14 ms·

How Does Mastodon Work?

389 points by codesections 8y ago

caf 8y ago
How does it deal with spam?
- brian-armstrong 8y ago
  Nobody wants to use it, so the ROI for spam is very low. This keeps spam to a minimum.
  - willismichael 8y ago
    Moral of the story: use Mastodon, but keep it unpopular?
    - erik_seaberg 8y ago
      Worked for Usenet from 1979 until 1993.
  - ISL 8y ago
    174,000 mostly-trendy tech people? Someone wants to market to them at low cost. https://mastodon.social/@usercount https://mastodon.social/@usercount
    - brian-armstrong 8y ago
      Is this counting registered users? Who cares? What's the RMAU?
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- ISL 8y ago
  What about phishing? @isl@isl.tld and @is1@is1.tld look pretty similar.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Right. There really ought to be key-based authentication.
    - cortesoft 8y ago
      Key based authentication isn't really going to protect against a homograph attack.
- codesections 8y ago
  Spam is an issue, though not (yet) a huge one. Mastodon has a couple of key advantages, though. * First, if the spammer is coming from a "good" instance, the admin of that instance can ban them—and the number of instances means that there are more mods to go around. * Second, if the spammer is coming from a pure spam instance, other instances can ban/unfederate with the whole instance. That said, it's an area that the community is focused on. Here's an issue discussing spam and additional tools that could help: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/8122 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/8122
  - caf 8y ago
    Yes, I was more wondering about the "spam instance" problem rather than the "spam user" problem (which that issue is discussing). From the overview it seems like dedicated spam instances could be quickly spun up in the same way that email domains are?
- whatsstolat 8y ago
  There seems to be a lot of "city" spam. See https://mstdn.io/tags/sydney https://mstdn.io/tags/sydney for example. Its about 80% escort ads.
  - rainbowmverse 8y ago
    That's not spam. That's from people on Switter. It's an instance for sex workers.
    - whatsstolat 8y ago
      Hashtagging dozens of cities though? These look like spam ads for the pimps.
      - rainbowmverse 8y ago
        You can mute switter.at if it bothers you. Click the three dots on a user's profile and you'll see the option.
- INTPenis 8y ago
  That's the key question imo. I run an instance and the last 2-3 days I've been flooded with spam bots. Reading github issues and toot threads I've noticed it's a big issue and has been coming in waves on other instances this summer. I like to draw parallels to e-mail because Mastodon's issues are very similar to the issues we had with email in the 90s. So I've seen mastodon instance admins mention things like maintaining centralized blacklists. I've even seen people mention using spamassassin to train on mastodon toots instead of mails. Sign-ups of spambots are likely automated yet reCaptcha is out of the question because Mastodon users tend to dislike big corporations like Google. I hope VisualCaptcha is a viable option but we'll see. Some claim that captcha is a waste of time altogether because they can be defeated but my opinion is that it would still protect against most less sophisticated bot networks. Short answer; right now there is no real solution other than manually banning and adding server IPs to a 800+ strong list of banned IP subnets maintained on github. There is also the option of banning MX servers because the last wave of bot signups all used the same backend MX server. Even though they used a ton of e-mail domains. And of course requiring confirmation of new accounts by admins. I predict spam is going to be a very hot topic in the fediverse for a while still. Mastodon is community driven, not backed by any one big corporation. Anything driven by the internet community is going to be wilder than a centralized solution. It will be the wild wild west of social media. There is no denying or escaping that fact.
mirimir 8y ago
Finally, a cogent explanation. Edit: But missing a key issue, perhaps. > Because Mastodon uses a collection of Instances, you’re not at the beck and call of one site owner. If you don’t like the direction an Instance is taking, you can pack your virtual bags and go. Mastodon even has an import/export tool that allows you to migrate the people you follow from one account/instance to another. That sounds great. But if you do "pack your virtual bags and go", is there any way to map foo@bar.net to foo@baz.net? In the email analogy, there's clearly not. You need to tell all correspondents.
- colanderman 8y ago
  With e-mail there is a way to migrate without losing your identity, if you own your own domain, and point its MX records at your provider (who is a real e-mail provider and not a "free" walled garden like GMail or AOL). Unfortunately owning a domain is not as accessible for 95% of the population as it ought to be. This concept of digital identity mobility is important to ensure that one's digital life is not tied to a single service provider. XMPP provides this capability as well, through SRV records. Bizarrely, given its aim to free users from walled gardens, Mastodon does not support SRV records [1]. The developers give some excuses about the WebFinger protocol, which basically means that if I want to own my own Mastodon identity, I must run my own server (either Mastodon or a WebFinger redirect). Apparently Diaspora made the same shortsighted decision [2]. I'm surprised and saddened that the concept of identity mobility is seemingly not well understood by those developing decentralized social platforms. [1] https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/1931 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/1931 [2] https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1109 https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1109
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Yes, I know that. But email was just the analogy ;) For Mastodon, that would be running your own instance, I guess.
    - colanderman 8y ago
      Which is unfortunate. I consider myself a highly skilled technical user, and the burden of running and maintaining my own Mastodon server, or even my own Nginx server to redirect WebFinger requests somewhere else, exceeds the free time I have to devote to the problem. (Keeping another VM alive, updated, and configured through the years costs mental energy, time, and money.) Whereas, adding an SRV record to my existing DNS server? That's trivial, comes at no marginal cost to me, and doesn't leave me with the constant mental burden of worrying whether my Mastodon or WebFinger server is available, secure, etc. Owning my own digital identity should be easy. Simplicity encourages adoption, and widespread self-ownership of one's digital identity is key to hindering the growth of walled gardens. Mastodon does not make ownership of one's digital identity simple.
Pfhreak 8y ago
The thing I never really see from these is about setting up on an existing instance vs running my own. And if I set up my own, does it need to be a community? Am I shutting myself out of an experience by creating, say, a Mastodon instance for my family? I'm bought in to the idea of Mastodon, but getting started is like being handed an atlas of the US and being told, "Please pick a neighborhood to live in."
- pat2man 8y ago
  Open social operates somewhat like email, where you don't need to be on the same server as someone else, but it can make things easier. For the most part, if you are running your own email server for you family, it might make sense to run your own mastodon server. You can have control over your file storage, etc.
- Torwald 8y ago
  Different servers are linked to with the system of federation. If you set up your own, you also choose to what other servers you connect to. So, no, you are not shutting yourself out. But you have to manage your federalization.
- shakna 8y ago
  1. And if I set up my own, does it need to be a community? No. Mastadon and other compatible servers like GNUSocial do have single-user environments. [0] 2. Am I shutting myself out of an experience by creating, say, a Mastodon instance for my family? No. The entire thing is federated, users from all servers can speak to each other. [0] https://github.com/ummjackson/mastodon-guide/blob/master/single-user-mode.md https://github.com/ummjackson/mastodon-guide/blob/master/sin...
  - ReverseCold 8y ago
