like to think this kind of freedom would lead to greater exchange of ideas and open lines of communication, but everything I have seen online points in this going the opposite direction.
- darkengine 9y ago
  That is my biggest concern with the health of the GNU Social network at the moment. Some operators of popular nodes are configuring their nodes to reject messages from all users of some other nodes, which they deem to be housing undesirables. I think people have forgotten the origin of John Gilmore's famous quote, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." He wasn't talking about the people of the internet (though I believe he later said it wouldn't be wrong to interpret it that way), but the way the Usenet network would find a way to pass messages across the network, even when some Usenet node operators decided there were messages they didn't want to pass. Those who do not learn their history...
- cemerick 9y ago
  The whole premise of federation is that you're not limited to talking with those on your home instance. What about Mastodon will yield more insular experiences than Twitter? As it is, the fact that I can see and interact with people on the local and federated timeline (much like one used to in the oldold days of the twitter firehose) means I am in _less_ of an echo chamber than I am on twitter, in every sense. Your definition of "dissenting opinions" is essential to this. If it's "genuine points of conflicting dialogue", I don't see any squelching of that in the slightest. If it's "hate speech, advocation of violence, etc", then yeah, that stuff has been shut down pretty hard, and I'm happy for it.
  - dkhenry 9y ago
    Mastodon will yield a more insular experience because it allows moderation to happen by a few people and, since they are effectively own your online identity once you have established presence on their server you are bound by their decisions. Once given that power it is extremely unlikely that any server admin, unless they are explicitly committed to free and open speech, will continue to allow dissent when it is so easy to control it. This is effectively a repeat of the sub-reddit moderation scheme, but applied to a twitter like messaging platform. Go look around reddit for a general discussion forum where there is healthy tolerant community, outside of very specific limited topics where moderation is focused solely on keeping people on topic you will find moderators who have used their ability to create insulated echo chambers.
    - cemerick 9y ago
      "We'll see how it goes" and "it can't be worse than what we have now" are my basic postures to this kind of critique. It's very, very clear that Twitter (for example) is hardly an exemplar. If you are concerned about moderation being in the hands of just a few people, I presume you're super-concerned about Twitter, facebook, etc etc. Again, I think it's important to be explicit about what you mean by "free and open speech", "dissent", etc. I don't really see the analogy to sub-reddits, or shared forums in general. On my instance, the only stuff that's eligible for ejection is illegal porn, hate speech, abuse/harassment, etc. If that's an "echo chamber", then we don't have a shared vocabulary here.
      - dkhenry 9y ago
        I don't think it will start out as an echo chamber, but as time goes by the desire to limit the speech of not just those limited categories will lead to at least some, and if history is an indicator most, of the instances limiting their connectivity to the network to keep out speech they don't agree with, but that decision will be made by the few who run the instances and control the peering, and even those who have good intentions will be faced with going along with the swarm ( limit speech ), or face their node being cut off as well. These kinds of protests and ultimatums are common on twitter ( https://duckduckgo.com/?q=petition+to+remove+an+account+on+twitter&t=ffab&ia=twitter https://duckduckgo.com/?q=petition+to+remove+an+account+on+t... ) ,but thankfully no one has enough clout on twitter to make them actually do anything. That will not be the case on a Mastadon instance when 25% of your server threatens to jump ship if you don't de-peer a node over some comment they don't like.
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  I have two responses to this: 1) Anyone is free to make a Mastodon host with no moderation (except for what's necessary to avoid running foul of the law), but I doubt you'd get a lot of takers, at least not among the sort of people who would build a functional discussion space. Probably you'd just end up with 4chan again. "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink": lots of people have decided they want moderation, usually for good reasons involving harassment and abuse. People often want echo chambers too; that's not great for us in the long run, but it's difficult to make a moral argument that people's preferences should be overruled and they should be forced to listen to content they'd rather avoid. and 2) Mastodon is no worse than the situation now with Twitter: Twitter also has a set of baked-in standards for moderation, and also allows you to live in an echo chamber if you want, with blocking. At least with Mastodon you can choose the type/degree of moderation you prefer.
