13 ms·

From GNU social to Mastodon

186 points by panic 8y ago

phaedryx 8y ago
I've become more and more annoyed with Twitter (the company) and Twitter (the things people are tweeting) and I've been looking for a replacement. I really like the way that the Fediverse has all kinds of different groups/instances/neighborhoods. For example, I joined https://ruby.social https://ruby.social this week and I've had some interesting discussions about Ruby programming. Twitter is a mess of everything because anything and everything is a topic.
- skybrian 8y ago
  I like it too, but having used it casually for about a week, I'm wondering how you visit different communities without creating multiple accounts? It should be as easy as visiting a different subreddit. (I do know that you can subscribe to individuals in other instances, but haven't done that yet.)
  - wetpaws 8y ago
    I assume you can't and this is a fundamental problem of federated systems.
    - cyphar 8y ago
      In Mastodon, I believe you can -- but it's more of a Twitter-dump than something as well-separated as subreddits. Each time a user follows someone from a new server, that server's "federated feed" is added to the homeserver of that user. It's not perfect, but it does mean that federated feeds do spread organically (and it does result in single-user instances spam-following everyone so that you can get a more cohesive feed).
      - s_kilk 8y ago
        > Each time a user follows someone from a new server, that server's "federated feed" is added to the homeserver of that user. Wait, is this a thing? I've been using Mastodon for months and have never seen this in the UI.
        cyphar 8y ago
        The "federated timeline" tab should be what I'm describing -- though to be honest the last time I talked to any of the mastodon folks about this was more than a year ago (the semantics might have changed).
    - xj9 8y ago
      we're working on it ;) there are a handful of proposals for doing SSO on fediverse, but it isn't super high priority since creating multiple accounts (alts) is a pretty common practice here.
      - craftyguy 8y ago
        > but it isn't super high priority since creating multiple accounts (alts) is a pretty common practice here. Then you'll only end up with users that are willing to put up with that, and you will not get users that perceive this as a major inconvenience (I'm in this camp, and I suspect many, many others are too.)
        ocdtrekkie 8y ago
        As a long time Mastodon user, I've never done the alt-account thing. If I'm interested in another community... I follow a bunch of people from that community. You don't need to have an account on every server, and I never have.
        elago 8y ago
        On the android app I use, switching between accounts is as simple UI wise as switching to different instances (or spaces or whatever the top level division is called) in Slack. In two taps I can switch between tech themed and social themed for example. I agree some platforms make multiple accounts hard to the point where you're registering multiple free email accounts, installing multiple browsers and using incognito mode, etc. That is not inherently the case, and can be quite the opposite when allowing users to control multiple accounts is part of the software's design.
        TuringTest 8y ago
        But tying accounts to instances, and then instances to topics, is bad design. The purpose of multiple accounts from a user perspective should be for having separate identities, not separate topics of conversation. If you're forced to create one account per instance, there's no way to do something as simple as "merge comments from two instances into a single stream", which supposedly was the selling point of federated systems like Mastodon.
    - wetpaws 8y ago
      People who downvote me without providing any counter-examples, please.
  - y2bd 8y ago
    There’s a beta iOS app called Toot that solves this by letting you add timelines for instances you don’t have an account on. If you try interacting with anyone on that timeline, it asks you if you want to use one of your other accounts to handle that interaction. Don’t know if any other clients offer this. Link: https://mastodon.social/@tootapp https://mastodon.social/@tootapp
    - rainbowmverse 8y ago
      10,000 prototype apps/mockups sprung up (a good thing) after mastodon.design popped up. Some of them are bound to launch with this feature.
    - arunsathiya 8y ago
      Mastalab on Android seems to do the same now, based on recent release notes. But, I haven't figured out how to do that yet.
  - RX14 8y ago
    The only thing that creates an instance's community is the local time line. Everything else is federated. So what you're really asking for is to be able to easily view another instance's local timeline I guess. There's some work being done in that area, currently focused on merging multiple instances local timelines, but the same technical infrastructure could easily be used to be able to show another instances local time line in the frontend.
  - jancsika 8y ago
    Let me see if I understand the problem. alice register on instance "music" alice wants to see what's up on instance "books" Is the problem that the default behavior of Mastodon requires alice to register a new account on "books" just to see that instance's timeline?
    - justinpombrio 8y ago
      Yes, that is exactly the problem. Although it might be better to say that that's the manifestation of the real problem. The real problem is that I want to be able to talk about books sometimes, even though I'm a musician so I registered on the musician instance. If there's a way for me to have conversations about books, I don't care whether it's an "instance" or not. I just don't want to manage two separate accounts. (As an end-user, none of my end-goals mention the word "instance".)
      - jancsika 8y ago
        Yeah, I guess I'm confused about why an instance has any topic whatsoever associated with it. For a federated design I'd assume the main difference among instances to be code of conduct/ToS.
        opan 8y ago
        I've been on one Mastodon instance and one Pleroma instance. Neither really had a set topic, and both pulled in some toots from other instances that were "similar", but my posts are about anything I want, as they would be on Twitter.