    > 1. No. Mastadon and other compatible servers like... Well that's the easy answer. I run my own instance and it's near impossible to find interesting people to follow. I started making alternate accounts on various other servers and it was immediately much better. Also, (from my experience) people actually do pay attention to the local feed. People are more likely to find about (and talk to) you when they see you on their local feed. It's very hard for people to find you when you have your own instance. So for Mastodon, at least, you most likely will want a community server - not a single user one.
ISL 8y ago
Is there a straightforward way to change Instances without losing connections with other users? Does it make more sense to host your own, so that you'll always be @isl@isl.tld ?
- mirimir 8y ago
  That's what I'm thinking.
- fenwick67 8y ago
  You can export/import the list of users you follow, but the people who follow you will have to re-follow you manually
samcat116 8y ago
With the death of certain Twitter APIs coming up soon, I wonder if many Twitter client developers will start to make Mastodon apps. I would love to see "Tootbot" by the Tweetbot developers.
- briandear 8y ago
  Besides a few neckbeard types, does any significant number of people actually care about Mastadoon? I remember App.net got all buzzy several years ago. Whatever happened to that? Facebook got big because college students wanted to get laid and that’s where their friends were. Twitter got big because it captured the Zeitgiest and had a FOMO aspect. I am not sure what Mastadoon has going for it to convince normal people to care. How is a Twitter client developer going to actually make any money on this? How is anyone going to make money on this?
  - ISL 8y ago
    I do, though I haven't adopted it yet. At some point, a new protocol will get social media right, and free itself from walled gardens. I don't know if it will be Mastodon, but I'll keep looking with interest until it happens. Mastodon seems to get a bunch of things right, and it may evolve into a more-open (and messier) Face-gram-ter-+ that gets enough traction to thrive. People derive a lot of value from email. A protocol like this should be viewed as something like email.
  - adrianratnapala 8y ago
    > Besides a few neckbeard types, does any significant number of people actually care about Mastadoon? The problem with this kind of argument is that it also explains why nobody uses that neckbeard internet thing and everyone still uses telephones and TV. And, in a way, that is true. But the internet still exists.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      Yes, to flesh that out, the Internet has morphed into "telephones and TV" :( For all too many, at least.
newscracker 8y ago
I wish the author had expanded on migration from one instance to another and what it entails (similar to the questions and responses here). Another point I would've liked to see is on encryption and privacy — who, other than the people I choose as an audience, can see my Toots (the admins of the instances, someone sniffing the network, etc.). If these platforms are being sold as "awesome", there need to be more reasons than just "no adverts and no tracking" (the latter claim is not provable without talking about encryption in a little more detail). No ads doesn't mean someone can't sell your information to someone else outside this platform. It's one thing that the owners/maintainers of many instances wouldn't sell information because of their own moral convictions that led them to get out of centralized, single company social networks. But asking to trust on that basis alone is not enough. I checked out Mastodon quite sometime ago, but stopped using it after one or two Toots. Network effect — not knowing anyone else is a big barrier. On chat platforms, I could at least persuade one or two people I know to use them for direct chats, but these ar harder to deal with when you're looking for people who are not only local but also are working on similar causes as oneself. Like the author says, finding some interesting people on Mastodon and creating new connections could work, but it also depends on one's areas of interest. I personally also find Twitter very noisy (not in the sense of signal to noise ratio, but the amount of content). At least on Facebook I can join certain groups, avoid the news feed, etc. Somehow the topic wise discussion format seems suitable to me than a chat format (without some amount of conversation threading) with many users.
- saurik 8y ago
  > I wish the author had expanded on migration from one instance to another and what it entails (similar to the questions and responses here). Account migration is not a thing yet, and conceptually requires a new namespace for referencing accounts (such as public keys). There is a multi-year-long actively-discussed open issue thread about this problem. https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177
  - woolvalley 8y ago
    What is the migrate account thing at the bottom of edit profile then? Move to a different account If you wish to redirect this account to a different one, you can configure it here.
codesections 8y ago
I wrote a companion piece that explains what makes Mastodon better than Twitter. It starts like this: > Mastodon is a newcomer social media platform that is a lot like Twitter—short messages, followers, hashtags, all that. But Mastodon is much better than Twitter, and not just because being totally ad-free and keeping chronological timelines make it far more enjoyable to use (though that certainly helps!). All that is nice, but the real advantage Mastodon has over Twitter is that Mastodon is not an outrage machine that's corroding our ability to view our politic opponents as real humans, deserving of sympathy and understanding. To explain how much better Mastodon is, I'm going to give you three examples of how Mastodon is better, and then I'll step back and talk about why Mastodon is better. https://www.codesections.com/blog/mastodon-elevator-pitch/ https://www.codesections.com/blog/mastodon-elevator-pitch/
- colordrops 8y ago
  "outrage machine". What a perfectly succinct description. That said, Mastodon would likely turn into an outrage machine if it ever reached critical mass. I suppose you could stay in your own mastodon instance to avoid it.
- manigandham 8y ago
  It's the people that bring the outrage, not the platform itself. Anything that reaches a certain scale will start to become it, it's part of human nature and something we haven't had sufficient time to learn and evolve past.
- nafey 8y ago
  I wonder if in the long run Mastodon will still not be an "outrage machine". Twitter also didn't start out as a vent for political outrage, but as a platform grows it gets more bad apples. In the case of Mastodon it's decentralized nature actually provides them more security. It will be interesting to see it play out.
  - merinowool 8y ago
    It will be easier for governments to shut down small instances and smear the owners. I don't think decentralisation has much security value.
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lxe 8y ago
How are email and ActivityPub different in spirit? If they are so similar, and often compared, then why not use the well-known email stack to build "federated" social/messaging apps? I think "not being gmail-compatible" was the core flaws of Google Wave.
Uhhrrr 8y ago
The failure to mention GNU Social, which Mastodon is almost completely based upon and which birthed the Fediverse, is just weird.
- INTPenis 8y ago
  Mastodon is not based on GNU Social in any way other than they both used the OStatus protocol. Before ActivityPub became the norm. GNU Social is made in PHP and Mastodon is made with Ruby and NodeJS. So two wildly different implementations. Mastodon also looked more modern and followed more so called modern developing practices. Which is why I think it caught on more than GNU Social ever did.
  - rainbowmverse 8y ago
    The kindness, quality, and eagerness to help is a big part of what propelled Mastodon. You'd log in, make your first toot, and have a pile of people welcoming you from the federated or local timeline. Same with beginner questions. I tried GNU Social a long time ago, but it was mostly technical people talking about technical stuff. Great if that's what you're into, but it's no basis for a general use social network. Niche networks are fine, but I don't get the impression that's what early federated social media proponents wanted.
  - Uhhrrr 8y ago
    Even so, it is still weird to pretend that everything in the Fediverse is Mastodon.
Kiro 8y ago
> This is by design so that a person’s Toot is only Boosted in a way that gets the message they intended across. Seems like a bad design decision trying to force people to use the platform in an unnatural way. They will just take screenshots and add their own comments instead, making the "retoots with comments" inferior to what it could be with native comments.