- thomnottom 9y ago
  Please do no conflate hate speech and abuse with dissenting opinions. There may, very well, be people who want to hide in an echo chamber. But that is all over twitter and Facebook today. Being able to isolate yourself from abusive speech should not be considered the same thing.
  - tomjen3 9y ago
    Most of the people who complain hate speech and abuse are conflating it with dissenting opinions, sometimes stated aggressively or insultingly and in large numbers. The first is a consequence of people, the other is a function of Twitter and the fact that you probably read it from a person with lots of followers, who have at least somewhat similar ideas and therefore many are going to disagree with you. Because there are many of them, it can feel overwhelming when they all answer you. And having not kept my mouth shut during the rocket-guy-shirt fiasco I can tell you that you get the same result when you are on the other side too. The complaint covers genuine abuse like what happened to Kathy Sierra.
    - thomnottom 9y ago
      >> Most of the people who complain hate speech and abuse are conflating it with dissenting opinions, sometimes stated aggressively or insultingly and in large numbers. I can only speak to my own observations, which do not support this assertion.
- kstrauser 9y ago
  I'm a Mastodon admin and I've "silenced" (not "blocked") one other instance. I wrote about why here: https://blog.freeradical.zone/our-first-silenced-instance/ https://blog.freeradical.zone/our-first-silenced-instance/ My goal is to allow as much free conversation as possible on my instance. In general, that means I'm taking a laissez-faire approach to enforcing the rules I've set out (see: https://freeradical.zone/about/more https://freeradical.zone/about/more) and not caring unless I have to. But if a user is causing problems, I reserve the right to drop them. If another instance is causing problems for one of my users, I reserve the right to silence or block them that server if that's what's necessary to protect my user. I have about a million things I'd rather be doing than powertripping on who can post what on my instance. Barring illegal, extremely distasteful, or abusive content, I really don't care what my users send or receive. But I will do what it takes to protect me, my users, and my instance.
  - dkhenry 9y ago
    and I hope you continue to be able to do that. Remember there was a time when Reddit claimed they wanted to be liasse-faire, then they got popular then that stopped. It takes a superlative amount of resolve to keep that attitude as you scale.
    - kstrauser 9y ago
      One key difference is that I'm not responsible for all of Mastodon: I'm responsible for my little corner of it. There aren't the same moral conundrums. Twitter and Reddit have to ask what stance they should take for every user in the world. Loli stuff is legal in Japan but iffy in USA. Holocaust denialism is legal in USA but verboten in Germany. What one policy can they write that would handle all of those situations? On the other hand, I only have to deal with what's legal an acceptable where I live. If an instance in Japan wants to host loli, fine. I can (and have) chosen not to carry their content. If an instance in Idaho wants to host Nazi content, that's up to them; the rest of us can choose not to carry their content. I won't have to (and can't) come up with global policies.
mxuribe 9y ago
I wonder if integrating any of the gnu social twitter bridges or plugins would get the best of both worlds? Does anyone have experience implementing something like this: https://wiki.loadaverage.org/gnusocial/plugins/twitterbridge https://wiki.loadaverage.org/gnusocial/plugins/twitterbridge ?
- Torgo 9y ago
  Everyone I know who has tried Twitter Bridge has found it utterly destroys the performance of your server.
  - mxuribe 9y ago
    Ah, ok. Still, I think i will set up an instance, try the bridge out, and if thrashing occurs, kill the bridge. Thanks again!
    - Torgo 9y ago
      If you have a problem, reach out using the !gnusocial group and there may be some people who will help you.
      - mxuribe 9y ago
        Ah-ha, good idea! Thx!
- kstrauser 9y ago
  This isn't at all the same, but I think it's in general category of "transition easers": https://mastodon-bridge.herokuapp.com https://mastodon-bridge.herokuapp.com Basically, it shows you which of your Twitter friends have signed up for Mastodon and registered themselves. It does nothing to share content between the two worlds, but that's probably for the best.
