19 ms·

Mastodon 2.0

408 points by gargron 9y ago

willvarfar 9y ago
I'm very curious, what kind of communities and subjects have embraced Mastodon? A while back there was a lot of noise about how it was a popular place with those uncomfortable topics that twitter had banned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15053064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15053064 I clicked gingerly on the links to communities at the bottom of the article - octodon.social, social.tchncs.de, mastodon.art, mstdn.io, mastodon.technology, mastodon.rocks - and many of them have a live feed of posts. I've gotta confess I couldn't quite tell what communities there were, but I'm not an insider and I don't know how to navigate it.
- Kihashi 9y ago
  Many of the instances are organized around a particular community. For example, toot.cat is for "cats and the people that love them". witches.town is "made to provide a nice place on Mastodon for queer, feminists, anarchists and stuff as well as their sympathizers." However, as you'd expect, you might not talk strictly about cats on toot.cat, but you'd be talking with other cat lovers. It might be difficult to discern the community from the local timelines. Also, some of the ones that you mention are just general social instances. Each instance has an about page that you can look at to get a better idea of what it is organized around. [1] [1]: https://mastodon.art/about https://mastodon.art/about
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    Something important to note is that though your local instance is often closest to you, all of the instances talk and you have access to the entire network (or nearly all of it) from any instance.
- tscs37 9y ago
  It should be noted that while this is uncomfortable for Twitter and US culture, for the Japenese this is acceptable behaviour. It's one of the reasons I like Mastodon; I'm not forced to follow US culture.
jochung 9y ago
Decentralization is just an affirmation until they fix the network lock in problem. You're still married to whatever instance you sign up with. The admin limits who you can federate with, and if the policy changes, it requires you to rebuild from scratch if you want to move. That's what's keeping platforms like Twitter on top even though many of its prolific users now sound more like an abused spouse than anything else. I still think the vast majority of this concern over abuse is a red herring though. People just don't like it when their curated bubble is pierced by information that contradicts it, and they confuse being corrected with persecution and social status games.
- ch4s3 9y ago
  Because no one everyone received 100s of death threats or was doxed on Twitter? Harassment is ver real and hard to miss in the platform.
  - mcny 9y ago
    What constitutes a death threat? What should we do with all those twelve year old kids playing call of duty and taking on chat?
    - falcolas 9y ago
      I’d advocate a spanking... ...for their parents.
    - ch4s3 9y ago
      In the US, in most states, it is illegal to " knowingly utter or convey a threat to cause death or bodily harm to any person."[1] California Penal Code 422 PC California criminal threats. ("Any person who willfully threatens to commit a crime which will result in death or great bodily injury to another person, with the specific intent that the statement, made verbally, in writing, or by means of an electronic communication device, is to be taken as a threat..." [2] California law even goes on to say that even absent intent, it is a crime. Which makes sense, because otherwise anyone making such a threat could argue that they were "joking", which happens to be a favorite defense of internet troll.s [1]https://definitions.uslegal.com/d/death-threat/ https://definitions.uslegal.com/d/death-threat/ [2]https://www.shouselaw.com/criminal_threats.html https://www.shouselaw.com/criminal_threats.html
paule89 9y ago
So as far as my simple mind understands, mastodon is a Twitter alternative. But without the adds, true timeconsistent Timeline, without annoying have you seen this tweet yet algorithms and simply working. But the problem is that it is a social network, that depends on your social network and its embrace of mastodon. Am i right?
- thom_nic 9y ago
  Actually I thought it's more like Usenet as soon as I started scrolling through https://joinmastodon.org/#getting-started https://joinmastodon.org/#getting-started
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  Yes, you're more or less correct. However, as someone who ditched Twitter for Mastodon, I don't miss Twitter. There's a vibrant community on Mastodon and you'll feel right at home. It'll only get better as more people make the leap.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    > Yes, you're more or less correct. However, as someone who ditched Twitter for Mastodon, I don't miss Twitter. There's a vibrant community on Mastodon and you'll feel right at home. I tried to quit twitter for Mastodon (because it felt more like an open effort than a facebook-esque megacorp) but I was immediately confused by the distributed thing. I thought it was going to be distributed in terms of how it operated, not in terms of the actual social networks being more or less separated. I understood I could follow people from other instances, but only if the instance was somehow connected to the other instance. This confused me even more. How do I pick an instance without ever running into the risk that interesting person X joins in the future and doesn't pick an instance disconnected from the group of instances I'm in? Basically I just use twitter for news: I follow some big names and organizations and just read from the firehose of news coming out. I probably have a lower than 1/10000 read to write ratio. Am I trying to use Mastodon like Twitter in a way it wasn't designed for?
    - 9y ago
disease 9y ago
How hard would it be to allow users on a server to sell their own personal data from a federated social network with both the server admin and some central authority taking a cut? I feel safe in saying that users being able to sell their own data for their profit, instead of Facebook's, would get people to jump ship.
- mxuribe 9y ago
  Yours is a very novel, clever idea! Being a fan of decentralized platforms, i sort of hope that these platforms get their UI, set, etc. designed in so simple a way in the future, as to allow (non-techies) to manage their own future...but what i forget to think about is not the "how", but the "why"...Your idea certainly offers a good motivator for enticing people to hop on the decentralization train, and legitimately be in control of their own data. Thanks for sharing!!
  - disease 9y ago
    Thanks, but there's nothing novel about it. It's a recurring theme in technology (computing in particular) where something is invented, delivers short-term profit to a small group of people, and then becomes standardized in some way that allows a greater, long-term benefit to a broader audience. I'm sure some economist somewhere has even come up with a clever name for this. Obviously the model I describe will not generate Facebook-scale wealth for any individual player, but I believe there is still good money to be made in addition to the positive externalities that come from standardization and decentralization.
kemenaran 9y ago
I started using Mastodon a few months ago, "just to see", and found great people to interact to there. And these days I'm using Twitter less and less. Looking back, I feel like the short-messages limit is fueling flaming statements rather than good discussions. I also see how constant enabled-by-default notifications and dark patterns made me addicted to new tweets ; on Mastodon I feel less pressure to keep up with the feed constantly. Also, the project grew from a few to 100+ contributors in a few weeks, and apparently managed this transition quite smoothly. Development is ongoing at a steady pace, including new features and major architectural changes. Congrats to the team and contributors!
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Definitely looking forward to Twitter's 280 change to help me communicate better with people there (it was always the reason I preferred G+, for instance, over Twitter), but it would overall be preferred if more people just used Mastodon.
  - nategri 9y ago
    Personally, I prefer Google Buzz
  - ChristianBundy 9y ago