- mobilehnuser 8y ago
  Whether it's bad design or not this is one of the aspects of Mastodon that appeals to me the most. The friction is just enough to stop the context collapse that plagues Twitter
  - glenstein 8y ago
    Right. I'm also a fan of friction any time I hear an argument that "well, [bad behavior] is inevitable, so you may as well purposely include it and design it to be easy to do!" We've seen that design can shape behavior in profound ways, and we have no obligation whatsoever to follow pressure toward a lowest common denominator if we think there are better designs that consciously resist that pressure.
    - rainbowmverse 8y ago
      Yep. I don't think it's coincidence that Twitter's slide started right around when they started giving you notifications for likes/retweets of retweets and replies when before it was only for your own posts. Then it got worse with quote tweeting.
jancsika 8y ago
> Well, finding the right one is very difficult That sounds like a rather critical UX bug. Just give me the instance I should sign up on in the "sign up" area of mastodon.social. Use what you think is the most suitable algorithm to cycle through a list of "appropriate" instances, where you-- the people with domain experience-- define "appropriate" for the potential user. Otherwise you end up with this passive-aggressive situation where everybody does the obvious thing of signing up on mastodon.social, but your devs and fans take it on themselves to "teach" people not to do that because federation. Case in point: the very first step of signing up is described as "very difficult" in this newbie guide.
- pawal 8y ago
  Would you say the same thing about e-mail and SMTP?
  - phoe-krk 8y ago
    That's a good example. In a way, e-mail was the first federated social network, and nowadays there's no critical UX issue with "there's too many e-mail providers to choose from, there should be only one GMail for people to sign up to". The only difference is that e-mail is "obvious" and Mastodon is new.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - gemlog 8y ago
    this. It doesn't matter one whit about the instance, except perhaps initially. Maybe. You choose who to read and follow and the instance doesn't matter. I already 'follow' about 80 like-minded geeks I'm interested to read each day and that's all I can keep up with. I never look at either the local timeline or the federated timeline: they are too much information; firehose. edit: and those 80-odd ppl are all over the planet on various instances in various languages.
    - 8y ago
baxtr 8y ago
I hope Mastodon will develop into a real twitter alternative one day. Currently it’s rather “empty” If anyone is intersted in a German round-up of Mastodon: https://www.achtungtechnik.de/archives/2018/mastodon/ https://www.achtungtechnik.de/archives/2018/mastodon/
lambada 8y ago
Something unclear from the article >You can also Favourite a Toot. Which basically means that you support or agree with a Toot. Are favourites toots private? Can someone else view them? Are they automatically shown up in timelines (as liked tweets do). Also, does favourite really imply agreement? To me atleast, I favourited tweets that I didn’t agree with just because they pointed to a well constructed argument, or for future reference. Since twitter changed terminology to like I’ve stopped doing that.
- zaarn 8y ago
  Favorites don't show up in any timeline other than your own favorite list. To my knowledge, others cannot see favorites but I might be wrong, I can't access my own instance atm due to a network filter. The canonical way is to retweet (boost) a toot which shows up in the timeline of your followers and your profile (the boosted tweet will also show up on the federated timeline but not associated with you).
  - RX14 8y ago
    You can see the list of favourites just like you can on twitter
    - zaarn 8y ago
      Ah yes then I remembered that wrong. Might be worth an issue opening on github :) edit: Found this one: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/7107 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/7107
edhelas 8y ago
I am really impressed by Mastodon all the efforts that the community is doing to explain the project and the decentralization to the "common people". It's something that I'm doing for years now when trying to show how Movim works (it's a federated social platform based on XMPP, https://movim.eu https://movim.eu). I always have difficulties when showing how a social platform can work in a decentralized (or in those two cases federated) way. The path that I'm taking for Movim at the moment is to start from the emails (in Movim the accounts and platforms are decoupled, you can connect using the same account on different instances and clients) and apply it to a social network and chat service (Movim is mixing social network and chat platform in the same UI) but I see often that it's not "easy" when people are used to centralized solutions.
msravi 8y ago
It isn't clear from the article - does Mastodon have the equivalent of Twitter lists in which I can group sets of handles into separate timelines that I can follow independently/parallelly? The one timeline thing doesn't work for me too well... I prefer a few separate parallel timelines and tweetdeck is great to organize and follow such parallel timelines.
- codewiz 8y ago
  You can create multiple named lists and you can add people you follow to them. I mostly post publicly, but I used this feature to create a list of friends who live in Japan.
  - msravi 8y ago
    Looks like it has everything that I wanted. Thank you.
ManlyBread 8y ago
I got banned from mastodon.social with no explanation or warning. Given that this is the "official" instance I remain sceptical to whether this is a project worth engaging in.
emilfihlman 8y ago
>Being open source gives us the reassurance that our data is not being harvested, or that we’re not being spied on. A false sense of reassurance.
baq 8y ago
so how do i ban russian trolls on a federated p2p social network...?
- fwn 8y ago
  The same way you would ban Swedish trolls on Twitter. Fun and russiophobia aside, there is an article by Eugen Rochko (maintainer of mastodon) somewhat covering that topic: https://medium.com/tootsuite/learning-from-twitters-mistakes-c272d67bba76 https://medium.com/tootsuite/learning-from-twitters-mistakes... AFAIK they also utilize crowdsourced block lists to automate part of the sorting in the fediverse.
ohthehugemanate 8y ago
I understand HOW mastodon works. I've got my account. But I still don't understand WHY. I got into twitter and facebook when I was a university student who gave a crap about broadcasting myself to the world. Now I'm old and don't care anymore, and I'm not deluded enough to think that anyone else cares. Is there a use case that goes beyond teenagers chatting at the lockers?
- codesections 8y ago
  You clearly see value in HackerNews—my use case for Mastodon isn't that different from my use case for HN. My instance (https:/fosstodon.org) is mostly focused on free and open source software (hence the name). Conversations there tend to be a lot like conversations on HN, but with the benifit of a local community where you get to know the regulars. (I'm not saying that there's no purely personal talk—but think "office water cooler" not "high school lockers")
  - vageli 8y ago
    Just a friendly heads up, I'm getting a certificate error on your site (cert expired 30 April).
    - codesections 8y ago
      Thanks! That was because I put the wrong link; fixed now. (And it's my instance only in the "my country" sense—I'm a user there, but I don't run it or anything.)
      - Avamander 8y ago
        You missed a slash, the link doesn't work.
kowdermeister 8y ago
I found a survey about Mastodon: https://medium.com/@cassolotl/a-mastodon-survey-ac74948765c7 https://medium.com/@cassolotl/a-mastodon-survey-ac74948765c7 It says the main reason for not joining / abandoning is lack of friends. And also hard to use which doesn't help pulling in more people, so no friends, then a downward spiral. Is there a way out?
- Mindwipe 8y ago
  I feel like a simple plugin that pulled in your public Twitter friends usernames and offered to follow anyone with the same username @mastodon.social would really help here. Pretty hard for Twitter to stop it if it were a client that scraped the list too.
  - rainbowmverse 8y ago
    It exists. https://bridge.joinmastodon.org/ https://bridge.joinmastodon.org/
    - Mindwipe 8y ago
      Thanks, I'll have a play with this.
corobo 8y ago
