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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 wou
by 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 agoWhat 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.
- CookieMon 8y agoThere are multiple account migration issues, the hardest is what happens when the hobbyist/volunteer instance you use inevitably goes down for good - you lose your address, your social network connections, your posts/history etc. That's unlikely to happen if you use the main Mastodon instance, but an aim of Mastodon is that you don't. In that situation you can't log into the old site to edit your profile to have it redirect people to a new account, and even if you could the redirect will still go down with the server. Mastodon can't fix these problems alone because the whole fediverse protocol needs to be rethought. Hubzilla saw this as the fundamental issue facing federated social media and so it was designed around a solution they call "nomadic identity" - you can shift your Hubzilla identity across many servers, keeping all your posts and subscriptions, and all the Hubzilla stuff updates and points to the new place, but subscriptions to you from Mastodon/fediverse will still break. Perhaps Mastodon can lead the work on a newer protocol for the fediverse.
- imglorp 8y agoThis sounds kind of like OPML export, and taking your RSS feeds with you when you go to another feed reader. Is that a meaningful analogy?
- someonenice 8y agoThis should work like Domain <-> web Hosting type. So you can register your id at one place (similar to domain with any tld registrar) and change to another instance (web hosting). So you do not lose the need to change the id when changing instance.
- vageli 8y agoThis would lead to IDs being globally unique, which means if you have a common name you are unlikely to get a handle that you want. Secure scuttlebutt has a method to allow multiple people to share the same "public id" (multiple people may be named "Jill" for example) but preserves uniqueness by addressing individuals by a public key associated with their public name. I'm not sure how the mapping from public key to handle is done though.
- WorldMaker 8y agoYou can do that today in the same way that email allows it: register your own domain and you can find a Mastodon host to service it and even CNAME it to a different Mastodon host if your needs change or a hosting provider becomes broken. It is part of why it was important to me to use an instance on a domain I control.
- colordrops 8y agoA (distributed?) search that crawls the federated network and indexes toots could be the killer feature that grows adoption. The search API could be seemlessly integrated into any mastodon client. Or does such a thing already exist? My short experience with it made it seem hard to find anything.
- robjan 8y agoThe developers have avoided implementing full text searching to reduce the risk of harassment
- colordrops 8y agoThere's no reason a third party couldn't do it.