16 ms·

DeleteFacebook: Perspective from Mastodon

215 points by bluefreeze 9y ago

spraak 9y ago
How do people feel about using Facebook's technology like React in light of all this controversy? Is there any concern that there is cross over between the data harvesting and the engineering behind React etc.?
- ch4s3 9y ago
  > cross over between the data harvesting and the engineering behind React I'm not sure I understand what you mean here.
- beeskneecaps 9y ago
  React does not harvest data.
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  I'm honestly struggling to figure out what you even think might be the issue here – is it that you think React might be harvesting data from people's projects?
- Retroity 9y ago
  React is an open-source freely-licensed javascript library that you can self-host, so I don't see the problem with it just because it's maintained by Facebook.
- saintPirelli 9y ago
  The worst thing Facebook could do to React is seize support and development (or make future development proprietary).
- a_humean 9y ago
  Its a JavaScript library used for providing an abstraction over DOM manipulation, and is open source. It doesn't phone home to facebook with your mother's maiden name, and it doesn't have a single line of network code in its source code. Worse that could happen is facebook stops supporting it for some reason and a lot of engineering talent dedicated to it evaporates.
jeffreyrogers 9y ago
I think the idea that Facebook is putting democracy in peril is a bit farfetched.
- Mortiffer 9y ago
  while Cambridge Analytica is clearly a horrible company the idea of gathering data and building some models to better target advertisement to them is something totally normal happening all over the place. And i don't think we can really dismantel the core of online advertising because of one shady company
  - pyjammas 9y ago
    I remember not thinking much of the whole CA story back when I read about it (few years ago?), but what makes me less certain about this is that they might have vastly more data to work with than I initially thought. I'm not a data scientist though, so I'd really like to hear why that is/isn't a problem. Basically: assuming one has massive datasets that can be combined, how dangerous can even basic analysis be?
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
    One? Have you been not been paying attention to the last decade of internet advertising?
  - mfringel 9y ago
    Dynamite is only interesting because it burns very quickly, in an energetic reaction. Things burn all the time, so I don't see why dynamite is all that interesting. Evaluating something based on its known external traits without discussing the context in which they're used is an incomplete assessment.
  - Tassels 9y ago
    It's not that CA is just gathering data and using that data to target ads. That's normal. But they've also been using fake news, spy operations, honeypots, and other tactics in order to manipulate people. They've even boasted about their ability to manufacture sex scandals by sending prostitutes to a political opponent. That goes above and beyond what is "totally normal happening all over the place".
oldsklgdfth 9y ago
I'm reposting this comment because I would like to open the discussion up beyond facebook and social media and into the reality that technology has provided marketing with some pretty ridiculous tools. : I feel like you used to be able to avoid getting swindled by ignoring the swindler, ex. close the door to the saleman, or ignore the gypsy pear salesmen at the market. Today, marketing is engineered at such a level that it is difficult to acknowledge it's influence. That, and you are constantly bombarded by ads, either explicitly or implicitly. I don't think I am saying anything novel. I guess I am curious what this means about society and our political systems. People with power and wealth could still be toppled when you exposed them to the truth. How in the fuck does that even come close to happening today? How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of? How do we patch our society and governing systems from being pwned? This isn't meant as a rant. I am curious, because to the best i can tell we don't live in a society where voting matters and we have a say in our governance.
- Freak_NL 9y ago
  > gypsy pear salesmen Did you mean pearl?
  - oldsklgdfth 9y ago
    Nope, I meant pear - like the fruit. Maybe I got a little carried away and painted a silly picture. My point is that you can ignore a salesmen and he can't possibly be THAT good that he can swindle everyone. But modern ads, IMO, are designed for high levels of success. Much more difficult to deal with that on a personal level.
- nopreserveroot 9y ago
  I do not understand how anyone in 2018 finds the internet remotely usable without some form of ad blocker. This is how you ignore the modern salesman.
  - kerng 9y ago
    Given the sophistication that we just now start to fully realize, adblockers probably dont help that much - i mean they get the obvious stuff out of the way, which is great. But there other forms of tracking (like super cookies), and others we might not even be aware of. The entire combination of what information some companies gather and exchange behind the scene is not that well understood at scale.
Mortiffer 9y ago
I really hope more people join mastodon or one of the other federated social networks. But it is hard to make the point that it could replace the utility of facebook (especially messenger, events, search)
- rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
  I think the utility of fb as you describe it is easy to replicate regardless of your social network structure. However, it is difficult to get past the enormous network effect advantage that existing social networks already have. Fb and twitter logos abound in any sports or news broadcast. That’s the hurdle for any up-and-coming social network.
cornholio 9y ago