    Mastodon's big issue is that it isn't fully decentralized. I don't want to give Twitter all of my trust, but I also don't want to put all my trust into some random server just because it isn't Twitter. For fully decentralized social networking (online or off-grid) I recommend: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/
    - mi100hael 9y ago
      You can run your own server.
    - e1ven 9y ago
      Can you help me understand what you mean by "isn't fully decentralized"? If you're running your own server, my understanding it's trusted by default by most servers - There is a blacklist of untrusted federation servers, rather than a whitelist? In what way would you prefer it to be setup? More of a p2p model, rather than a federated model?
nstart 9y ago
Here's a quick question I have about Mastodon instances. Most instances I visit are hidden behind a sign up home page. Is this default? How does this encourage more people to interact? Or is that the point? Happy if anyone can just point me in the right direction
- rogerbraun 9y ago
  This is something that was always a problem on Mastodon, but you can use other fediverse servers like https://social.sakamoto.gq/main/all https://social.sakamoto.gq/main/all to look at the network, they show things publicly.
- librexpr 9y ago
  On the about page of an instance[0], if you scroll down, there's "a look inside" of the federated timeline. If you know a username, you can go directly to their page[1]. You can find the username of the admin on the about/more page[2]. These are sample links to mastodon.social: [0] https://mastodon.social/about https://mastodon.social/about [1] https://mastodon.social/@Gargron https://mastodon.social/@Gargron [2] https://mastodon.social/about/more https://mastodon.social/about/more
  - rogerbraun 9y ago
    sadly, the federated timeline is close to useless. I don't understand why it isn't the public timeline that's exposed.
- egypturnash 9y ago
  That's pretty much standard for any social network. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, they all just have a front page inviting you to join and/or log in. And a not-insignificant chance of flat-out refusing to show you a specific post someone linked to unless you're logged in. If you scroll down, the default home page will show you a tiny snippet of the timeline - but it only shows the "federated" timeline, made of public toots from every other instance this one knows about, instead of the "local" one of public toots from this instance, which maybe kinda defeats the point of being a sample of what you'll get if you join this particular instance...
zanedb 9y ago
Mastodon seems very interesting, but I have one significant issue with it. If every instance is decentralized, how can you be sure the instance you use is actually running the Mastodon code? How can you be sure it hasn't been modified to collect user credentials, for example? Is there some sort of signature verification for Mastodon instances?
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  This is the same problem as connecting to any arbitrary forum, or email server. How do you verify the phpBB instance a server is running is actually the one they say it is? And if you centralize (like to Twitter or Facebook), how do you verify it has the security and/or privacy policies they claim it does?
- detaro 9y ago
  You can't. (and given that it's using open protocols, not forcing everyone to run the same software is part of the design) That said, what "user credentials" would an instance collect? The only people logging into it would be user registered at this instance, "capturing" that makes no sense. The security model is very much like the one of e-mail: To protect your data, you have to trust your provider, and for communications both the senders and the receivers server have to be trusted to handle the communication contents as expected.
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  There's also: run it yourself. If you want to be certain the instance you call home is safe and running the right code, spin it up yourself and be your own admin.
CoolGuySteve 9y ago
Can Mastodon work as an isolated server on a corporate network without phoning home? We're looking for a Slack alternative (edit: with channels). Regulations prevent us from using external SaaS products.
- detaro 9y ago
  Sure (there isn't even a direct "home" for it to phone to, as far as I know). It can't connect to other instances then, but that's probably what you want. It's really a twitter-like though, not a chat system, so it isn't necessarily a Slack replacement.
  - CoolGuySteve 9y ago
    We actually want the Slack channel functionality more than anything for stuff like releases, production debugging, etc.
- dsr_ 9y ago
  Mastodon is more like twitter, less like slack. Try a Jabber server, like prosody or ejabberd. There are web jabber clients, as well as native clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. You can require TLS on all connections, optionally log all conversations and chatrooms on the server, and easily federate servers to scale. Most Jabber servers have LDAP integration if you want to push user auth out that way. All of them can be configured to never talk to any other server outside of your control.
- Carioca 9y ago
  Check out https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/ for a FOSS alternative to Slack
- daveid 9y ago
  Mastodon has no home to phone to. You only host your own user's data and the data they request by e.g. following users on other instances. If your users don't follow anyone on the outside, nothing will leave your instance.
tschellenbach 9y ago
From a tech perspective I love this project, very cool. I think it's more likely to end up partially replacing IRC than tools like Twitter/Facebook though.
- mxuribe 9y ago
  I'm a big fan of open platforms like mastodon and Gnu Social, and even i acknowledge that twitter and facebook may not be fully replaced any time soon...But the world is big enough for all to co-exist. And, just because mastodon won;'t replace twitter/facebook, shouldn't stop us all from playing/working on it. Also, my bet on what platform will (eventually) replace IRC is matrix; see https://matrix.org/#about https://matrix.org/#about Of course, that's just my opinion.
mvdwoord 9y ago
Ah, mastodon again, wonder how it is going. Logs in.. Your home timeline is empty! Visit the public timeline or use search to get started and meet other users. Double checks, yes following people, checks again... closes tab, goes back to somewhere else.
- fenwick67 9y ago
  This happens if you don't log in for a while, the server stops updating your timeline for you, and it will be empty when you first log in. If you wait a few minutes it should populate again.
- mxuribe 9y ago
  Yeah, i don't always log into mastodon directly (I usually engage via my Gnu Social network)...but when i see this happen - although rare - it shows empty for about a second, then populates things. If you're not seeing stuff after a second or 2, that's weird.
styfle 9y ago
Would it be possible to write a service that connects twitter into a mastodon instance so that mastodon users can follow twitter users? I’m thiking outloud here but besides scale, are there any other drawbacks?
- mxuribe 9y ago
  The original creator of mastodon has stated his preference for leaving this out of the core of mastodon: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/3888 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/3888 ...But by the virtue of mastodon being only one open source platform that works on the overall federated universe and employs the OStatus protocol, there isn't anything stopping such a service as you described from being built...well, except for twitter eventually deciding to block access to their platform...but i'd guess that would turn the federated universe into a sort of social network martyr. Anyway, sorry i digress...To answer your question a bit more concretely, there are options for what you asked about: * https://github.com/halcy/MastodonToTwitter https://github.com/halcy/MastodonToTwitter * https://medium.com/@pimterry/sync-your-mastodon-back-to-twitter-3c72f2bc8626 https://medium.com/@pimterry/sync-your-mastodon-back-to-twit... I'm sure there are more options; try googling. Cheers!
CaptSpify 9y ago
Mastodon seems cool, but I haven't used it enough yet. Does anyone have a client that they would recommend? Preferably a terminal-client?