      - jaequery 8y ago
        Slack also have this same "problem" but strangely enough, it didn't stop them from growing as they are now.
    - elago 8y ago
      I wouldn't say that's the problem. You do not need to register a new account to see an instance's timeline. For example this page shows the instance's timeline without logging in: https://mastodon.sdf.org/about https://mastodon.sdf.org/about If you like someone's toots there, you can follow and message any user on SDF's instance from your account on any other instance. As mentioned elsewhere, the only thing you would gain by creating an account on sdf.org is to have your toots appear by default in the local timeline of other sdf.org users.
  - phaedryx 8y ago
    Yeah, I've been wondering if I can write a bot that signs in to other accounts and aggregates things for a primary account.
    - WorldMaker 8y ago
      A number of instances in the Fediverse run bots whose sole purpose is to follow "interesting" accounts that they find on other instances in order to beef up the bot's instance's Federated feed. It can be a useful tool for small instances to still see a wider view of the Fediverse without any individual user themselves following a lot of people.
  - panic 8y ago
    There's a tension here between different views of what Mastodon should be. Is an instance more like an email server (where it just acts as a gateway) or a web forum (with a community of people on each instance)? It seems like the ActivityPub protocol itself is designed from the "email server" perspective, but as different instances try to differentiate themselves and attract users, I bet the platform will swing more and more toward "web forum". It'll be interesting to see how it turns out.
    - TuringTest 8y ago
      Even if each instance has its own community, that's no reason to force users to create a different account at each instance. Given the federated protocol, it's a reasonable expectation carrying around the same identity across instances.
    - ok-repl 8y ago
      I feel like the product signals a strange mix of the two, which has to at least be resolved in terms of what's user-facing (e.g. UX-wise)
  - epeus 8y ago
    My tool unmung.com/mastoview let's you peek at local and federated timelines on other instances (by default the homepage view is federated, which is less useful in a large instance)
- foxylad 8y ago
  For any kiwi twitter refugees, I'm setting up https://mastodon.nz https://mastodon.nz. Very quiet so far, but fully functional and federation is working well. Come on over!
- deleted 8y ago
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- deleted 8y ago
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oopsman88 8y ago
With all of its faults, I'll take Twitter and its almost free speech over Mastodon any day. Many people say they are quitting Twitter because of the algorithmic timeline and so on, and they are going to Mastodon where a cabal of people choose to ban opinions that are perfectly legal.
- phaedryx 8y ago
  Why not just join an instance that matches your needs or start your own instance and make it whatever you want?
  - oopsman88 8y ago
    Because most of the bigger instances have shared blocklists. I am not interested in Mastodon as a tech stack, I am interested in joining a social network. But the truth is that it's all aligned to the political left. And I'm sad because I think Twitter is very politically charged and its alternative should be neutral. You can create your own instance or join a small instance you like, but that would be like IRC. I already use IRC every day, I don't need another IRC.
    - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      I'm willing to bet most of the instances that a large group of instances have blocked federate with each other. There's definitely kinda a split among Mastodon instances, between free speech instances and fairly moderated instances. I wonder if you could find an instance which plays well with both sides. There is no overarching authority on these instances, so there's a lot of options, it may just be hard to find the one that meets your needs.
    - jmarinez 8y ago
      I agree. No single person or group should have the capability to "censor" anyone. On an individual basis, any single user should decide to block, hide or completely ignore anyone they want at will. And here's the thing, Mastodon already has all kinds of controls like that for all users. Why the need to have a "benevolent dictator" that can by popularity or influence can decide what an entire group gets to read or see. That's censorship in my book.
zpiro 8y ago
This is shiny new toy, not a positive development. Very little of substance apart from declaring a GNU project dead.
dorianm 8y ago
To get a list of mastodon isntance https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/ is pretty neat
TheJoYo 8y ago
if anyone is averse to the column layout on the default Mastodon UI they should check out https://pinafore.social https://pinafore.social for a more Twitter like layout. rather than being a mastodon instance you simply use pinafore as your portal to your existing mastodon account.
- bumholio 8y ago
  Can't really figure it out. I try to login and put mastodon.social in the Add instance field, but I get an error: > Error: undefined. Is this a valid Mastodon instance? Is a browser extension blocking the request?
  - callahad 8y ago
    You'll see that error if the Service Worker failed to register. Check your browser console?
    - bumholio 8y ago
      I think I've cracked it: it does not work in Firefox Private mode.
      - nolanl 8y ago
        Author of Pinafore here. Yes, ironically for an app and userbase that is so focused on privacy, things like private browsing, Privacy Badger, adblockers, etc. can cause compat issues with Pinafore. Interestingly, the reason is (as I discovered) that most of these tools consider cross-origin requests as a signal of a third-party tracker or ad, and therefore block it. Pinafore works by talking directly to the instance's API, and so the instance itself is suspected to be a third-party tracker. ‍️
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  Or use the Emacs package ( https://github.com/jdenen/mastodon.el https://github.com/jdenen/mastodon.el ) : https://i.imgur.com/dizqJmY.png https://i.imgur.com/dizqJmY.png