> Mastodon [...] No real name policies Lacking a very rarefied community capable of self-moderation, like this site has or some specialized reddits and forums, the no-real-name becomes a major drawback. A minority of douche-bags will generate a majority of noise and will come to shape that world in their image. This is quite visible when browsing Mastodon instances, many of which look like a crossbreed of 4chan with Myspace. Most accounts don't have a real picture. The fact people assumed their real identities, cared about what they said and did, and that you could find real people knowing only their name was one of the key ingredients to the success of early Facebook. Furthermore, the whole "no data collected" has any value from the perspective of the user only when using real names. Otherwise, I really couldn't care less about data attached to an anonymous account.
- bitumen 9y ago
  The real name policy doesn’t seem to stop duplicate accounts, bots, and spammers on FaceBook or Twitter, it just ensures they have vaguely human names.
  - cornholio 9y ago
    That's quite a different issue, is it not? The spam bots come because the social network is successful, as they will come to any other network regardless of real name policy. What I'm saying is that anonymous accounts will prevent that success in the first place, because of the behavior of non-spam users. At least for a mass market product most regular folk would want to use, like Facebook.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - Paul-ish 9y ago
    We don't know what the services would look like without a real name policy.
  - gaius 9y ago
    The real name policy is barely enforced by FB, as long as a name is basically plausible they don’t even bother.
kolbe 9y ago
LOL at the popup I get. "You've read over 3 articles this month. Let's make it official. Log in with Facebook or Google."
- elago 9y ago
  If only there were some sort of free non-democracy-eroding microblogging platform the author could have used instead.
- Slansitartop 9y ago
  Comments like yours are tiring an meaningless. Facebook and Google have their tentacles in nearly everything. If you want to get a message out, it's going to intersect with their platforms in some way, even if you're directly criticizing them. AFAIK, there are no purist corners at this time that attract enough eyeballs.
  - kolbe 9y ago
    "Tiring and meaningless" eh? As opposed to your meaningful and engaging strawman reply? Even if it were true that an essay or article couldn't be disseminated effectively without Facebook getting involved at some point, it doesn't mean that readers must be burdened with a popup that asks them to log in to Facebook before viewing.
    - Slansitartop 9y ago
      It seems nearly every single post where someone suggests people delete their Facebook accounts always has some comment pointing out that the NYT, or Medium, or whatever the article was published has a Facebook share widget or something like that. IMHO, those comments might as well be "First Post!" for all they add. > it doesn't mean that readers must be burdened with a popup that asks them to log in to Facebook before viewing. The first step to that world is getting people off Facebook so it's not so ubiquitous that making a request like that seems reasonable.
      - 9y ago
godelski 9y ago
So I question the sustainability of these platforms? How are they supported when they have sufficient mass? If they aren't gathering data on users and selling ads then how are they generating revenue?
- Slansitartop 9y ago
  > If they aren't gathering data on users and selling ads then how are they generating revenue? Maybe they take donations, maybe you run your own instance and pay for the hosting. Not having shareholders that expect profits and growth probably takes a lot of the pressure off, too. All they have to do is not have burdensome costs or break even.
  - godelski 9y ago
    I definitely don't think the current people running it are trying to be the next Zuckerberg. But you do have to have people working full time and pay for server costs, electricity, etc. A distributed system would be interesting, but is that what they are doing? At this point is it purely developers volunteering their time and money (along with donations)? I can't see donations supporting this type of thing at a larger scale. I'm just wondering how they are getting the capital to scale.
    - Tassels 9y ago
      It's decentralized. Larger instances are funded by patreon donations, while smaller ones are usually run by the folks that use the instance. The decentralized nature helps the network scale. And yeah, it's an open source project funded by donations. Plenty of those exist, and if it gets big enough, it'll get more contributors and donations.
- spdionis 9y ago
  The main developer has a patreon.
  - AsyncAwait 9y ago
partycoder 9y ago
Sounds good in principle but how would mastodon scale to billions of accounts and maintain data centers around the world?
- egypturnash 9y ago
  This would involve a buttload of people independently deciding they want to run a Mastodon instance and setting one up in a location convenient to themselves and the community they want to serve. It’s like mesh networking.
- prophesi 9y ago
  The main Mastodon instance probably can't do that. But then I think you're missing the point of a distributed social network.
  - partycoder 9y ago
    Makes sense. But how can a user validate a mastodon instance is not malicious?
    - rainbowmverse 9y ago
      Reputation! And I don't mean some convoluted algorithmic scoring system. Most people seem to find out about Mastodon from someone, and that someone suggests the instance they're on. That's why a lot of artists end up on Mastodon.art, for example. So far, the admin has a good reputation for being consistent about updates and keeping the community engaged. People keep trying to find some technological heuristic to establish trust, like requiring legal names or some kind of scoring system. So far, it's even worse because people encode all their cognitive biases into it and none of the mental models or processes people develop for checking those biases.
      - partycoder 9y ago
        An instance could have good reputation and still be malicious in terms of privacy and what is done with your data. In this sense, trusting a Mastodon instance with your data is the same as trusting a Bitcoin exchange with your money. Bitcoin is decentralized too, that doesn't make Bitcoin exchanges trustworthy.