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  This came up on a search, but I don't know if it's any good: https://github.com/ihabunek/toot https://github.com/ihabunek/toot
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    Yeah, I've seen a few others via searching around, but I haven't heard any reviews or anything. Thanks
    - rainbowmverse 9y ago
      I've had good luck treating stars and forks on GitHub as reviews. It means it served someone's needs, so it's probably worth trying.
- mxuribe 9y ago
  I have only used mastodon via web browser and Tusky (android mobile app), and both are totally fine. However, here is a list of "known" apps/clients: https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using-Mastodon/Apps.md https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using... If you're looking for term clients - on the above web page - look under the "Other clients" section; I assume "CLI" refers to terminal clients. Happy tooting, and cheers!
evv 9y ago
I can't switch to Mastodon right now because most of my network is on Twitter. Why hasn't somebody built an instance that lets me interact with both networks at once?
- coolsunglasses 9y ago
  Twitter's API is aggressively limited, so limited that third party clients barely work. Believe me, I've tried.
- egypturnash 9y ago
  There's external tools[1] that will clone your toots to Twitter. Nothing integrated, though, and Gargron has said he'd rather keep it that way. [2] Nothing's stopping you from making your own fork and fooling around with it though. Well aside from "not wanting it badly enough to spin up a local Mastodon instance and spend some chunk of the precious few hours remaining of your life on it". 1: https://www.google.com/search?q=mastodon+github+twitter https://www.google.com/search?q=mastodon+github+twitter will find you a bunch 2: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/3888#issuecomment-314936518 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/3888#issuecomme...
- mxuribe 9y ago
  Its less a technical issue, and more of a business/political thing. Its twitter's silo, so if they wish to block or severely limit outside systems from integrating with it, twitter will do so. Twitter can pick up their ball, kill the game, head home, and leave everyone without a game to play; philosophically speaking of course. That's the downside of such a centralized platform. So, i would guess - just my guess really - that it would explain why some rock star devs don't hurry and develop such an integration platform. Think about it: what if some devs build some awesome integration tool/platform, and then twitter sees all the outbound traffic (read: affecting their potential revenue)...well, twitter would just kill that access. And all the devs would get frustrated, etc. I would further guess that these devs probably thought, screw that, i'll just leave twitter for good, and simply post on mastodon (or some such/similar open platform), and just help build out this open platform.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
dethos 9y ago
Started using just out of curiosity, about it being a federated system (just like email), I also knew about the interoperability with Gnu Social and OStatus networks, so I gave it a shot. I launched my private instance and started from there. I can say I'm very surprised, the system works very well, never had major problems and the communication with people with accounts on other instances (since I'm the only one in mine) works flawlessly. This is how the Internet was supposed to work (not full of walled gardens). The good thing is that we're seeing some great decentralized applications and tools appearing recently and a renewed interest in this area, which is great.
- mintplant 9y ago
  > This is how the Internet was supposed to work (not full of walled gardens). The good thing is that we're seeing some great decentralized applications and tools appearing recently and a renewed interest in this area, which is great. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, lumped under my own umbrella term of "communal computing". Instead of one large instance, many smaller instances hosted by independent administrators and often targeted toward particular communities. Avoiding the scaling issues of the former type of service by shrinking things down to where individual operators can run them. Examples include Mastodon, shell services like tilde.town or sdf.org, old-school MUDs, chat servers.
  - erikpukinskis 9y ago
    > Avoiding the scaling issues of the former type of service by shrinking things down to where individual operators can run them. As an aside, this will happen on all businesses too, not just web sites. As software, services, and robotics get better we will start to see solo operated versions of every business. Once we start dropping the average corporation size below 1 (each person runs multiple businesses) most of capitalism’s ill effects will be blunted.
    - konschubert 9y ago
      I don't know. I think that it will be a long time until the benefits of working in regular cooperation with others will disappear.
afandian 9y ago
I'm interested to know if anyone's using Mastodon for discussing research / scholarly publications. Equivalent of people sharing / discussing articles on Twitter.
- mxuribe 9y ago
  You have 3 options: 1. Search for a mastodon instance/server which might already cover this community, and then join up. Besides searching for servers via google, you can visit the following "Join Mastodon" page, and search for a server: https://joinmastodon.org/#getting-started https://joinmastodon.org/#getting-started I see 2 servers when i searched for "scholar", though may not apply to what you want/need: https://scholar.social/about https://scholar.social/about and https://tusk.schoollibraries.net/about https://tusk.schoollibraries.net/about 2. You can join almost any mastodon server, and then search for and follow users - regardless of which server they actually "live" on. Much like the concept of email, you can follow anyone, regardless of their "home server". I think someone else here has already stated, that in masotodon, you follow people, and not necessarily servers/sites. 3. You can set up/run your own mastodon server/instance that would focus on "discussing research / scholarly publications"...Again, you will eventually gain a following of users who would be interested in your topic, even though they won't need to live on your server. I hope that helps! EDIT: Not sure if it was clear, but in my option 2 above, my assumption is that you could follow users who would be interested (and perhaps already involved) in "discussing research / scholarly publications".
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  https://mathstodon.xyz/ https://mathstodon.xyz/ Is geared towards math topics. That made the rounds here earlier this year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14564624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14564624
kzrdude 9y ago
(About the page design) I don't know what medium is doing. They have bars both along the top and bottom of their page, which cramps reading. Instant reader mode click to resolve that, which shouldn't really be needed on medium.
- heroprotagonist 9y ago
  It's kind of curious that they posted this on Medium instead of some Mastodon site.
  - daveid 9y ago
    Mastodon is a microblogging platform. This does not fit into the format.
    - Deimorz 9y ago
      It shouldn't be posted on Mastodon itself, but they should just set up a simple static blog somewhere. Medium is the opposite of Mastodon in so many ways (centralized, heavy data-collection, etc.) that it really makes no sense for them to be using it as their official method of making announcements.
heroprotagonist 9y ago
I tried to use this a couple of times, but had a difficult time choosing a community. They seemed to mostly appear the same, so I chose based on activity and uptime. But apparently those instances were largely in languages I didn't understand. The "filter out these languages" improved it a bit, if I go through and check every box except english (slightly unintuitive, there, as most people will know few languages and want to select what they know instead of what they do not know) though not completely. It seems to work better with 'local' than with 'federated' results, which can mean cutting you off from the global community if you limit yourself to local. I wouldn't mind seeing a guide to various popular communities to choose what to pick.
- mintplant 9y ago