  - mxuribe 9y ago
    Yep, I knew about that; but appreciate it. Right now, discovery is not my priority...its more about me being lazy to post my stuff to multiple UIs. Its 2017, my lazy self simply wants to post to my gnu social, and have computers under my control auto-post to maybe 1 or 2 other destination silos (cough https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE cough) Again, thx anyway! ;-)
Dirlewanger 9y ago
What is the point of this platform outside of being an echo chamber? This kind of walled-off masturbatory interaction is why everything from journalism to politics is as messed as it is now.
x1798DE 9y ago
I'm less than impressed by the federation model of Mastodon (though it doesn't need too many tweaks to make it work). The main problem I have is the fact that you are pretty tied in with your instance. I think most of the problems I have viewing content from other instances can be solved with better clients: - tag searches only cover posts that your instance knows about (i.e. it searches the federated feed rather than querying a list of federated instances) - You can't customize your "federated" feed to merge multiple instances' local feeds (especially important on small instances and when looking at small instances). The more fundamental issues that I think has to be addressed at the "protocol" level is that I'd really like my identity to be portable. As it is now, if I like 10 different small instances, I have to join all 10, then I might have to repeat or boost my posts from all the relevant instances to get them to show up in the local feed - plus people who want to follow me will find 10 different accounts on different instances and not know which ones to follow. If, client-side, I just create a bot that auto-posts on multiple instances, if my followers on a given instance are following different versions of my account, the federated feed on that instance will be spammed with multiple posts. I think some sort of customization where an identity is at least partially independent from its instance is required here.
- cemerick 9y ago
  Portable identities as a feature is definitely being worked on, but IIRC it will only help in the "I need to move from one instance to another" case. I don't have a project issue number handy, but it's there. Multiple identities seems like a problem best solved by client-side tools (e.g. tweetdeck handles this usage really well IME).
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    The easiest way to merge multiple toots originating from the same person (through multiple federated accounts) is not to need to merge them in the first place. Admittedly, the current intent is that you (person) keep individual toots to specific instances and don't "cross-post", but there may be all sorts of reasons to need to cross-post across identities but try to avoid spamming federated friends. Email doesn't need to solve the problem because there isn't a "public feed" to try to hit. The issue here is that the individual feeds in an instance are always going to be complicated game to play to get attention and the next steps are going to be instance-feed-optimization (IFO?) techniques including mass cross-posts, whether the Mastodon community wants to see that or not. (Just as advertisers still care to optimize how they show up on the Twitter public feed...) Portable cross-instance identities are a possible way to mitigate some of the worst of that. My pessimism/cynicism thinks that maybe Mastodon instances shouldn't have instance and federated feeds publically visible. If I were to run my own instance, that would be the first things I'd disable.
rocky1138 9y ago
I run a GNU Social (Mastodon compatible) instance for Kitchener Waterloo hackers at https://kwat.chat https://kwat.chat . I know many of the people personally and consider them truly bright. You're more than welcome to join! (or follow from your instance)
- unknown2374 9y ago
  Hey fellow KWian! Looks like the site is extremely slow, I'm hoping that's a temporary issue as a result of posting about it on HN, but you might want to get that looked into if the issue persists.
  - rocky1138 9y ago
    You're right, it is slow! I have to find out why. Do you know much about GNU Social? Is there a caching feature? Am I missing an obvious optimization switch in the config?
Karrot_Kream 9y ago
I wish there were fewer references to Mastodon and more to GNU Social (since Mastodon is a particular implementation) but the more people in the ecosystem the better!
- mbrubeck 9y ago
  Both Mastodon and GNU social are implementations of the OStatus suite of protocols.
- cemerick 9y ago