jdlyga 9y ago
Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg. If a fully featured app or service is free, then you are the product. Collecting and selling user information is pervasive.
- naravara 9y ago
  >If a fully featured app or service is free, then you are the product. Depends on the business model. Wikipedia, for example, is a non-profit. You can also theoretically have a public benefit corporation that is structured to protect data privacy, but I don't know of any.
  - leadingthenet 9y ago
    Mozilla?
    - naravara 9y ago
      I think Mozilla has some weird structure where it's a non-profit foundation that happens fully own a for-profit corporation. I'm not an expert on the topic, though, so maybe that counts? Probably depends on the state where it's incorporated. The only big PBCs I've ever heard of were hospitals and private colleges. But you are right that the way Mozilla is set up, it is focused more on pushing the technology and mission of the foundation forward rather than on delivering share price increases or dividends to shareholders.
- choward 9y ago
  Even if you're paying for a product, you're probably still a product.
fluxsauce 9y ago
I'm using an unfederated node of Madtodon running on a Raspberry pi with Let's Encrypt certs as a private family social network. Works well and family response has been massively positive. You can disconnect while staying connected on your own terms.
- artursapek 9y ago
  That's intriguing. You're just hosting it at your house? How hard was it to convince your family members to try using it?
  - fluxsauce 9y ago
    Yup, it's just lurking next to the router. Convincing - tried it with just my partner first and smoothed out some rough edges. I then sent a group email to extended family that included a brief justification, some screen shots of it in action, a picture of the actual server, and an offer to create an account for them. Transparency, ease of use, and privacy were all important factors. Most live far away and have griped about various facets of Facebook but felt like it was a necessary evil. This has been a good alternative for daily communication, discussions about weather and children, and so forth. The closest to game support is sharing crossword solving times with a hashtag.
- mfoy_ 9y ago
  For me and mine, a big selling point of FB is the event management piece. Does Mastodon have anything similar?
  - fluxsauce 9y ago
    Nope. It's more similar to Twitter (chronological timeline), but without promoted messages / "you may have missed" types of features. Event Invitations is one of the few uses of FB that I still have. I'm open to alternatives that simplify facilitate threaded discussions between those who were invited, but as with any system convenience is a factor. Google Calendar does work, yet somehow (and ironically) seems more intrusive than Facebook in that you're communicating directly with emails; the younger the participant, the greater the lack of enthusiasm for emails.
ld00d 9y ago
Mastodon is cool technology. The problem is Facebook fills a hole that Mastodon does not. Facebook connects people in real life. Folks from varying distances are able to keep up with their friends and family. There's a built-in desire to monitor their conversations. They're rewarded with "reactions". Facebook provides value for a very large group of people. A relatively small group of people saw a problem with Facebook. Of course they have to have some underlying goal to make money. So they set out to create a federated system anyone can host that doesn't depend on some central company that's just out to make a buck. It's a noble goal, but it solves a problem that most users of Facebook simply don't care about. It doesn't do the thing that Facebook does, so it's a non-starter. I'd also add that Mastodon is more of a Twitter replacement than a Facebook replacement. Facebook is better at isolating your feed into your group of "friends". Mastodon is more of a river of information from folks you follow (many of whom you will never meet in real life.) If you want to replace Facebook, first figure out what people value about Facebook and expand on that. You'll need to be better than they are (at least until people determine they're that awful.) Then look at how you can federate it or achieving whatever other goal you have.
- Goronmon 9y ago
  I'd also add that Mastodon is more of a Twitter replacement than a Facebook replacement. Facebook is better at isolating your feed into your group of "friends". Mastodon is more of a river of information from folks you follow (many of whom you will never meet in real life.) I noticed this as well, and it's something I've come across in the past when checking out Facebook alternatives. Most seem to only be a replacement on a superficial level.
- johnnycarcin 9y ago
  "Folks from varying distances are able to keep up with their friends and family" - this is literally the only reason I have a Facebook account. Most of my family is not very tech-savvy so asking them to use something like Mastodon to see family pictures or whatever is pointless. Even if they did try to use it, all of their other friends and family are on Facebook so asking them to use Mastodon just for me adds one more thing/app to their list that they are probably going to use maybe twice and then just stop. I really wish there was a good alternative to this but I haven't been able to find anything (yet) :(.
personjerry 9y ago
As far as I've seen, this doesn't provide new information, so it just reads to me like "Developer of startup social media platform agrees with bandwagon: please consumers, stop using the product of our biggest competitor"
- AsyncAwait 9y ago
  Mastodon is an open-source, distributed project, there is no commercial interest to scale in it per se.
  - personjerry 9y ago
    Why do I see so much shilling for it on HN?
    - AsyncAwait 9y ago
      Perhaps because it's something distinctively different than the typical HN posts of startup X raising 5 trillion series G funding and Musk going to Andromeda in 2003?
