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I really can't recommend Mastodon highly enough. The interactions on there are just so much more organic than on Twitter. You get to actually have discussions

I really can't recommend Mastodon highly enough. The interactions on there are just so much more organic than on Twitter. You get to actually have discussions with people, instead of aiming for as much snark as possible.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bdz 8y ago
>You get to actually have discussions with people Ofc. Mastodon by nature is an echo chamber. Choose your own enclosure and find people who agree with you. The only difference that Mastodon is the first where that's the main selling point
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  I get what you're saying, but disagree. I receive plenty of pushback, but we have a back and forth and it can often be quite stimulating.
- toyg 8y ago
  There is also self-selection: early adopters will always be, on average, more knowledgeable than mainstream users, which usually correlates with politeness and civility.
- sp332 8y ago
  Sometimes it's just nice to have a conversation, you know? Not everyone is looking for an argument or criticism 100% of the time.
- _red 8y ago
  The trope of "X is an echo-chamber" needs to die out. You say it like high-trust communities are a bad thing. All productive interest groups are that way by their nature (HN is that way too). The opposite simply devolves into lowest common denominator garbage...instagram models posing with their breakfast, twitter outrage-porn, etc.
  - sp332 8y ago
    And in the bad old days of the internet, people wouldn't just pick one group to be part of. You could have different personas on different sites and decide how much to participate with different groups. This is harder to do with Twitter and Facebook because they only run one instance. E.g. there's no "fringe science" echo-chamber Twitter, but that means the fringe science people just get thrown in with the rest of Twitter.
- contravariant 8y ago
  You can have the ability to make an echo chamber without making one. The truly dangerous situation is one where you don't have any control and an echo chamber is made for you.
kabacha 8y ago
I feel the opposite. I don't use twitter but Mastodon is kind of an echo chamber. 1. There's no way to discover content. Sure you can search for tag but that's absurdly inconvenient. The pinable UI is borked and awkward as it allows to subscribe only to one tag. The language filter is laughable at best. 2. There's just so much spam. Just take a look at public or local timeline - if you're not on a small isntance it's just people doing the same pointless messages like "umm spaghetti" 3. Only now proper moderetion tools are introduced - before you'd get suspended with a mysteri 403 error where you can't even log out lol. This was heavily abused by mastodon.social administrator and every github issue closed and purged. I'm so sad to see Mastodon overtake actually well thought out social networks such as Diaspora*. I'm not even touching how much of a step back the whole Fediverse is to XMPP or Federation protocols.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  > 1. There's no way to discover content. Sure you can search for tag but that's absurdly inconvenient Coincidentally, there's a new directory feature to help with just that. Just go onto any 2.7 instance that has it enabled and /explore would list users you might want to follow based on somolar interests, i.e. [1]. 1 - https://mastodon.social/explore https://mastodon.social/explore > There's just so much spam. Either go to a particular interest instance if you want to see a useful local timeline, or follow people and then look at your personal timeline, which is not really different than how Twitter does it. > Only now proper moderation tools are introduced Moderation tools have been pretty robust for a long time. > This was heavily abused by mastodon.social administrator Mastodon.social is based in Germany and has to follow local speech laws, which are more restrictive than in the U.S. It also has several moderators, not just the admin. But you can just join a U.S. based instance, which is the whole point of federation. Now if your content is such that no respectable instance wants to take you, there's still the self-host option, which is quite straight forward with Docker, but perhaps also reconsider why you're getting banned.
  - yrf 8y ago
    That's a big problem there. Mastodon seems to be a EU thing. The bigger instances should consider hosting in a place with free speech. It makes no sense, imagine if all instances were hosted in China.
yogthos 8y ago
Same here, I've been on it for about a year now and I prefer it to Twitter in every single way. One example is that you can turn off tracking boosts and retoots in the notifications. It's complete noise to me, and I find it's just distracting. Twitter splits notifications between all and mentions, but there's no way to stop notifications for things other than mentions. This is just one of the many little things that result in a much nicer user experience for me.
h1d 8y ago
Isn't it due to the ratio of highly motivated people being more on Mastodon or does anything else makes it so? Like HN vs Reddit.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

bdz 8y ago

>You get to actually have discussions with people Ofc. Mastodon by nature is an echo chamber. Choose your own enclosure and find people who agree with you. The only difference that Mastodon is the first where that's the main selling point