  OK, I'll bite. IMO, GNU Social / the broader "fediverse" is mostly uninteresting to me as a user, for a bunch of reasons: * The user experience simply is more pleasant (a tight tweetdeck-esque UI vs. GNU Social's Twitter 2009 skin?) * only mastodon supports important features like CW and message privacy flags * GNU social instances, in general, are not pleasant places. For whatever reasons, the worst fediverse instances (i.e. those that feature child porn, hate speech, etc etc) are generally GNU Social. This will (and maybe already has, to some degree) changed, but it matters a lot that the vast majority of mastodon instances and mastodon users are basically decent people that are very conscious of the climate around them. It's great that Mastodon can federate with GNU Social instances (I know and follow some people that are on GNU Social instances), but they are different things with important distinctions. P.S. it's funny that GNU enthusiasts are doing the "you should call it GNU/Mastodon", etc., or otherwise conflating the two as demonstrating here. Federation just happens over a set of related protocols; Mastodon shares no code lineage with any GNU Social implementation AFAIK. An analogue would be if we were supposed to mention NCSA in a post about nginx. But GNU folk are gonna GNU, I guess? ;-P
  - Karrot_Kream 9y ago
    I'm mostly saying this because I don't use a Mastodon instance myself. I don't really want to get into a protracted argument over naming, GNU, etc, etc but: > * GNU social instances, in general, are not pleasant places. For whatever reasons, the worst fediverse instances (i.e. those that feature child porn, hate speech, etc etc) are generally GNU Social. This will (and maybe already has, to some degree) changed, but it matters a lot that the vast majority of mastodon instances and mastodon users are basically decent people that are very conscious of the climate around them. I really have no problem with the wild west nature of the internet at large. I grew up digitally on the internet and physically in an income depressed area, so the idea of "country clubbing" my life seems counterproductive. But hey you do you! The beauty of the Fediverse is that we can all talk to each other!
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
How about dropping Twitter for Mastodon entirely? What are you really leaving behind, anyway?
- scandox 9y ago
  The only reason I use Twitter is to keep in touch with the Irish literary scene really. They're hardly going to be on Mastodon anytime soon. So pretty much everything.
- CivilianZero 9y ago
  All the time spent building your network and all the people who would not be moving with you. So...the network and the social part of a social network. I have an account on both, at the moment (three separate Mastodon instances, actually).
  - scandox 9y ago
    Is it necessary to have different accounts to communicate across instances? Surely not?
    - dingdingdang 9y ago
      Interested in this point too!
    - swampangel 9y ago
      It's not necessary, one account lets you reply/boost/communicate with anyone. But if you find an instance catering to a community/topic you like, you may want to create an account there to fully participate in that instance's local timeline.
- frou_dh 9y ago
  Customer service reps. ^Bob
- tomjen3 9y ago
  99.999% of all the people worth following? Seriously are there any even slightly famous people who are primarily/mainly Mastodon? I am not talking just actors, but I follow people like Julia Galef and Joel Spolsky and don't see a point in a social network with people like them or my friends and family.
fake-name 9y ago
I was very confused about how a heavy-metal band was having an "exclusive week". Apparently mastodon is also a twitter-like thing.
rabidsnail 9y ago
I'm probably going to turn this into a blog post but this is the outline of my take on what federation is good for: * different people have different needs from social networks * starting new social networks is hard becasue getting a critical mass of users is hard * people would have social networks that are better tailored to their needs if there was a larger diversity of social networks * centralized platforms target the average of everyone which doesn't serve anyone very well * there are two ways to get critical mass: piggy-backing off an existing network or trying to bootstrap one from friends/family/interest groups * piggy-backing is awkward because the upstart network and the established network both want to kill each other in the long run, but think they can get value out of each other in the short run * federation can provide the benefits of piggy-backing without being adversarial * if it's the case that each person has a social network that's right for them that isn't right for that many people, then federation can be a stable equilibrium
Grue3 9y ago
I takes a lot of effort to create a social network that's even harder to navigate than Twitter, but, by god, they did it. As a logged out user, it's literally impossible to follow any conversations that happen on there.