snvzz 9y ago
Something I can't figure out from Mastodon's website is where and how it uses cryptography. I fear it might all be plaintext, despite the insanity of doing that in the present post-Snowden world, rather than the appropriate end-to-end combined with point-per-point encryption.
- deft 9y ago
  It's not encrypted afaik at all, besides https but that would be up to the host of the instance. Where do you want the encryption to happen and how? Anyone can federate with you.
  - egypturnash 9y ago
    Followers-only toots and private toots are a good candidate for encryption.
    - snvzz 9y ago
      They're neither "followers-only" nor "private" if there's no encryption. Even if both me and my followers do run their own Mastodon servers. This is terrible indeed. How is this any better than twitter? At least, for private tweets and such, they'd need a court order to get the information from twitter.
- Shoothe 9y ago
  They are not encrypted but signed with an elaborate algorithm (I worked on ActivityPub server implementation). Twtxt is minimalist but functional: https://github.com/buckket/twtxt https://github.com/buckket/twtxt
misterbowfinger 9y ago
Mastodon can't be considered a real alternative unless you have a solution for all the child porn on some of the most popular instances.
- egypturnash 9y ago
  “Defederate with pawoo” There you go
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    I think this was what prompted the finer-grained federation controls. Most instances at least block its images now and/or mute it.
nothrabannosir 9y ago
For the life of me I can't remember where I originally read this quote, but it forever changed my perspective of FB. Paraphrased: "Facebook is 3 things: the wall, the messaging, and an automatically updating rolodex." Many apps fill 1 and/or 2, but nothing satisfies #3. There is no alternative. For better or for worse: I want to stay in touch with people I've met in the oddest places. In the middle of bumsquash Uruguay, people who had barely ever heard of Europe, but they had Facebook. All of them. The only place on earth where this wasn't true was China, in my experience. So, no, I won't #deletefacebook. I've stopped using it meaningfully a long time ago, but until something becomes a reliable, multi-decade spanning auto-updating rolodex, I'll have to stay here. Mastodon will never, ever, not in a billion years fill that gap. And I don't need more alternatives for #1 and #2, so there dies that dream for me.
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  Honestly, I think this is more a problem of perception than anything else. For one thing, loss aversion makes us think we'll miss things way more than we'll do (see also: FOMO). Losing contact with people mostly involves not thinking about them. If you don't think about them, you don't miss them either. Friends come and go in life, it's natural. And if you did miss them, you'd put in work to keep in touch through other means. I know because I have a circle of close friends that I only see once or twice a year, but stay in touch with through email. Guess what: it works. And if you migrate, you just email your friends about it. Similarly, although I don't know if this is generally possible in every country, but I have diligently carried over my first mobile phone number from carrier to carrier. When I moved abroad to Sweden for a few years, I switched to the absolute cheapest minimal carrier to essentially "invest" in keeping that phone identity. This means that people who met me as far back as the late nineties can still reach me on it. Friends that I have made later even know they can rely on this, that this is my "policy". I'm about to leave Sweden for Germany. Still keeping that Dutch phone number. In fact, I'm leaving it with all of my friends here, and use it for all the messaging apps that rely on phone numbers. And finally, just claim your own bit of internet and get a website. Your friends can search for you.
  - nothrabannosir 9y ago
tunesmith 9y ago
I don't care about events, but I'd like my friends and weak ties to easily be able to keep up with what's going on with me. The only alternatives I can think of is signing them up all for a mailing list, or starting a website/blog. But if I don't want my blog to be public, I'm faced with doing something like setting up a wordpress blog with membership, and asking them all to register and sign in to see my semi-private blog. Unless there's a free / open-source blog system with a decentralized federated SSO system, where everyone can choose to friend up (probably one-way, not two-way) to follow each other's feeds? I suppose like mastodon, but for long-form or free-form writing?
- Karrot_Kream 9y ago
  Secure Scuttlebutt is this, but suffers from the same problem every non-Facebook social network does: critical mass.
  - tunesmith 9y ago
    Critical mass is just one of those things that will be a flaw until it isn't. Facebook has this "decisive competitive edge" in that the fact that it is seen as the only alternative is what reinforces it being the only alternative. It's good that these other solutions are free and open source because most commercial competition would dry up and fail. But for these things that bump along and grow slowly in a sustainable way, they might actually approach an inflection point where things will snowball. At least I hope so!
CharlesW 9y ago
If you're thinking about using Mastodon, the CounterSocial[1] instance is worth considering. It's run by "The Jester"[2][3], who has experience running secure/hardened systems, and who takes more of an active role in countering bad actors. [1] https://counter.social/about https://counter.social/about [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jester_(hacktivist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jester_(hacktivist) [3] https://keybase.io/th3j35t3r https://keybase.io/th3j35t3r
- AsyncAwait 9y ago
  It's an instance that promotes U.S. hegemony, imperialism and exceptionalism. It's an instance that i.e. brands Iran as hostile, but doesn't acknowledge our hostility towards them etc. No thanks!

