6 ms·

Mastodon is not Twitter

55 points by rainbowmverse 9y ago

JoshTriplett 9y ago
> Since all instances are more or less part of the same federation, it’s as simple as clicking follow when they see you’ve followed them from a new instance. That's not simple, not at scale. It doesn't tell you who the new account is, match them up to the old account, unfollow the old account, automatically remind you when you go to @mention them, or otherwise make the transition automatic. Simple would be the old account that you trust signing a message saying they're now the new account, and when your instance saw that message, it automatically moved your follow over, remembering the old account and using that as a hint to help you switch over.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
falsedan 9y ago
How is Mastodon not like Twitter? I didn't understand after reading the article, it mostly repeats: > Mastodon is different. <describes how it's similar to Twitter>
- sp332 9y ago
  It's a reaction to this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15244596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15244596 which is linked in the first sentence.
  - falsedan 9y ago
    I read that, and I still don't understand the point the article is making about how Mastodon is different to Twitter.
ztratar 9y ago
Exporting is the differentiating feature? As someone who worked in the social space for years, I find this quite misguided. Users want more than exporting. When building a social produdct, you have to be able to excite a mainstream audience. The math behind a superior network connection model or techy-feature like exporting is practically useless to these people. Build something people (from St. Louis) want.
- sp332 9y ago
  It's not a differentiating feature. The article it's replying to says that Masotodon et al. don't have large networks. But since the little networks are federated, they still get most of the benefits of having a large network. This article points out that exporting and moving somewhere else is not a showstopper.
- egypturnash 9y ago
  The two biggest differentiating features in my circles seem to be: * less nazis/gamergaters/people who think it is fun to be assholes on the internet (unless you wanna go hang out on an instance that welcomes them, which is probably banned from federating to a lot of other instances) * you can actually emit a paragraph containing a complete thought instead of a very simple sentence Being able to hide the bulk of your post behind an arbitrary user-entered "content warning" tag is damn nice too.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    > you can actually emit a paragraph containing a complete thought instead of a very simple sentence This is one of those interesting things about a two-sided product. That is a feature for writers, but it's not always feature for readers. I use Twitter for breadth; I follow a lot of people. The more people can write, the fewer people I can follow. So for me, "they can write more" is an anti-feature.
    - egypturnash 9y ago
      How many of these people regularly make 3-4 tweets in a row, in which they emit a complete thought? How much of your Twitter feed is people quote-tweeting the first of many of these, with a comment along the lines of "Thread"?
      - falsedan 9y ago
        That's what the unfollow button/muting 'Thread.' is for.
      - 9y ago
goatsi 9y ago
Decentralized projects never seem to gain steam until mainstream users are forced away from centralized services. Take a look at this recent article looking at why the majority of mastodon users are from Japan: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2017/08/18/mastodon-is-big-in-japan-the-reason-why-is-uncomfortable/ http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2017/08/18/mastodon-is-bi...
- criddell 9y ago
  What are some examples of decentralized projects that won over centralized services?
  - xena 9y ago
    email
    - zokier 9y ago
      Okay, and anything from the umm.. past 20 years or so?
    - bitcuration 9y ago
      Not exactly. Gamil, Hotmail etc. are some successes that had clearly centralized email despite remained on the same protocols.
      - criddell 9y ago
        Gmail and Hotmail are still part of a federated email system. Email won over messaging on centralized services like Compuserve and Prodigy.
  - bigphishy 9y ago
    GNU+Linux
- yborg 9y ago
  > Federated distributed servers > Refuse to federate with certain servers because of content > Somehow different from the status quo So we end up with a balkanized sea of Mastodon servers with arbitrary interconnection. How this becomes a compelling Facebook competitor to all but a tiny minority is not obvious to me. Groups may as well set up their own bulletin board sites each with their own vision of allowed content. I.e. what we have now.
htormey 9y ago
Mastodon really isn’t a replacement for Twitter. The original Wired article did a poor job of critiquing it. I think this guy does a much better job of critiqueing Mastodon than the article linked in the parent post. https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e8abb1?gi=78a14d4791ce https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e... Key points: “The foremost problem is that federation is a lie. Well, it’s partially a lie. The benefits described above do work; if you send a message to anyone at @username@custom.website, it will be delivered to them. But if @custom.website is a domain that mastodon.social deems inappropriate, replies from that users on that domain don’t show up in your notifications or on your feed, unless you explicitly follow them. So if you’re having a conversation with your friend, @person@custom.website, and another user from custom.website wants to chime in, they will be invisible to you.” And “Suppose you’re a semi-famous content publisher. You have 10,000 followers on Twitter, whom you converse with regularly and have a large history of communications with. If you decide to switch networks to something like Mastodon, you immediately come into contact with the Hardest Problem of Identity on the Internet, which is that your social graph is not portable between platforms.” I feel these are two very important limitations to understand about Mastodon. I see Mastodon as basically Wordpress for people who want a twitter like experience off of twitter. Aka niche communities.