When you first start out someone gives you an email address. Your ISP, Your employer, Microsoft, Google (push) When you first start out with Mastodon, you have to find a server on your own and hope it's not going to disappear on you in the distant future (pull) The mainstream doesn't do pull. I haven't verified but I imagine sites such as Twitter didn't take off until they started pushing accounts through advertising and word of mouth suggestion (upload your contacts, invite your friends!). Facebook pushed accounts on people in by limiting who could sign up until a certain demand threshold was reached so that when the next wave of potential users look at it, they have an account pushed on them by peer pressure as their friends were already there Leave the decentralised aspects to us nerds. To get it properly going you're gonna need a way to push accounts on people
moonbug 8y ago
"badly"
bopbop 8y ago
Apologies for the vulgarity, but I am presuming someone has informed the initial design team that toot is slang for a fart (at least in England) - which leads to the phrase "a mastadon toot" being quite a double entendre. How well ingrained is the name? Is it as commonly used in the community as a tweet in twitter? As in do the users identify the messages they send as toots, and are likely to say as such? https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=toots https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=toots
- willvarfar 8y ago
  Is someone who uses Twitter a twit? Silly names that mean things in different places don't seem to deter Americans (I'm a Brit but I've never heard the slang "toot" before; I guess it might be very regional)
  - bopbop 8y ago
    I rather delicately confirmed with a few co-workers and they are aware of the usage, so it could be regional? They're rather reserved PHD kind of people (I'm not), but seemed to find it hysterical. With regards to Twit, that's a great point - although in that instance it seemed like a more intentional slur, as I think I'd normally default to "tweeter". Because it is a verb substitution it has this kind of wordbomb effect of corrupting every sentence it could be used in. Some examples! -the latest release by the Jonas brothers made me so happy i just had to toot. -these toots are a breath of fresh air. -Welcome! Let's get you tooting! For when Mastodon social gets it's first celebrity president: -President Trump released another obnoxious toot in his seemingly never-ending tirade and finally, -I toot, therefore I am.
- rwmj 8y ago
  FWIW I've lived in England my whole life and never heard a fart referred to as a "toot". The only meaning I'm aware of is "toot[ing] a horn", meaning sounding the horn on a car ("honk" in US English). That seems appropriate in the context of Mastodon.
- codesections 8y ago
  This was apparently unintentional—the founder wasn't aware of the slang term when they decided on the terminology. That said, I view it as a happy accident, since it keeps the tone a bit silly/irreverent and reminds users that their thoughts aren't that valuable.
needle0 8y ago
I'm not sure if this will be relevant to its longer-term success, but I notice that the word "Mastodon" seems to be very easy to misspell -- In the comments here alone I already find "Mastadon", "Mastadoon", etc.
- piotrkubisa 8y ago
  I am curious why they have misspelled the Mastodon? In many languages it is written and spelled in the same way. I am not native speaker but I would pronounce mastadon and mastodon in the same way (ˈmæstədɑn), but hardly I can imagine to write down as mastadon. > First attested 1813, from the New Latin genus name Mastodon (1806), coined by French naturalist Georges Cuvier, from Ancient Greek μαστός (mastós, “breast”) + ὀδούς (odoús, “tooth”), from the similarity of the mammilloid projections on the crowns of the extinct mammal's molars. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mastodon https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mastodon
  - Dayshine 8y ago
    It doesn't have to be misspelling. More likely it's forgetting which word it's supposed to be. I've only seen the word written/used in museums, so I'm unlikely to remember whether it's a mastadon, mastodon, matadon, etc.
  - vxNsr 8y ago
    In the US at least people spell based on how words sound in their head if they don't really remember the correct way to spell it. No one is thinking about the history of the word, in fact I personally was wondering why they chose an elephant as their mascot until I remembered what a Mastodon was.
amelius 8y ago
Would Mastodon be a useful platform to, collaboratively, define the requirements of software? Perhaps it could be used to define the next iteration of Mastodon, then.
pard68 8y ago
I joined a server. It was alright. Then I looked at the federated timeline and decided I did not wish to be a part of Mastadon. Too much hate and virtue signalling. It was like what Twitter already was.
- ColinWright 8y ago
  I don't understand this. The Federated timeline is always going to be full of the same kind of crap that Twitter (and other social media) has. The whole point of Mastodon is that you can avoid that by joining an instance that matches your interests, and then only look at your notifications and the local timeline. By doing that you can see only things said by, or boosted by, people who you have chosen to associate with. Then you get most of the benefits of social media without getting the crap from the uncontrolled firehose. But sure, if you want it to be like Twitter, and then reject it because your experience is like Twitter, then by all means. I just don't understand your reaction.
  - asdkhadsj 8y ago
    Can you join multiple "local" timelines? Ie, lets say you join an OSS dev focused federation and you like it. Down the line, it grows and becomes less HN, more Reddit. Okay, you say to yourself, time to move to the next HN-like you find. So you do that, but it's small, and feels dead. Seeing feeds from both the old, somewhat bad and the new, better but still too small would ease migration woes. Is that possible?
    - ColinWright 8y ago
      You can start a new account on a new instance, watch the old account on the old instance, see which people are still worth following, then follow them from the new instance account. I've done that and it worked a treat. You can also export the list of people you follow and import that into the new instance, then unfollow anyone who says stupid things. My experience is that all platforms reward putting in a small amount of effort to curate those I follow and engage with. Unless you do that you end up with the shower of complete crap hiding the nuggets worth having. With a comparatively small amount of effort you can get a high-quality stream with very little crap, and then you can block or filter that.
amelius 8y ago
> If we use our email analogy; think of Mastodon as email as a whole. Shouldn't that be ActivityPub instead of Mastodon?
jesuisuncaillou 8y ago
I really wish I could join several instances with the same account. This is a feature currently missing, but someone told me they're working on it. Go mastodon, go !
- ColinWright 8y ago
  You can just join the instances using the same handle. Then from each in turn export the people you follow and import that into each of the others. Now each of your accounts follows the same collection of people. Then on each instance cull those you don't want to follow on this instance. Now each account has the flavour of the instance you're on. You can do all that now, although it requires a little work.
Avamander 8y ago
The idea seems very interesting to me, but I have to ask, people talk a lot about the social aspect and how I can follow people, this honestly doesn't interest me at all, what I'm interested at is aggregation, could I actually replace say twitter and my RSS reader with self-hosted Mastodon instance?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
woodandsteel 8y ago
From the article: "To my surprise, I couldn’t find a decent guide anywhere" How often open source projects shoot themselves in the foot this way. They come up with something marvelous that many ordinary users would love to use. But then they fail to make a friendly UI and write good user docs, so few people adopt it. One example I struggled with is gpg. I wanted to use it, but found the user docs confusing. So I thought of helping improve them so it would be more widely adopted. So I dug into how it works, but I discovered it was so inherently hard to use that few would ever adopt it, no matter how good the user docs were, and so I just gave up. One thing that is going to determine whether web decentralization succeeds and rescues us from Facebook et al is whether or not the developers can come up with user friendly software. One thing that means is that it is quite possible that a piece of decentralization software that is far from optimal will take over a segment simply because it is easier to use that others that are much superior.