  Something like https://instances.social https://instances.social?
  - heroprotagonist 9y ago
    That's pretty nice. I remember using it before, but maybe my selections were better this time. Thanks! Though, if you filter for 'English' it still gives second result with description "Une instance francaise...' Also, I found a solution for the language issue, by adding a regex filter: .*[^\u0000-\u007F].* It may be over-filtering a little, I am not sure. But better to filter too much than not enough, I guess.
- liguafranc 9y ago
  I chose English. The top five it found for me were: 1. Chinese 2. German 3. Looks English, except for the word "astronomie" 4. French 5. English
BadassFractal 9y ago
How do I browse the different instances out there to find the ones I might want to join?
- mxuribe 9y ago
  Visit https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/ You can walk through the "help wizard", or click "list" link in topnav to see all of the known instances. EDIT: I failed to mention, that you should not feel like joining one instance excludes you from the greater federation of networks...you can join one instance and follow people from anywhere else. And, if you begin to dislike the instance that you joined, simply move to another one...or even better - though a tad more work for you - set up your own personal instance, do whatever you want, and still be able to follow anyone on any other instance.
- nolanl 9y ago
  A good place to start is https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/ or https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org
dorfsmay 9y ago
I'm confused about identity in mastodon. Your identity is based on which server you use? So if you change server within the federation you are essentially a different person?
- ProfessorLayton 9y ago
  Think of it like email identities, but applied to twitter john@ google dot com can be a different person than john@ yahoo dot com
  - dorfsmay 9y ago
    But if you owned @example.com, you could move alex@example.com from one server to the next.
- pfg 9y ago
  That's accurate, yes. It's easy to import and export things like users you follow and blocks, but not timelines or your own followers (they'd have to refollow). There are efforts under way to change this[1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15518277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15518277
pc2g4d 9y ago
"Toot" Still can't get over it. Definition 2 on Wiktionary: "A fart; flatus."
- mxuribe 9y ago
  Never let it be said that technologists lack a sense of humor! ;-)
- disease 9y ago
  I don't like this word either. Not just the 'fart' aspect, or even the 'cutesy' aspect - I just don't like how closely this apes the word 'tweet' from Twitter.
natural219 9y ago
I'm the one who wrote this piece in April outlining Mastodon/GNU Social's core problem with identity portability[1]. I'm sad to see the development team has decided to focus on emojis and fancy features while kicking the society-breaking problem of federated moderation down the road. As one user put it on the open Github issue describing the problem[2]: > Being told right up front that you should irrevocably attach your social life to a server run by some rando.... is not a welcoming way to start using a new service. I still think Mastodon is best-in-class in terms of UI for open social projects, and hope the development team will consider tackling this problem. Until then, I still cannot endorse using Mastodon/GNU Social as a platform in its current state. [1] https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e8abb1 https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e... [2] https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177
- natural219 9y ago
  (For anyone interested, I can rant a little) This problem is easily fixable code-wise, but there's hesitation to diverge from the standards upon which Mastodon is based, and the original standards body behind this particular issue has long since disbanded. Other than monkeypatching Mastodon (and potentially breaking GNU social federation), the solution would be to re-convene a working standards body to implement a "correct" spec for this problem. Since nobody seems willing to do that, monkeypatching Mastodon to make an order of magnitude more users comfortable with switching to it is probably my recommendation. The world needs more protocol standards bodies and more engaged, engineering-minded parliamentarians.
  - nolanl 9y ago
    It looks like the Social CG is still active, and they're working on the new ActivityPub protocol which Mastodon 2.0 supports. Follower migration is one of the issues they're discussing: - https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG/2017-10-11 https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG/2017-10-11 - https://github.com/swicg/general/issues/1 https://github.com/swicg/general/issues/1
    - 9y ago
orthecreedence 9y ago
Question for users of mastodon: Given the flagship's stances on free speech (https://mastodon.social/about/more https://mastodon.social/about/more), if I am a user on the flagship instance (we'll call it A) and I want to follow an account on another server (let's call it B) that posts content that wouldn't be allowed on A, would my act of following that user on B pull the content to A? And would that content be removed? or does it only get removed if it is post to A in the first place? My concern is that users on the flagship instance would only see a curated feed of the things they follow, even if following content on server that don't have such strict content policies.
- pfg 9y ago
  I'm not entirely sure if mastodon.social has published any policy clarifying how and under what circumstances they apply instance bans. There are two ways administrators can block other instances on Mastodon: Silence: Posts from users of these instances are only visible to users following that user directly, but not in public timelines. Suspend: All posts from users of these instances are always removed, even if you follow them directly. I would suspect that most admins stick with the first option for almost all bans. That said, users who are concerned about this should stick to instances with a broad interpretation of free speech.
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sdrothrock 9y ago
Just joined out of curiosity (https://mstd.tokyo/@scott https://mstd.tokyo/@scott) and I'm pretty impressed by how smoothly things have gone... but I'm also a bit disappointed by how it handles federation. If I try searching for tags or topics, I generally come up with zero results -- I'm never quite sure if it's because they don't exist on the instance I joined on or whether there just aren't enough users to have that tag/topic out there in the federation. Discoverability seems very, very low out of the box and that seems like the one thing that would keep me from staying on Mastodon. Another issue I ran into was that after I tooted a few times, I started wondering if I'd chosen a "bad" server (low activity) and started looking for ways to move my account to another server -- it feels like a waste to go and start up another account and leave my toots behind. :/ I really wish it were possible to just browse other instances' public feeds. For example, I'd love to see some stuff from mastodon.art, but I can't yet figure out a way to just browse over there short of making another account.
- JD557 9y ago
  >Another issue I ran into was that after I tooted a few times, I started wondering if I'd chosen a "bad" server (low activity) and started looking for ways to move my account to another server Account migration is still the top issue on GitHub. I was a bit disappointed when I saw that they announced 2.0 without it.
aqsalose 9y ago
Is there a sane solution to following local timelines of several instances? The local timeline on my instance is quite dead, the federated timeline has so much variance it's nearly useless.
- snthd 9y ago
  Don't think so. Open issue "Browse Other Instances' Public Timeline" - https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/1053 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/1053
jeena 9y ago
The only meaningfull way to use it is with your own domain so you can change the hosters easyly without loosing your whole network of followers/friends. You can self host for sure but it would be nice to be able to just use your domain with one of the hosters for starters, is there such a possibility?