fimdomeio 8y ago
I would love to remember to which instance I signed up with. This is a problem that is harder to solve than email was in the 90's. I knew that it was myNickname@myISP.myCountry. For mastodon I guess I'll have to go through the list and find the exotic instance i signed up with.
- spinningarrow 8y ago
  Wouldn’t you have received a confirmation email from the instance you signed up with?
stesch 8y ago
What I don't understand: Why do they promote the software instead of the protocols? News and e-mail had different server software and clients and were both used around the world. Mastodon uses standard protocols, too.
- unimpressive 8y ago
  People use software, the value add Mastodon has over GnuSocial is that it's software that advertises itself to users on its own merits. (Well that and a moderation policy that's stricter than Twitter's, supposedly.)
  - mattl 8y ago
    GNU social was never supposed to be a brand seen by end users. The idea was “take our software, make your own network”
  - spc476 8y ago
    Yeah, but I'd like to use software that isn't written in PHP or Ruby (for a variety of reasons, some valid, and some not). If the protocol was better documented, there might be more choice.
    - zaarn 8y ago
      There is pleroma which is written in Python and functions with the mastodon web interface natively .
      - marci 8y ago
        Pleroma is written in Elixir https://blog.soykaf.com/post/what-is-pleroma/#less-moving-parts https://blog.soykaf.com/post/what-is-pleroma/#less-moving-pa...
        zaarn 8y ago
        I probably remembered wrong... still not Ruby or php!
cjhanks 8y ago
So I was curious and went to look at a few of the servers online. The top server was an unending stream (like, more than once a minute) of Richard Stallman automatically posting political references from some other service he apparently runs. Another server was just some guy who I have never heard of complaining about various things. I came across a group talking about current and passed times they had a beer. That content will not inspire others to join.
- krupan 8y ago
  Are you suggesting that the early days of Twitter were better? Heck, that even describes a large portion of current Twitter.
- drngdds 8y ago
  >Some guy who I have never heard of complaining about various things You just described 90% of the content on every social media platform
  - cjhanks 8y ago
    Yeah, I'm a part of the 90% I suppose. :)
ifur 8y ago
For the social part to really work, you need a community to adopt it. Not just an internet community. Good to see alternatives to Twitter however. Generally don't like AJAX, it's JS and XML, and in the latter case Twitter services don't require Stylesheets or XLS as it's called -- without -- XML is bloated and creates metadata for sale. In addition to AJAX allowing Orwellian advertisement influence. Edit: this gets downvoted? reasonable technical criticism or dialogue.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  > Generally don't like AJAX, it's JS and XML, and in the latter case Twitter services don't require Stylesheets or XLS as it's called -- without -- XML is bloated and creates metadata for sale. In addition to AJAX allowing Orwellian advertisement influence. ...what?
  - ifur 8y ago
    In addition to tagging data with XML, I wont go into the misguided use of it in configuration files as its not really quicker creating checks using XML and XLS as a programmer in the "zone" :) Point is that albeit nice, there is no need for something like this to even be in a browser. But by using AJAX it kind of have to be. In addition to advertisers being able to know due to Javascript that the user is present. And since the data is tagged arbitrarily in XML in addition to hashtags and the like, it's a lot less hit and miss for suggestions and advertisement. For example getting flooded with bad things about people working or the US state just because they're in the vicinity of Trump to either reinforce or encourage guilt by association. After you've made a Trump pun for additional effect.
    - crooked-v 8y ago
      What are you even talking about? Modern web apps don't even use XML anymore, barring a few outliers.
      - ifur 8y ago
        "Ajax (also AJAX /ˈeɪdʒæks/; short for "Asynchronous JavaScript And XML")" Is this wrong? Only worked with HPC and mostly hardware-software layer.
bdz 8y ago
Every social media platform is an echo chamber but it's interesting to see that Mastodon is the first where that's the main selling point
foxhop 8y ago
I decided to join Mastodon when it first came out. I planned to stand up my own server, but I kept.putting it off... Flash 2 years later, last week I finally got a Mastodon instance up, and I don't host it myself. I'm using https://masto.host https://masto.host They let you used your own domain. My thought process is to not waste my time writing automation to stand up a server until I know I really want to use it. So far I love it even though I only have 3 followers. I'm "micro blogging" more frequently than I used to on Twitter. Of you have been meaning to stand up a Mastodon instance but just have not gotten around to it, maybe give mastodon.host a try. They provide the ability to export and self host.
- anderspitman 8y ago
  I was wondering if they allow export. I poked around the website for a bit and didn't see anything. That's the primary selling point for me. I want to run my own instance eventually but I'd love to start with something hosted.
  - jdeibele 8y ago
    https://github.com/kensanata/mastodon-backup/ https://github.com/kensanata/mastodon-backup/ allows you to backup your mastodon data. It also allows you to expire your toots, boosts, etc. The idea is that you don't want people searching your timeline to find gotcha's.
owlmusic 8y ago
Also recently felt a need to leave Twitter and search for an alternative. I initially began using mastodon.social, and have now moved to my own instance https://mastodon.zone https://mastodon.zone as I wanted to setup something in a closer geo location, join if you're around SE Asia!
ad_hominem 8y ago