389 points by codesections 8y ago

caf 8y ago

How does it deal with spam?

brian-armstrong 8y ago
Nobody wants to use it, so the ROI for spam is very low. This keeps spam to a minimum.
- willismichael 8y ago
  Moral of the story: use Mastodon, but keep it unpopular?
  - erik_seaberg 8y ago
    Worked for Usenet from 1979 until 1993.
- ISL 8y ago
  174,000 mostly-trendy tech people? Someone wants to market to them at low cost. https://mastodon.social/@usercount https://mastodon.social/@usercount
  - brian-armstrong 8y ago
    Is this counting registered users? Who cares? What's the RMAU?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
ISL 8y ago
What about phishing? @isl@isl.tld and @is1@is1.tld look pretty similar.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Right. There really ought to be key-based authentication.
  - cortesoft 8y ago
    Key based authentication isn't really going to protect against a homograph attack.
codesections 8y ago
Spam is an issue, though not (yet) a huge one. Mastodon has a couple of key advantages, though. * First, if the spammer is coming from a "good" instance, the admin of that instance can ban them—and the number of instances means that there are more mods to go around. * Second, if the spammer is coming from a pure spam instance, other instances can ban/unfederate with the whole instance. That said, it's an area that the community is focused on. Here's an issue discussing spam and additional tools that could help: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/8122 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/8122
- caf 8y ago
  Yes, I was more wondering about the "spam instance" problem rather than the "spam user" problem (which that issue is discussing). From the overview it seems like dedicated spam instances could be quickly spun up in the same way that email domains are?
whatsstolat 8y ago
There seems to be a lot of "city" spam. See https://mstdn.io/tags/sydney https://mstdn.io/tags/sydney for example. Its about 80% escort ads.
- rainbowmverse 8y ago
  That's not spam. That's from people on Switter. It's an instance for sex workers.
  - whatsstolat 8y ago
    Hashtagging dozens of cities though? These look like spam ads for the pimps.
    - rainbowmverse 8y ago
      You can mute switter.at if it bothers you. Click the three dots on a user's profile and you'll see the option.
INTPenis 8y ago
That's the key question imo. I run an instance and the last 2-3 days I've been flooded with spam bots. Reading github issues and toot threads I've noticed it's a big issue and has been coming in waves on other instances this summer. I like to draw parallels to e-mail because Mastodon's issues are very similar to the issues we had with email in the 90s. So I've seen mastodon instance admins mention things like maintaining centralized blacklists. I've even seen people mention using spamassassin to train on mastodon toots instead of mails. Sign-ups of spambots are likely automated yet reCaptcha is out of the question because Mastodon users tend to dislike big corporations like Google. I hope VisualCaptcha is a viable option but we'll see. Some claim that captcha is a waste of time altogether because they can be defeated but my opinion is that it would still protect against most less sophisticated bot networks. Short answer; right now there is no real solution other than manually banning and adding server IPs to a 800+ strong list of banned IP subnets maintained on github. There is also the option of banning MX servers because the last wave of bot signups all used the same backend MX server. Even though they used a ton of e-mail domains. And of course requiring confirmation of new accounts by admins. I predict spam is going to be a very hot topic in the fediverse for a while still. Mastodon is community driven, not backed by any one big corporation. Anything driven by the internet community is going to be wilder than a centralized solution. It will be the wild wild west of social media. There is no denying or escaping that fact.

mirimir 8y ago

Finally, a cogent explanation. Edit: But missing a key issue, perhaps. > Because Mastodon uses a collection of Instances, you’re not at the beck and call of one site owner. If you don’t like the direction an Instance is taking, you can pack your virtual bags and go. Mastodon even has an import/export tool that allows you to migrate the people you follow from one account/instance to another. That sounds great. But if you do "pack your virtual bags and go", is there any way to map foo@bar.net to foo@baz.net? In the email analogy, there's clearly not. You need to tell all correspondents.

colanderman 8y ago
With e-mail there is a way to migrate without losing your identity, if you own your own domain, and point its MX records at your provider (who is a real e-mail provider and not a "free" walled garden like GMail or AOL). Unfortunately owning a domain is not as accessible for 95% of the population as it ought to be. This concept of digital identity mobility is important to ensure that one's digital life is not tied to a single service provider. XMPP provides this capability as well, through SRV records. Bizarrely, given its aim to free users from walled gardens, Mastodon does not support SRV records [1]. The developers give some excuses about the WebFinger protocol, which basically means that if I want to own my own Mastodon identity, I must run my own server (either Mastodon or a WebFinger redirect). Apparently Diaspora made the same shortsighted decision [2]. I'm surprised and saddened that the concept of identity mobility is seemingly not well understood by those developing decentralized social platforms. [1] https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/1931 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/1931 [2] https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1109 https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1109
- mirimir 8y ago
  Yes, I know that. But email was just the analogy ;) For Mastodon, that would be running your own instance, I guess.
  - colanderman 8y ago
    Which is unfortunate. I consider myself a highly skilled technical user, and the burden of running and maintaining my own Mastodon server, or even my own Nginx server to redirect WebFinger requests somewhere else, exceeds the free time I have to devote to the problem. (Keeping another VM alive, updated, and configured through the years costs mental energy, time, and money.) Whereas, adding an SRV record to my existing DNS server? That's trivial, comes at no marginal cost to me, and doesn't leave me with the constant mental burden of worrying whether my Mastodon or WebFinger server is available, secure, etc. Owning my own digital identity should be easy. Simplicity encourages adoption, and widespread self-ownership of one's digital identity is key to hindering the growth of walled gardens. Mastodon does not make ownership of one's digital identity simple.

Pfhreak 8y ago

The thing I never really see from these is about setting up on an existing instance vs running my own. And if I set up my own, does it need to be a community? Am I shutting myself out of an experience by creating, say, a Mastodon instance for my family? I'm bought in to the idea of Mastodon, but getting started is like being handed an atlas of the US and being told, "Please pick a neighborhood to live in."

pat2man 8y ago
Open social operates somewhat like email, where you don't need to be on the same server as someone else, but it can make things easier. For the most part, if you are running your own email server for you family, it might make sense to run your own mastodon server. You can have control over your file storage, etc.
Torwald 8y ago
Different servers are linked to with the system of federation. If you set up your own, you also choose to what other servers you connect to. So, no, you are not shutting yourself out. But you have to manage your federalization.
shakna 8y ago
1. And if I set up my own, does it need to be a community? No. Mastadon and other compatible servers like GNUSocial do have single-user environments. [0] 2. Am I shutting myself out of an experience by creating, say, a Mastodon instance for my family? No. The entire thing is federated, users from all servers can speak to each other. [0] https://github.com/ummjackson/mastodon-guide/blob/master/single-user-mode.md https://github.com/ummjackson/mastodon-guide/blob/master/sin...
- ReverseCold 8y ago
  > 1. No. Mastadon and other compatible servers like... Well that's the easy answer. I run my own instance and it's near impossible to find interesting people to follow. I started making alternate accounts on various other servers and it was immediately much better. Also, (from my experience) people actually do pay attention to the local feed. People are more likely to find about (and talk to) you when they see you on their local feed. It's very hard for people to find you when you have your own instance. So for Mastodon, at least, you most likely will want a community server - not a single user one.