408 points by gargron 9y ago

I'm very curious, what kind of communities and subjects have embraced Mastodon? A while back there was a lot of noise about how it was a popular place with those uncomfortable topics that twitter had banned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15053064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15053064 I clicked gingerly on the links to communities at the bottom of the article - octodon.social, social.tchncs.de, mastodon.art, mstdn.io, mastodon.technology, mastodon.rocks - and many of them have a live feed of posts. I've gotta confess I couldn't quite tell what communities there were, but I'm not an insider and I don't know how to navigate it.

Kihashi 9y ago
Many of the instances are organized around a particular community. For example, toot.cat is for "cats and the people that love them". witches.town is "made to provide a nice place on Mastodon for queer, feminists, anarchists and stuff as well as their sympathizers." However, as you'd expect, you might not talk strictly about cats on toot.cat, but you'd be talking with other cat lovers. It might be difficult to discern the community from the local timelines. Also, some of the ones that you mention are just general social instances. Each instance has an about page that you can look at to get a better idea of what it is organized around. [1] [1]: https://mastodon.art/about https://mastodon.art/about
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  Something important to note is that though your local instance is often closest to you, all of the instances talk and you have access to the entire network (or nearly all of it) from any instance.
tscs37 9y ago
It should be noted that while this is uncomfortable for Twitter and US culture, for the Japenese this is acceptable behaviour. It's one of the reasons I like Mastodon; I'm not forced to follow US culture.

jochung 9y ago

Decentralization is just an affirmation until they fix the network lock in problem. You're still married to whatever instance you sign up with. The admin limits who you can federate with, and if the policy changes, it requires you to rebuild from scratch if you want to move. That's what's keeping platforms like Twitter on top even though many of its prolific users now sound more like an abused spouse than anything else. I still think the vast majority of this concern over abuse is a red herring though. People just don't like it when their curated bubble is pierced by information that contradicts it, and they confuse being corrected with persecution and social status games.

ch4s3 9y ago
Because no one everyone received 100s of death threats or was doxed on Twitter? Harassment is ver real and hard to miss in the platform.
- mcny 9y ago
  What constitutes a death threat? What should we do with all those twelve year old kids playing call of duty and taking on chat?
  - falcolas 9y ago
    I’d advocate a spanking... ...for their parents.
  - ch4s3 9y ago
    In the US, in most states, it is illegal to " knowingly utter or convey a threat to cause death or bodily harm to any person."[1] California Penal Code 422 PC California criminal threats. ("Any person who willfully threatens to commit a crime which will result in death or great bodily injury to another person, with the specific intent that the statement, made verbally, in writing, or by means of an electronic communication device, is to be taken as a threat..." [2] California law even goes on to say that even absent intent, it is a crime. Which makes sense, because otherwise anyone making such a threat could argue that they were "joking", which happens to be a favorite defense of internet troll.s [1]https://definitions.uslegal.com/d/death-threat/ https://definitions.uslegal.com/d/death-threat/ [2]https://www.shouselaw.com/criminal_threats.html https://www.shouselaw.com/criminal_threats.html

paule89 9y ago

So as far as my simple mind understands, mastodon is a Twitter alternative. But without the adds, true timeconsistent Timeline, without annoying have you seen this tweet yet algorithms and simply working. But the problem is that it is a social network, that depends on your social network and its embrace of mastodon. Am i right?

thom_nic 9y ago
Actually I thought it's more like Usenet as soon as I started scrolling through https://joinmastodon.org/#getting-started https://joinmastodon.org/#getting-started
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
Yes, you're more or less correct. However, as someone who ditched Twitter for Mastodon, I don't miss Twitter. There's a vibrant community on Mastodon and you'll feel right at home. It'll only get better as more people make the leap.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  > Yes, you're more or less correct. However, as someone who ditched Twitter for Mastodon, I don't miss Twitter. There's a vibrant community on Mastodon and you'll feel right at home. I tried to quit twitter for Mastodon (because it felt more like an open effort than a facebook-esque megacorp) but I was immediately confused by the distributed thing. I thought it was going to be distributed in terms of how it operated, not in terms of the actual social networks being more or less separated. I understood I could follow people from other instances, but only if the instance was somehow connected to the other instance. This confused me even more. How do I pick an instance without ever running into the risk that interesting person X joins in the future and doesn't pick an instance disconnected from the group of instances I'm in? Basically I just use twitter for news: I follow some big names and organizations and just read from the firehose of news coming out. I probably have a lower than 1/10000 read to write ratio. Am I trying to use Mastodon like Twitter in a way it wasn't designed for?
  - 9y ago

disease 9y ago

How hard would it be to allow users on a server to sell their own personal data from a federated social network with both the server admin and some central authority taking a cut? I feel safe in saying that users being able to sell their own data for their profit, instead of Facebook's, would get people to jump ship.

mxuribe 9y ago
Yours is a very novel, clever idea! Being a fan of decentralized platforms, i sort of hope that these platforms get their UI, set, etc. designed in so simple a way in the future, as to allow (non-techies) to manage their own future...but what i forget to think about is not the "how", but the "why"...Your idea certainly offers a good motivator for enticing people to hop on the decentralization train, and legitimately be in control of their own data. Thanks for sharing!!
- disease 9y ago
  Thanks, but there's nothing novel about it. It's a recurring theme in technology (computing in particular) where something is invented, delivers short-term profit to a small group of people, and then becomes standardized in some way that allows a greater, long-term benefit to a broader audience. I'm sure some economist somewhere has even come up with a clever name for this. Obviously the model I describe will not generate Facebook-scale wealth for any individual player, but I believe there is still good money to be made in addition to the positive externalities that come from standardization and decentralization.

kemenaran 9y ago

I started using Mastodon a few months ago, "just to see", and found great people to interact to there. And these days I'm using Twitter less and less. Looking back, I feel like the short-messages limit is fueling flaming statements rather than good discussions. I also see how constant enabled-by-default notifications and dark patterns made me addicted to new tweets ; on Mastodon I feel less pressure to keep up with the feed constantly. Also, the project grew from a few to 100+ contributors in a few weeks, and apparently managed this transition quite smoothly. Development is ongoing at a steady pace, including new features and major architectural changes. Congrats to the team and contributors!