I tried Mastodon early on and it was pretty slow, which I assume is due to it being a Ruby on Rails app that probably wasn't heavily optimized. Probably also partly due to there only being a handful of popular instances so the inrush of users weren't being spread out very much. Anyone still encountering that? A fairly popular instance also crashed and lost all accounts, toots etc.: https://web.archive.org/web/20180325132625/https://mastodon.rocks/about https://web.archive.org/web/20180325132625/https://mastodon....
- throw2016 8y ago
  The choice of Ruby for a platform that is supposed to enable decentralization does not make sense. Most Ruby apps have tens to hundreds of dependencies and require a build environment which immediately limits access to a smaller group of developers familiar with Ruby build environments and debugging their way out of any dependency hell. Customization also becomes a problem. There is also no particular design in Mastodon itself to enable more transparency and prevent any arbitrary behavior and abuse of power.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    Really? There's official Docker images that I've been running sucesfully for a while, the deployment of Mastodon is really no different from any other self-hosted app these days.
    - throw2016 8y ago
      This is even worse. Now you want the average user to know to now only know Ruby but also Docker? These are technologies for technical folks, the kind of troubleshooting required is not trivial. And just packaging something in Docker does not make the need to understand it go away, what happens when things needs to be configured, when database connections don't work, when things go wrong? You still need to understand the software stack pretty well if you want to run it with any degree of confidence.
      - 8y ago
needle0 8y ago
So very tempting to post in every single Mastodon-related thread emphasizing it's MastOdon, not MastAdon.
- nwah1 8y ago
  More proof we are living in the Berenstain Bears universe, forever disconnected from our original Berenstein universe.
fwn 8y ago
Down for me right now. Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20180827000013/https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2018/08/19/from-gnu-social-to-mastodon.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180827000013/https://thomask.s...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
TuringTest 8y ago
I really miss something like thematic "groups" or "channels" in Mastodon, i.e., a mechanism for making sure that all the people subscribed get all the messages published in it. That's the #1 feature that allows separate communities to grow, which makes places like Usenet or Reddit or ICQ to become a global conversation where anyone can participate, and where private conversations between restricted communities can happen independent of a central server. The "timeline" model where everyone publishes their own stream, and anyone subscribe to individual persons, is good for fast propagating of ideas and news; but it doesn't create "clusters" of like-minded ideas that you can follow, and forces everybody to curate their own inputs. This makes it really difficult to jump in, as building a subscription list that provides interesting content and avoids noise has a lot of friction.
- epeus 8y ago
  You can do that with hashtags, but it is only going to show up within your instance's federation. Gnusocial has ! Groups which do propagate all posts, but mastodon didn't implement that bit.
  - TuringTest 8y ago
    Yes, the article mentioned that and that's what made me think about it; it's a different model, close to Twitter but different from other "thematic" social platforms. Matrix.org has a good model for channels (called rooms), groups of channels [1] (called Communities), and distributed identities. I only hope that Matrix.org will become the common background middleware for all federated services, and all these will tend to implement the same features for interoperability. [1] https://medium.com/@RiotChat/communities-aka-groups-are-here-announcing-riot-web-0-13-riot-ios-0-6-and-riot-android-0-7-4-933cb193a28e https://medium.com/@RiotChat/communities-aka-groups-are-here...
throw2016 8y ago
The problem is abuse of power and arbitrary behavior that affects many when they have even a little bit of power. This is what leads to censorship, suppressing views, bubbles and lack of accountability. Mastodon does not solve this in the slightest, just enables thousands of arbitrary admins. At least with Twitter there is one source and its easier to seek some kind of accountability and put a global spotlight on them. With platforms like Mastodon this becomes impossible. We instead quickly develop 'ingroups of admins' quietly suppressing others and not amenable to transparency or accountability. Decentralization is about diffusing control not empowering a super group of admins. If that is what you seek why not just stick to twitter.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  It does enable you to be your own admin. Sure, it doesn't work if people sign up with arbitrary admins with arbitrary (ab)use of power, but even with an alternative that does "solve" it - it only works if people sign up there.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  Be your own "arbitrary" admin in that case? The decentralized nature certainly allows for "competition" between "ingroups of admins". Don't like your current admins? Move to an instance elsewhere. If you have friends, encourage them to follow you in the move. Different instances have different transparency/accountability metrics, and the good ones tend to have that posted in the Instance About page/terms. Many of the "ingroups of admins" people decry have all of their silences/suspends posted publicly and transparently on GitHub repositories and offer suggestions/propose fixes as GitHub issues and PRs. That's certainly way more amenable to transparency/accountability than anything Twitter has ever offered. The things that lead to censorship/suppressing views/bubbles/etc on Mastodon aren't power-hungry admins in a secretive cabal, but instead the same powers that be in the world of email: signal-to-noise management (spam management, "newsletter" management, "fwd: fwd: re:" management). That's as much a user opt-in choice/need as any sort of admin opt-out "power", and if other users think you are more part of the noise rather than the signal, then that's more of a "you" problem, isn't it?
  - 8y ago