ISL 8y ago

Is there a straightforward way to change Instances without losing connections with other users? Does it make more sense to host your own, so that you'll always be @isl@isl.tld ?

mirimir 8y ago
That's what I'm thinking.
fenwick67 8y ago
You can export/import the list of users you follow, but the people who follow you will have to re-follow you manually

samcat116 8y ago

With the death of certain Twitter APIs coming up soon, I wonder if many Twitter client developers will start to make Mastodon apps. I would love to see "Tootbot" by the Tweetbot developers.

briandear 8y ago
Besides a few neckbeard types, does any significant number of people actually care about Mastadoon? I remember App.net got all buzzy several years ago. Whatever happened to that? Facebook got big because college students wanted to get laid and that’s where their friends were. Twitter got big because it captured the Zeitgiest and had a FOMO aspect. I am not sure what Mastadoon has going for it to convince normal people to care. How is a Twitter client developer going to actually make any money on this? How is anyone going to make money on this?
- ISL 8y ago
  I do, though I haven't adopted it yet. At some point, a new protocol will get social media right, and free itself from walled gardens. I don't know if it will be Mastodon, but I'll keep looking with interest until it happens. Mastodon seems to get a bunch of things right, and it may evolve into a more-open (and messier) Face-gram-ter-+ that gets enough traction to thrive. People derive a lot of value from email. A protocol like this should be viewed as something like email.
- adrianratnapala 8y ago
  > Besides a few neckbeard types, does any significant number of people actually care about Mastadoon? The problem with this kind of argument is that it also explains why nobody uses that neckbeard internet thing and everyone still uses telephones and TV. And, in a way, that is true. But the internet still exists.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Yes, to flesh that out, the Internet has morphed into "telephones and TV" :( For all too many, at least.

newscracker 8y ago

I wish the author had expanded on migration from one instance to another and what it entails (similar to the questions and responses here). Another point I would've liked to see is on encryption and privacy — who, other than the people I choose as an audience, can see my Toots (the admins of the instances, someone sniffing the network, etc.). If these platforms are being sold as "awesome", there need to be more reasons than just "no adverts and no tracking" (the latter claim is not provable without talking about encryption in a little more detail). No ads doesn't mean someone can't sell your information to someone else outside this platform. It's one thing that the owners/maintainers of many instances wouldn't sell information because of their own moral convictions that led them to get out of centralized, single company social networks. But asking to trust on that basis alone is not enough. I checked out Mastodon quite sometime ago, but stopped using it after one or two Toots. Network effect — not knowing anyone else is a big barrier. On chat platforms, I could at least persuade one or two people I know to use them for direct chats, but these ar harder to deal with when you're looking for people who are not only local but also are working on similar causes as oneself. Like the author says, finding some interesting people on Mastodon and creating new connections could work, but it also depends on one's areas of interest. I personally also find Twitter very noisy (not in the sense of signal to noise ratio, but the amount of content). At least on Facebook I can join certain groups, avoid the news feed, etc. Somehow the topic wise discussion format seems suitable to me than a chat format (without some amount of conversation threading) with many users.

saurik 8y ago
> I wish the author had expanded on migration from one instance to another and what it entails (similar to the questions and responses here). Account migration is not a thing yet, and conceptually requires a new namespace for referencing accounts (such as public keys). There is a multi-year-long actively-discussed open issue thread about this problem. https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177
- woolvalley 8y ago
  What is the migrate account thing at the bottom of edit profile then? Move to a different account If you wish to redirect this account to a different one, you can configure it here.

codesections 8y ago

I wrote a companion piece that explains what makes Mastodon better than Twitter. It starts like this: > Mastodon is a newcomer social media platform that is a lot like Twitter—short messages, followers, hashtags, all that. But Mastodon is much better than Twitter, and not just because being totally ad-free and keeping chronological timelines make it far more enjoyable to use (though that certainly helps!). All that is nice, but the real advantage Mastodon has over Twitter is that Mastodon is not an outrage machine that's corroding our ability to view our politic opponents as real humans, deserving of sympathy and understanding. To explain how much better Mastodon is, I'm going to give you three examples of how Mastodon is better, and then I'll step back and talk about why Mastodon is better. https://www.codesections.com/blog/mastodon-elevator-pitch/ https://www.codesections.com/blog/mastodon-elevator-pitch/

colordrops 8y ago
"outrage machine". What a perfectly succinct description. That said, Mastodon would likely turn into an outrage machine if it ever reached critical mass. I suppose you could stay in your own mastodon instance to avoid it.
manigandham 8y ago
It's the people that bring the outrage, not the platform itself. Anything that reaches a certain scale will start to become it, it's part of human nature and something we haven't had sufficient time to learn and evolve past.
nafey 8y ago
I wonder if in the long run Mastodon will still not be an "outrage machine". Twitter also didn't start out as a vent for political outrage, but as a platform grows it gets more bad apples. In the case of Mastodon it's decentralized nature actually provides them more security. It will be interesting to see it play out.
- merinowool 8y ago
  It will be easier for governments to shut down small instances and smear the owners. I don't think decentralisation has much security value.

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lxe 8y ago

How are email and ActivityPub different in spirit? If they are so similar, and often compared, then why not use the well-known email stack to build "federated" social/messaging apps? I think "not being gmail-compatible" was the core flaws of Google Wave.

Uhhrrr 8y ago

The failure to mention GNU Social, which Mastodon is almost completely based upon and which birthed the Fediverse, is just weird.

INTPenis 8y ago
Mastodon is not based on GNU Social in any way other than they both used the OStatus protocol. Before ActivityPub became the norm. GNU Social is made in PHP and Mastodon is made with Ruby and NodeJS. So two wildly different implementations. Mastodon also looked more modern and followed more so called modern developing practices. Which is why I think it caught on more than GNU Social ever did.
- rainbowmverse 8y ago
  The kindness, quality, and eagerness to help is a big part of what propelled Mastodon. You'd log in, make your first toot, and have a pile of people welcoming you from the federated or local timeline. Same with beginner questions. I tried GNU Social a long time ago, but it was mostly technical people talking about technical stuff. Great if that's what you're into, but it's no basis for a general use social network. Niche networks are fine, but I don't get the impression that's what early federated social media proponents wanted.
- Uhhrrr 8y ago
  Even so, it is still weird to pretend that everything in the Fediverse is Mastodon.