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Definitely looking forward to Twitter's 280 change to help me communicate better with people there (it was always the reason I preferred G+, for instance, over Twitter), but it would overall be preferred if more people just used Mastodon.
- nategri 9y ago
  Personally, I prefer Google Buzz
- ChristianBundy 9y ago
  Mastodon's big issue is that it isn't fully decentralized. I don't want to give Twitter all of my trust, but I also don't want to put all my trust into some random server just because it isn't Twitter. For fully decentralized social networking (online or off-grid) I recommend: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/
  - mi100hael 9y ago
    You can run your own server.
  - e1ven 9y ago
    Can you help me understand what you mean by "isn't fully decentralized"? If you're running your own server, my understanding it's trusted by default by most servers - There is a blacklist of untrusted federation servers, rather than a whitelist? In what way would you prefer it to be setup? More of a p2p model, rather than a federated model?

nstart 9y ago

Here's a quick question I have about Mastodon instances. Most instances I visit are hidden behind a sign up home page. Is this default? How does this encourage more people to interact? Or is that the point? Happy if anyone can just point me in the right direction

rogerbraun 9y ago
This is something that was always a problem on Mastodon, but you can use other fediverse servers like https://social.sakamoto.gq/main/all https://social.sakamoto.gq/main/all to look at the network, they show things publicly.
librexpr 9y ago
On the about page of an instance[0], if you scroll down, there's "a look inside" of the federated timeline. If you know a username, you can go directly to their page[1]. You can find the username of the admin on the about/more page[2]. These are sample links to mastodon.social: [0] https://mastodon.social/about https://mastodon.social/about [1] https://mastodon.social/@Gargron https://mastodon.social/@Gargron [2] https://mastodon.social/about/more https://mastodon.social/about/more
- rogerbraun 9y ago
  sadly, the federated timeline is close to useless. I don't understand why it isn't the public timeline that's exposed.
egypturnash 9y ago
That's pretty much standard for any social network. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, they all just have a front page inviting you to join and/or log in. And a not-insignificant chance of flat-out refusing to show you a specific post someone linked to unless you're logged in. If you scroll down, the default home page will show you a tiny snippet of the timeline - but it only shows the "federated" timeline, made of public toots from every other instance this one knows about, instead of the "local" one of public toots from this instance, which maybe kinda defeats the point of being a sample of what you'll get if you join this particular instance...

zanedb 9y ago

Mastodon seems very interesting, but I have one significant issue with it. If every instance is decentralized, how can you be sure the instance you use is actually running the Mastodon code? How can you be sure it hasn't been modified to collect user credentials, for example? Is there some sort of signature verification for Mastodon instances?

Jtsummers 9y ago
This is the same problem as connecting to any arbitrary forum, or email server. How do you verify the phpBB instance a server is running is actually the one they say it is? And if you centralize (like to Twitter or Facebook), how do you verify it has the security and/or privacy policies they claim it does?
detaro 9y ago
You can't. (and given that it's using open protocols, not forcing everyone to run the same software is part of the design) That said, what "user credentials" would an instance collect? The only people logging into it would be user registered at this instance, "capturing" that makes no sense. The security model is very much like the one of e-mail: To protect your data, you have to trust your provider, and for communications both the senders and the receivers server have to be trusted to handle the communication contents as expected.
WorldMaker 9y ago
There's also: run it yourself. If you want to be certain the instance you call home is safe and running the right code, spin it up yourself and be your own admin.

CoolGuySteve 9y ago

Can Mastodon work as an isolated server on a corporate network without phoning home? We're looking for a Slack alternative (edit: with channels). Regulations prevent us from using external SaaS products.

detaro 9y ago
Sure (there isn't even a direct "home" for it to phone to, as far as I know). It can't connect to other instances then, but that's probably what you want. It's really a twitter-like though, not a chat system, so it isn't necessarily a Slack replacement.
- CoolGuySteve 9y ago
  We actually want the Slack channel functionality more than anything for stuff like releases, production debugging, etc.
dsr_ 9y ago
Mastodon is more like twitter, less like slack. Try a Jabber server, like prosody or ejabberd. There are web jabber clients, as well as native clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. You can require TLS on all connections, optionally log all conversations and chatrooms on the server, and easily federate servers to scale. Most Jabber servers have LDAP integration if you want to push user auth out that way. All of them can be configured to never talk to any other server outside of your control.
Carioca 9y ago
Check out https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/ for a FOSS alternative to Slack
daveid 9y ago
Mastodon has no home to phone to. You only host your own user's data and the data they request by e.g. following users on other instances. If your users don't follow anyone on the outside, nothing will leave your instance.

tschellenbach 9y ago

From a tech perspective I love this project, very cool. I think it's more likely to end up partially replacing IRC than tools like Twitter/Facebook though.

mxuribe 9y ago
I'm a big fan of open platforms like mastodon and Gnu Social, and even i acknowledge that twitter and facebook may not be fully replaced any time soon...But the world is big enough for all to co-exist. And, just because mastodon won;'t replace twitter/facebook, shouldn't stop us all from playing/working on it. Also, my bet on what platform will (eventually) replace IRC is matrix; see https://matrix.org/#about https://matrix.org/#about Of course, that's just my opinion.

mvdwoord 9y ago

Ah, mastodon again, wonder how it is going. Logs in.. Your home timeline is empty! Visit the public timeline or use search to get started and meet other users. Double checks, yes following people, checks again... closes tab, goes back to somewhere else.

fenwick67 9y ago
This happens if you don't log in for a while, the server stops updating your timeline for you, and it will be empty when you first log in. If you wait a few minutes it should populate again.
mxuribe 9y ago
Yeah, i don't always log into mastodon directly (I usually engage via my Gnu Social network)...but when i see this happen - although rare - it shows empty for about a second, then populates things. If you're not seeing stuff after a second or 2, that's weird.

styfle 9y ago

Would it be possible to write a service that connects twitter into a mastodon instance so that mastodon users can follow twitter users? I’m thiking outloud here but besides scale, are there any other drawbacks?

mxuribe 9y ago
The original creator of mastodon has stated his preference for leaving this out of the core of mastodon: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/3888 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/3888 ...But by the virtue of mastodon being only one open source platform that works on the overall federated universe and employs the OStatus protocol, there isn't anything stopping such a service as you described from being built...well, except for twitter eventually deciding to block access to their platform...but i'd guess that would turn the federated universe into a sort of social network martyr. Anyway, sorry i digress...To answer your question a bit more concretely, there are options for what you asked about: * https://github.com/halcy/MastodonToTwitter https://github.com/halcy/MastodonToTwitter * https://medium.com/@pimterry/sync-your-mastodon-back-to-twitter-3c72f2bc8626 https://medium.com/@pimterry/sync-your-mastodon-back-to-twit... I'm sure there are more options; try googling. Cheers!