186 points by panic 8y ago

I've become more and more annoyed with Twitter (the company) and Twitter (the things people are tweeting) and I've been looking for a replacement. I really like the way that the Fediverse has all kinds of different groups/instances/neighborhoods. For example, I joined https://ruby.social https://ruby.social this week and I've had some interesting discussions about Ruby programming. Twitter is a mess of everything because anything and everything is a topic.

skybrian 8y ago
I like it too, but having used it casually for about a week, I'm wondering how you visit different communities without creating multiple accounts? It should be as easy as visiting a different subreddit. (I do know that you can subscribe to individuals in other instances, but haven't done that yet.)
- wetpaws 8y ago
  I assume you can't and this is a fundamental problem of federated systems.
  - cyphar 8y ago
    In Mastodon, I believe you can -- but it's more of a Twitter-dump than something as well-separated as subreddits. Each time a user follows someone from a new server, that server's "federated feed" is added to the homeserver of that user. It's not perfect, but it does mean that federated feeds do spread organically (and it does result in single-user instances spam-following everyone so that you can get a more cohesive feed).
    - s_kilk 8y ago
      > Each time a user follows someone from a new server, that server's "federated feed" is added to the homeserver of that user. Wait, is this a thing? I've been using Mastodon for months and have never seen this in the UI.
      - cyphar 8y ago
        The "federated timeline" tab should be what I'm describing -- though to be honest the last time I talked to any of the mastodon folks about this was more than a year ago (the semantics might have changed).
  - xj9 8y ago
    we're working on it ;) there are a handful of proposals for doing SSO on fediverse, but it isn't super high priority since creating multiple accounts (alts) is a pretty common practice here.
    - craftyguy 8y ago
      > but it isn't super high priority since creating multiple accounts (alts) is a pretty common practice here. Then you'll only end up with users that are willing to put up with that, and you will not get users that perceive this as a major inconvenience (I'm in this camp, and I suspect many, many others are too.)
      - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
        As a long time Mastodon user, I've never done the alt-account thing. If I'm interested in another community... I follow a bunch of people from that community. You don't need to have an account on every server, and I never have.
      - elago 8y ago
        On the android app I use, switching between accounts is as simple UI wise as switching to different instances (or spaces or whatever the top level division is called) in Slack. In two taps I can switch between tech themed and social themed for example. I agree some platforms make multiple accounts hard to the point where you're registering multiple free email accounts, installing multiple browsers and using incognito mode, etc. That is not inherently the case, and can be quite the opposite when allowing users to control multiple accounts is part of the software's design.
        TuringTest 8y ago
        But tying accounts to instances, and then instances to topics, is bad design. The purpose of multiple accounts from a user perspective should be for having separate identities, not separate topics of conversation. If you're forced to create one account per instance, there's no way to do something as simple as "merge comments from two instances into a single stream", which supposedly was the selling point of federated systems like Mastodon.
  - wetpaws 8y ago
    People who downvote me without providing any counter-examples, please.
- y2bd 8y ago
  There’s a beta iOS app called Toot that solves this by letting you add timelines for instances you don’t have an account on. If you try interacting with anyone on that timeline, it asks you if you want to use one of your other accounts to handle that interaction. Don’t know if any other clients offer this. Link: https://mastodon.social/@tootapp https://mastodon.social/@tootapp
  - rainbowmverse 8y ago
    10,000 prototype apps/mockups sprung up (a good thing) after mastodon.design popped up. Some of them are bound to launch with this feature.
  - arunsathiya 8y ago
    Mastalab on Android seems to do the same now, based on recent release notes. But, I haven't figured out how to do that yet.
- RX14 8y ago
  The only thing that creates an instance's community is the local time line. Everything else is federated. So what you're really asking for is to be able to easily view another instance's local timeline I guess. There's some work being done in that area, currently focused on merging multiple instances local timelines, but the same technical infrastructure could easily be used to be able to show another instances local time line in the frontend.
- jancsika 8y ago
  Let me see if I understand the problem. alice register on instance "music" alice wants to see what's up on instance "books" Is the problem that the default behavior of Mastodon requires alice to register a new account on "books" just to see that instance's timeline?
  - justinpombrio 8y ago
    Yes, that is exactly the problem. Although it might be better to say that that's the manifestation of the real problem. The real problem is that I want to be able to talk about books sometimes, even though I'm a musician so I registered on the musician instance. If there's a way for me to have conversations about books, I don't care whether it's an "instance" or not. I just don't want to manage two separate accounts. (As an end-user, none of my end-goals mention the word "instance".)
    - jancsika 8y ago
      Yeah, I guess I'm confused about why an instance has any topic whatsoever associated with it. For a federated design I'd assume the main difference among instances to be code of conduct/ToS.
      - opan 8y ago
        I've been on one Mastodon instance and one Pleroma instance. Neither really had a set topic, and both pulled in some toots from other instances that were "similar", but my posts are about anything I want, as they would be on Twitter.
    - jaequery 8y ago
      Slack also have this same "problem" but strangely enough, it didn't stop them from growing as they are now.
  - elago 8y ago
    I wouldn't say that's the problem. You do not need to register a new account to see an instance's timeline. For example this page shows the instance's timeline without logging in: https://mastodon.sdf.org/about https://mastodon.sdf.org/about If you like someone's toots there, you can follow and message any user on SDF's instance from your account on any other instance. As mentioned elsewhere, the only thing you would gain by creating an account on sdf.org is to have your toots appear by default in the local timeline of other sdf.org users.
- phaedryx 8y ago
  Yeah, I've been wondering if I can write a bot that signs in to other accounts and aggregates things for a primary account.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    A number of instances in the Fediverse run bots whose sole purpose is to follow "interesting" accounts that they find on other instances in order to beef up the bot's instance's Federated feed. It can be a useful tool for small instances to still see a wider view of the Fediverse without any individual user themselves following a lot of people.
- panic 8y ago
  There's a tension here between different views of what Mastodon should be. Is an instance more like an email server (where it just acts as a gateway) or a web forum (with a community of people on each instance)? It seems like the ActivityPub protocol itself is designed from the "email server" perspective, but as different instances try to differentiate themselves and attract users, I bet the platform will swing more and more toward "web forum". It'll be interesting to see how it turns out.
  - TuringTest 8y ago
    Even if each instance has its own community, that's no reason to force users to create a different account at each instance. Given the federated protocol, it's a reasonable expectation carrying around the same identity across instances.
  - ok-repl 8y ago
    I feel like the product signals a strange mix of the two, which has to at least be resolved in terms of what's user-facing (e.g. UX-wise)
- epeus 8y ago
  My tool unmung.com/mastoview let's you peek at local and federated timelines on other instances (by default the homepage view is federated, which is less useful in a large instance)
foxylad 8y ago
For any kiwi twitter refugees, I'm setting up https://mastodon.nz https://mastodon.nz. Very quiet so far, but fully functional and federation is working well. Come on over!
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oopsman88 8y ago

