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Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary
- forrestthewoods 8y agoWhat Mastadon servers do folks here frequent? Which ones are worth your time?
- fabianhjr 8y agosunbeam.city a solarpunk instance.
- WA9ACE 8y agohttps://ruby.social https://ruby.social is geared towards Rubyists but by no means is it restricted to only that topic.
- ar0 8y agoMathstodon is cool, and it allows LaTeX formulas in your toots: https://mathstodon.xyz/about https://mathstodon.xyz/about And if you are into data science and especially data visualisation, also check out vis.social: https://vis.social/about https://vis.social/about Both are also well run, IMHO.
- codewiz 8y agoI picked https://mstdn.io/ https://mstdn.io/ because it's a medium-size instance hosted in Europe, the sysadmin seems very competent, and the site rules seemed reasonable (especially where it says "We only block/silence foreign accounts and instances for legal reasons."). There are quite a few instances where a capricious admin gets to decide what content is acceptable for all their users. Even less transparent and less accountable than corporate censorship.
- gemma 8y agohttps://mastodon.technology https://mastodon.technology is chock full of geeks, so the local timeline is all people's hacks and bugs and side projects. It's one of the older instances, and it's maintained by this guy: https://ashfurrow.com/ https://ashfurrow.com/
- ognarb 8y agolinuxrocks.online is a cool tech-focused instances.
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- pome 8y agoFor *BSD - https://bsd.network/ https://bsd.network/ BTW, maybe exists something like to the "Awesome-Mastodon-Instances" for IT? BSD have instance, Ruby have instance, but how about Python, Linux, Computer Graphics, Game Development and so on. :-)
- fmoralesc 8y agoicosahedron.website and scholar.social are the ones I frequent, I like both a lot.
- diasp 8y agohttps://toot.io https://toot.io is a new free instance.
- wpietri 8y agoAren't these all vanity metrics? [1] Features are swell, and registered users are nice, in that it indicates somebody was at least curious. But how many of those 1,627,557 registered users are, say, active at least once a week for the last 3 months? What's the NPS of Mastodon users after 7, 30, and 90 days? I'd love to see them succeed. But I think it's dangerous for programmers to focus on building a thing rather than serving their users. [1] This isn't a slam; it's a technical term from Eric Ries: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/12/why-vanity-metrics-are-dangerous.html http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/12/why-vanity-metr...
- buovjaga 8y agoStats for the whole federation (from servers that agree to share their stats): https://the-federation.info/ https://the-federation.info/ Last month active users: 478516
- wpietri 8y agoAh, great. There are definitely some non-vanity metrics in there. Thanks!
- unicornporn 8y ago> I think it's dangerous for programmers to focus on building a thing rather than serving their users. It seems Mastodon is an example of programmers actually building something with real ambitions rather than just trying to make big money by trying to form an addiction for their users.
- wpietri 8y agoSure, and that influences the choice of metrics. I think chasing things like user active minutes (UAM) can lead to pathological development. But for a social product, "real ambitions" must include people a) using it, and b) being happy they are using it. But my point is that features and signups can't be ends in themselves, as those are not real ambitions.
- unstuckdev 8y agoI made a toot with 100 boosts the other day on a new account. The average is closer to 10-20. Tweets barely register on accounts with 10x the following. Mastodon might look small, but it's big where it counts. I'm glad Eugen started it, and I'm glad it's thriving. It's like Twitter was before they went impression-obsessed after the 2013/2014 Situation showed them what was possible. And it's all funded by Patreons for the most part.
- piracyde25 8y agoShould I leave Twitter for this? Looks so good.
- vpzom 8y agoThat sort of depends on what you use Twitter for. I used both for a while, but eventually found myself checking Twitter less and less and discovered I didn't really care. Basically just Mastodon and Reddit for me now
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- riffic 8y agoActivityPub the protocol is quite promising and there are other implementations besides Mastodon: https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub What will really get the ball rolling will be organizations such as governments, educational institutions, public libraries, or news agencies that create federated social infrastructure for their own membership.