- sp332 9y ago
  For the first, you're always at the mercy of the whims of the mods for whatever service you're on. The difference with federated services is that you can move to or even set up a server with different mods. Can't do that with Twitter. For the second, that's a limitation of Twitter. If you had 10,000 followers on a federated system, you could switch networks and your old followers could just re-follow you there. They wouldn't have to switch with you.
  - htormey 9y ago
    Yep, fair points. To clarify, I think Mastodon is really cool and a big step in the right direction. I don't mean to come across as overly critical. I do feel the second issue he raises is still valid. re-following is a lot of friction, even in a federated system, albeit less so than moving from one centralized service to another. It would be nice if Mastodon provided some way of altering users when someone switches to a new instance.
jaydestro 9y ago
i wish this was about the band.
publicfig 9y ago
Not really sure what point to take away from this article. It's not Twitter, because of some differences in the way the network is set up? It doesn't really seem to make any arguments to the first article (or more so comment thread) that it links to. Obviously Mastodon is a different service than Twitter, but to ignore and dismiss the comparison seems lazy and misguided.
personjerry 9y ago
This was what I got: "Mastodon is different. It has all of the same functionalities, but it's different. Also, following and contacts and everything are the same, but you can export your info, and that's different. People don't understand, but it's different." I honestly can't tell if I'm reading a piece of satire. Having started with no knowledge of Mastodon, at the end of the read all I know about it is that it seems to have all the functionality of Twitter? At the risk of being crass, this sounds like a desperate founder or investor trying to self-validate and coming up woefully short on evidence.
- msla 9y ago
  From what I gather, Mastodon is to Twitter what Usenet is to Hacker News: Both provide a way to have text-based discussions in a threaded fashion, but Usenet is a protocol shared by many computers, whereas Hacker News is a specific piece of software run on (what is essentially, to all appearances, from the outside) a single, blessed computer. Upshot: Hacker News can go down and be erased forever, modulo archival efforts like the Wayback Machine. Usenet can't go down.
  - eli 9y ago
    That's interesting, but doesn't seem super relevant to end users. I'm not particularly worried about Twitter disappearing, but if I was I'd use the export feature to run backups.
    - wongarsu 9y ago
      I think censorship resistance is the more interesting feature. Mastodon seems to be mostly used for content that isn't blessed by Twitter policies.
      - kstrauser 9y ago
        I've found it to be the exact opposite: Mastodon instances are a lot more likely to disconnect from others due to unwelcome content. That's by design, though! Suppose you and I host our own Mastodon servers (aka "instances") as part of a federation of 1,000 instances. I start posting lots of content you and your users dislike (where that could mean anything - porn, pro-Nazi, pro-Antifa, overly conservative, overly liberal - anything). With a checkbox in the web UI, you can start refusing traffic from my server. That would only affect you and your users, and I can still talk to anyone else as usual. Some of yours users might dislike that a flee for more tolerant pastures. That's fine! Some of my users might dislike that my rules are so loose that my server's getting banned, and they'd flee to more closely moderated servers. That's also fine! In either case, our spat only involves the connection between you and me, but the rest of the network chugs away as always. Basically, it's the federation model of email but with the functionality of Twitter. That's what makes it different.
weego 9y ago
It's the same because of how it is but different because of techy features no one who is needed for it to get traction cares about so it's doomed to obsolescence.
s73ver_ 9y ago
I feel that trying to dismiss criticism of something by saying "It's different!", without actually saying why those differences matter is pretty weak sauce.
- kstrauser 9y ago
  I think this was in response to some articles flying around earlier this week that said, essentially, that Mastodon will fail because some of its features are slightly different from their Twitter equivalents. The target audience was like people who had read them.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    Yeah, but just saying, "It's different! You don't understand!" doesn't really inspire confidence, or reflect well.
throwawayhey88 9y ago
Guys -- the name sucks. Change it. Your product will fail without a good name. Would Jobs have ever released a product named "Mastodon"? I think not.
- sctb 9y ago
  Please don't create accounts just to post unsubstantively like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
throwawayhey88 9y ago
Mastodon will never take off. It has a shitty name that doesn't roll off the tongue easily, and the name doesn't have any light or positive connotations.
Crontab 9y ago
Mastodon is very interesting to me but discoverability would seem to be an issue. Despite Twitter's flaws, I can at least search all of it. What are people using to find things across Mastodon servers? Google search?