57 points by blinry 9y ago

I don't like the idea of walled gardens and echo chambers, which is the major benefit Mastodon is providing over Twitter. Already this isn't morphing into a community where people have more control, its encouraging people to insulate themselves into communities where everyone thinks the same way and dissenting opinions can be squashed by the site moderators. I would like to think this kind of freedom would lead to greater exchange of ideas and open lines of communication, but everything I have seen online points in this going the opposite direction.

darkengine 9y ago
That is my biggest concern with the health of the GNU Social network at the moment. Some operators of popular nodes are configuring their nodes to reject messages from all users of some other nodes, which they deem to be housing undesirables. I think people have forgotten the origin of John Gilmore's famous quote, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." He wasn't talking about the people of the internet (though I believe he later said it wouldn't be wrong to interpret it that way), but the way the Usenet network would find a way to pass messages across the network, even when some Usenet node operators decided there were messages they didn't want to pass. Those who do not learn their history...
cemerick 9y ago
The whole premise of federation is that you're not limited to talking with those on your home instance. What about Mastodon will yield more insular experiences than Twitter? As it is, the fact that I can see and interact with people on the local and federated timeline (much like one used to in the oldold days of the twitter firehose) means I am in _less_ of an echo chamber than I am on twitter, in every sense. Your definition of "dissenting opinions" is essential to this. If it's "genuine points of conflicting dialogue", I don't see any squelching of that in the slightest. If it's "hate speech, advocation of violence, etc", then yeah, that stuff has been shut down pretty hard, and I'm happy for it.
- dkhenry 9y ago
  Mastodon will yield a more insular experience because it allows moderation to happen by a few people and, since they are effectively own your online identity once you have established presence on their server you are bound by their decisions. Once given that power it is extremely unlikely that any server admin, unless they are explicitly committed to free and open speech, will continue to allow dissent when it is so easy to control it. This is effectively a repeat of the sub-reddit moderation scheme, but applied to a twitter like messaging platform. Go look around reddit for a general discussion forum where there is healthy tolerant community, outside of very specific limited topics where moderation is focused solely on keeping people on topic you will find moderators who have used their ability to create insulated echo chambers.
  - cemerick 9y ago
    "We'll see how it goes" and "it can't be worse than what we have now" are my basic postures to this kind of critique. It's very, very clear that Twitter (for example) is hardly an exemplar. If you are concerned about moderation being in the hands of just a few people, I presume you're super-concerned about Twitter, facebook, etc etc. Again, I think it's important to be explicit about what you mean by "free and open speech", "dissent", etc. I don't really see the analogy to sub-reddits, or shared forums in general. On my instance, the only stuff that's eligible for ejection is illegal porn, hate speech, abuse/harassment, etc. If that's an "echo chamber", then we don't have a shared vocabulary here.
    - dkhenry 9y ago
      I don't think it will start out as an echo chamber, but as time goes by the desire to limit the speech of not just those limited categories will lead to at least some, and if history is an indicator most, of the instances limiting their connectivity to the network to keep out speech they don't agree with, but that decision will be made by the few who run the instances and control the peering, and even those who have good intentions will be faced with going along with the swarm ( limit speech ), or face their node being cut off as well. These kinds of protests and ultimatums are common on twitter ( https://duckduckgo.com/?q=petition+to+remove+an+account+on+twitter&t=ffab&ia=twitter https://duckduckgo.com/?q=petition+to+remove+an+account+on+t... ) ,but thankfully no one has enough clout on twitter to make them actually do anything. That will not be the case on a Mastadon instance when 25% of your server threatens to jump ship if you don't de-peer a node over some comment they don't like.