With all of its faults, I'll take Twitter and its almost free speech over Mastodon any day. Many people say they are quitting Twitter because of the algorithmic timeline and so on, and they are going to Mastodon where a cabal of people choose to ban opinions that are perfectly legal.

phaedryx 8y ago
Why not just join an instance that matches your needs or start your own instance and make it whatever you want?
- oopsman88 8y ago
  Because most of the bigger instances have shared blocklists. I am not interested in Mastodon as a tech stack, I am interested in joining a social network. But the truth is that it's all aligned to the political left. And I'm sad because I think Twitter is very politically charged and its alternative should be neutral. You can create your own instance or join a small instance you like, but that would be like IRC. I already use IRC every day, I don't need another IRC.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    I'm willing to bet most of the instances that a large group of instances have blocked federate with each other. There's definitely kinda a split among Mastodon instances, between free speech instances and fairly moderated instances. I wonder if you could find an instance which plays well with both sides. There is no overarching authority on these instances, so there's a lot of options, it may just be hard to find the one that meets your needs.
  - jmarinez 8y ago
    I agree. No single person or group should have the capability to "censor" anyone. On an individual basis, any single user should decide to block, hide or completely ignore anyone they want at will. And here's the thing, Mastodon already has all kinds of controls like that for all users. Why the need to have a "benevolent dictator" that can by popularity or influence can decide what an entire group gets to read or see. That's censorship in my book.

zpiro 8y ago

This is shiny new toy, not a positive development. Very little of substance apart from declaring a GNU project dead.

dorianm 8y ago

To get a list of mastodon isntance https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/ is pretty neat

TheJoYo 8y ago

if anyone is averse to the column layout on the default Mastodon UI they should check out https://pinafore.social https://pinafore.social for a more Twitter like layout. rather than being a mastodon instance you simply use pinafore as your portal to your existing mastodon account.

bumholio 8y ago
Can't really figure it out. I try to login and put mastodon.social in the Add instance field, but I get an error: > Error: undefined. Is this a valid Mastodon instance? Is a browser extension blocking the request?
- callahad 8y ago
  You'll see that error if the Service Worker failed to register. Check your browser console?
  - bumholio 8y ago
    I think I've cracked it: it does not work in Firefox Private mode.
    - nolanl 8y ago
      Author of Pinafore here. Yes, ironically for an app and userbase that is so focused on privacy, things like private browsing, Privacy Badger, adblockers, etc. can cause compat issues with Pinafore. Interestingly, the reason is (as I discovered) that most of these tools consider cross-origin requests as a signal of a third-party tracker or ad, and therefore block it. Pinafore works by talking directly to the instance's API, and so the instance itself is suspected to be a third-party tracker. ‍️
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
Or use the Emacs package ( https://github.com/jdenen/mastodon.el https://github.com/jdenen/mastodon.el ) : https://i.imgur.com/dizqJmY.png https://i.imgur.com/dizqJmY.png

fimdomeio 8y ago

I would love to remember to which instance I signed up with. This is a problem that is harder to solve than email was in the 90's. I knew that it was myNickname@myISP.myCountry. For mastodon I guess I'll have to go through the list and find the exotic instance i signed up with.

