26 ms·

Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

• est 8y ago
  I hope mastodon could allow @domain.tld "naked" user names. Much simpler to remember, also connects directly to personal website.
• wild_preference 8y ago
  I was expecting a post trying to convince me to care about federated servers for my social media, but it made some decent points. I really like the “Boost” approach to the retweet-with-snark problem. And I like to see Mastodon addressing Twitter’s outrage-as-a-business problem.
• how_to_bake 8y ago
  I recently joined Twitter and I have to agree that Retweets are the most cancerous part. Accounts with many followers act like schoolyard bullies with their gang of yes men. I still see federation as being too niche, but it doesn't have to be that way! I think in an ideal situation, federated servers would rely more on physical location than on deviant niche hobbies or addictions. The Smith family should have a server (or your neighborhood should) rather than cyberpunk.furry.foxes. Because the reality is that people are more than just one thing and the concept breaks down when you start discussing action movies or cryptography on your @steve@luddite.peace account. I think secure-scuttlebutt goes for more of the real world location-based server concept a bit. But I think most people prefer the peace of mind of some kind of administration being possible if needed.
  • thsealienbstrds 8y ago
    ISPs could even provide the federated services like they provide e-mail. Another way it might work is companies that sell people federated service servers as products that they can deploy for example in their home or let the company host it. In any case maintenance must be included. I don't see how federated will take off without commercial support. The Smiths might be technically capable but I doubt the Jones's who are not are willing to let the Smiths control their service. That kind of defeats the point.
    • esrauch 8y ago
      Do people use ISPs email anymore?
      • ColinWright 8y ago
        Yes.
      • twblalock 8y ago
        Yes, and it keeps people locked in to their ISP because switching would involve updating the email address in all of their online accounts and notifying all of their contacts about the change. I finally convinced my parents to bite the bullet and switch to Gmail so they can switch to a better ISP. It's a real problem.
    • how_to_bake 8y ago
      There is at least one[0] company providing mastodon hosting as a service. There really should be more though. The more Mastodon becomes compliant with Activity Pub, the more you could potentially replace all social media with it. Then both email and social media would be properly federated. I agree that the Jones' wouldn't want to be hosted by the Smith's instance. But I can forsee something like a local co-op managing an instance for all neighbors. But personally, I'd rather just pay a company that I know is subject to various laws and consumer agreements, etc. [0]: https://masto.host/ https://masto.host/
• digitaLandscape 8y ago
  > As a result, Mastodon users basically never boost toots to say how wrong they are, and there isn't an issue with armies of followers descending on the original author. Because Mastodon is full of like-thinking people, and the ones they'd strongly disagree with aren't joining. This isn't a bad thing (it's the "local" point this post makes), but it's important to emphasize this as the primary factor responsible for people being nicer, above any design decisions the author is complimenting. Keeping people civil is easy when there are ten thousand times fewer and they all voted socialist. I checked the mastodon.social local timeline and fewer than 1% of posts were tagged, so I don't see how that's going to make a big difference to my experience. > Twitter is a public company, funded by investor money; they thus owe a legal duty to make as much money for their investors as they can. False. This isn't a legal obligation, it's what the investors want because they're toxic scum.
  • icebraining 8y ago
    Keeping people civil is easy when there are ten thousand times fewer and they all voted socialist. Clearly you haven't spent much time with actual socialists!
  • ohtwenty 8y ago
    >Because Mastodon is full of like-thinking people, and the ones they'd strongly disagree with aren't joining. or they're on other instances. there's some far-right political instances, for example (that the leftist crowd of the larger majority of early adopters don't really talk to, although they could in most cases)
• DanAndersen 8y ago
  >Finally, with instances, you keep control: if you find that you don't like the moderation policies or culture of a particular instance, you're always free to pick up and move to a different one. Last I heard, Mastodon didn't support migration between instances while still keeping followers, etc. Instead, you have to essentially start from scratch with a new account on a new instance. This is a serious problem because it strongly discourages exodus; Twitter itself shows that people will put up with a lot of nonsense before leaving to alternatives because they've cultivated a brand and a following and don't want to lose it all. Moderators of instances are not a static thing; like any political system it shifts with whoever is in charge over time. An instance that seemed friendly to a user initially can over time become more oppressive to them, but the user has invested so much into that instance that they would have to leave behind that they'd put up with it when they shouldn't have to.
  • ColinWright 8y ago
    You can export the lists of people you follow, block, or mute, and then import them into your new account at your new instance. With regards people that follow you, you can mark an account as migrated and leave a forwarding address. People are starting to do this, and it seems to be working reasonably well, although it's obviously not ideal. This is a difficult problem to solve and people are actively working on it. If you have a suggestion as to how one could create and sustain a presence on one instance, gain a body of followers, and then migrate all that to another instance, then I'm sure people would be interested to hear your thoughts and suggestions.
    • eat_veggies 8y ago
      Would it be interesting to have sort of a signed "302 moved permanently" message that signals to other clients to automatically follow the other account?
      • amelius 8y ago
        But what if the original instance shuts down, or becomes malicious and doesn't cooperate?
• pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Who names these things - cumbersome, heavy, ancient ... doesn't look like they did even a cursory test. I'm as anti-marketing as the next person but that doesn't mean I'd call my child Shithead.
  • radus 8y ago
    I'm a little turned off by posts being called toots but I suppose I could get over it.
    • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      The system should be called Trumpet/Bugle, fits well with toots. "Toot" is a childish term for a fart; but most words have some downside and it's quite a fun word, much better than a wanking-professor (masto-don).
    • AsyncAwait 8y ago
      Not everyone lives in the U.S. and in Europe toot is not offensive, it just means the sound an elephant makes with its trunk.
      • ummonk 8y ago
        So it's a social network for Europeans?
  • davidw 8y ago
    Sounds more like a good name for a metal band... Oh wait
• k__ 8y ago
  Worse UI and fewer users, can't recommend.