55 points by rainbowmverse 9y ago

> Since all instances are more or less part of the same federation, it’s as simple as clicking follow when they see you’ve followed them from a new instance. That's not simple, not at scale. It doesn't tell you who the new account is, match them up to the old account, unfollow the old account, automatically remind you when you go to @mention them, or otherwise make the transition automatic. Simple would be the old account that you trust signing a message saying they're now the new account, and when your instance saw that message, it automatically moved your follow over, remembering the old account and using that as a hint to help you switch over.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

falsedan 9y ago

How is Mastodon not like Twitter? I didn't understand after reading the article, it mostly repeats: > Mastodon is different. <describes how it's similar to Twitter>

sp332 9y ago
It's a reaction to this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15244596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15244596 which is linked in the first sentence.
- falsedan 9y ago
  I read that, and I still don't understand the point the article is making about how Mastodon is different to Twitter.

ztratar 9y ago

Exporting is the differentiating feature? As someone who worked in the social space for years, I find this quite misguided. Users want more than exporting. When building a social produdct, you have to be able to excite a mainstream audience. The math behind a superior network connection model or techy-feature like exporting is practically useless to these people. Build something people (from St. Louis) want.

sp332 9y ago
It's not a differentiating feature. The article it's replying to says that Masotodon et al. don't have large networks. But since the little networks are federated, they still get most of the benefits of having a large network. This article points out that exporting and moving somewhere else is not a showstopper.
egypturnash 9y ago
The two biggest differentiating features in my circles seem to be: * less nazis/gamergaters/people who think it is fun to be assholes on the internet (unless you wanna go hang out on an instance that welcomes them, which is probably banned from federating to a lot of other instances) * you can actually emit a paragraph containing a complete thought instead of a very simple sentence Being able to hide the bulk of your post behind an arbitrary user-entered "content warning" tag is damn nice too.
- wpietri 9y ago
  > you can actually emit a paragraph containing a complete thought instead of a very simple sentence This is one of those interesting things about a two-sided product. That is a feature for writers, but it's not always feature for readers. I use Twitter for breadth; I follow a lot of people. The more people can write, the fewer people I can follow. So for me, "they can write more" is an anti-feature.
  - egypturnash 9y ago
    How many of these people regularly make 3-4 tweets in a row, in which they emit a complete thought? How much of your Twitter feed is people quote-tweeting the first of many of these, with a comment along the lines of "Thread"?
    - falsedan 9y ago
      That's what the unfollow button/muting 'Thread.' is for.
    - 9y ago

goatsi 9y ago

Decentralized projects never seem to gain steam until mainstream users are forced away from centralized services. Take a look at this recent article looking at why the majority of mastodon users are from Japan: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2017/08/18/mastodon-is-big-in-japan-the-reason-why-is-uncomfortable/ http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2017/08/18/mastodon-is-bi...

criddell 9y ago
What are some examples of decentralized projects that won over centralized services?
- xena 9y ago
  email
  - zokier 9y ago
    Okay, and anything from the umm.. past 20 years or so?
  - bitcuration 9y ago
    Not exactly. Gamil, Hotmail etc. are some successes that had clearly centralized email despite remained on the same protocols.
    - criddell 9y ago
      Gmail and Hotmail are still part of a federated email system. Email won over messaging on centralized services like Compuserve and Prodigy.
- bigphishy 9y ago
  GNU+Linux
yborg 9y ago
> Federated distributed servers > Refuse to federate with certain servers because of content > Somehow different from the status quo So we end up with a balkanized sea of Mastodon servers with arbitrary interconnection. How this becomes a compelling Facebook competitor to all but a tiny minority is not obvious to me. Groups may as well set up their own bulletin board sites each with their own vision of allowed content. I.e. what we have now.

htormey 9y ago

Mastodon really isn’t a replacement for Twitter. The original Wired article did a poor job of critiquing it. I think this guy does a much better job of critiqueing Mastodon than the article linked in the parent post. https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e8abb1?gi=78a14d4791ce https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e... Key points: “The foremost problem is that federation is a lie. Well, it’s partially a lie. The benefits described above do work; if you send a message to anyone at @username@custom.website, it will be delivered to them. But if @custom.website is a domain that mastodon.social deems inappropriate, replies from that users on that domain don’t show up in your notifications or on your feed, unless you explicitly follow them. So if you’re having a conversation with your friend, @person@custom.website, and another user from custom.website wants to chime in, they will be invisible to you.” And “Suppose you’re a semi-famous content publisher. You have 10,000 followers on Twitter, whom you converse with regularly and have a large history of communications with. If you decide to switch networks to something like Mastodon, you immediately come into contact with the Hardest Problem of Identity on the Internet, which is that your social graph is not portable between platforms.” I feel these are two very important limitations to understand about Mastodon. I see Mastodon as basically Wordpress for people who want a twitter like experience off of twitter. Aka niche communities.

