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Mastodon – an open source alternative to Twitter
- eponeponepon 9y agoI really want to embrace this - but I'm still not able to make up my mind whether I object more to Twitter the company or to the whole concept that Mastodon is implementing. (edit: not that Twitter themselves have done much to offend me - "Twitter the company" above is more of a stand-in for commercial social networking companies at large) 2nd edit because I've not had my coffee yet and didn't explain myself properly: the "whole concept" that I'm talking about is, I guess, what people used to call 'microblogging' - a service of which Twitter is the holotype; as far as I can see, the real utility of it is in its constant presence via a phone app, but I am not sure if I want to do that. I definitely don't want to have that in my life by joining Twitter, but I can't make up my mind whether my dislike is more about the companies providing the service, or more about the generic service itself. Does that make better sense? :)
- andrewguenther 9y agoWhat do you object to about the concept of what Mastodon is implementing?
- eponeponepon 9y agoSee 2nd edit above :)
- shakna 9y ago> or to the whole concept that Mastodon is implementing. Huh? You can have a user on any Mastadon or GNUSocial server, and communicate with any other user on any other Mastadon/GNUSocial server. So, no get tied in there. That's the main complaint I see with people and social networks... So can you expand?
- eponeponepon 9y agoEdited my post. More coffee needed, evidently.
- bostand 9y agoI don't mind the company, but I don't like that a product of a single company has become the defacto communication channel for tech people. In many gatherings speakers identify themselves by twitter handles instead of email. Do you think that is sound?
- eponeponepon 9y agoIn many gatherings speakers identify themselves by twitter handles instead of email. Do you think that is sound? No, I very much dislike that. Part of it is that I am (by choice, for sure), not able to use that information, but part of it is, as you say, an objection to a single commercial offering having that position.
- yogthos 9y agoI find that 500 chars limit is enough space to express ideas, and facilitates meaningful discussions around them.
- tscs37 9y agoI'm a mastodon user, so I might be a bit biased, but I find it a lot better than twitter. Different servers can also carter to different cultures or groups so you can find your own niche there.
- yogthos 9y agoSame here, I've been using Mastodon for the past 3 months, and I find practically everything works better than on Twitter. The site loads much faster, and it's more responsive because it doesn't load trackers and ads to monetize users. 500 char limit actually facilitates having meaningful interactions with people. The column UI layout lets you see the timeline and notifications without having to jump between tabs. Fundamentally, Mastodon is exactly the way social media should work in my opinion. Anybody can run their own instance and configure it any way they like. Since Mastodon is open source and community driven there aren't any VCs driving it, and it doesn't need to monetize to stick around. As long as people want to use Mastodon, it'll continue to thrive. Any features added to the platform are there for the benefit of the users and on one else. I also think that Mastodon happens to be at the right place and at the right time. Hosting has become very affordable nowadays. You can get a DigitalOcean VPN for 5 bucks a month. Docker makes the installation process a breeze, and Let's Encrypt provides free TLS. You can literally spin up an instance in an hour or so. I wrote a short guide here https://github.com/yogthos/cheatsheets/blob/master/mastodon.social.md https://github.com/yogthos/cheatsheets/blob/master/mastodon.... We took a big detour with walled gardens like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. It's time to go back to the original spirit of the internet where anybody can run a server and people can interact with one another on their own terms.
- lightedman 9y agoNiche? Most every Mastodon instance I've joined has been more like clique, almost the exact opposite of an open social thing.
- aqsalose 9y agoCounterpoint: True, there are many "niche" instances available, but on the other hand, finding the one that aligns with your interests may be difficult.
- daveid 9y agoPerhaps it would be better to submit https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org instead of the flagship instance. The project homepage has links to all the info as well as a directory of servers (instances), which might spread out new users better.
- KGIII 9y agoOne that may interest HN is called mathstodon.