Analemma_ 9y ago
I have two responses to this: 1) Anyone is free to make a Mastodon host with no moderation (except for what's necessary to avoid running foul of the law), but I doubt you'd get a lot of takers, at least not among the sort of people who would build a functional discussion space. Probably you'd just end up with 4chan again. "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink": lots of people have decided they want moderation, usually for good reasons involving harassment and abuse. People often want echo chambers too; that's not great for us in the long run, but it's difficult to make a moral argument that people's preferences should be overruled and they should be forced to listen to content they'd rather avoid. and 2) Mastodon is no worse than the situation now with Twitter: Twitter also has a set of baked-in standards for moderation, and also allows you to live in an echo chamber if you want, with blocking. At least with Mastodon you can choose the type/degree of moderation you prefer.
thomnottom 9y ago
Please do no conflate hate speech and abuse with dissenting opinions. There may, very well, be people who want to hide in an echo chamber. But that is all over twitter and Facebook today. Being able to isolate yourself from abusive speech should not be considered the same thing.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  Most of the people who complain hate speech and abuse are conflating it with dissenting opinions, sometimes stated aggressively or insultingly and in large numbers. The first is a consequence of people, the other is a function of Twitter and the fact that you probably read it from a person with lots of followers, who have at least somewhat similar ideas and therefore many are going to disagree with you. Because there are many of them, it can feel overwhelming when they all answer you. And having not kept my mouth shut during the rocket-guy-shirt fiasco I can tell you that you get the same result when you are on the other side too. The complaint covers genuine abuse like what happened to Kathy Sierra.
  - thomnottom 9y ago
    >> Most of the people who complain hate speech and abuse are conflating it with dissenting opinions, sometimes stated aggressively or insultingly and in large numbers. I can only speak to my own observations, which do not support this assertion.
kstrauser 9y ago
I'm a Mastodon admin and I've "silenced" (not "blocked") one other instance. I wrote about why here: https://blog.freeradical.zone/our-first-silenced-instance/ https://blog.freeradical.zone/our-first-silenced-instance/ My goal is to allow as much free conversation as possible on my instance. In general, that means I'm taking a laissez-faire approach to enforcing the rules I've set out (see: https://freeradical.zone/about/more https://freeradical.zone/about/more) and not caring unless I have to. But if a user is causing problems, I reserve the right to drop them. If another instance is causing problems for one of my users, I reserve the right to silence or block them that server if that's what's necessary to protect my user. I have about a million things I'd rather be doing than powertripping on who can post what on my instance. Barring illegal, extremely distasteful, or abusive content, I really don't care what my users send or receive. But I will do what it takes to protect me, my users, and my instance.
- dkhenry 9y ago
  and I hope you continue to be able to do that. Remember there was a time when Reddit claimed they wanted to be liasse-faire, then they got popular then that stopped. It takes a superlative amount of resolve to keep that attitude as you scale.
  - kstrauser 9y ago
    One key difference is that I'm not responsible for all of Mastodon: I'm responsible for my little corner of it. There aren't the same moral conundrums. Twitter and Reddit have to ask what stance they should take for every user in the world. Loli stuff is legal in Japan but iffy in USA. Holocaust denialism is legal in USA but verboten in Germany. What one policy can they write that would handle all of those situations? On the other hand, I only have to deal with what's legal an acceptable where I live. If an instance in Japan wants to host loli, fine. I can (and have) chosen not to carry their content. If an instance in Idaho wants to host Nazi content, that's up to them; the rest of us can choose not to carry their content. I won't have to (and can't) come up with global policies.