  • ohtwenty 8y ago
    >fewer users that's just a bad point to make? I mean of course a newer platform will have fewer. UI is a good point (although I prefer it this way). But there's Pinafore[0] or Halcyon[1], or Brutaldon[2] that allow you to change the UI layout if you log in with those. 0: https://pinafore.social/ https://pinafore.social/ 1: https://halcyon.toromino.de/login https://halcyon.toromino.de/login 2: https://brutaldon.online/about https://brutaldon.online/about
  • quadrangle 8y ago
    if "fewer users" means can't recommend, then nothing newer can ever be recommended…
• peatmoss 8y ago
  The posting from a few days ago that reimagined email as a social network really got me thinking how much our approach to social networks has been led by the webbification of everything. The spirit-of-the-nineties approach to recreating mastodon would probably look like one or two dominant native apps and something like a newsgroup server. Or maybe something like a really great RSS reader. Questions about federation vs a walled controlled servive would be silly, because technologists are fighting it out to sell the best app. And of course a walled-in service is stupid because that would be as obsolete as Compuserve. We’re all fighting it out on the web now. Well, except possibly on iOS and (grudgingly) Android. In some ways I think the web was how we geeks made survival on Linux possible, as we never had the mass to demand desktop apps. Part of what I liked about the reimagining of email as social media was that it allowed for the return of the app. In the case of Mastodon, the protocols are presumably open and don’t preclude interaction via apps. So here the question of web or heavy client is not technical but one of point of view or preference. This is all to say I kind of miss when we were chasing “the killer app” as opposed to competing for service share. When the focus was on the user’s desktop, any associated service was more or less seen as boring plumbing—-certainly nothing to have brand affinity for. EDIT: Case in point, there’s another comment explaining that Mastodon doesn’t let you move instances and retain followers. In the 90s app-centric view of the world this is a non-issue, because following other people is the client’s job, for better or worse. Your computer crashes, you lose who you were following. If you want to publish who you’re following that’s you or your client’s job. Giving up your social network graph to the service provider isn’t an issue in the heavy client model, because the 90s service isn’t going to pay to store that information on your behalf anyway. It wasn’t because the service viewed that personal information as “oily rags”; it was because they simply didn’t want to expend the resources to store it.
  • brightball 8y ago
    I’ve been saying the same for a long time. Email gives you both a distributed delivery mechanism to unlimited users and a data storage platform. If you want things available in more than one place, leave it on the server and sync with IMAP. All you really need to turn it into a social network is an app that can read it, parse it and arrange it in a more convenient manner than clicking on individual messages.
• kylnew 8y ago
  I can’t quite get over this critiquing of Twitter’s Retweet system. I totally understand how it’s misused but all the benefits are overlooked too. I love retweeting with commentary for positive reasons. I find they are a great way to validate and engage people who reply. I never think of using them as a tool for shaming, so I would be sad to see the feature go.
  • jadbox 8y ago
    There's two issues I'm concerned about. As you mentioned, one is yanking retweets because 'it can be used for ill'. I doubt that would make any real difference in toxic behavior, but would hurt positive commentary more. The other concern is the "block posts by tag" (e.g. ban all #politics). This could cause an even greater problem where it allow stronger social bubbles to form because one side could outright block the other (people blocking #dems or #gop). It could become like a Black Mirror episode where people literally do not know what's happening outside of their group/tribe because they've blocked entire groups/topics/nodes. We have this problem today to an extent, but I worry about new platforms that provide more tools for group isolation.
    • vageli 8y ago
      > There's two issues I'm concerned about. As you mentioned, one is yanking retweets because 'it can be used for ill'. I doubt that would make any real difference in toxic behavior, but would hurt positive commentary more. > The other concern is the "block posts by tag" (e.g. ban all #politics). This could cause an even greater problem where it allow stronger social bubbles to form because one side could outright block the other (people blocking #dems or #gop). It could become like a Black Mirror episode where people literally do not know what's happening outside of their group/tribe because they've blocked entire groups/topics/nodes. We have this problem today to an extent, but I worry about new platforms that provide more tools for group isolation. In that case, couldn't the opposing side just use the other tag? Who could enforce proper tagging in this case?
      • jadbox 8y ago
        That's a fair point, but I'm thinking of this more in principle. Is it a good direction for platforms to reduce toxic behavior by imposing more communication limitations and providing topic/group isolation systems?
• Avamander 8y ago
  Let me know when Mastodon can take RSS, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and etc. feeds as inputs. The platform needs to have a way to import content to bootstrap an instance without having a lot of friends.
  • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Isn't that a place for 3rd party services, like IFTTT? Doesn't have to be first party.
    • Avamander 8y ago
      I don't know, my current experience is that the system lacks content I want to see and there's no easy way to import that. It's just my honest opinion about the system in the current state.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• jamesrcole 8y ago
  I think the term "toots" is spectacularly bad, and could majorly hinder broader uptake of their service. Word of mouth (or 'word of text') is a major way services like this spread. Imagine discussions of Twitter in the media but where the words "tweet" and "tweeted" are replaced with "toot" and "tooted".
  • wool_gather 8y ago
    Can you elaborate on the problem you see with the word "toot"?
    • johnnyb128 8y ago
      Beans beans, the musical fruit. The more you eat, the more you toot.
    • jamesrcole 8y ago
      Aside from "toot my own horn" the only other uses of the term I can think of are: Kids impersonating the noise a train horn makes. A word for farting. The only context in which you'd normally say that someone "tooted" is the latter.
    • 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
      It's an onomatopoeic term for briefly sounding a horn, but I almost never hear it used for that. In my experience, there are two primary uses of the word in American English: 1) In the expression toot [one's] own horn, which means to praise oneself. Often in the form "I don't want to toot my own horn, but [...]". 2) A cutesy word for a fart, used primarily when talking to young children. Notably, an elephant using its trunk to make noise is said to be trumpeting, not tooting.
      • vesak 8y ago
        Isn't 1) exactly what tooting and tweeting both are really about, though?