Kiro 8y ago

> This is by design so that a person’s Toot is only Boosted in a way that gets the message they intended across. Seems like a bad design decision trying to force people to use the platform in an unnatural way. They will just take screenshots and add their own comments instead, making the "retoots with comments" inferior to what it could be with native comments.

mobilehnuser 8y ago
Whether it's bad design or not this is one of the aspects of Mastodon that appeals to me the most. The friction is just enough to stop the context collapse that plagues Twitter
- glenstein 8y ago
  Right. I'm also a fan of friction any time I hear an argument that "well, [bad behavior] is inevitable, so you may as well purposely include it and design it to be easy to do!" We've seen that design can shape behavior in profound ways, and we have no obligation whatsoever to follow pressure toward a lowest common denominator if we think there are better designs that consciously resist that pressure.
  - rainbowmverse 8y ago
    Yep. I don't think it's coincidence that Twitter's slide started right around when they started giving you notifications for likes/retweets of retweets and replies when before it was only for your own posts. Then it got worse with quote tweeting.

jancsika 8y ago

> Well, finding the right one is very difficult That sounds like a rather critical UX bug. Just give me the instance I should sign up on in the "sign up" area of mastodon.social. Use what you think is the most suitable algorithm to cycle through a list of "appropriate" instances, where you-- the people with domain experience-- define "appropriate" for the potential user. Otherwise you end up with this passive-aggressive situation where everybody does the obvious thing of signing up on mastodon.social, but your devs and fans take it on themselves to "teach" people not to do that because federation. Case in point: the very first step of signing up is described as "very difficult" in this newbie guide.

pawal 8y ago
Would you say the same thing about e-mail and SMTP?
- phoe-krk 8y ago
  That's a good example. In a way, e-mail was the first federated social network, and nowadays there's no critical UX issue with "there's too many e-mail providers to choose from, there should be only one GMail for people to sign up to". The only difference is that e-mail is "obvious" and Mastodon is new.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- gemlog 8y ago
  this. It doesn't matter one whit about the instance, except perhaps initially. Maybe. You choose who to read and follow and the instance doesn't matter. I already 'follow' about 80 like-minded geeks I'm interested to read each day and that's all I can keep up with. I never look at either the local timeline or the federated timeline: they are too much information; firehose. edit: and those 80-odd ppl are all over the planet on various instances in various languages.
  - 8y ago

baxtr 8y ago

I hope Mastodon will develop into a real twitter alternative one day. Currently it’s rather “empty” If anyone is intersted in a German round-up of Mastodon: https://www.achtungtechnik.de/archives/2018/mastodon/ https://www.achtungtechnik.de/archives/2018/mastodon/

lambada 8y ago

Something unclear from the article >You can also Favourite a Toot. Which basically means that you support or agree with a Toot. Are favourites toots private? Can someone else view them? Are they automatically shown up in timelines (as liked tweets do). Also, does favourite really imply agreement? To me atleast, I favourited tweets that I didn’t agree with just because they pointed to a well constructed argument, or for future reference. Since twitter changed terminology to like I’ve stopped doing that.

zaarn 8y ago
Favorites don't show up in any timeline other than your own favorite list. To my knowledge, others cannot see favorites but I might be wrong, I can't access my own instance atm due to a network filter. The canonical way is to retweet (boost) a toot which shows up in the timeline of your followers and your profile (the boosted tweet will also show up on the federated timeline but not associated with you).
- RX14 8y ago
  You can see the list of favourites just like you can on twitter
  - zaarn 8y ago
    Ah yes then I remembered that wrong. Might be worth an issue opening on github :) edit: Found this one: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/7107 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/7107

edhelas 8y ago

I am really impressed by Mastodon all the efforts that the community is doing to explain the project and the decentralization to the "common people". It's something that I'm doing for years now when trying to show how Movim works (it's a federated social platform based on XMPP, https://movim.eu https://movim.eu). I always have difficulties when showing how a social platform can work in a decentralized (or in those two cases federated) way. The path that I'm taking for Movim at the moment is to start from the emails (in Movim the accounts and platforms are decoupled, you can connect using the same account on different instances and clients) and apply it to a social network and chat service (Movim is mixing social network and chat platform in the same UI) but I see often that it's not "easy" when people are used to centralized solutions.

msravi 8y ago

It isn't clear from the article - does Mastodon have the equivalent of Twitter lists in which I can group sets of handles into separate timelines that I can follow independently/parallelly? The one timeline thing doesn't work for me too well... I prefer a few separate parallel timelines and tweetdeck is great to organize and follow such parallel timelines.

codewiz 8y ago
You can create multiple named lists and you can add people you follow to them. I mostly post publicly, but I used this feature to create a list of friends who live in Japan.
- msravi 8y ago
  Looks like it has everything that I wanted. Thank you.

ManlyBread 8y ago

I got banned from mastodon.social with no explanation or warning. Given that this is the "official" instance I remain sceptical to whether this is a project worth engaging in.

emilfihlman 8y ago

>Being open source gives us the reassurance that our data is not being harvested, or that we’re not being spied on. A false sense of reassurance.

baq 8y ago

so how do i ban russian trolls on a federated p2p social network...?

fwn 8y ago
The same way you would ban Swedish trolls on Twitter. Fun and russiophobia aside, there is an article by Eugen Rochko (maintainer of mastodon) somewhat covering that topic: https://medium.com/tootsuite/learning-from-twitters-mistakes-c272d67bba76 https://medium.com/tootsuite/learning-from-twitters-mistakes... AFAIK they also utilize crowdsourced block lists to automate part of the sorting in the fediverse.

ohthehugemanate 8y ago

I understand HOW mastodon works. I've got my account. But I still don't understand WHY. I got into twitter and facebook when I was a university student who gave a crap about broadcasting myself to the world. Now I'm old and don't care anymore, and I'm not deluded enough to think that anyone else cares. Is there a use case that goes beyond teenagers chatting at the lockers?

codesections 8y ago
You clearly see value in HackerNews—my use case for Mastodon isn't that different from my use case for HN. My instance (https:/fosstodon.org) is mostly focused on free and open source software (hence the name). Conversations there tend to be a lot like conversations on HN, but with the benifit of a local community where you get to know the regulars. (I'm not saying that there's no purely personal talk—but think "office water cooler" not "high school lockers")
- vageli 8y ago
  Just a friendly heads up, I'm getting a certificate error on your site (cert expired 30 April).
  - codesections 8y ago
    Thanks! That was because I put the wrong link; fixed now. (And it's my instance only in the "my country" sense—I'm a user there, but I don't run it or anything.)
    - Avamander 8y ago
      You missed a slash, the link doesn't work.

kowdermeister 8y ago

I found a survey about Mastodon: https://medium.com/@cassolotl/a-mastodon-survey-ac74948765c7 https://medium.com/@cassolotl/a-mastodon-survey-ac74948765c7 It says the main reason for not joining / abandoning is lack of friends. And also hard to use which doesn't help pulling in more people, so no friends, then a downward spiral. Is there a way out?