CaptSpify 9y ago

Mastodon seems cool, but I haven't used it enough yet. Does anyone have a client that they would recommend? Preferably a terminal-client?

rainbowmverse 9y ago
This came up on a search, but I don't know if it's any good: https://github.com/ihabunek/toot https://github.com/ihabunek/toot
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  Yeah, I've seen a few others via searching around, but I haven't heard any reviews or anything. Thanks
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    I've had good luck treating stars and forks on GitHub as reviews. It means it served someone's needs, so it's probably worth trying.
mxuribe 9y ago
I have only used mastodon via web browser and Tusky (android mobile app), and both are totally fine. However, here is a list of "known" apps/clients: https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using-Mastodon/Apps.md https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using... If you're looking for term clients - on the above web page - look under the "Other clients" section; I assume "CLI" refers to terminal clients. Happy tooting, and cheers!

evv 9y ago

I can't switch to Mastodon right now because most of my network is on Twitter. Why hasn't somebody built an instance that lets me interact with both networks at once?

coolsunglasses 9y ago
Twitter's API is aggressively limited, so limited that third party clients barely work. Believe me, I've tried.
egypturnash 9y ago
There's external tools[1] that will clone your toots to Twitter. Nothing integrated, though, and Gargron has said he'd rather keep it that way. [2] Nothing's stopping you from making your own fork and fooling around with it though. Well aside from "not wanting it badly enough to spin up a local Mastodon instance and spend some chunk of the precious few hours remaining of your life on it". 1: https://www.google.com/search?q=mastodon+github+twitter https://www.google.com/search?q=mastodon+github+twitter will find you a bunch 2: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/3888#issuecomment-314936518 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/3888#issuecomme...
mxuribe 9y ago
Its less a technical issue, and more of a business/political thing. Its twitter's silo, so if they wish to block or severely limit outside systems from integrating with it, twitter will do so. Twitter can pick up their ball, kill the game, head home, and leave everyone without a game to play; philosophically speaking of course. That's the downside of such a centralized platform. So, i would guess - just my guess really - that it would explain why some rock star devs don't hurry and develop such an integration platform. Think about it: what if some devs build some awesome integration tool/platform, and then twitter sees all the outbound traffic (read: affecting their potential revenue)...well, twitter would just kill that access. And all the devs would get frustrated, etc. I would further guess that these devs probably thought, screw that, i'll just leave twitter for good, and simply post on mastodon (or some such/similar open platform), and just help build out this open platform.
s73ver_ 9y ago

dethos 9y ago

Started using just out of curiosity, about it being a federated system (just like email), I also knew about the interoperability with Gnu Social and OStatus networks, so I gave it a shot. I launched my private instance and started from there. I can say I'm very surprised, the system works very well, never had major problems and the communication with people with accounts on other instances (since I'm the only one in mine) works flawlessly. This is how the Internet was supposed to work (not full of walled gardens). The good thing is that we're seeing some great decentralized applications and tools appearing recently and a renewed interest in this area, which is great.

mintplant 9y ago
> This is how the Internet was supposed to work (not full of walled gardens). The good thing is that we're seeing some great decentralized applications and tools appearing recently and a renewed interest in this area, which is great. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, lumped under my own umbrella term of "communal computing". Instead of one large instance, many smaller instances hosted by independent administrators and often targeted toward particular communities. Avoiding the scaling issues of the former type of service by shrinking things down to where individual operators can run them. Examples include Mastodon, shell services like tilde.town or sdf.org, old-school MUDs, chat servers.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  > Avoiding the scaling issues of the former type of service by shrinking things down to where individual operators can run them. As an aside, this will happen on all businesses too, not just web sites. As software, services, and robotics get better we will start to see solo operated versions of every business. Once we start dropping the average corporation size below 1 (each person runs multiple businesses) most of capitalism’s ill effects will be blunted.
  - konschubert 9y ago
    I don't know. I think that it will be a long time until the benefits of working in regular cooperation with others will disappear.

afandian 9y ago

I'm interested to know if anyone's using Mastodon for discussing research / scholarly publications. Equivalent of people sharing / discussing articles on Twitter.

mxuribe 9y ago
You have 3 options: 1. Search for a mastodon instance/server which might already cover this community, and then join up. Besides searching for servers via google, you can visit the following "Join Mastodon" page, and search for a server: https://joinmastodon.org/#getting-started https://joinmastodon.org/#getting-started I see 2 servers when i searched for "scholar", though may not apply to what you want/need: https://scholar.social/about https://scholar.social/about and https://tusk.schoollibraries.net/about https://tusk.schoollibraries.net/about 2. You can join almost any mastodon server, and then search for and follow users - regardless of which server they actually "live" on. Much like the concept of email, you can follow anyone, regardless of their "home server". I think someone else here has already stated, that in masotodon, you follow people, and not necessarily servers/sites. 3. You can set up/run your own mastodon server/instance that would focus on "discussing research / scholarly publications"...Again, you will eventually gain a following of users who would be interested in your topic, even though they won't need to live on your server. I hope that helps! EDIT: Not sure if it was clear, but in my option 2 above, my assumption is that you could follow users who would be interested (and perhaps already involved) in "discussing research / scholarly publications".
Jtsummers 9y ago
https://mathstodon.xyz/ https://mathstodon.xyz/ Is geared towards math topics. That made the rounds here earlier this year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14564624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14564624

kzrdude 9y ago

(About the page design) I don't know what medium is doing. They have bars both along the top and bottom of their page, which cramps reading. Instant reader mode click to resolve that, which shouldn't really be needed on medium.

heroprotagonist 9y ago
It's kind of curious that they posted this on Medium instead of some Mastodon site.
- daveid 9y ago
  Mastodon is a microblogging platform. This does not fit into the format.
  - Deimorz 9y ago
    It shouldn't be posted on Mastodon itself, but they should just set up a simple static blog somewhere. Medium is the opposite of Mastodon in so many ways (centralized, heavy data-collection, etc.) that it really makes no sense for them to be using it as their official method of making announcements.

heroprotagonist 9y ago

I tried to use this a couple of times, but had a difficult time choosing a community. They seemed to mostly appear the same, so I chose based on activity and uptime. But apparently those instances were largely in languages I didn't understand. The "filter out these languages" improved it a bit, if I go through and check every box except english (slightly unintuitive, there, as most people will know few languages and want to select what they know instead of what they do not know) though not completely. It seems to work better with 'local' than with 'federated' results, which can mean cutting you off from the global community if you limit yourself to local. I wouldn't mind seeing a guide to various popular communities to choose what to pick.