        • 8y ago
• danShumway 8y ago
  From the article: > Twitter Is in the Outrage Business; Mastodon Isn't a Business I need to spend way more time thinking about this, but I feel like in some scenarios there is a competitive advantage to not needing to care about stuff like stock prices or insane prices. If you can get a business or a project to the point where it's stable and competitive and it's funding you enough to keep going, then there's a whole bunch of stuff that you don't need to care about. That's obviously not universal, but there are clearly downsides to large businesses. There are things that large business will always be worse at then a small business or personal project. Again, I haven't thought enough about this to make a cognizant point, but... it feels like something I want to think about more. Being a nonprofit or a small business or a completely non-commercial entity should in some instances give you a competitive advantage over other businesses. Facebook can copy every single feature and then some of Snapchat. But Twitter can't really copy everything that Mastadon is doing, because some of the stuff that Mastadon is doing is completely contradictory to Twitter's entire business model. I feel like there's something to be said about (if you're in Mastadon's position) figuring out some way to tie at least a few public-facing features into that nonprofit model that you know, 100%, your largest competitors will literally never be able to do.
  • wool_gather 8y ago
    It's worth noting that one of the supporting points here > And Twitter doesn't have any choice in the matter, either. [...] Twitter is a public company, funded by investor money; they thus owe a legal duty to make as much money for their investors as they can is not, strictly speaking, true. This has been discussed a few times on HN recently. (And this book The Shareholder Value Myth is well worth reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17529520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17529520 .) There's no categorical legal requirement for a company to make share value the absolute, #1 priority. On the other hand, it may be that enough people believe this duty exists that it has a sort of ipso facto existence.
    • quadrangle 8y ago
      If investors feel that profit is not being maximized, they can sue or take other actions to punish those they see as not focusing on profit etc. I mean, the point is that "you aren't prioritizing profit" has legal standing for investors. And "we don't prioritize profit in cases that involve harming the world" does not is not a legal stance for the company unless the harm itself is illegal or the entity is a Benefit Corp or similar.
• raverbashing 8y ago
  > Well, Mastodon doesn't have retweets; it has "boosts". Boosts are essentially like retweets, with one key difference: there's no option to add your own commentary. I disagree. Retweets can be an issue but they have their place as well What all "timeline" social networks are missing is the underboost, the downvote button, call it as you want. People will boost good stuff but they will boost crap. Networks need the contrary signal, they need the "WTF are you thinking posting this crap here" signal. Not censorship, but a "tone down" indication. Twitter has been cutting down and restricting/banning accounts which I'm not fundamentally against it but they are focusing on one side of the political spectrum. With that, I can't agree.
  • talkingme 8y ago
    The downvote is to ignore it. People will still boost crap but even with a small amount of users anything will quickly get buried in the timeline.
    • raverbashing 8y ago
      Ignoring is ok, but not as good.
  • egypturnash 8y ago
    Does the admin of your server saying "hey people on other Mastodon servers sure are reporting you a lot, stop doing that shit" count as a "wtf are you thinking posting this crap here" signal? Because Mastodon has a "report" button, and because of the way Mastodon scales, reports actually get acted on by humans who have a vested interest in keeping their users civil, lest their server get a reputation as That One Server Full Of Jerks and find other admins telling their servers to ignore it entirely.
• tablethnuser 8y ago
  I am interested in joining a Mastodon instance but I don't know how to find the right one to join. Every pro-Mastodon article mentions I can pack my bags and leave for a new instance but if you do research you find that that feature isn't built yet and the community can't agree on how it should work. So picking the right server is currently a very heavy decision. I've tried some of these instance finder tools but they reveal that Mastodon instances are like 25% furry communities and other fringe fetishes and I really just want a place to talk tech, philosophy, and video games.
  • ColinWright 8y ago
    There are many, many out there. I suggest you join one with a deliberately "throw away" account and start following a few people. Then see where they are, and after a time export the list of people you follow, and move. I'm on https://mathstodon.xyz/ https://mathstodon.xyz/ and https://fosstodon.org/ https://fosstodon.org/ if you want to start on either of those. Then again, maybe you will neither need nor want to move. A quick web search for "mastodon instance tech video games" has produces a few pages listing some instances with comments about what sorts of things they cover: https://thefishcrow.com/2017/04/08/mastodon-instance-content-list/ https://thefishcrow.com/2017/04/08/mastodon-instance-content... https://instances.noct.zone/ https://instances.noct.zone/ Visit one of those pages and Ctrl-F for the things you're interested in. Again, a couple of minutes searching has suggested https://elekk.xyz/about https://elekk.xyz/about and https://mastodon.gamedev.place/about https://mastodon.gamedev.place/about
    • ryanjamurphy 8y ago
      This is a useful set of instructions (thanks!) but it points to the biggest challenge Mastodon/ActivityPub will have in gaining a network. It's taken decades for people to "get" email, en masse (and many still don't understand CC/Bcc). Twitter and FB have been mainstreamed faster in part because the onboarding/acquisition UX is so easy. It's necessary to think this through (if widespread adoption _is_ the goal).
    • fritz8261 8y ago
      Anybody knows of a free speech Mastodon instance? Something that’s not banned from the rest of the network, of course. :/
• PretzelFisch 8y ago
  I guess I don't understand why so much effort is put into these federated social networks rather then starting with a blog and rss perspective to build the same kind of network.
  • tablethnuser 8y ago
    I'd like things to go in this direction as well, but with slightly different tech than rss. What you really want is the notification layer of social networks as a standard, so that ppl who follow you are merely alerted that they should visit your site. RSS can be used for this of course, but it's really meant for content syndication rather than as a notification transport layer
    • teleclimber 8y ago
      You're describing ActivityPub, which is a W3C recommendation[0], which happens to be what Mastodon uses. At least one blogging platform is set up to interact with the fediverse[1]. Hopefully many more one day. [0] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ [1] https://discuss.write.as/t/activitypub-support/64 https://discuss.write.as/t/activitypub-support/64
      • ohtwenty 8y ago
        Plume is a WIP, and has been discussed here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17411173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17411173
  • mikebelanger 8y ago
    RSS was/is a good idea, but it wasn't implemented by browsers that well. I actually think the rise of social networks like Facebook/Twitter were partly due to RSS's usability issues, given that they provided users with functionality similar to RSS's but with much less technical terms. "Following" someone is an easier to understand idea than "click to use my RSS link into your feed reader".