sp332 9y ago
For the first, you're always at the mercy of the whims of the mods for whatever service you're on. The difference with federated services is that you can move to or even set up a server with different mods. Can't do that with Twitter. For the second, that's a limitation of Twitter. If you had 10,000 followers on a federated system, you could switch networks and your old followers could just re-follow you there. They wouldn't have to switch with you.
- htormey 9y ago
  Yep, fair points. To clarify, I think Mastodon is really cool and a big step in the right direction. I don't mean to come across as overly critical. I do feel the second issue he raises is still valid. re-following is a lot of friction, even in a federated system, albeit less so than moving from one centralized service to another. It would be nice if Mastodon provided some way of altering users when someone switches to a new instance.

jaydestro 9y ago

i wish this was about the band.

publicfig 9y ago

Not really sure what point to take away from this article. It's not Twitter, because of some differences in the way the network is set up? It doesn't really seem to make any arguments to the first article (or more so comment thread) that it links to. Obviously Mastodon is a different service than Twitter, but to ignore and dismiss the comparison seems lazy and misguided.

personjerry 9y ago

This was what I got: "Mastodon is different. It has all of the same functionalities, but it's different. Also, following and contacts and everything are the same, but you can export your info, and that's different. People don't understand, but it's different." I honestly can't tell if I'm reading a piece of satire. Having started with no knowledge of Mastodon, at the end of the read all I know about it is that it seems to have all the functionality of Twitter? At the risk of being crass, this sounds like a desperate founder or investor trying to self-validate and coming up woefully short on evidence.

msla 9y ago
From what I gather, Mastodon is to Twitter what Usenet is to Hacker News: Both provide a way to have text-based discussions in a threaded fashion, but Usenet is a protocol shared by many computers, whereas Hacker News is a specific piece of software run on (what is essentially, to all appearances, from the outside) a single, blessed computer. Upshot: Hacker News can go down and be erased forever, modulo archival efforts like the Wayback Machine. Usenet can't go down.
- eli 9y ago
  That's interesting, but doesn't seem super relevant to end users. I'm not particularly worried about Twitter disappearing, but if I was I'd use the export feature to run backups.
  - wongarsu 9y ago
    I think censorship resistance is the more interesting feature. Mastodon seems to be mostly used for content that isn't blessed by Twitter policies.
    - kstrauser 9y ago
      I've found it to be the exact opposite: Mastodon instances are a lot more likely to disconnect from others due to unwelcome content. That's by design, though! Suppose you and I host our own Mastodon servers (aka "instances") as part of a federation of 1,000 instances. I start posting lots of content you and your users dislike (where that could mean anything - porn, pro-Nazi, pro-Antifa, overly conservative, overly liberal - anything). With a checkbox in the web UI, you can start refusing traffic from my server. That would only affect you and your users, and I can still talk to anyone else as usual. Some of yours users might dislike that a flee for more tolerant pastures. That's fine! Some of my users might dislike that my rules are so loose that my server's getting banned, and they'd flee to more closely moderated servers. That's also fine! In either case, our spat only involves the connection between you and me, but the rest of the network chugs away as always. Basically, it's the federation model of email but with the functionality of Twitter. That's what makes it different.

weego 9y ago

It's the same because of how it is but different because of techy features no one who is needed for it to get traction cares about so it's doomed to obsolescence.

s73ver_ 9y ago

I feel that trying to dismiss criticism of something by saying "It's different!", without actually saying why those differences matter is pretty weak sauce.

kstrauser 9y ago
I think this was in response to some articles flying around earlier this week that said, essentially, that Mastodon will fail because some of its features are slightly different from their Twitter equivalents. The target audience was like people who had read them.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  Yeah, but just saying, "It's different! You don't understand!" doesn't really inspire confidence, or reflect well.

throwawayhey88 9y ago

Guys -- the name sucks. Change it. Your product will fail without a good name. Would Jobs have ever released a product named "Mastodon"? I think not.

sctb 9y ago
Please don't create accounts just to post unsubstantively like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

throwawayhey88 9y ago

Mastodon will never take off. It has a shitty name that doesn't roll off the tongue easily, and the name doesn't have any light or positive connotations.

Crontab 9y ago

Mastodon is very interesting to me but discoverability would seem to be an issue. Despite Twitter's flaws, I can at least search all of it. What are people using to find things across Mastodon servers? Google search?