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In my experience, Mastodon is in use mostly not in America. Pawoo, Mastodon hosted by Pixiv in Japan, has 375k users with 15m statuses, connected to 4k other Ma

by Shank 8y ago

In my experience, Mastodon is in use mostly not in America. Pawoo, Mastodon hosted by Pixiv in Japan, has 375k users with 15m statuses, connected to 4k other Mastodon instances. But it doesn't have any metrics about still being in use, and their instance is mostly in Japanese. [0] The biggest problem I ran into when trying to use Mastodon is the instance federation wars. Instances were banning other instances left and right from federating with each other due to content disputes (lolicon, "offensive speech," etc). This kinda made it problematic if you picked an instance that didn't want to behave nicely with the rest of the ecosystem, unbeknownst to you. [0]: https://pawoo.net/about/more https://pawoo.net/about/more

CrystalLangUser 8y ago
Mastodon.social has over 150k users, and there are other large non-Japanese instances. [1] After the SESTA / FOSTA bills, switter.at also became a huge instance for sex workers. The instance banning thing is a huge problem and it’s not really being talked about much. The only thing you can do really is sign up on an instance like niu.moe that doesn’t filter besides illegal content. [1]: https://instances.social/list/advanced#lang=&allowed=&prohibited=&users= https://instances.social/list/advanced#lang=&allowed=&prohib...
- wila 8y ago
  > Mastodon.social has over 150k users What would be more interesting as a number is active users. For example, I've got an account at mastodon.social, but last time I used it is over a month ago and before that there had been several months of inactivity. When I last looked at my friend list and follower list on mastodon it seemed like most people treated mastodon like that.
  - nightpool 8y ago
    mastodon.social has around 10,000 weekly active users (https://mastodon.social/api/v1/instance/activity https://mastodon.social/api/v1/instance/activity). Switter is about 2x that. Other instances are bigger or smaller. Pawoo (The largest Japanese instance) has 30,000 but the French & English-speaking fediverse tends to be a little more spread out among smaller servers, so these numbers aren't exactly directly comparable.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  The challenge is: Many of the servers which block other servers will block servers solely because they don't also block servers. "Free speech zones" are considered servers that should be blocked by the most social justice inclined servers. So it's fairly difficult to find a server that can, indeed, talk with everyone in the fediverse. I don't think that's inherently a problem, decentralization allows people to segment themselves off, and that is okay.
  - zaarn 8y ago
    I've found that such servers are usually not worth federating with, though I usually silence these instances instead of full blocking them. These instances are rare, the bigger problem as administrator is to find and media-block the instances that post NSFW or content illegal in your jurisdiction (switter, most japanese instances...) Also bot spam if it occurs and the admin on the other end doesn't care...
Torgo 8y ago
Part of the problem is that Mastodon doesn't have, and apparently the BDFL won't implement, a built-in way of a remote server telling you that your server is blocked (either as a sender or recipient of a message.) Which is really frustrating when, you make a post; a user on a different server boosts your post; a third party, which is on a server that normally blocks your posts but can see posts from that different server, sees the boost and responds to you. Not knowing that you can't respond directly back top them. The network is so big now that this happens all the time.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mercer 8y ago
  Have you looked into how Patchwork approaches this issue? It's not quite equivalent to Mastodon, I think, but I am fascinated by their approach to 'mapping' social relationships. Would be very curious to hear what you or others with more experience on the matter think about it. EDIT: to elaborate a bit. While I'm only just diving into these topics, I can't help but feel that a fundamental problem in many cases is that many problems of 'online social' have to do with a very unintuitive/inorganic implementation that just fundamentally doesn't work well for humans. What I found interesting about Patchwork is that it tries, to some extent, to resemble the way humans 'naturally' interact. Now I'm not at all opposed to experiments in augmenting the way humans interact with others, but I can't help but feel that many of the things we've come up with that are popular went too far in not considering human nature (or intentionally messed with it). And perhaps a more constructive way forward is to come up with 'online social' tools that start with a more conservative resemblance to how humans have interacted for much of their history, and iterate from there.
  - Torgo 8y ago
    When I have enough free time to block out, I'll be trying Secure Scuttlebutt/Patchwork, maybe will write a blog entry about the experience. Looks interesting.
woodandsteel 8y ago
>The biggest problem I ran into when trying to use Mastodon is the instance federation wars. Instances were banning other instances left and right from federating with each other due to content disputes (lolicon, "offensive speech," etc). Two things are needed for a decentralized social network to go mainstream. One is that it be technically competent, the other is that at be designed so that a large part of the population will actually enjoy using it. Both problems require very high ability. The problem is that the relatively small number of people who are both motivated and able to solve the first problem are generally techno-geeks who are average or below average in social ability,and so foul up the second problem terribly. However, the need for such a network is becoming widely enough known that I am pretty sure that rather soon we will get someone who can solve the second problem who will take up what the techno-geeks have been doing and produce a network that will become popular.