• armandososa 8y ago
  We should remember that the retweet feature was originally created by the community, like, years before twitter implemented it officially. You'll compose a tweet with the format "RT @username <quote post>" and broadcast it to all your followers. There's no reason mastodon users can't do the same. Right?
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • denzil_correa 8y ago
    Slightly off-topic but important mention about the RT feature. RT was definitely not the first "feature" and there were many other ones which existed. There were some factors that led to the adoption of the RT convention [0]. > The inventors of these variations were not the typical user. They posted more tweets, had higher network degree, and were more likely to describe themselves with words like “geek” and “founder”; in other words, they were the core members of the Twitter community. The early adopters were also more active and innovative. The variations spread through densely connected networks, bouncing from person to person in a way that meant most adopters of the varia- tion were fewer than two hops from someone who had never been exposed to the variation on Twitter when they first used it. This could be a general finding, that social conventions are more likely to arise in the active and densely connected parts of a community. [0] https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM12/paper/view/4661/4983 https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM12/paper/view/...
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• azangru 8y ago
  Could anyone share their thoughts about the attractiveness of a platform that says how many characters long your posts can be? What I see on Twitter is that people are constantly fighting this limitation by writing several tweets in a row (sometimes marking them as parts of a whole message). I would think that’s an annoyance. So what’s the attraction?
  • sincerely 8y ago
    I would say the majority of tweets on my timeline (>95%) are single-post messages. Knowing that everything on twitter will be relatively short means I can check it when i only have 2-3 minutes to kill for example.
  • ohtwenty 8y ago
    It's not mentioned but it depends on the instance how long the character limit is (as in, it's configurable). default is 500, but there's some with a limit of 5000, or 666 (some witchy instance iirc)
    • makomk 8y ago
      Probably witches.town, which was intentionally destroyed by its owner and no longer exists.
• dorfsmay 8y ago
  Isn't the concept of local servers making it easier to create a bunch of echo chambers? I haven't even tried Mastodon because my understanding of identify is tied to a server rather than an email or a gpg key... so outside of your control (unless you run your own server). My understanding is that when the server you are currently using disappear, your current identity, history, etc... disappear too.
  • Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    You can export most of your data and move to another instance. It's not the most elegant process, but it seems to work out fine in the long run. You just tell people where you went.
    • dorfsmay 8y ago
      It's well beyond not being elegant: Exports are fine for when you want to move, but typically too late when the server you use and its data disappear. Do Mastodon evangelists advertise the fact that you need to do frequent export? I follow a lot of people on twitter because I came across one of their tweet, check their history, and found them interesting. They have no idea who I am, they don't post often enough that I could remember their names. If their data and metadata were to disappear, how could they know how to contact me to let me know they have changed server, and therefore identity? Even if I remembered them and did noticed they had disappeared (two huge assumptions), how could I find them on their new server?
      • Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
        In practice I think most people just don't care if ancient posts are lost. They aren't exactly the cultural cornerstones of the internet. This isn't a problem often enough that your history is going to be empty most of the time. I think I only know of one occasion where an instance with ~20 users shut down with little warning.
    • s73v3r_ 8y ago
      I completely and utterly disagree with your “work out fine” sentiment. It is embarrassing that something set up like Mastodon was from the beginning did not plan for people to move between instances from the start.
• simula67 8y ago
  > One of the most pernicious parts of Twitter is how people will retweet something dumb, offensive, or awful that an opponent said, along with a message mocking that opponent. Over time, this leads people on all sides of an issue to see only a distorted caricature of their opponents, comprised of an amalgam of all the worst features of that group. > How does Mastodon solve this issue? Well, Mastodon doesn't have retweets; it has "boosts". Boosts are essentially like retweets, with one key difference: there's no option to add your own commentary. I think "Right problem, wrong solution". The reason people mock bad ideas on Twitter is probably because Twitter has a character limit. Refuting bad ideas often takes longer than 240 characters. In fact, putting forward bad ideas takes less time and energy than refuting them. This is why, usually, burden of proof is placed on the one making a claim. Otherwise people who value truth will be exhausted from the approximately 10 times the effort it takes to refute false claims and truth will never win out. Showing bad ideas to be bad is very important in civil discourse, not being able to point out bad ideas by "retweeting" them with commentary will likely make this social network an echo chamber devoid of intellectual curiosity
  • guelo 8y ago
    Twitter didn't used to have retweets with comments but people did basically the same thing using manual retweets or . replies. I imagine if Mastodon develops a big partisan political community the same thing will happen there.
    • maxerickson 8y ago
      Yeah, that particular criticism dances right up to "The problem with Twitter is that people are using it".
  • dangom 8y ago
    > Refuting bad ideas often takes longer than 240 characters. Not necessarily true. > Showing bad ideas to be bad is very important in civil discourse, not being able to point out bad ideas by "retweeting" them with commentary will likely make this social network an echo chamber devoid of intellectual curiosity Theoretically yes, but the problem with Twitter is not "properly" refuting ideas, because there is no such thing as absolute truth when it comes to human interactions. People will tend to believe whatever they want, independent of facts. Furthermore, people may interpret the same fact in completely diverging ways, depending on their prior conceptions. Not allowing awfulness to spread could be more efficient than helplessly trying to refute it.