215 points by bluefreeze 9y ago

How do people feel about using Facebook's technology like React in light of all this controversy? Is there any concern that there is cross over between the data harvesting and the engineering behind React etc.?

ch4s3 9y ago
> cross over between the data harvesting and the engineering behind React I'm not sure I understand what you mean here.
beeskneecaps 9y ago
React does not harvest data.
matthewmacleod 9y ago
I'm honestly struggling to figure out what you even think might be the issue here – is it that you think React might be harvesting data from people's projects?
Retroity 9y ago
React is an open-source freely-licensed javascript library that you can self-host, so I don't see the problem with it just because it's maintained by Facebook.
saintPirelli 9y ago
The worst thing Facebook could do to React is seize support and development (or make future development proprietary).
a_humean 9y ago
Its a JavaScript library used for providing an abstraction over DOM manipulation, and is open source. It doesn't phone home to facebook with your mother's maiden name, and it doesn't have a single line of network code in its source code. Worse that could happen is facebook stops supporting it for some reason and a lot of engineering talent dedicated to it evaporates.

jeffreyrogers 9y ago

I think the idea that Facebook is putting democracy in peril is a bit farfetched.

Mortiffer 9y ago
while Cambridge Analytica is clearly a horrible company the idea of gathering data and building some models to better target advertisement to them is something totally normal happening all over the place. And i don't think we can really dismantel the core of online advertising because of one shady company
- pyjammas 9y ago
  I remember not thinking much of the whole CA story back when I read about it (few years ago?), but what makes me less certain about this is that they might have vastly more data to work with than I initially thought. I'm not a data scientist though, so I'd really like to hear why that is/isn't a problem. Basically: assuming one has massive datasets that can be combined, how dangerous can even basic analysis be?
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  One? Have you been not been paying attention to the last decade of internet advertising?
- mfringel 9y ago
  Dynamite is only interesting because it burns very quickly, in an energetic reaction. Things burn all the time, so I don't see why dynamite is all that interesting. Evaluating something based on its known external traits without discussing the context in which they're used is an incomplete assessment.
- Tassels 9y ago
  It's not that CA is just gathering data and using that data to target ads. That's normal. But they've also been using fake news, spy operations, honeypots, and other tactics in order to manipulate people. They've even boasted about their ability to manufacture sex scandals by sending prostitutes to a political opponent. That goes above and beyond what is "totally normal happening all over the place".

oldsklgdfth 9y ago

I'm reposting this comment because I would like to open the discussion up beyond facebook and social media and into the reality that technology has provided marketing with some pretty ridiculous tools. : I feel like you used to be able to avoid getting swindled by ignoring the swindler, ex. close the door to the saleman, or ignore the gypsy pear salesmen at the market. Today, marketing is engineered at such a level that it is difficult to acknowledge it's influence. That, and you are constantly bombarded by ads, either explicitly or implicitly. I don't think I am saying anything novel. I guess I am curious what this means about society and our political systems. People with power and wealth could still be toppled when you exposed them to the truth. How in the fuck does that even come close to happening today? How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of? How do we patch our society and governing systems from being pwned? This isn't meant as a rant. I am curious, because to the best i can tell we don't live in a society where voting matters and we have a say in our governance.

Freak_NL 9y ago
> gypsy pear salesmen Did you mean pearl?
- oldsklgdfth 9y ago
  Nope, I meant pear - like the fruit. Maybe I got a little carried away and painted a silly picture. My point is that you can ignore a salesmen and he can't possibly be THAT good that he can swindle everyone. But modern ads, IMO, are designed for high levels of success. Much more difficult to deal with that on a personal level.
nopreserveroot 9y ago
I do not understand how anyone in 2018 finds the internet remotely usable without some form of ad blocker. This is how you ignore the modern salesman.
- kerng 9y ago
  Given the sophistication that we just now start to fully realize, adblockers probably dont help that much - i mean they get the obvious stuff out of the way, which is great. But there other forms of tracking (like super cookies), and others we might not even be aware of. The entire combination of what information some companies gather and exchange behind the scene is not that well understood at scale.

