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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 b

by 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
    - xigma 8y ago
      That's not really answering my questions. I understand that different Mastodon instances have different moderation. I don't understand how that ties into the usage of the service as a Twitter clone. Who decides how content is relayed? Can I be on multiple instances at the same time? If don't like my instance anymore, can I seamlessly move to another one? Frankly, I don't even want to have all these questions, it's too complicated. I'll just stick with Twitter.
      - ohtwenty 8y ago
        >Who decides how content is relayed? I mean things are relayed if you ask for them to be. Two cases, pretty much: (1) someone is following someone else, content is asked for by the one server and pushed to the other. (2) You look up a URL (someone's posts, a profile, etc) and it asks the other server for it. Of course you can block certain instances from asking for stuff, or block/mute specific people if you'd like to, so it's not just out there for anyone to grab (except of course that it's the internet, so realistically nothing is ephemeral). >Can I be on multiple instances at the same time? If don't like my instance anymore, can I seamlessly move to another one? Of course you can be on multiple instances. Just like you can make multiple emails. Same case though: why would you? some edge cases (being able to see multiple local/home timelines for example, even from people you're not following, via the 'local timeline' tab). So yeah, there's people that have multiple accounts, just like you can have a few reddit or HN accounts if you'd like to. There's definitely usecases, but most people just have the one account. Moving is being worked on, it's not 'seamless' by any means, but you can download a backup of followers etc and upload that to another instance, and have your old account forward to the new one (preventing people from using your old handle, and also meaning that if there's a link somewhere they'd know where you moved to). >Frankly, I don't even want to have all these questions, it's too complicated. I'll just stick with Twitter. Do your thing, but I hope you know most people don't necessarily have these questions. If you introduced email or reddit to someone they wouldn't necessarily right away think of data portability, multiple accounts, etc. The onboarding needs a bunch of work, but for basic usage it's really not all that hard.
        8y ago

by xigma 8y ago

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
  - xigma 8y ago
    That's not really answering my questions. I understand that different Mastodon instances have different moderation. I don't understand how that ties into the usage of the service as a Twitter clone. Who decides how content is relayed? Can I be on multiple instances at the same time? If don't like my instance anymore, can I seamlessly move to another one? Frankly, I don't even want to have all these questions, it's too complicated. I'll just stick with Twitter.
    - ohtwenty 8y ago
      >Who decides how content is relayed? I mean things are relayed if you ask for them to be. Two cases, pretty much: (1) someone is following someone else, content is asked for by the one server and pushed to the other. (2) You look up a URL (someone's posts, a profile, etc) and it asks the other server for it. Of course you can block certain instances from asking for stuff, or block/mute specific people if you'd like to, so it's not just out there for anyone to grab (except of course that it's the internet, so realistically nothing is ephemeral). >Can I be on multiple instances at the same time? If don't like my instance anymore, can I seamlessly move to another one? Of course you can be on multiple instances. Just like you can make multiple emails. Same case though: why would you? some edge cases (being able to see multiple local/home timelines for example, even from people you're not following, via the 'local timeline' tab). So yeah, there's people that have multiple accounts, just like you can have a few reddit or HN accounts if you'd like to. There's definitely usecases, but most people just have the one account. Moving is being worked on, it's not 'seamless' by any means, but you can download a backup of followers etc and upload that to another instance, and have your old account forward to the new one (preventing people from using your old handle, and also meaning that if there's a link somewhere they'd know where you moved to). >Frankly, I don't even want to have all these questions, it's too complicated. I'll just stick with Twitter. Do your thing, but I hope you know most people don't necessarily have these questions. If you introduced email or reddit to someone they wouldn't necessarily right away think of data portability, multiple accounts, etc. The onboarding needs a bunch of work, but for basic usage it's really not all that hard.
      - 8y ago