• jeffbax 8y ago
  I think that Mastodon has a lot going for it, and indeed It think an open source federated system is a great idea I hope to see succeed, but I don't think that RT is the main problem with Twitter. Maybe I'm lucky that few pay attention to me, but I haven't had a lot of trouble making Twitter incredibly, if not the most, useful social network. Its easy to find your interests and fairly simple to ignore/block things you don't care about. I also don't think that "there are people I disagree with also using this space" === "this place is toxic" which seems to be the lazy default these days. I prefer Twitter, being a US company, tread as close as it can to the 1st Amendment. I think that people need to engage with views they are unfamiliar with or misunderstand -- though there's certainly the echo chamber problem, to never face ideas that challenge you is to never grow yourself and understand what you believe as most often reflected in classrooms that now boycott professors or require everything come with some trigger warning. Twitter has a ways to go to provide tools for dealing with trolls but it's making its way there in a way that seems more methodical and less reactionary than something like FB, and while I find characters like Alex Jones offensive, I find the rush for people (particularly some journalists and 20's something safe-space-mobists that are every bit as vocal as the mobs on the right) to default to the ban hammer more offensive. These companies have immense power over speech in a way that should frighten us, not encourage us to have the centralization as an excuse to circumvent the 1st amendment. True, no platform is obligated to host someone, but given they are effectively monopolies (extremely responsive to legislator outrage that would otherwise have to fight the 1st) this should give everyone more pause than it appears to. Jones fell like a domino once Apple removed him first. When Spotify removed the reprehensible music it did, the other companies fell in line and the immediate reaction was for activist groups to demand more and more be removed to varying degrees of things being actually offensive (do we now remove old NWA tracks?) This is all an incredibly slippery slope, and to me the sign of the times is that the trolls have made it so that any difference of opinion is now something everyone flees from and that the default is to assume the worst of someone who might have a different point of view than you do.
  • AJ007 8y ago
    If you follow people on Twitter based on the quality of their activity then Twitter is incredibly valuable. My problem has never been about people tweeting things which were offensive, it was about them tweeting things about their dogs and cats all day long. If you follow people because you like them, because you are friends with them, or because you hope they will follow you back, Twitter is a fucking disaster. There are people I really wanted to follow, but if I see 30 tweets/likes/retweets in my feed for every 1 incredibly useful tweet, they have to be unfollowed. Unsurprisingly, this approach pretty much cleans out all of the off-topic annoying non-sense, irregardless of your political views or lack there of. The flip side to all of this is, if a lot of people follow you, the very open nature of Twitter can certainly be a problem. If you are a celebrity or a well known person and are not able to ignore what I imagine is basically a hate stream, then for your own well-being you probably should not use Twitter. There are plenty of people who are addicted to the algorithm drip feed of content now. Snapchat and Instagram/Facebook have turned this in to a compulsive behavior and the ad revenue has followed. My guess is that as a "solution" to whatever is going on now, Twitter is going to move toward this model. When they do, I sincerely hope that Mastodon or some other open ActivityPub platform is good enough that all of the really smart people who post fantastic content to Twitter, like John Carmack and Tim Sweeney, will follow.
• undoware 8y ago
  What I find amusing about all these "solutions" to "online outrage" is that they are invariably made by comfortable centrists, with a smattering of libertarians. I can say this with some authority as both of these terms would have aptly described myself, before I lost my career, my home, and everything else in gender transition, and ended up working three minimum wage jobs instead of coding for 2 years. Let me tell you where the outrage is coming from. It's not coming from UX decisions. It's coming from mind boggling suffering. It's coming from exhausted and starving bodies who are disrespected and discarded, repeatedly. It's coming from a lack of opportunity and a lack of services necessary for survival. It's coming from a parlous minimum wage and no safety net. It's coming from addiction and the homelessness and precariousness that so often drive it. Those prone to conservatism interpret their pain as an attack on them from people who look different. Those prone, like myself, to systems level thinking about social structures view it (correctly) as an induced state, effectively selected for because the alternative was selected against. The pain and outrage leaks onto social media, but it is not from there. It is all around you, and it is nearly big enough to blot out the sun. Get ready.
  • dredmorbius 8y ago
    Mastodon has a very large and thriving gender-nonbinary / non-normative population. There's a very large East Asian population (mostly Japan, though with Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and China represented). I've seen Indian, Indonesian, Arabic, and other voices. European representation is strongly weighted to France, though with numerous countries and languages represented. North-American usage tends to tech-early adopters (male, white,some others), and tends to be light on traditional minorities that I've observed (note; personal observation on social networks tends to be exceedingly self-selective and nonrepresentitive). Libertarian viewpoints don't seem particularly prevalent, or well-received.
    • undoware 8y ago
      I'm sure it does. I was not replying to Mastodon-the-platform, I was commenting on the cognitive bias present in the OP. Mastodon may well be the cat's pajamas, but not for the reasons given; namely, that centralized social media somehow synthesize outrage ex nihilo. Which got downvoted, because pointing out that class and privilege are lens aberrations in the minds of technologists does not sit well with technologists.
• cwyers 8y ago
  The lead point is about misuse of quote retweets. I don't disagree that quote retweets can be misused in the way that the article says, but I don't think that's the primary use. And Twitter didn't invent the quote retweet, users did and Twitter adopted it as an official feature. If people really want to use it, they will without official support. The points about moderation I found much more interesting, and I wish the author had led with that.
• subway 8y ago
  Too bad the Mastodon devs hate SRV records so much. The reliance on WebFinger for federation is the biggest blocker for me deploying an instance on my personal domain.
  • _eht 8y ago
    Can you expand more on why WebFinger is the blocker for you? I've been considering running a server lately on my personal domain and didn't even consider SRV vs WebFinger.
• vesak 8y ago
  It sure is! https://mastodon.social/@vegai https://mastodon.social/@vegai if people want to gather followers together.
• kethinov 8y ago
  What Mastodon badly needs is a desktop client as good as Twitterrific that can crosspost to both Twitter and a Mastodon instance to lower the barrier to slowly switching. Something like Pidgin/Adium is for IM. That way people can default to Mastodon where possible and fallback to Twitter where necessary.