spinningarrow 8y ago
Wouldn’t you have received a confirmation email from the instance you signed up with?

stesch 8y ago

What I don't understand: Why do they promote the software instead of the protocols? News and e-mail had different server software and clients and were both used around the world. Mastodon uses standard protocols, too.

unimpressive 8y ago
People use software, the value add Mastodon has over GnuSocial is that it's software that advertises itself to users on its own merits. (Well that and a moderation policy that's stricter than Twitter's, supposedly.)
- mattl 8y ago
  GNU social was never supposed to be a brand seen by end users. The idea was “take our software, make your own network”
- spc476 8y ago
  Yeah, but I'd like to use software that isn't written in PHP or Ruby (for a variety of reasons, some valid, and some not). If the protocol was better documented, there might be more choice.
  - zaarn 8y ago
    There is pleroma which is written in Python and functions with the mastodon web interface natively .
    - marci 8y ago
      Pleroma is written in Elixir https://blog.soykaf.com/post/what-is-pleroma/#less-moving-parts https://blog.soykaf.com/post/what-is-pleroma/#less-moving-pa...
      - zaarn 8y ago
        I probably remembered wrong... still not Ruby or php!

cjhanks 8y ago

So I was curious and went to look at a few of the servers online. The top server was an unending stream (like, more than once a minute) of Richard Stallman automatically posting political references from some other service he apparently runs. Another server was just some guy who I have never heard of complaining about various things. I came across a group talking about current and passed times they had a beer. That content will not inspire others to join.

krupan 8y ago
Are you suggesting that the early days of Twitter were better? Heck, that even describes a large portion of current Twitter.
drngdds 8y ago
>Some guy who I have never heard of complaining about various things You just described 90% of the content on every social media platform
- cjhanks 8y ago
  Yeah, I'm a part of the 90% I suppose. :)

ifur 8y ago

For the social part to really work, you need a community to adopt it. Not just an internet community. Good to see alternatives to Twitter however. Generally don't like AJAX, it's JS and XML, and in the latter case Twitter services don't require Stylesheets or XLS as it's called -- without -- XML is bloated and creates metadata for sale. In addition to AJAX allowing Orwellian advertisement influence. Edit: this gets downvoted? reasonable technical criticism or dialogue.

crooked-v 8y ago
> Generally don't like AJAX, it's JS and XML, and in the latter case Twitter services don't require Stylesheets or XLS as it's called -- without -- XML is bloated and creates metadata for sale. In addition to AJAX allowing Orwellian advertisement influence. ...what?
- ifur 8y ago
  In addition to tagging data with XML, I wont go into the misguided use of it in configuration files as its not really quicker creating checks using XML and XLS as a programmer in the "zone" :) Point is that albeit nice, there is no need for something like this to even be in a browser. But by using AJAX it kind of have to be. In addition to advertisers being able to know due to Javascript that the user is present. And since the data is tagged arbitrarily in XML in addition to hashtags and the like, it's a lot less hit and miss for suggestions and advertisement. For example getting flooded with bad things about people working or the US state just because they're in the vicinity of Trump to either reinforce or encourage guilt by association. After you've made a Trump pun for additional effect.
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    What are you even talking about? Modern web apps don't even use XML anymore, barring a few outliers.
    - ifur 8y ago
      "Ajax (also AJAX /ˈeɪdʒæks/; short for "Asynchronous JavaScript And XML")" Is this wrong? Only worked with HPC and mostly hardware-software layer.

bdz 8y ago

Every social media platform is an echo chamber but it's interesting to see that Mastodon is the first where that's the main selling point

foxhop 8y ago

I decided to join Mastodon when it first came out. I planned to stand up my own server, but I kept.putting it off... Flash 2 years later, last week I finally got a Mastodon instance up, and I don't host it myself. I'm using https://masto.host https://masto.host They let you used your own domain. My thought process is to not waste my time writing automation to stand up a server until I know I really want to use it. So far I love it even though I only have 3 followers. I'm "micro blogging" more frequently than I used to on Twitter. Of you have been meaning to stand up a Mastodon instance but just have not gotten around to it, maybe give mastodon.host a try. They provide the ability to export and self host.

anderspitman 8y ago
I was wondering if they allow export. I poked around the website for a bit and didn't see anything. That's the primary selling point for me. I want to run my own instance eventually but I'd love to start with something hosted.
- jdeibele 8y ago
  https://github.com/kensanata/mastodon-backup/ https://github.com/kensanata/mastodon-backup/ allows you to backup your mastodon data. It also allows you to expire your toots, boosts, etc. The idea is that you don't want people searching your timeline to find gotcha's.

owlmusic 8y ago

Also recently felt a need to leave Twitter and search for an alternative. I initially began using mastodon.social, and have now moved to my own instance https://mastodon.zone https://mastodon.zone as I wanted to setup something in a closer geo location, join if you're around SE Asia!