mintplant 9y ago
Something like https://instances.social https://instances.social?
- heroprotagonist 9y ago
  That's pretty nice. I remember using it before, but maybe my selections were better this time. Thanks! Though, if you filter for 'English' it still gives second result with description "Une instance francaise...' Also, I found a solution for the language issue, by adding a regex filter: .*[^\u0000-\u007F].* It may be over-filtering a little, I am not sure. But better to filter too much than not enough, I guess.
liguafranc 9y ago
I chose English. The top five it found for me were: 1. Chinese 2. German 3. Looks English, except for the word "astronomie" 4. French 5. English

BadassFractal 9y ago

How do I browse the different instances out there to find the ones I might want to join?

mxuribe 9y ago
Visit https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/ You can walk through the "help wizard", or click "list" link in topnav to see all of the known instances. EDIT: I failed to mention, that you should not feel like joining one instance excludes you from the greater federation of networks...you can join one instance and follow people from anywhere else. And, if you begin to dislike the instance that you joined, simply move to another one...or even better - though a tad more work for you - set up your own personal instance, do whatever you want, and still be able to follow anyone on any other instance.
nolanl 9y ago
A good place to start is https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/ or https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org

dorfsmay 9y ago

I'm confused about identity in mastodon. Your identity is based on which server you use? So if you change server within the federation you are essentially a different person?

ProfessorLayton 9y ago
Think of it like email identities, but applied to twitter john@ google dot com can be a different person than john@ yahoo dot com
- dorfsmay 9y ago
  But if you owned @example.com, you could move alex@example.com from one server to the next.
pfg 9y ago
That's accurate, yes. It's easy to import and export things like users you follow and blocks, but not timelines or your own followers (they'd have to refollow). There are efforts under way to change this[1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15518277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15518277

pc2g4d 9y ago

"Toot" Still can't get over it. Definition 2 on Wiktionary: "A fart; flatus."

mxuribe 9y ago
Never let it be said that technologists lack a sense of humor! ;-)
disease 9y ago
I don't like this word either. Not just the 'fart' aspect, or even the 'cutesy' aspect - I just don't like how closely this apes the word 'tweet' from Twitter.

natural219 9y ago

I'm the one who wrote this piece in April outlining Mastodon/GNU Social's core problem with identity portability[1]. I'm sad to see the development team has decided to focus on emojis and fancy features while kicking the society-breaking problem of federated moderation down the road. As one user put it on the open Github issue describing the problem[2]: > Being told right up front that you should irrevocably attach your social life to a server run by some rando.... is not a welcoming way to start using a new service. I still think Mastodon is best-in-class in terms of UI for open social projects, and hope the development team will consider tackling this problem. Until then, I still cannot endorse using Mastodon/GNU Social as a platform in its current state. [1] https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e8abb1 https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e... [2] https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177

natural219 9y ago
(For anyone interested, I can rant a little) This problem is easily fixable code-wise, but there's hesitation to diverge from the standards upon which Mastodon is based, and the original standards body behind this particular issue has long since disbanded. Other than monkeypatching Mastodon (and potentially breaking GNU social federation), the solution would be to re-convene a working standards body to implement a "correct" spec for this problem. Since nobody seems willing to do that, monkeypatching Mastodon to make an order of magnitude more users comfortable with switching to it is probably my recommendation. The world needs more protocol standards bodies and more engaged, engineering-minded parliamentarians.
- nolanl 9y ago
  It looks like the Social CG is still active, and they're working on the new ActivityPub protocol which Mastodon 2.0 supports. Follower migration is one of the issues they're discussing: - https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG/2017-10-11 https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG/2017-10-11 - https://github.com/swicg/general/issues/1 https://github.com/swicg/general/issues/1
  - 9y ago

orthecreedence 9y ago

Question for users of mastodon: Given the flagship's stances on free speech (https://mastodon.social/about/more https://mastodon.social/about/more), if I am a user on the flagship instance (we'll call it A) and I want to follow an account on another server (let's call it B) that posts content that wouldn't be allowed on A, would my act of following that user on B pull the content to A? And would that content be removed? or does it only get removed if it is post to A in the first place? My concern is that users on the flagship instance would only see a curated feed of the things they follow, even if following content on server that don't have such strict content policies.

pfg 9y ago
I'm not entirely sure if mastodon.social has published any policy clarifying how and under what circumstances they apply instance bans. There are two ways administrators can block other instances on Mastodon: Silence: Posts from users of these instances are only visible to users following that user directly, but not in public timelines. Suspend: All posts from users of these instances are always removed, even if you follow them directly. I would suspect that most admins stick with the first option for almost all bans. That said, users who are concerned about this should stick to instances with a broad interpretation of free speech.

deleted 9y ago

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deleted 9y ago

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sdrothrock 9y ago

Just joined out of curiosity (https://mstd.tokyo/@scott https://mstd.tokyo/@scott) and I'm pretty impressed by how smoothly things have gone... but I'm also a bit disappointed by how it handles federation. If I try searching for tags or topics, I generally come up with zero results -- I'm never quite sure if it's because they don't exist on the instance I joined on or whether there just aren't enough users to have that tag/topic out there in the federation. Discoverability seems very, very low out of the box and that seems like the one thing that would keep me from staying on Mastodon. Another issue I ran into was that after I tooted a few times, I started wondering if I'd chosen a "bad" server (low activity) and started looking for ways to move my account to another server -- it feels like a waste to go and start up another account and leave my toots behind. :/ I really wish it were possible to just browse other instances' public feeds. For example, I'd love to see some stuff from mastodon.art, but I can't yet figure out a way to just browse over there short of making another account.

JD557 9y ago
>Another issue I ran into was that after I tooted a few times, I started wondering if I'd chosen a "bad" server (low activity) and started looking for ways to move my account to another server Account migration is still the top issue on GitHub. I was a bit disappointed when I saw that they announced 2.0 without it.

aqsalose 9y ago

Is there a sane solution to following local timelines of several instances? The local timeline on my instance is quite dead, the federated timeline has so much variance it's nearly useless.

snthd 9y ago
Don't think so. Open issue "Browse Other Instances' Public Timeline" - https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/1053 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/1053

jeena 9y ago

The only meaningfull way to use it is with your own domain so you can change the hosters easyly without loosing your whole network of followers/friends. You can self host for sure but it would be nice to be able to just use your domain with one of the hosters for starters, is there such a possibility?