  • StavrosK 8y ago
    I use this service: https://crossposter.masto.donte.com.br/ https://crossposter.masto.donte.com.br/ It posts your posts from one to the other, so I can use them interchangeably. I definitely prefer Mastodon, although I was never a big Twitter user.
    • DavideNL 8y ago
      > "Due to an issue with Twitter, posting from Mastodon to Twitter is temporarily disabled. For more information check out this thread. https://masto.donte.com.br/@crossposter/100479477531222745 https://masto.donte.com.br/@crossposter/100479477531222745 "
  • stesch 8y ago
    One of the Tweetbot programmers is using Mastodon and invited his followers. Let's see where this is going …
• giffarage 8y ago
  If X is better than Y, is stating so necessary?
• sonnyblarney 8y ago
  If Mastodon wants to be successful, it might be beneficial to try to get some luminaries on board, i.e. the 1% that the rest follow. Unfortunately, they are in the conflict business as well. Another option would be to consider dropping out of the concept altogether.
• xigma 8y ago
  What I expect of a "better" Twitter: - A timeline that shows what people I follow say, in chronological order - no censorship, unless requested and enforced by authorities in my jurisdiction - no notifications, no @messages (unless I follow them) I don't even understand how Mastodon really works or how it's comparable to Twitter. Do people post onto channels? Do I have to join channels to read what they post on those channels? To me Mastodon just looks like "Twitter with more moderation" and I don't think the average Twitter user cares about that, because they don't partake in mudfights with other users, nor do they care about other users getting into mudfights with one another. Social Media isn't actually that terrible to use, it just looks terrible when some journalist selects some particularly "outstanding" posts and proclaims the end of civility because of this technology.
  • fredsir 8y ago
    > I don’t even understand ... It works exactly the same as Twitter, except that not everyone is using Twitter.com. Some are using mastodon.social, some are using some other instance and so on, but you can still follow people on other instances, like you can email people using gmail from a hotmail adress and so on. A username is @username@instance instead of just @username as with Twitter.
    • xigma 8y ago
      E-Mail doesn't have moderation (besides Spamfilters). It's unclear to me how this all ties in, if I follow someone and they get banned from their instance, how does it affect me? How does it affect their content? Not saying there aren't solutions for this, I'm saying it's unclear from just looking at the service and I don't care about moderation in the first place. So it's unclear to me how this is "better".
      • ohtwenty 8y ago
        so join an instance with lax moderation. or set up your own. if you're thinking "that's expensive", look into Pleroma, it can run on a $1 a month server or a raspi. Set something up purely for you, then find some people on other instances you'd like to follow
• twblalock 8y ago
  I went to the Mastodon website and clicked "Get Started" and was brought to a menu where I needed to choose a server. Many of them focus on niche interests, and it was not very clear what to do if I wanted to be a member of more than one of them. I'm a techie; I could figure it out. But it is too much to ask of the general public to wade through many niche servers they won't understand, e.g. the one for BSD fans and multiple furry-themed servers. And there seem to be several overlapping Chinese-language servers -- which one should a Chinese newbie choose? And what prevents each server from devolving into a petty little fiefdom where the moderators abuse their power? Compare that to getting started on Twitter: pick a username and password, boom, done! The Mastodon project is clearly designed for a technical audience, whether or not that is what they actually intended. Outside of the techie bubble the usability is just not there.
  • ohtwenty 8y ago
    You make a good point (and one that's being worked on being overcome, better onboarding and whatever). But consider twitter: >Compare that to getting started on Twitter: pick a username and password, boom, done! And then what? follow some celebs? Figure out if you know anyone? On mastodon you can use the local feed to find people interested in the same subjects (or same culture), and then you start talking. I've seen many people be surprised that within an hour or two on mastodon they've had more and better interactions than years on twitter. The experience once you're there tends to be quite good (from my completely unbiased and scientific viewpoint, of course)
    • randomsearch 8y ago
      Wait, so once you've overcome the off-putting insanely technical (who in their right mind thinks about "servers" outside of tech circles?) onboarding, mastodon is a lot better? It does not make an iota of difference.
      • ohtwenty 8y ago
        >who in their right mind thinks about "servers" outside of tech circles? the way a lot of subreddits are used, for example, is intuitive enough to people who get used to the concept. 'servers' or 'instances' as a word might be too technical, but the concept of different groups you join, while still being able to talk to others? Of course my experience is 99% people who have persisted and joined, but they seem to enjoy it. Mostly because you join, you think "this is confusing but I've arrived" and there's a few hundred people on the same instance who are interested in similar things, who know people from other instances who have similar interests, etc. I think it might help build a network quicker (or at least, that's what I've heard from a lot of newer people that have joined since I've been there!)
• bilbo0s 8y ago
  OK, here's the problem in a nutshell: no one among regular people cares. You guys are splitting hairs right now when talking about the difference between tweeting and boosting or public companies vs open source or what have you. None of that attracts users. If you have no users, then for regular people, your product is useless. Even the article is not really making a pitch for mastodon that indicates any features at all that would convince any of Kim K or Kylie Jenner's followers to go take a look at it. I'll even go a step further and say that Mastodon is probably more for fringe groups than for the unwashed masses those fringe groups are trying to influence. Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat. Is there some triple-I indie game that Mastodon will allow me to play in my browser? (Or triple-A non indie? I'm not picky. Just don't show me a point and click please.) Post the link for that game, you'll get a lot more people trying Mastodon. Alternatively, is there some new and novel porn that Mastodon will allow me to access? Or is there a new generation of FIFA stars on Mastodon? Or new generation of NBA stars? I mean, even a new generation of "It" Girls chasing NBA stars would be better for attracting users than "thoughtful and local uncommented retweets". Which is not only what you're asking me to get excited about right now, but is likely not even true. Boosts will be no more thoughtful than retweets, likely a good deal less thoughtful since Mastodon seems to be on a road that relegates it to fringe groups. Right now, it's like buying a large tract of land in Kansas and saying that you've started a new municipality. No we don't have beaches, or theaters, or parks, or much of anything else, but everyone here is more thoughtful. so we're much better than Miami, San Diego, or Minneapolis. I mean, it might work? But I think Las Vegas hit on a much better method of populating empty area by just saying, "HEY! We've got gambling and naked women!"
