11 ms·

The local timeline is the key to enjoying Mastodon

173 points by carlesfe 6y ago

eznzt 6y ago
Twitter used to be like you are describing 10-12 years ago. At least in my country, which is not small, it kinda felt like everybody knew everybody. With time it just turned into... well, what Twitter is now, so I left years ago. I've wanted to find an alternative to it (and IRC), but I don't think a clone with even more draconian moderation rules is the way to go. Also, as I get older I just don't feel like dealing with this kind of stuff.
- holler 6y ago
  another new project in this space is sqwok.im, small beta test community atm but growing
gojomo 6y ago
Twitter lists could conceivably provide the same benefit - curated collections of people likely to enjoy discovering each other – but Twitter's neglect of that feature, and other problems with Twitter, prevent lists from reaching their full potential. Bundling "hosting server" with "shared interests" and "shared norms" has clearly been helpful to a certain style of Mastodon usage, but in the long-term/long-view, still strikes me as a bug not a feature. It still places such usage, and group-formation, at the mercy of a feudal federation of sysop-lords, "my land my rules". The creation of lists/communities-of-commonality that can transcend any one server/delivery-path choice seems the purest option, with the most headroom for generative expansions. It should be most possible in identity-based, server-oblivious systems, like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB).
- vkou 6y ago
  > The creation of lists/communities-of-commonality that can transcend any one server/delivery-path choice seems the purest option, with the most headroom for generative expansions. It should be most possible in identity-based, server-oblivious systems, like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB). Who will moderate these cross-instance communities?
  - gojomo 6y ago
    I imagine some would be moderated by their founders, and others might adopt conventions where their members moderate. Moderation in such server-oblivious systems would chiefly be a label applied: "this conforms to our norms" or "this doesn't conform". Being a member-in-good-standing of a community would be a standing default that one's messaging is presumed conformant. Violations beyond the tolerance of the community would flip that "presumed conformant" bit to "presumed in violation", so that software wanting to show the community-conformant view knows what to do. (This only requires cryptographic identities & messaging, not centralized server sysops with delete privileges.)
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      Presumably it would be like classic mailing list moderation where the email server hosting the list might not be the server hosting any of the participants.
itronitron 6y ago
Discord feels like it is filling this niche. I try to get interested in Mastodon occasionally but I am consistently put off from it as I never quite know what I am looking at.
criddell 6y ago
If Mastodon is easy to use incorrectly, then maybe the problem isn't entirely on the user's end.
andrewrothman 6y ago
I have a Mastodon account. I just tried visiting the local timeline of a different instance, as recommended, and I have to say it was a much more engaging experience than I had had before on my account's instance. Is there any chance for a federated interaction to effectively replace the local timeline? It'd be cool to be able to jump into a "community timeline" without that being tied to your account's "instance" (ie. using one account for multiple interests). Thanks for the tip!
- rhn_mk1 6y ago
  How to check a local timeline before registering?
  - bubersson 6y ago
    Usually it's under /public link. For example https://fosstodon.org/public https://fosstodon.org/public .
stingraycharles 6y ago
“ The problem most people have with Mastodon is that they "get bored" with it quickly. I've seen it a lot, and it means one thing: the person created their account on the wrong server.” And this is exactly why I haven’t created an account yet. I went to Mastadon, and saw that I needed to choose a community. There are many communities I may like, and I have no idea how each community behaves until I actually join it. I use Linux and I like FOSS and I am still an oldschool BSD nerd, and I also like regional communities. So which one do I choose? I cannot even explore a server’s users and posts from the community list. And then I created an account in the wrong server, and then what? Can I migrate my account to another server? Mastadon gives me a bit of the nostalgic feelings of the early internet of the 90s. In The Netherlands we had something called “The Digital City” (de Digitale Stad) which Mastadon reminds me of, combined with the IRC geekiness. But at least with IRC I could join multiple servers and a whole plethora of channels from a single client, so I didn’t have to “commit” to a single server and make the wrong choice. All in all I want to try Mastadon, but the choices I need to make (and fear of making the wrong choice!) before I can even join and experience it scares me.
- vdddv 6y ago
  "I use Linux and I like FOSS and I am still an oldschool BSD nerd, and I also like regional communities." FOSStodon is the obvious choice https://fosstodon.org/public https://fosstodon.org/public But I think the article actually misses the main point about Mastodon. You an follow and interact with people on any instances.