mxuribe 9y ago

I wonder if integrating any of the gnu social twitter bridges or plugins would get the best of both worlds? Does anyone have experience implementing something like this: https://wiki.loadaverage.org/gnusocial/plugins/twitterbridge https://wiki.loadaverage.org/gnusocial/plugins/twitterbridge ?

Torgo 9y ago
Everyone I know who has tried Twitter Bridge has found it utterly destroys the performance of your server.
- mxuribe 9y ago
  Ah, ok. Still, I think i will set up an instance, try the bridge out, and if thrashing occurs, kill the bridge. Thanks again!
  - Torgo 9y ago
    If you have a problem, reach out using the !gnusocial group and there may be some people who will help you.
    - mxuribe 9y ago
      Ah-ha, good idea! Thx!
kstrauser 9y ago
This isn't at all the same, but I think it's in general category of "transition easers": https://mastodon-bridge.herokuapp.com https://mastodon-bridge.herokuapp.com Basically, it shows you which of your Twitter friends have signed up for Mastodon and registered themselves. It does nothing to share content between the two worlds, but that's probably for the best.
- mxuribe 9y ago
  Yep, I knew about that; but appreciate it. Right now, discovery is not my priority...its more about me being lazy to post my stuff to multiple UIs. Its 2017, my lazy self simply wants to post to my gnu social, and have computers under my control auto-post to maybe 1 or 2 other destination silos (cough https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE cough) Again, thx anyway! ;-)

Dirlewanger 9y ago

What is the point of this platform outside of being an echo chamber? This kind of walled-off masturbatory interaction is why everything from journalism to politics is as messed as it is now.

x1798DE 9y ago

I'm less than impressed by the federation model of Mastodon (though it doesn't need too many tweaks to make it work). The main problem I have is the fact that you are pretty tied in with your instance. I think most of the problems I have viewing content from other instances can be solved with better clients: - tag searches only cover posts that your instance knows about (i.e. it searches the federated feed rather than querying a list of federated instances) - You can't customize your "federated" feed to merge multiple instances' local feeds (especially important on small instances and when looking at small instances). The more fundamental issues that I think has to be addressed at the "protocol" level is that I'd really like my identity to be portable. As it is now, if I like 10 different small instances, I have to join all 10, then I might have to repeat or boost my posts from all the relevant instances to get them to show up in the local feed - plus people who want to follow me will find 10 different accounts on different instances and not know which ones to follow. If, client-side, I just create a bot that auto-posts on multiple instances, if my followers on a given instance are following different versions of my account, the federated feed on that instance will be spammed with multiple posts. I think some sort of customization where an identity is at least partially independent from its instance is required here.

cemerick 9y ago
Portable identities as a feature is definitely being worked on, but IIRC it will only help in the "I need to move from one instance to another" case. I don't have a project issue number handy, but it's there. Multiple identities seems like a problem best solved by client-side tools (e.g. tweetdeck handles this usage really well IME).
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  The easiest way to merge multiple toots originating from the same person (through multiple federated accounts) is not to need to merge them in the first place. Admittedly, the current intent is that you (person) keep individual toots to specific instances and don't "cross-post", but there may be all sorts of reasons to need to cross-post across identities but try to avoid spamming federated friends. Email doesn't need to solve the problem because there isn't a "public feed" to try to hit. The issue here is that the individual feeds in an instance are always going to be complicated game to play to get attention and the next steps are going to be instance-feed-optimization (IFO?) techniques including mass cross-posts, whether the Mastodon community wants to see that or not. (Just as advertisers still care to optimize how they show up on the Twitter public feed...) Portable cross-instance identities are a possible way to mitigate some of the worst of that. My pessimism/cynicism thinks that maybe Mastodon instances shouldn't have instance and federated feeds publically visible. If I were to run my own instance, that would be the first things I'd disable.

rocky1138 9y ago

I run a GNU Social (Mastodon compatible) instance for Kitchener Waterloo hackers at https://kwat.chat https://kwat.chat . I know many of the people personally and consider them truly bright. You're more than welcome to join! (or follow from your instance)

unknown2374 9y ago
Hey fellow KWian! Looks like the site is extremely slow, I'm hoping that's a temporary issue as a result of posting about it on HN, but you might want to get that looked into if the issue persists.
- rocky1138 9y ago
  You're right, it is slow! I have to find out why. Do you know much about GNU Social? Is there a caching feature? Am I missing an obvious optimization switch in the config?