Mortiffer 9y ago

I really hope more people join mastodon or one of the other federated social networks. But it is hard to make the point that it could replace the utility of facebook (especially messenger, events, search)

rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
I think the utility of fb as you describe it is easy to replicate regardless of your social network structure. However, it is difficult to get past the enormous network effect advantage that existing social networks already have. Fb and twitter logos abound in any sports or news broadcast. That’s the hurdle for any up-and-coming social network.

cornholio 9y ago

> Mastodon [...] No real name policies Lacking a very rarefied community capable of self-moderation, like this site has or some specialized reddits and forums, the no-real-name becomes a major drawback. A minority of douche-bags will generate a majority of noise and will come to shape that world in their image. This is quite visible when browsing Mastodon instances, many of which look like a crossbreed of 4chan with Myspace. Most accounts don't have a real picture. The fact people assumed their real identities, cared about what they said and did, and that you could find real people knowing only their name was one of the key ingredients to the success of early Facebook. Furthermore, the whole "no data collected" has any value from the perspective of the user only when using real names. Otherwise, I really couldn't care less about data attached to an anonymous account.

bitumen 9y ago
The real name policy doesn’t seem to stop duplicate accounts, bots, and spammers on FaceBook or Twitter, it just ensures they have vaguely human names.
- cornholio 9y ago
  That's quite a different issue, is it not? The spam bots come because the social network is successful, as they will come to any other network regardless of real name policy. What I'm saying is that anonymous accounts will prevent that success in the first place, because of the behavior of non-spam users. At least for a mass market product most regular folk would want to use, like Facebook.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- Paul-ish 9y ago
  We don't know what the services would look like without a real name policy.
- gaius 9y ago
  The real name policy is barely enforced by FB, as long as a name is basically plausible they don’t even bother.

kolbe 9y ago

LOL at the popup I get. "You've read over 3 articles this month. Let's make it official. Log in with Facebook or Google."

elago 9y ago
If only there were some sort of free non-democracy-eroding microblogging platform the author could have used instead.
Slansitartop 9y ago
Comments like yours are tiring an meaningless. Facebook and Google have their tentacles in nearly everything. If you want to get a message out, it's going to intersect with their platforms in some way, even if you're directly criticizing them. AFAIK, there are no purist corners at this time that attract enough eyeballs.
- kolbe 9y ago
  "Tiring and meaningless" eh? As opposed to your meaningful and engaging strawman reply? Even if it were true that an essay or article couldn't be disseminated effectively without Facebook getting involved at some point, it doesn't mean that readers must be burdened with a popup that asks them to log in to Facebook before viewing.
  - Slansitartop 9y ago
    It seems nearly every single post where someone suggests people delete their Facebook accounts always has some comment pointing out that the NYT, or Medium, or whatever the article was published has a Facebook share widget or something like that. IMHO, those comments might as well be "First Post!" for all they add. > it doesn't mean that readers must be burdened with a popup that asks them to log in to Facebook before viewing. The first step to that world is getting people off Facebook so it's not so ubiquitous that making a request like that seems reasonable.
    - 9y ago

godelski 9y ago

So I question the sustainability of these platforms? How are they supported when they have sufficient mass? If they aren't gathering data on users and selling ads then how are they generating revenue?

Slansitartop 9y ago
> If they aren't gathering data on users and selling ads then how are they generating revenue? Maybe they take donations, maybe you run your own instance and pay for the hosting. Not having shareholders that expect profits and growth probably takes a lot of the pressure off, too. All they have to do is not have burdensome costs or break even.
- godelski 9y ago
  I definitely don't think the current people running it are trying to be the next Zuckerberg. But you do have to have people working full time and pay for server costs, electricity, etc. A distributed system would be interesting, but is that what they are doing? At this point is it purely developers volunteering their time and money (along with donations)? I can't see donations supporting this type of thing at a larger scale. I'm just wondering how they are getting the capital to scale.
  - Tassels 9y ago
    It's decentralized. Larger instances are funded by patreon donations, while smaller ones are usually run by the folks that use the instance. The decentralized nature helps the network scale. And yeah, it's an open source project funded by donations. Plenty of those exist, and if it gets big enough, it'll get more contributors and donations.
spdionis 9y ago
The main developer has a patreon.
- AsyncAwait 9y ago

partycoder 9y ago

Sounds good in principle but how would mastodon scale to billions of accounts and maintain data centers around the world?

egypturnash 9y ago
This would involve a buttload of people independently deciding they want to run a Mastodon instance and setting one up in a location convenient to themselves and the community they want to serve. It’s like mesh networking.
prophesi 9y ago
The main Mastodon instance probably can't do that. But then I think you're missing the point of a distributed social network.
- partycoder 9y ago
  Makes sense. But how can a user validate a mastodon instance is not malicious?
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    Reputation! And I don't mean some convoluted algorithmic scoring system. Most people seem to find out about Mastodon from someone, and that someone suggests the instance they're on. That's why a lot of artists end up on Mastodon.art, for example. So far, the admin has a good reputation for being consistent about updates and keeping the community engaged. People keep trying to find some technological heuristic to establish trust, like requiring legal names or some kind of scoring system. So far, it's even worse because people encode all their cognitive biases into it and none of the mental models or processes people develop for checking those biases.
    - partycoder 9y ago
      An instance could have good reputation and still be malicious in terms of privacy and what is done with your data. In this sense, trusting a Mastodon instance with your data is the same as trusting a Bitcoin exchange with your money. Bitcoin is decentralized too, that doesn't make Bitcoin exchanges trustworthy.