  - stingraycharles 6y ago
    But then why is it so important to choose the right server? The author asserts that choosing the right server is essential to your experience of Mastadon, is that not the case? Also the author says that I should choose a community between 500 and 5000 people, which fosstodon exceeds. All in all, my point is, there are so many choices and decisions to make before I can even create an account and experience it. It’s fairly common knowledge that people actually don’t like choice. When you go to a restaurant and see a menu with 100 choices, people actually enjoy their meal less than when there would be little choice; they have this nagging feeling of “was that other choice perhaps better?” For me, Mastadon has the same problem. Too much choice is a bug, not a feature.
jwildeboer 6y ago
Nah. Just go masto.host with your own sub domain and pay the few bucks a month to enjoy true decentralisation. Meet me as jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net.
- olah_1 6y ago
  If it really was a few bucks per month, I would consider it. Frankly though, I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone that thinks their random thoughts are worth $8 USD per month.
  - andrewzah 6y ago
    That's not quite accurate. Parent comment was referring to self-hosting their own instance (as opposed to joining a hosted instance like mastodon.social, or whatever). It costs nothing to join those, but some people like having their own node on the federated network. If you have a raspberry pi you can self-host pleroma and still follow mastodon users that you like. Mastodon is a bit resource intensive for a pi still, I believe.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    The way I saw it I probably saw way more than $8/month in ads per month on Twitter before I quit Twitter for Mastodon (especially when you count brands getting retweeted everywhere for essentially free marketing on their part), and as an "ad removal" fee, Masto.host or someone else is still a good idea to own your own social media with basically no brands trying for "engagement" and definitely no ads or "Promoted Posts". It's not that the stuff I post is worth that much a month to spin it out into the network, but that it has been worth it to have so much control over what I receive from the network, including no ads and no "brands".
jb1991 6y ago
> Mastodon is to Linux what Twitter is to Windows. Weird phrasing there! I think the author meant: Mastodon is to Twitter what Linux is to Windows.
- rhn_mk1 6y ago
  It checks out though! Let ML be the difference between Mastodon and Linux, and Twitter and Windows differ by ML too. That reflects the original sentence. Let's call MT the difference between Mastodon and Twitter. From the first sentence, Linux is separated from Mastodon by ML, and from Twitter by both ML and MT, and from Windows by ML, and MT, and ML again. But because Twitter and Windows difference is analogous but opposite to Linux and Mastodon difference, we can ignore them, so Linux is separated from Windows by MT, the separation of Mastodon to Twitter. Which is exactly what the reworded version says.
  - jb1991 6y ago
    Sigh.
- carlesfe 6y ago
  Thanks! Fixed
olah_1 6y ago
> Mastodon, instead, has an extra layer between your network and the whole world: messages from people on your server. This is called the local timeline. This is not the right way to do decentralized social media imo. Why not just use a real social graph? If I want to branch out, just show me all of my 2nd degree contacts (friends of friends) and their content?
- andrewzah 6y ago
  I believe the idea is like-minded people will join the same node as you. E.g. fosstodon, ruby.social, writing.exchange probably have people interested in those things. Or non-English speaking instances, etc. Not to mention people interested in the same rules like nudity being outright forbidden or being hidden by a spoiler tag.
  - maddyboo 6y ago
    The biggest issue for me is that I have more than one serious interest. I don’t want to pick just one. I feel this design encourages monoculture and echo chambers rather than diversity of ideas.
    - kixiQu 6y ago
      this is why it's very common for people to have multiple alts on mastodon, different from twitter where I basically only see alts for nsfw content.
    - enneff 6y ago
      On the contrary I think this design encourages a lot of different cultures to develop. Each instance had its own rules and etiquette, so the diversity of tone and topic across mastodon is greater than on twitter ime.
- mxuribe 6y ago
  May i infer from your question that you have not experienced the fediverse (nor software like Mastodon) yet? If not, may i invite you to kindly give it a try. Beyond the users of one's network and the local timeline, there is also what is known as the "whole known network". At some points, it is quite broad and doses not address the perceived shortcoming that you asked/commented on. At other times - because of how the different instaces and their relevant users are connected - it may in effect operate in a fashion that you noted. No offense to you, but normally, i would not go out of my way to invite folks to the fediverse...but it sounds like your question is legitimate so i really wish to invite you so that you can learn for yourself how deep the rabbit hole can go. Please visit https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse Enjoy!