ad_hominem 8y ago

I tried Mastodon early on and it was pretty slow, which I assume is due to it being a Ruby on Rails app that probably wasn't heavily optimized. Probably also partly due to there only being a handful of popular instances so the inrush of users weren't being spread out very much. Anyone still encountering that? A fairly popular instance also crashed and lost all accounts, toots etc.: https://web.archive.org/web/20180325132625/https://mastodon.rocks/about https://web.archive.org/web/20180325132625/https://mastodon....

throw2016 8y ago
The choice of Ruby for a platform that is supposed to enable decentralization does not make sense. Most Ruby apps have tens to hundreds of dependencies and require a build environment which immediately limits access to a smaller group of developers familiar with Ruby build environments and debugging their way out of any dependency hell. Customization also becomes a problem. There is also no particular design in Mastodon itself to enable more transparency and prevent any arbitrary behavior and abuse of power.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  Really? There's official Docker images that I've been running sucesfully for a while, the deployment of Mastodon is really no different from any other self-hosted app these days.
  - throw2016 8y ago
    This is even worse. Now you want the average user to know to now only know Ruby but also Docker? These are technologies for technical folks, the kind of troubleshooting required is not trivial. And just packaging something in Docker does not make the need to understand it go away, what happens when things needs to be configured, when database connections don't work, when things go wrong? You still need to understand the software stack pretty well if you want to run it with any degree of confidence.
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needle0 8y ago

So very tempting to post in every single Mastodon-related thread emphasizing it's MastOdon, not MastAdon.

nwah1 8y ago
More proof we are living in the Berenstain Bears universe, forever disconnected from our original Berenstein universe.

fwn 8y ago

Down for me right now. Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20180827000013/https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2018/08/19/from-gnu-social-to-mastodon.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180827000013/https://thomask.s...

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TuringTest 8y ago

I really miss something like thematic "groups" or "channels" in Mastodon, i.e., a mechanism for making sure that all the people subscribed get all the messages published in it. That's the #1 feature that allows separate communities to grow, which makes places like Usenet or Reddit or ICQ to become a global conversation where anyone can participate, and where private conversations between restricted communities can happen independent of a central server. The "timeline" model where everyone publishes their own stream, and anyone subscribe to individual persons, is good for fast propagating of ideas and news; but it doesn't create "clusters" of like-minded ideas that you can follow, and forces everybody to curate their own inputs. This makes it really difficult to jump in, as building a subscription list that provides interesting content and avoids noise has a lot of friction.

epeus 8y ago
You can do that with hashtags, but it is only going to show up within your instance's federation. Gnusocial has ! Groups which do propagate all posts, but mastodon didn't implement that bit.
- TuringTest 8y ago
  Yes, the article mentioned that and that's what made me think about it; it's a different model, close to Twitter but different from other "thematic" social platforms. Matrix.org has a good model for channels (called rooms), groups of channels [1] (called Communities), and distributed identities. I only hope that Matrix.org will become the common background middleware for all federated services, and all these will tend to implement the same features for interoperability. [1] https://medium.com/@RiotChat/communities-aka-groups-are-here-announcing-riot-web-0-13-riot-ios-0-6-and-riot-android-0-7-4-933cb193a28e https://medium.com/@RiotChat/communities-aka-groups-are-here...

throw2016 8y ago

The problem is abuse of power and arbitrary behavior that affects many when they have even a little bit of power. This is what leads to censorship, suppressing views, bubbles and lack of accountability. Mastodon does not solve this in the slightest, just enables thousands of arbitrary admins. At least with Twitter there is one source and its easier to seek some kind of accountability and put a global spotlight on them. With platforms like Mastodon this becomes impossible. We instead quickly develop 'ingroups of admins' quietly suppressing others and not amenable to transparency or accountability. Decentralization is about diffusing control not empowering a super group of admins. If that is what you seek why not just stick to twitter.

Vinnl 8y ago
It does enable you to be your own admin. Sure, it doesn't work if people sign up with arbitrary admins with arbitrary (ab)use of power, but even with an alternative that does "solve" it - it only works if people sign up there.
WorldMaker 8y ago
Be your own "arbitrary" admin in that case? The decentralized nature certainly allows for "competition" between "ingroups of admins". Don't like your current admins? Move to an instance elsewhere. If you have friends, encourage them to follow you in the move. Different instances have different transparency/accountability metrics, and the good ones tend to have that posted in the Instance About page/terms. Many of the "ingroups of admins" people decry have all of their silences/suspends posted publicly and transparently on GitHub repositories and offer suggestions/propose fixes as GitHub issues and PRs. That's certainly way more amenable to transparency/accountability than anything Twitter has ever offered. The things that lead to censorship/suppressing views/bubbles/etc on Mastodon aren't power-hungry admins in a secretive cabal, but instead the same powers that be in the world of email: signal-to-noise management (spam management, "newsletter" management, "fwd: fwd: re:" management). That's as much a user opt-in choice/need as any sort of admin opt-out "power", and if other users think you are more part of the noise rather than the signal, then that's more of a "you" problem, isn't it?
- 8y ago