AsyncAwait 8y ago
I get what you're saying, but disagree. I receive plenty of pushback, but we have a back and forth and it can often be quite stimulating.
toyg 8y ago
There is also self-selection: early adopters will always be, on average, more knowledgeable than mainstream users, which usually correlates with politeness and civility.
sp332 8y ago
Sometimes it's just nice to have a conversation, you know? Not everyone is looking for an argument or criticism 100% of the time.
_red 8y ago
The trope of "X is an echo-chamber" needs to die out. You say it like high-trust communities are a bad thing. All productive interest groups are that way by their nature (HN is that way too). The opposite simply devolves into lowest common denominator garbage...instagram models posing with their breakfast, twitter outrage-porn, etc.
- sp332 8y ago
  And in the bad old days of the internet, people wouldn't just pick one group to be part of. You could have different personas on different sites and decide how much to participate with different groups. This is harder to do with Twitter and Facebook because they only run one instance. E.g. there's no "fringe science" echo-chamber Twitter, but that means the fringe science people just get thrown in with the rest of Twitter.
contravariant 8y ago
You can have the ability to make an echo chamber without making one. The truly dangerous situation is one where you don't have any control and an echo chamber is made for you.

kabacha 8y ago

I feel the opposite. I don't use twitter but Mastodon is kind of an echo chamber. 1. There's no way to discover content. Sure you can search for tag but that's absurdly inconvenient. The pinable UI is borked and awkward as it allows to subscribe only to one tag. The language filter is laughable at best. 2. There's just so much spam. Just take a look at public or local timeline - if you're not on a small isntance it's just people doing the same pointless messages like "umm spaghetti" 3. Only now proper moderetion tools are introduced - before you'd get suspended with a mysteri 403 error where you can't even log out lol. This was heavily abused by mastodon.social administrator and every github issue closed and purged. I'm so sad to see Mastodon overtake actually well thought out social networks such as Diaspora*. I'm not even touching how much of a step back the whole Fediverse is to XMPP or Federation protocols.

AsyncAwait 8y ago
> 1. There's no way to discover content. Sure you can search for tag but that's absurdly inconvenient Coincidentally, there's a new directory feature to help with just that. Just go onto any 2.7 instance that has it enabled and /explore would list users you might want to follow based on somolar interests, i.e. [1]. 1 - https://mastodon.social/explore https://mastodon.social/explore > There's just so much spam. Either go to a particular interest instance if you want to see a useful local timeline, or follow people and then look at your personal timeline, which is not really different than how Twitter does it. > Only now proper moderation tools are introduced Moderation tools have been pretty robust for a long time. > This was heavily abused by mastodon.social administrator Mastodon.social is based in Germany and has to follow local speech laws, which are more restrictive than in the U.S. It also has several moderators, not just the admin. But you can just join a U.S. based instance, which is the whole point of federation. Now if your content is such that no respectable instance wants to take you, there's still the self-host option, which is quite straight forward with Docker, but perhaps also reconsider why you're getting banned.
- yrf 8y ago
  That's a big problem there. Mastodon seems to be a EU thing. The bigger instances should consider hosting in a place with free speech. It makes no sense, imagine if all instances were hosted in China.

yogthos 8y ago

Same here, I've been on it for about a year now and I prefer it to Twitter in every single way. One example is that you can turn off tracking boosts and retoots in the notifications. It's complete noise to me, and I find it's just distracting. Twitter splits notifications between all and mentions, but there's no way to stop notifications for things other than mentions. This is just one of the many little things that result in a much nicer user experience for me.

h1d 8y ago

Isn't it due to the ratio of highly motivated people being more on Mastodon or does anything else makes it so? Like HN vs Reddit.