- ColinWright 9y agoFound at https://mathstodon.xyz/ https://mathstodon.xyz/
- j_s 9y agoWhen did the 'flagship instance' begin accepting new users again? I wonder how long it will last this time, and whether or not this HN post will affect that! Of all the random strangers hosting the service, I waited until I could get onto the instance hosted by the actual project itself; the bus factor feels higher, and the account suspension process less arbitrary. https://web.archive.org/web/20170406103653/https://mastodon.social/about https://web.archive.org/web/20170406103653/https://mastodon.... (April 2017) Due to exceptionally high traffic, registrations on this instance are closed until quality of service can be assured for existing users. Choose one of the various other public instances to sign up! https://web.archive.org/web/20170806214711/https://mastodon.social/about https://web.archive.org/web/20170806214711/https://mastodon.... (August 2017) Given that this is most shared instance, to preserve the ideals of decentralization we have closed sign ups in favour of spreading new users through the various alternative instances — you get the same network wherever you sign up. Click below to find one:
- kmfrk 9y agoGargron closed it off during its peak, not because of the load, but because mastodon.social became too synonymous with Mastodon proper, so he forced people to go to other instances so everyone wouldn't be in the same basket of eggs. A few months later, I think mastodon.social has been fairly open to signups, especially now that we've got all these French and Japanese instances up and running.
- woogiewonka 9y agoYeah, but does it run on blockchain?! :)
- ProxCoques 9y agoThat's Twister http://twister.net.co http://twister.net.co
- sunilkumarc 9y agoPrevious discussion of Mastodon here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13303346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13303346
- PyComfy 9y agoalso https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15053064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15053064
- newscracker 9y agoI'm looking forward to platforms that are decentralized as well as allow rich media content (photos, videos, etc.) to be embedded/uploaded. Such platforms would have some chance of being an alternatives to centralized walled gardens like Facebook and Google+. Edit: As pointed out by daveid (thanks!), Mastodon does allow uploading photos and videos. So my statement referring to it as text-only was incorrect, and I've removed that part. Update: I created an account on an instance and it looked like Tweetdeck's web interface, which is something I do like during the rare times I login to Twitter. I personally would still like to see something richer and more familiar to people who use Facebook and Google+ in terms of the interface, features like groups, etc. I struggle to keep up with Twitter, and I find groups to be the best place for me on social networks. I also like that longform articles can be posted on Facebook with Notes. The 500 character limit in Mastodon seems a lot better than Twitter, but is still a huge restriction.
- daveid 9y agoMastodon supports photos and videos.
- vfu6 9y agoThere is also https://mediagoblin.org/ https://mediagoblin.org/ , which is more oriented toward videos.
- sprokolopolis 9y agoFor groups, people just tend to pin hashtags at this point. Glitch.social added a feature to pin a column from a search and it looks like most instances have added it now, too. Also, there are a some instances that tend to loosely target certain themes/subjects. I totally agree that it is a bit barebones at the moment and could use real groups and other social features. The fact that admins of different instances can hack on their servers separately might promote third party features being created and merged.
- nosuchthing 9y agoMastodon impliments a very very confusing username system, due to the design of domain-name based federation. alice@mastadon.social alice@mastadon.network Twitter suffers from impersonator accounts on its own network, imagine the confusion of an unfamiliar user having to find a real account on mastadon.
- ar0 9y agoYou hear this a lot, but I don't really get this... Everyone is using email and I have never heard anyone complain "email implements a very very confusing username system" because alice@gmail.com and alice@hotmail.com are not the same people. Maybe it would help to make it more explicit that Mastodon works more like email than Twitter in that respect, but to be fair joinmastodon.org and also the new user onboarding tutorial do try hard to make that very clear.
- QAPereo 9y agoYou do hear those complaints, but they tend to take the form of bemoaning the prevalence of phishing emails.
- vidarh 9y agoA big difference is that with e-mail we've long ago stopped expecting discoverability. You don't expect to be able to search <insert random celebrity> and find their e-mail address. You do expect to be able to search for them on Twitter.
- tkmh 9y agoI think not being able to search for <random celebrity> is a good marker of how mastodon is trying to be something other than just a decentralized twitter clone. I personally find the twitter microblogging model, wherein most tweets seem to be retweets of high-profile users or comments on their posts, quite unhealthy for discussion among equals. Twitter is essentially a media site, whereas (I think) Mastodon hopes to be something else, more of a forum for actually taking to people. Whether it can work as/if the userbase grows remains to be seen, but I'm cautiously optimistic.
- marban 9y agoHaven't we been through this with the likes of identi.ca / statusnet?
- r3bl 9y agoI would say that this is happening at the critical time when Twitter is under a shit ton of pressure: not fighting bots and abusive accounts, not implementing features requested by its users, its overall incompetence to roll out new features in a sane way, and them fucking up the homepage with algorithms. If there's any decentralized service that has even a remote chance of succeeding, I would say that it's Mastodon. Simply because of the time when it appeared.