by Shank 8y ago

CrystalLangUser 8y ago

Mastodon.social has over 150k users, and there are other large non-Japanese instances. [1] After the SESTA / FOSTA bills, switter.at also became a huge instance for sex workers. The instance banning thing is a huge problem and it’s not really being talked about much. The only thing you can do really is sign up on an instance like niu.moe that doesn’t filter besides illegal content. [1]: https://instances.social/list/advanced#lang=&allowed=&prohibited=&users= https://instances.social/list/advanced#lang=&allowed=&prohib...

wila 8y ago
> Mastodon.social has over 150k users What would be more interesting as a number is active users. For example, I've got an account at mastodon.social, but last time I used it is over a month ago and before that there had been several months of inactivity. When I last looked at my friend list and follower list on mastodon it seemed like most people treated mastodon like that.
- nightpool 8y ago
  mastodon.social has around 10,000 weekly active users (https://mastodon.social/api/v1/instance/activity https://mastodon.social/api/v1/instance/activity). Switter is about 2x that. Other instances are bigger or smaller. Pawoo (The largest Japanese instance) has 30,000 but the French & English-speaking fediverse tends to be a little more spread out among smaller servers, so these numbers aren't exactly directly comparable.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
The challenge is: Many of the servers which block other servers will block servers solely because they don't also block servers. "Free speech zones" are considered servers that should be blocked by the most social justice inclined servers. So it's fairly difficult to find a server that can, indeed, talk with everyone in the fediverse. I don't think that's inherently a problem, decentralization allows people to segment themselves off, and that is okay.
- zaarn 8y ago
  I've found that such servers are usually not worth federating with, though I usually silence these instances instead of full blocking them. These instances are rare, the bigger problem as administrator is to find and media-block the instances that post NSFW or content illegal in your jurisdiction (switter, most japanese instances...) Also bot spam if it occurs and the admin on the other end doesn't care...

Torgo 8y ago

Part of the problem is that Mastodon doesn't have, and apparently the BDFL won't implement, a built-in way of a remote server telling you that your server is blocked (either as a sender or recipient of a message.) Which is really frustrating when, you make a post; a user on a different server boosts your post; a third party, which is on a server that normally blocks your posts but can see posts from that different server, sees the boost and responds to you. Not knowing that you can't respond directly back top them. The network is so big now that this happens all the time.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mercer 8y ago
Have you looked into how Patchwork approaches this issue? It's not quite equivalent to Mastodon, I think, but I am fascinated by their approach to 'mapping' social relationships. Would be very curious to hear what you or others with more experience on the matter think about it. EDIT: to elaborate a bit. While I'm only just diving into these topics, I can't help but feel that a fundamental problem in many cases is that many problems of 'online social' have to do with a very unintuitive/inorganic implementation that just fundamentally doesn't work well for humans. What I found interesting about Patchwork is that it tries, to some extent, to resemble the way humans 'naturally' interact. Now I'm not at all opposed to experiments in augmenting the way humans interact with others, but I can't help but feel that many of the things we've come up with that are popular went too far in not considering human nature (or intentionally messed with it). And perhaps a more constructive way forward is to come up with 'online social' tools that start with a more conservative resemblance to how humans have interacted for much of their history, and iterate from there.
- Torgo 8y ago
  When I have enough free time to block out, I'll be trying Secure Scuttlebutt/Patchwork, maybe will write a blog entry about the experience. Looks interesting.

woodandsteel 8y ago

>The biggest problem I ran into when trying to use Mastodon is the instance federation wars. Instances were banning other instances left and right from federating with each other due to content disputes (lolicon, "offensive speech," etc). Two things are needed for a decentralized social network to go mainstream. One is that it be technically competent, the other is that at be designed so that a large part of the population will actually enjoy using it. Both problems require very high ability. The problem is that the relatively small number of people who are both motivated and able to solve the first problem are generally techno-geeks who are average or below average in social ability,and so foul up the second problem terribly. However, the need for such a network is becoming widely enough known that I am pretty sure that rather soon we will get someone who can solve the second problem who will take up what the techno-geeks have been doing and produce a network that will become popular.