- djsumdog 8y agoI currently run my own Mastodon server, and wrote some scripts if you want to run your own on Vultr: https://github.com/sumdog/bee2/ https://github.com/sumdog/bee2/ I'm really glad I set this up. Mastodon is an interesting platform; like one big lopsided chatroom. You do have to follow a lot of strangers to get started (unless you can convince a bunch of your friends to join). People also go pretty ban crazy on there. I've been called a "Nazi stooge" and been flagged and reported once ... which went to my instance admin .. which is me. A lot of instances ban entire instances (instances like sealion.club tend to get banned and bofa.lol recently imploded). So running your own ensures you control what you see and not be censored by an instance admin. I'd be interested in following more HN users. I suggest putting your ActivityPub address in your HN profile.
- s73v3r_ 8y agoRunning your own instance ensures that the idiot admin of the instance isn't gonna ban you, but other instances can choose not to federate with you.
- abstractbeliefs 8y agoOn bans, there are frequent waves of new users who migrate away from Twitter to mastodon because they're told that mastodon has instances that are more suited to their personal (typically) political inclinations, and that the other side isn't permitted here and that discussion is more reasoned. It's not really true. What really happens is that people are told that mastodon is the land of milk and honey, and people of all stripes migrate over, and continue to clash. Mastodon brings better tools to deal with it, but the same people import the same negative behaviours but end up on instances that typically reinforce their beliefs. I really hoped that mastodon would be better, but it's really the same noise as twitter but worse - people end up on hyper-polarised instances where war is waged with blocks, bans, and federation filters. At least on twitter you have to share a home with people you don't agree with, here you can build all the walls you want to isolate yourself from anyone who doesn't completely agree with you.
- danso 8y agoI personally find Twitter’s centralization, despite the obvious inherent downsides, to be its defining feature. To be able to have a real-time feed of everything that is being tweeted by anyone in the world on a given keyword or topic is really amazing, as well as the (reasonable) certainty that I’m following/tweeting at the “real” @celebrityaccount. Otherwise, I’d be happy to stick to blogging and Google searches. That said, it’s great to see a community-driven open source social media project and watch its ongoing development. Really loved the reflection from the developer here: > I’m very happy with Mastodon’s accomplishments. Overseeing such a large project has its ups and downs, as it’s impossible to keep everyone happy all the time when people have conflicting desires. Irregardless, I consider these to be the two best years of my life, as work on Mastodon is incredibly fulfilling and interacting with all the interesting people on the platform is very fun.
- sprokolopolis 8y agoEven though Mastodon is decentralized, the interface has a federated timeline that shows toots from all instances that the server federates with. I have found this to feel similar to a centralized, real-time stream of posts like Twitter. The user can still follow hashtags/keywords from most of the users out there. Many of the more popular instances do not federate with a few of the more toxic, anything-goes servers, so the federated timeline won't be completely universal. While that might be true much of the stuff posted on those instances being censored wouldn't be tolerated on a platform like Twitter anyway.
- ndnxhs 8y agoI don't think searching works properly as it only searches posts your instance knows about.
- sprokolopolis 8y agoI think this is true for general full-text searches, but hashtag searches should return toots from the whole federation.
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- natural219 8y agoIt doesn't seem like a lot has been accomplished since launch.
- MrEldritch 8y agoI mean, it successfully created a social network I find enjoyable enough to be my primary social network, and which is sufficiently active + growing that I don't see it dying out the way Diaspora did, so regardless of whether they accomplished a lot, they certainly have accomplished enough
- natural219 8y agoOh yeah. I think Gargron accomplished a lot when he launched the initial version. Just wondering what this list is supposed to communicate. I'd hope for more active development on the critical issues.
- kragen 8y agoI'm finding Mastodon (I'm at https://nerdculture.de/@kragen https://nerdculture.de/@kragen at the moment) to be much more pleasant than Twitter, and much richer than IRC. The vicious culture war stuff on Twitter almost doesn't show up in my Mastodon timeline at all.
- iuwhagtr 8y agoOf course it doesn't show up: most if not all Mastodon servers ban you for having the wrong political ideology, it's in the server rules of most of them.