BeetleB 6y ago
I joined Mastodon some years ago, but I did not use it for long. I eventually realized the same - you need to find an instance with people/content that you like/relate to. The thing is: Do I really want another time sink? I've been on the Internet for over 20 years, and I think whatever gains I could have gotten from online forums/discussions have been attained. Time is a premium, and I'm actively trying to quash sites where I just browse for new content. I spend way too much time on HN as it is, and at some point I'll probably find a way to temporarily disable my account for a year or so (e.g. set a password that is a pain to access).
- tartoran 6y ago
  Just my thougts as well. I guess we are simply another category. There is a variety out there, it’s a good thing. Aside form timesinks, communities are a necessary part of the human development, I am hopeful to see a changing trend where people move the part of the community in the real world and use the technology part to solve the logistics
- musingsole 6y ago
  > Do I really want another time sink? Most probably not, but I think the argument is it's a better time sink than the other social platforms it competes with.
barkingcat 6y ago
There's no way to use a website "wrong" ... clickbait title.
- dinkleberg 6y ago
  I thought it was a much less clickbait title than the standard “you are using X wrong”
amelius 6y ago
Mastodon should implement "events" as they exist in Facebook. And provide a scraper for FB events which users can run.
- TobTobXX 6y ago
  Unfamiliar with FB. What are those "Events"?
  - amelius 6y ago
    Organizations post events. Users indicate that they go to these events by clicking the "Going" button. Friends of these users then know where to go to see their friends (or to find the best place to go to see most of their friends).
- input_sh 6y ago
  FramaSoft is building exactly that (minus the scraping): https://joinmobilizon.org/en/ https://joinmobilizon.org/en/ Supports federation, so you should be able to RSVP using Mastodon or any other compatible software.
  - mxuribe 6y ago
    Oops, i guess i should have refreshed before my posting. :-)
  - amelius 6y ago
    Interesting. How do they plan to solve the problem of the "network effect" (i.e. event organizers posting events only to FB because it has the most users?)
- mxuribe 6y ago
  The fediverse has the beginnings of (federated) events - and associated software. There is great desire for this functionality all around. Not sure if @Gargron (the creator and main contributor of Mastodon) will be implementing this on his Mastodon software or if he'll incorporate what others accomplish around the standard/protocol (also, not sure if ActiviyPub does or does not include events already). Here are some fediverse platforms that are already making forays into events (which will/should eventually be used by platforms such as Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.): https://joinmobilizon.org/en/faq https://joinmobilizon.org/en/faq https://gettogether.community/about/ https://gettogether.community/about/
arkanciscan 6y ago
Mastodon doesn't prevent censorship. If anything it makes it worse. Instead of dealing with professional community managers operating with clear rules, you are at the mercy of some random nerd running a server from his mom's basement. You can run your own instance, but then you're just talking to yourself. Nothing is stopping you from building your own Twitter, hell we had blogs for years before Twitter. You go to Twitter so you don't have to promote yourself to get an audience, and abiding by Twitter's censorship policies is the cost of admission.
- kixiQu 6y ago
  Literally nothing about this article is about censorship. (Also, I have a ~single-user instance and... follow and have followers through federation? As is the essential point of the software)
  - arkanciscan 6y ago
    > Yes, some users really do migrate there to avoid censorship or bullying Literally
    - kixiQu 6y ago
      > ....but, for most of us, that will not be the case. Article then written 100% about Not That. Really: thinking this had anything to do with censorship would only be defensible in the context of a realllll naive bag-of-words model, not a human brain.
- 67868018 6y ago
  I run my own instance and talk to thousands of people on their own instances every day. I don't think you know how this works. Its federation, like email. People with GMail accounts can communicate with Yahoo users in case you missed that...