jdlyga 9y ago

Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg. If a fully featured app or service is free, then you are the product. Collecting and selling user information is pervasive.

naravara 9y ago
>If a fully featured app or service is free, then you are the product. Depends on the business model. Wikipedia, for example, is a non-profit. You can also theoretically have a public benefit corporation that is structured to protect data privacy, but I don't know of any.
- leadingthenet 9y ago
  Mozilla?
  - naravara 9y ago
    I think Mozilla has some weird structure where it's a non-profit foundation that happens fully own a for-profit corporation. I'm not an expert on the topic, though, so maybe that counts? Probably depends on the state where it's incorporated. The only big PBCs I've ever heard of were hospitals and private colleges. But you are right that the way Mozilla is set up, it is focused more on pushing the technology and mission of the foundation forward rather than on delivering share price increases or dividends to shareholders.
choward 9y ago
Even if you're paying for a product, you're probably still a product.

fluxsauce 9y ago

I'm using an unfederated node of Madtodon running on a Raspberry pi with Let's Encrypt certs as a private family social network. Works well and family response has been massively positive. You can disconnect while staying connected on your own terms.

artursapek 9y ago
That's intriguing. You're just hosting it at your house? How hard was it to convince your family members to try using it?
- fluxsauce 9y ago
  Yup, it's just lurking next to the router. Convincing - tried it with just my partner first and smoothed out some rough edges. I then sent a group email to extended family that included a brief justification, some screen shots of it in action, a picture of the actual server, and an offer to create an account for them. Transparency, ease of use, and privacy were all important factors. Most live far away and have griped about various facets of Facebook but felt like it was a necessary evil. This has been a good alternative for daily communication, discussions about weather and children, and so forth. The closest to game support is sharing crossword solving times with a hashtag.
mfoy_ 9y ago
For me and mine, a big selling point of FB is the event management piece. Does Mastodon have anything similar?
- fluxsauce 9y ago
  Nope. It's more similar to Twitter (chronological timeline), but without promoted messages / "you may have missed" types of features. Event Invitations is one of the few uses of FB that I still have. I'm open to alternatives that simplify facilitate threaded discussions between those who were invited, but as with any system convenience is a factor. Google Calendar does work, yet somehow (and ironically) seems more intrusive than Facebook in that you're communicating directly with emails; the younger the participant, the greater the lack of enthusiasm for emails.

ld00d 9y ago

Mastodon is cool technology. The problem is Facebook fills a hole that Mastodon does not. Facebook connects people in real life. Folks from varying distances are able to keep up with their friends and family. There's a built-in desire to monitor their conversations. They're rewarded with "reactions". Facebook provides value for a very large group of people. A relatively small group of people saw a problem with Facebook. Of course they have to have some underlying goal to make money. So they set out to create a federated system anyone can host that doesn't depend on some central company that's just out to make a buck. It's a noble goal, but it solves a problem that most users of Facebook simply don't care about. It doesn't do the thing that Facebook does, so it's a non-starter. I'd also add that Mastodon is more of a Twitter replacement than a Facebook replacement. Facebook is better at isolating your feed into your group of "friends". Mastodon is more of a river of information from folks you follow (many of whom you will never meet in real life.) If you want to replace Facebook, first figure out what people value about Facebook and expand on that. You'll need to be better than they are (at least until people determine they're that awful.) Then look at how you can federate it or achieving whatever other goal you have.

Goronmon 9y ago
I'd also add that Mastodon is more of a Twitter replacement than a Facebook replacement. Facebook is better at isolating your feed into your group of "friends". Mastodon is more of a river of information from folks you follow (many of whom you will never meet in real life.) I noticed this as well, and it's something I've come across in the past when checking out Facebook alternatives. Most seem to only be a replacement on a superficial level.
johnnycarcin 9y ago
"Folks from varying distances are able to keep up with their friends and family" - this is literally the only reason I have a Facebook account. Most of my family is not very tech-savvy so asking them to use something like Mastodon to see family pictures or whatever is pointless. Even if they did try to use it, all of their other friends and family are on Facebook so asking them to use Mastodon just for me adds one more thing/app to their list that they are probably going to use maybe twice and then just stop. I really wish there was a good alternative to this but I haven't been able to find anything (yet) :(.

personjerry 9y ago

As far as I've seen, this doesn't provide new information, so it just reads to me like "Developer of startup social media platform agrees with bandwagon: please consumers, stop using the product of our biggest competitor"

AsyncAwait 9y ago
Mastodon is an open-source, distributed project, there is no commercial interest to scale in it per se.
- personjerry 9y ago
  Why do I see so much shilling for it on HN?
  - AsyncAwait 9y ago
    Perhaps because it's something distinctively different than the typical HN posts of startup X raising 5 trillion series G funding and Musk going to Andromeda in 2003?