- unstuckdev 8y agoI skimmed the rules of Mastodon.social: https://mastodon.social/about/more https://mastodon.social/about/more It's the default, and most instances stick with it. None of the items seem controversial. Which one stands out as a problem to you?
- iuwhagtr 8y agoAs an example, that one will ban extreme (and not so extreme) right-wingers. But you also have the opposite in other servers. And of course those servers refuse to federate with others. So there obviously are no flame wars like on Twitter... All ideologies are separated. The reason there are no flame wars is not that Mastodon users are somewhat enlightened, as opposed to the Twitter rabble. Instead, clashes are avoided by having (and enforcing) rules and banning ideologies. The catch here is that this would never scale; this only works because there are only a few users.
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- Lambdanaut 8y agoHowever each instance has its own self contained moderation, allowing moderation to scale horizontally. If an instance is unable to moderate all its users, they can shut down signups temporarily.
- AnaniasAnanas 8y agoMy only issue with Mastodon is that it does not solve the issue of authenticity - you can't verify that a post sent by a user was not forged or modified by one of the servers in the federation. This is where public key crypto could help.
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- RX14 8y agoThis is untrue, Actors have a keypair and inbox POSTs are signed with that key to ensure authenticity. For boosts (Announce), mastodon uses a complex signing algorithm based on JSON-LD, and pleroma just re-requests the post from the original instance and uses that, discarding the relayed object.
- NoGravitas 8y agoIt also (now) can verify that the @my_cool_username@mastodon.social is the same person/group as runs my_cool_web.site, by using a rel=me link on my_cool_web.site. So it ties verification to DNS, which is centralized enough to serve for that kind of verification. You can also prove that you hold both a mastodon identity and an identity on another social network, if the other social network lets you post rel=me links in your profile.
- TarpitCarnivore 8y agoI’ve been enjoying the use of Mastodon, though it’s not fully replaced Twitter for me. There’s a few TV/Movie & Video game related things I enjoy Twitter for. While I’ve settled into two instances on Mastodon the one problem I’m finding is that you do kind of need multiple instances. Some instances, even with decent user bases, just don’t have the correlating activity. That or the user base skews to a time zone which can shift the discussion time. The upside is being able to mute/block from the get go. This helps keep the federated timeline much more quiet. There’s a ton of bots & hashtag heavy people posting reblog kind of stuff. Things that aren’t really much value to a discussion so being able to just declutter that out has been helpful.
- sascha_sl 8y agoI run deadinsi.de. I wrote some kubernetes definitions and they work, but in the end there was too much overhead, uncertainty about storage stability and cost to keep it running on k8s. But if you have access to a cluster and want to try it, here you go: https://github.com/SerenityLaboratories/cluster https://github.com/SerenityLaboratories/cluster It includes a storage provider I wouldn't trust all too much yet and the docs are sparse, but you should be able to get it running if you know Kubernetes.
- heydonovan 8y agoDoes Mastodon suffer from the same problems as Reddit in terms of censorship? I've been part of a few communities that have been banned or quarantined. I'm looking for a platform where freedom of speech is something everyone can have, regardless of opinion.
- zanny 8y agoReddit is a centralized proprietary product, Mastodon is not. The worst that can happen to a user in terms of censorship is: * Your instance banning you, which means you can just join another instance. The hardest thing about Mastodon is chosing an instance whose administration you can trust. The reason the service is valuable and important is that barring any instance being trustable to you you can always start your own. * Another instance banning you (or your entire instance) which just means users on that instance don't see you in the fediverse. This can lead to complications where swarms of instances cooperate their ban lists and thus getting banned from one of them can see you cut out of a swathe of the network, but in practice those using mastodon pride themselves on not centralizing and thus there is limited interest in centralizing moderation like this in the first place. Of note there are degrees of that second kind of ban. The lightest form is that you or your instance just doesn't show up in timelines - users can still find you by other means and follow you. The most severe is the total noop communication with that instance server which means its users don't exist to the instance doing the banning.