Karrot_Kream 9y ago

I wish there were fewer references to Mastodon and more to GNU Social (since Mastodon is a particular implementation) but the more people in the ecosystem the better!

mbrubeck 9y ago
Both Mastodon and GNU social are implementations of the OStatus suite of protocols.
cemerick 9y ago
OK, I'll bite. IMO, GNU Social / the broader "fediverse" is mostly uninteresting to me as a user, for a bunch of reasons: * The user experience simply is more pleasant (a tight tweetdeck-esque UI vs. GNU Social's Twitter 2009 skin?) * only mastodon supports important features like CW and message privacy flags * GNU social instances, in general, are not pleasant places. For whatever reasons, the worst fediverse instances (i.e. those that feature child porn, hate speech, etc etc) are generally GNU Social. This will (and maybe already has, to some degree) changed, but it matters a lot that the vast majority of mastodon instances and mastodon users are basically decent people that are very conscious of the climate around them. It's great that Mastodon can federate with GNU Social instances (I know and follow some people that are on GNU Social instances), but they are different things with important distinctions. P.S. it's funny that GNU enthusiasts are doing the "you should call it GNU/Mastodon", etc., or otherwise conflating the two as demonstrating here. Federation just happens over a set of related protocols; Mastodon shares no code lineage with any GNU Social implementation AFAIK. An analogue would be if we were supposed to mention NCSA in a post about nginx. But GNU folk are gonna GNU, I guess? ;-P
- Karrot_Kream 9y ago
  I'm mostly saying this because I don't use a Mastodon instance myself. I don't really want to get into a protracted argument over naming, GNU, etc, etc but: > * GNU social instances, in general, are not pleasant places. For whatever reasons, the worst fediverse instances (i.e. those that feature child porn, hate speech, etc etc) are generally GNU Social. This will (and maybe already has, to some degree) changed, but it matters a lot that the vast majority of mastodon instances and mastodon users are basically decent people that are very conscious of the climate around them. I really have no problem with the wild west nature of the internet at large. I grew up digitally on the internet and physically in an income depressed area, so the idea of "country clubbing" my life seems counterproductive. But hey you do you! The beauty of the Fediverse is that we can all talk to each other!

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

How about dropping Twitter for Mastodon entirely? What are you really leaving behind, anyway?

scandox 9y ago
The only reason I use Twitter is to keep in touch with the Irish literary scene really. They're hardly going to be on Mastodon anytime soon. So pretty much everything.
CivilianZero 9y ago
All the time spent building your network and all the people who would not be moving with you. So...the network and the social part of a social network. I have an account on both, at the moment (three separate Mastodon instances, actually).
- scandox 9y ago
  Is it necessary to have different accounts to communicate across instances? Surely not?
  - dingdingdang 9y ago
    Interested in this point too!
  - swampangel 9y ago
    It's not necessary, one account lets you reply/boost/communicate with anyone. But if you find an instance catering to a community/topic you like, you may want to create an account there to fully participate in that instance's local timeline.
frou_dh 9y ago
Customer service reps. ^Bob
tomjen3 9y ago
99.999% of all the people worth following? Seriously are there any even slightly famous people who are primarily/mainly Mastodon? I am not talking just actors, but I follow people like Julia Galef and Joel Spolsky and don't see a point in a social network with people like them or my friends and family.

fake-name 9y ago

I was very confused about how a heavy-metal band was having an "exclusive week". Apparently mastodon is also a twitter-like thing.

rabidsnail 9y ago

I'm probably going to turn this into a blog post but this is the outline of my take on what federation is good for: * different people have different needs from social networks * starting new social networks is hard becasue getting a critical mass of users is hard * people would have social networks that are better tailored to their needs if there was a larger diversity of social networks * centralized platforms target the average of everyone which doesn't serve anyone very well * there are two ways to get critical mass: piggy-backing off an existing network or trying to bootstrap one from friends/family/interest groups * piggy-backing is awkward because the upstart network and the established network both want to kill each other in the long run, but think they can get value out of each other in the short run * federation can provide the benefits of piggy-backing without being adversarial * if it's the case that each person has a social network that's right for them that isn't right for that many people, then federation can be a stable equilibrium

Grue3 9y ago

I takes a lot of effort to create a social network that's even harder to navigate than Twitter, but, by god, they did it. As a logged out user, it's literally impossible to follow any conversations that happen on there.