snvzz 9y ago

Something I can't figure out from Mastodon's website is where and how it uses cryptography. I fear it might all be plaintext, despite the insanity of doing that in the present post-Snowden world, rather than the appropriate end-to-end combined with point-per-point encryption.

deft 9y ago
It's not encrypted afaik at all, besides https but that would be up to the host of the instance. Where do you want the encryption to happen and how? Anyone can federate with you.
- egypturnash 9y ago
  Followers-only toots and private toots are a good candidate for encryption.
  - snvzz 9y ago
    They're neither "followers-only" nor "private" if there's no encryption. Even if both me and my followers do run their own Mastodon servers. This is terrible indeed. How is this any better than twitter? At least, for private tweets and such, they'd need a court order to get the information from twitter.
Shoothe 9y ago
They are not encrypted but signed with an elaborate algorithm (I worked on ActivityPub server implementation). Twtxt is minimalist but functional: https://github.com/buckket/twtxt https://github.com/buckket/twtxt

misterbowfinger 9y ago

Mastodon can't be considered a real alternative unless you have a solution for all the child porn on some of the most popular instances.

egypturnash 9y ago
“Defederate with pawoo” There you go
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  I think this was what prompted the finer-grained federation controls. Most instances at least block its images now and/or mute it.

nothrabannosir 9y ago

For the life of me I can't remember where I originally read this quote, but it forever changed my perspective of FB. Paraphrased: "Facebook is 3 things: the wall, the messaging, and an automatically updating rolodex." Many apps fill 1 and/or 2, but nothing satisfies #3. There is no alternative. For better or for worse: I want to stay in touch with people I've met in the oddest places. In the middle of bumsquash Uruguay, people who had barely ever heard of Europe, but they had Facebook. All of them. The only place on earth where this wasn't true was China, in my experience. So, no, I won't #deletefacebook. I've stopped using it meaningfully a long time ago, but until something becomes a reliable, multi-decade spanning auto-updating rolodex, I'll have to stay here. Mastodon will never, ever, not in a billion years fill that gap. And I don't need more alternatives for #1 and #2, so there dies that dream for me.

vanderZwan 9y ago
Honestly, I think this is more a problem of perception than anything else. For one thing, loss aversion makes us think we'll miss things way more than we'll do (see also: FOMO). Losing contact with people mostly involves not thinking about them. If you don't think about them, you don't miss them either. Friends come and go in life, it's natural. And if you did miss them, you'd put in work to keep in touch through other means. I know because I have a circle of close friends that I only see once or twice a year, but stay in touch with through email. Guess what: it works. And if you migrate, you just email your friends about it. Similarly, although I don't know if this is generally possible in every country, but I have diligently carried over my first mobile phone number from carrier to carrier. When I moved abroad to Sweden for a few years, I switched to the absolute cheapest minimal carrier to essentially "invest" in keeping that phone identity. This means that people who met me as far back as the late nineties can still reach me on it. Friends that I have made later even know they can rely on this, that this is my "policy". I'm about to leave Sweden for Germany. Still keeping that Dutch phone number. In fact, I'm leaving it with all of my friends here, and use it for all the messaging apps that rely on phone numbers. And finally, just claim your own bit of internet and get a website. Your friends can search for you.
- nothrabannosir 9y ago

tunesmith 9y ago

I don't care about events, but I'd like my friends and weak ties to easily be able to keep up with what's going on with me. The only alternatives I can think of is signing them up all for a mailing list, or starting a website/blog. But if I don't want my blog to be public, I'm faced with doing something like setting up a wordpress blog with membership, and asking them all to register and sign in to see my semi-private blog. Unless there's a free / open-source blog system with a decentralized federated SSO system, where everyone can choose to friend up (probably one-way, not two-way) to follow each other's feeds? I suppose like mastodon, but for long-form or free-form writing?

Karrot_Kream 9y ago
Secure Scuttlebutt is this, but suffers from the same problem every non-Facebook social network does: critical mass.
- tunesmith 9y ago
  Critical mass is just one of those things that will be a flaw until it isn't. Facebook has this "decisive competitive edge" in that the fact that it is seen as the only alternative is what reinforces it being the only alternative. It's good that these other solutions are free and open source because most commercial competition would dry up and fail. But for these things that bump along and grow slowly in a sustainable way, they might actually approach an inflection point where things will snowball. At least I hope so!

CharlesW 9y ago

If you're thinking about using Mastodon, the CounterSocial[1] instance is worth considering. It's run by "The Jester"[2][3], who has experience running secure/hardened systems, and who takes more of an active role in countering bad actors. [1] https://counter.social/about https://counter.social/about [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jester_(hacktivist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jester_(hacktivist) [3] https://keybase.io/th3j35t3r https://keybase.io/th3j35t3r

AsyncAwait 9y ago
It's an instance that promotes U.S. hegemony, imperialism and exceptionalism. It's an instance that i.e. brands Iran as hostile, but doesn't acknowledge our hostility towards them etc. No thanks!