- Vinnl 9y agoIf I understood it correctly, Mastodon is actually compatible with them (yay standard protocols), so it's more like their rebirth rather than one or the other having to "win" :)
- yogthos 9y agoI think the climate might be more favorable today. People are starting to realize that walled gardens have serious drawbacks, so there's more interest in decentralized solutions. Conversely, hosting has become much cheaper and easier than before. You can spin up a DigitalOcean droplet for 5 bucks, get a Let's Encrypt cert, and spin up a Mastodon Docker image in an hour or so. The barrier to running an instance is very low nowadays.
- ColinWright 9y agoFor people who want to know more, I wrote this: http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/ThinkingAboutMastodon.html?HN_20170910 http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/ThinkingAboutMastodon.html?HN_... Submitted it here ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14626958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14626958 ... but it got very little attention. In fact, checking my logs only about 20 people even clicked through. Perhaps people are genuinely not interested. Attention fatigue?? Who knows? Edit: I should add that I'm here: https://mathstodon.xyz/@ColinTheMathmo https://mathstodon.xyz/@ColinTheMathmo https://mathstodon.xyz https://mathstodon.xyz is very quiet, but building slowly.
- aqsalose 9y agoI believe it's quite random whether a link trends on HN or not, even if other links about same topic had got a quite large number of upvotes in past. Cool visualizations and engaging title helps, but isn't a guarantee. Maybe also the time of the day makes a difference (though I have no idea what would be the best timezone to optimize for popularity).
- not_max 9y agoI am a huge advocate for Mastodon. It is worth remembering that nearly all of the value for the users of a social network comes from other users. Most of Twitter's defining features -- retweets, hashtags, and @ mentions -- were invented not by Twitter's employees, but by its users: https://qz.com/135149/the-first-ever-hashtag-reply-and-retweet-as-twitter-users-invented-them/ https://qz.com/135149/the-first-ever-hashtag-reply-and-retwe... As a result, building services like this in a distributed way a la email seems much more appropriate. Why let Twitter greedily monetize your content?
- cyberpunk0 9y agoTalking about mentioning people and retweets (ie forwarding) like they are grand monolithic features just blows them up to insane proportions. These aren't anything new or special, if you list them as core "features" then you have a terrible product with more marketing bullshit than quality
- Quanttek 9y agoHow does it compare to GNU.social?
- baxuz 9y agoHonestly, it's a barren wasteland, worse than Google+. As far as I've seen it's mainly used as a replacement for imageboards. Most of the server topics are either a variant of /b/, or a gathering place for SJWs, furries and lolicons.
- glenstein 9y agoYou are describing a completely different platform from the one I visit and post to every day. For one, it's not barren; it's quite active. One of the distinguishing features of mastodon compared to other decentralized platforms is that people use it. In fact one of the complaints about the federated feed is that it updates so fast it's hard to keep up with. As for the people there, the people I talk to are interested in games, philosophy, linux, vaporwave, memes, and meta talk about mastodon and decentralized platforms. There are a lot of trans and and furries and people interested in politics. The vast majority have been unfailingly nice. The granular privacy options allow one to mute those who are overbearing. And the biggest difference between it and /b/ is that conversations tend to be two-way a lot more. People aren't purposely posting to try and anger you. In fact, here's a post I see on my feed right now: >someone should write a paper on mastodon as a model of a therapeutic community If what you're saying is you just don't like platforms that have lots of people you disagree with politically, that's one thing. But the behavior and subject matter and culture are significantly different from /b/ and in no way a wasteland.
- yogthos 9y agoThat mirrors my experience as well. I also find that the 500 char limit makes for much more interesting conversations than Twitter. I've discussed books, games, and programming on Mastodon, and I wouldn't have bothered having these discussions trying to fit my thoughts into 140 chars.
- sprokolopolis 9y agoI totally agree that the higher character limit contributes to better and deeper conversations. This was one thing excited my about Google+ when it first came out. People could write essays, explain long processes and they didn't have to worry about a character limit.
- Proven 9y agoSame shitty rules and privacy as on Twitter.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- carlchenet 9y agoThe wanna be Mastodon users could use reading my blog post The Importance of Choosing the Correct Mastodon Instance https://carlchenet.com/the-importance-of-choosing-the-correct-mastodon-instance/ https://carlchenet.com/the-importance-of-choosing-the-correc... There are some ideological and technical points to consider before choosing your instance.