  • TillE 8y ago
    You say problem, I say advantage. Not everything has to be a massive public square! It's okay to be niche. Until the mid/late 2000s, the internet was far more decentralized and often much the better for it. In other words: https://mastodon.social/@helldude/100572161034726032 https://mastodon.social/@helldude/100572161034726032
    • 8y ago
• crazy_monkey 8y ago
  Care to pass the pipe? That's some pretty strong stuff we're smoking here...
• phreack 8y ago
  So instances are like subreddits? Having never used Mastodon I'm not entirely sure I understood what an instance is, but if they are just like subreddits then I'd say that's a way better elevator pitch than trying to define them, and it also helps to show that people do like to congregate on a large platform around topics.
  • rm445 8y ago
    It's a decentralized, federated, network. So choosing an instance I guess is more like choosing an IRC server. Or picking between Gmail and Hotmail, or any other e-mail service. Livejournal or Blogger. It's no coincidence the examples I can think of seem slightly old hat, because these things have been out of fashion for a while. They need to involve the blockchain somehow if they want it to seem modern.
  • ohtwenty 8y ago
    Kiiiind of, but there's quite some general instances. Most of them are more like a "here's some people interested in the same subjects as you". So yes, on my (politically motivated, I guess) instance I find quite some people with the same political slant (and some commentary on that), but many cats, daily stories, etc. Just like twitter or other platforms. It's worth a try seeing what joinmastodon.org tells you, and have a look.
    • phreack 8y ago
      Now I see. I looked around and it seemed hard to choose 'the right instance' to begin, knowing nothing about the platform. Most had esoteric names, like clubs. It might be a nice idea for Mastodon advocates to create general topic instances, that may feel more approachable for newcomers. In any case, it does seem like a great platform and might blow up in time with few changes in the onboarding process
      • ohtwenty 8y ago
        >It might be a nice idea for Mastodon advocates to create general topic instances, that may feel more approachable for newcomers. Yeah, the instance names are often quite silly, but there's silly people on there. I mean 3000 variations of "mastodonUKsocial.com" or something wouldn't really tell you all that much more. If you don't want to go to mastodon.social, the biggest english language instance, octodon.social is a good, smaller (~11k users) general instance with a good vibe. Fwiw i think a lot of people use twitter to follow 'their kind of people' (lgbt groups, open source fans, music people) and this codifies those groups a bit more into proper instances/servers/communities, while of course allowing you to follow other people.
• Torwald 8y ago
  This is way too long for an elevator pitch.
• interfixus 8y ago
  At the joinmastodon.org site, in order to get me started and in touch with likeminded individuals, it is suggested I define myself as a heterosexual or a white European. No, wait, the terms are LGBTQ+ and Black American, whatever was I thinking?
  • rainbowmverse 8y ago
    You might like https://playvicious.social/ https://playvicious.social/. The impression I get from his toots is he's trying to carve out a space where marginalized people, and especially people of color, can just be without having to deal with unsolicited opinions since you can report and expect that someone who understands will deal with it.
  • eahman00 8y ago
    The main website reeks of social justice, and take a look at the rules of mastodon.social (the primary instance) if you want something to laugh at: https://mastodon.social/about/more https://mastodon.social/about/more - All the big instances are exactly the same, and I guess if you make a more "free" instance, the big instances will completely ban your instance from theirs, so it won't be of much use. So federation doesn't really solve any censorship problems. Mastodon is as politically aligned as Gab.ai. Someone should create a Twitter clone that isn't politically aligned, now that would be a step forward :P
• scarejunba 8y ago
  If you told me this in an elevator, I would think you're one of those online people who cares a lot about your online presence and has big arguments about social networks. Also, let me be honest, the language in the article is the sort used by people who have arguments about whether lolicon should be legal or not. This is not something I'm interested in talking about. Just like voat.co and friends this is a fringe-people network. No thanks. I don't want 99% of my conversations to be about furries. Consequently I would ignore you.
• mortenjorck 8y ago
  This is about as useful to countering toxicity as, say, not supporting avatars and claiming your experience is superior to Twitter because no one can upload a swastika. To start, the author doesn't get the terminology right: A retweet on Twitter is the un-commented repost to which Mastodon's "boost" is analogous, whereas a "quote tweet" is the thing Mastodon doesn't have native support for. Twitter didn't natively support quoting either until comparatively recently in its history, and there was plenty of toxicity on the platform before then. Before native quote-tweet support, you would just see a URL to the tweet someone was commenting on, and you'd have to click to view it rather than seeing it expanded inline, which is no less possible on Mastodon. And since this is really up to the client anyway, there's no reason a Mastodon client couldn't auto-expand quoted "toots," nullifying this supposed advantage.
• nixarian 8y ago
  Yeah, it's totally Twitter's fault that people are dehumanizing each other on twitter. We need our machines to stop us from being monsters, right?
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• notyourtypical 8y ago
  > Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter I sort of agree, it's like Twitter users forming their own groups but it didn't make me like Mastodon. I don't like the name, I don't like the fact I have to sign up for every group, every group has its own layout, which is confusing and I just don't get the whole idea behind it. Sorry, I'll stick to Reddit
  • AsyncAwait 8y ago
    > I don't like the name, I don't like the fact I have to sign up for every group You don not have to do that at all. The point of federation is that you sign up on one instance and can follow and communicate with people on practically every other instance from that single account. Think about how email works.
• replies_to_all 8y ago
  Memo.Cash is better than Mastodon.