Mindwipe 8y ago
I feel like a simple plugin that pulled in your public Twitter friends usernames and offered to follow anyone with the same username @mastodon.social would really help here. Pretty hard for Twitter to stop it if it were a client that scraped the list too.
- rainbowmverse 8y ago
  It exists. https://bridge.joinmastodon.org/ https://bridge.joinmastodon.org/
  - Mindwipe 8y ago
    Thanks, I'll have a play with this.

corobo 8y ago

When you first start out someone gives you an email address. Your ISP, Your employer, Microsoft, Google (push) When you first start out with Mastodon, you have to find a server on your own and hope it's not going to disappear on you in the distant future (pull) The mainstream doesn't do pull. I haven't verified but I imagine sites such as Twitter didn't take off until they started pushing accounts through advertising and word of mouth suggestion (upload your contacts, invite your friends!). Facebook pushed accounts on people in by limiting who could sign up until a certain demand threshold was reached so that when the next wave of potential users look at it, they have an account pushed on them by peer pressure as their friends were already there Leave the decentralised aspects to us nerds. To get it properly going you're gonna need a way to push accounts on people

moonbug 8y ago

"badly"

bopbop 8y ago

Apologies for the vulgarity, but I am presuming someone has informed the initial design team that toot is slang for a fart (at least in England) - which leads to the phrase "a mastadon toot" being quite a double entendre. How well ingrained is the name? Is it as commonly used in the community as a tweet in twitter? As in do the users identify the messages they send as toots, and are likely to say as such? https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=toots https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=toots

willvarfar 8y ago
Is someone who uses Twitter a twit? Silly names that mean things in different places don't seem to deter Americans (I'm a Brit but I've never heard the slang "toot" before; I guess it might be very regional)
- bopbop 8y ago
  I rather delicately confirmed with a few co-workers and they are aware of the usage, so it could be regional? They're rather reserved PHD kind of people (I'm not), but seemed to find it hysterical. With regards to Twit, that's a great point - although in that instance it seemed like a more intentional slur, as I think I'd normally default to "tweeter". Because it is a verb substitution it has this kind of wordbomb effect of corrupting every sentence it could be used in. Some examples! -the latest release by the Jonas brothers made me so happy i just had to toot. -these toots are a breath of fresh air. -Welcome! Let's get you tooting! For when Mastodon social gets it's first celebrity president: -President Trump released another obnoxious toot in his seemingly never-ending tirade and finally, -I toot, therefore I am.
rwmj 8y ago
FWIW I've lived in England my whole life and never heard a fart referred to as a "toot". The only meaning I'm aware of is "toot[ing] a horn", meaning sounding the horn on a car ("honk" in US English). That seems appropriate in the context of Mastodon.
codesections 8y ago
This was apparently unintentional—the founder wasn't aware of the slang term when they decided on the terminology. That said, I view it as a happy accident, since it keeps the tone a bit silly/irreverent and reminds users that their thoughts aren't that valuable.

needle0 8y ago

I'm not sure if this will be relevant to its longer-term success, but I notice that the word "Mastodon" seems to be very easy to misspell -- In the comments here alone I already find "Mastadon", "Mastadoon", etc.

piotrkubisa 8y ago
I am curious why they have misspelled the Mastodon? In many languages it is written and spelled in the same way. I am not native speaker but I would pronounce mastadon and mastodon in the same way (ˈmæstədɑn), but hardly I can imagine to write down as mastadon. > First attested 1813, from the New Latin genus name Mastodon (1806), coined by French naturalist Georges Cuvier, from Ancient Greek μαστός (mastós, “breast”) + ὀδούς (odoús, “tooth”), from the similarity of the mammilloid projections on the crowns of the extinct mammal's molars. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mastodon https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mastodon
- Dayshine 8y ago
  It doesn't have to be misspelling. More likely it's forgetting which word it's supposed to be. I've only seen the word written/used in museums, so I'm unlikely to remember whether it's a mastadon, mastodon, matadon, etc.
- vxNsr 8y ago
  In the US at least people spell based on how words sound in their head if they don't really remember the correct way to spell it. No one is thinking about the history of the word, in fact I personally was wondering why they chose an elephant as their mascot until I remembered what a Mastodon was.

amelius 8y ago

Would Mastodon be a useful platform to, collaboratively, define the requirements of software? Perhaps it could be used to define the next iteration of Mastodon, then.

pard68 8y ago

I joined a server. It was alright. Then I looked at the federated timeline and decided I did not wish to be a part of Mastadon. Too much hate and virtue signalling. It was like what Twitter already was.

ColinWright 8y ago
I don't understand this. The Federated timeline is always going to be full of the same kind of crap that Twitter (and other social media) has. The whole point of Mastodon is that you can avoid that by joining an instance that matches your interests, and then only look at your notifications and the local timeline. By doing that you can see only things said by, or boosted by, people who you have chosen to associate with. Then you get most of the benefits of social media without getting the crap from the uncontrolled firehose. But sure, if you want it to be like Twitter, and then reject it because your experience is like Twitter, then by all means. I just don't understand your reaction.
- asdkhadsj 8y ago
  Can you join multiple "local" timelines? Ie, lets say you join an OSS dev focused federation and you like it. Down the line, it grows and becomes less HN, more Reddit. Okay, you say to yourself, time to move to the next HN-like you find. So you do that, but it's small, and feels dead. Seeing feeds from both the old, somewhat bad and the new, better but still too small would ease migration woes. Is that possible?
  - ColinWright 8y ago
    You can start a new account on a new instance, watch the old account on the old instance, see which people are still worth following, then follow them from the new instance account. I've done that and it worked a treat. You can also export the list of people you follow and import that into the new instance, then unfollow anyone who says stupid things. My experience is that all platforms reward putting in a small amount of effort to curate those I follow and engage with. Unless you do that you end up with the shower of complete crap hiding the nuggets worth having. With a comparatively small amount of effort you can get a high-quality stream with very little crap, and then you can block or filter that.

amelius 8y ago

> If we use our email analogy; think of Mastodon as email as a whole. Shouldn't that be ActivityPub instead of Mastodon?

jesuisuncaillou 8y ago

I really wish I could join several instances with the same account. This is a feature currently missing, but someone told me they're working on it. Go mastodon, go !

ColinWright 8y ago
You can just join the instances using the same handle. Then from each in turn export the people you follow and import that into each of the others. Now each of your accounts follows the same collection of people. Then on each instance cull those you don't want to follow on this instance. Now each account has the flavour of the instance you're on. You can do all that now, although it requires a little work.

Avamander 8y ago

The idea seems very interesting to me, but I have to ask, people talk a lot about the social aspect and how I can follow people, this honestly doesn't interest me at all, what I'm interested at is aggregation, could I actually replace say twitter and my RSS reader with self-hosted Mastodon instance?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

woodandsteel 8y ago

From the article: "To my surprise, I couldn’t find a decent guide anywhere" How often open source projects shoot themselves in the foot this way. They come up with something marvelous that many ordinary users would love to use. But then they fail to make a friendly UI and write good user docs, so few people adopt it. One example I struggled with is gpg. I wanted to use it, but found the user docs confusing. So I thought of helping improve them so it would be more widely adopted. So I dug into how it works, but I discovered it was so inherently hard to use that few would ever adopt it, no matter how good the user docs were, and so I just gave up. One thing that is going to determine whether web decentralization succeeds and rescues us from Facebook et al is whether or not the developers can come up with user friendly software. One thing that means is that it is quite possible that a piece of decentralization software that is far from optimal will take over a segment simply because it is easier to use that others that are much superior.