• bluishgreen 8y ago
  I tried to login, and this error gif gave me a headache. I get it, some error has happened, but this looping speed some sort of triggers me. https://mastodon.social/oops.gif https://mastodon.social/oops.gif Mastodon needs more designers and a general sense of visual design. If not a keen visual design ethic, then at least a basic sense of "visual obnoxiousness" to avoid. (Any Mastodoners watching, kindly pass on the message)
• andyidsinga 8y ago
  > The Why: Twitter Is in the Outrage Business; Mastodon Isn't a Business This section casting twitter as being in "the outrage business" but mastadon not being a business at all doesn't quite sit right. Even though mastodon "the open source project" is "not a business", there is an entity behind it accepting $ for it's development[1] and presumably has control over the rules by which the main line development occurs and controls the brand "mastadon" and its website. I think that section would be more useful and convincing if folks behind mastadon discussed how the money flows in twitter cause it to be in the "outrage business" and how the Mastadon maintainer's money flows solve those problems. [1] (Gargron - https://www.patreon.com/mastodon https://www.patreon.com/mastodon) (edits: grammar)
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• forrestthewoods 8y ago
  I tried the gamedev Mastadon, but it’s entirely hobbyists and students. I want a platform where I can interact with peers. I’ll go to where ever that is. But so far Mastadon is not the place.
• Rotdhizon 8y ago
  Aside the point a little bit, but I just made a mastadon account today and I've already seen a few dozen female accounts that exist solely to promote their patreon/gofundme accounts. The exact same type of negative atmosphere that plagues snap, IG, and twitter.
• robertwiblin 8y ago
  This is a good article. I just wanted to take issue with this claim: "Twitter is a public company, funded by investor money; they thus owe a legal duty to make as much money for their investors as they can." This is a common misconception. While public companies have some duties to shareholders they are not required to maximise profits as such: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co... It's important to be aware of this so that corporations cannot use this excuse to get off the hook for otherwise immoral behaviour.
  • tlholaday 8y ago
    Thank you for battling against the "must maximize profits" antipattern.
• oedmarap 8y ago
  I love Mastodon but the only thing stopping me from using it is the way they approach federation [0]. The "ideal" for me is to make an account on a centralized official Mastodon instance (with Keybase verification, if needed) and then be able to seamlessly join another instance without having to sign up for that instance separately to be a member -- and thus not having to make a per-instance account. That way my account is created once, and I can jump between other instances OAuth-style. I do like the fact that niche instances exist, but in my opinion it's better to be known as [username@mastodon.social] even when being a member of [@niche.social] much like how Disqus or Gravatar works, in principle. At least the option would be nice. [0] https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using-Mastodon/FAQ.md#federation https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using...
• ChildOfChaos 8y ago
  Mastodon will be dead soon enough and also awful marketing, they really need to change the name as to not conflict with the band.
• DoreenMichele 8y ago
  I think it's a lousy article with a poor title. It's poorly written. It leads with the wrong info. It's framing sucks. But just as I was thinking "The fact that Twitter is a business is a feature, not a bug" they mentioned they are funded by Patreon. So, they are a business, and one that possibly has a more sustainable business model than Twitter. They just don't call themselves a business for some reason. I've done a lot of volunteer work over the years. Volunteers tend to be unreliable because they aren't being paid. They are often bitter people because they aren't being paid, so they want you to damn well be grateful as all hell that they do this out of the goodness of their hearts. Etc. So, I'm less of a fan of open source than I used to be. If you want to do a thing sustainably, creating a business you are passionate about that can also pay your bills makes more sense than doing it for free. Getting the incentives right matters. Doing it for free means either you are independently wealthy, you are a bored homemaker or you actually do something full-time to pay your bills and this gets what little time and energy you have left over. Maybe I need to look up the info on the guy who said he would answer my questions patiently if I had any and make "trying Mastodon" my new hobby for a bit.
• jl2718 8y ago
  People went to twitter specifically for the outrage. I think the alternative to twitter is nothing.
• brunoqc 8y ago
  Is mastodon a one man show? I was interested but I had doubts when I saw those posts on their discourse about the project governance.
• theshadowknows 8y ago
  I also enjoy micro.blog
• jimbo1qaz 8y ago
  >Mastodon lets you or your moderators decide to block entire instances If your instance operator blocks another instance, are they effectively banning you from following or viewing anyone on the other instance? That would be very stifling.
• mikebelanger 8y ago
  I'm yet another person who's skeptical that this project and its instances will be able to solve any issues that currently plague the more popular, profit-based social media platforms. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it worsens things. Let's take the widely-known phenomena of 'information bubbles' - where your feeds/networks only serve you information that confirms something you already believe/some worldview you already have. Not only would a mastadon instance server be prone to attracting users of the same mindset - cross-posting from other sites would be problematic. What if posting on instance A doesn't violate instance A's content guideline terms, but does violate the content guidelines of instance B? Users of B are less likely to see certain content from A. In some ways that's worse than the one-instance for profit networks. As much as I dislike the snarky reply to bad-retweet phenomenon - at least opposing ideas are being discussed there. Plus, these instances can be run by anyone, and those people can set up any terms they want. Someone like Alex Jones could set up his own mastadon instance, and have his own content guidelines, and wrap his followers in an even 'thicker' information bubble.
• ummonk 8y ago
  I'm just never joining a social network that requires me to "toot". Sorry.
• Grue3 8y ago
  Do they have a search yet, that isn't searching by a hashtag? Twitter wins here by default with proper search and filtering options. How am I supposed to find people talking about something?
• smsm42 8y ago
  Being "better than Twitter" is not hard - Twitter is awful on almost any metric you can find. The only redeeming feature is has is that sometimes interesting people post interesting things there. Do they do it on Mastodon? I honestly have no idea - I've never once encountered anybody linking to a post on Mastodon, and I am a voracious consumer of content.
• garfieldnate 8y ago
  Uuuuuh mastadon people, you know "toot" means "fart" for a lot of people, right? I laughed pretty hard reading lines like, "...a middle ground between unfollowing someone and seeing every toot they ever make." Very unfortunate vocabulary choice there.