  - arkanciscan 6y ago
    Gmail can also ban you
kixiQu 6y ago
* You can move your account to a different local server * If you use a personal server for privacy reasons, you can still get into Mastodon! My tactic was to look at the profile of anyone who was boosted onto my timeline a couple times and to be very liberal with follows... and then to unfollow anyone whose posts ended up being more annoying than valuable. It's not as a big deal because you will only see that person's content; if you end up following someone you don't like, it won't "pollute your recommendations" or whatever.
betwixthewires 6y ago
For me that would mean I see one other person and a bot. I do like my instance though, the other person is the admin and is a reasonable person. I've been on larger instances with more interesting people before. I've found following certain instances and looking for people that interest you works better.
grishka 6y ago
Sorry but I have to disagree. Most connections most people have on social media are with those they already know. This is what Mastodon ignores. Mastodon assumes you want to follow random like-minded people, but offers absolutely no tools for the overwhelmingly more relevant use case of finding your existing friends in the fediverse and following them. In other words, it offers no sensible way to bootstrap your network. This leads to a weird UX: you pick an instance, you sign up, you flip through the onboarding, and now what? This lack of discernible way forward drives people away. They sign up, play with it for a bit, like some cat pictures Eugen boosts, and abandon their account. Virtually all social services that had any semblance of success offered at least one of two ways to bootstrap your network when you signed up: a global search of some sort, or importing your contact list form somewhere else (Facebook/Twitter, phonebook, etc). Mastodon offers none. Now, I understand that it's a technical challenge to have anything resembling globally-searchable account directory in a decentralized environment, but it's certainly solvable. I'm thinking of DHT for my fediverse project for example.
- wan23 6y ago
  > Most connections most people have on social media are with those they already know This definitely depends on what kind of social media you like. Facebook is for following people you know. Twitter is for following people you're interested in hearing from but don't necessarily know personally. Tiktok is for watching videos that you find entertaining from anyone who posts that type of video. Tumblr is about following your interests and finding people who post content you like and potentially interacting with them anonymously.
alkonaut 6y ago
I still don’t get it. If the author is into FOSS and could choose between one of the FOSS servers or the Catalan one... how would you choose? On Twitter I have 3 groups of people I follow (tech, sports, politics). Choosing one topic for a server wouldn’t that mean my local timeline would have people going on and on about one of my topics, but virtually nothing about the others? That would be extremely boring.
- spiffytech 6y ago
  My impression is Mastodon expects you to join a server oriented towards some particular interest group, then to find and follow individual users from other Mastodon servers who you want to hear from. But it seems to be designed with the expectation that most of your read/write will be inside your chosen server. That doesn't sound well-aligned with common use cases.
  - lokedhs 6y ago
    I'm not sure it was ever designed with that in mind. Almost all my interaction is with people on other instances, and I'm pretty sure that's true for most people (unless you're on gab, as they are blocked by everybody)
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    I feel like this is a common fallacy about Mastodon and something I disagree with the article here about. In my view the local timeline is a mostly useless red herring that sometimes causes new users to the network to suffer analysis paralysis (you see several comments here about "but which one do I join???"). For what it is worth, I'm a solo user of a personal instance and my local timeline is indeed useless and just everything I've posted. Though I agree with the article that the Federated timeline is also useless. (Who reads the public Everything on Twitter feed? It's a fast scrolling mess of useless. Federated is that.) The only timeline that matters is the Home timeline where you see the people you follow, and who they boost (if you like). That's just like Twitter. The whole point of Federation is that it doesn't matter which instance you are on you should be able to follow just about anyone you want. As others point out, focusing people on the local timeline forces people to "pick a lunch table in high school" before feeling like they can use the network. It's a distraction when picking an instance, and it's a "sunk cost fallacy" feeling that leads to so much of the angst about "portable identity" because it puts the cart before the horse. It ties you identity to something someone else owns "the cafeteria table", rather that the classic answer in federated systems: if you want a portable identity that you own/control, get your own domain name. (Yes, that's a tough answer for non-technical average users, but there are solutions to that too, just as "custom domain email host" is just about googleable to solve today there are a couple of Mastodon hosts that will run just about everything for you and BYOD or buy one through an affiliate link with them.)
fernly 6y ago
This post caused me to log in to Mastodon for the first time in quite a while, I joined it from curiosity -- when? I have no idea and that is not shown in my Profile. Let's say, 2018? Well, what server am I on? At the time I picked it because a well-known blogger I follow was on it. The timeline today is not offensive, but not interesting either. Which server is it? I have no idea, it is not shown in my profile. What other servers are available? There is no way to answer that question from the home page (https://mastodon.social/web/timelines/home https://mastodon.social/web/timelines/home). Several links in posts here go to joinMastodon.org, a site that I'd never have known about except for this HN post. While the list at joinmastodon.org/communities is interesting, it is also very shallow (where are "writing", "philosophy", "atheism", "photography" -- to name only a few of my reddit subs?) and, crucially, there is no search box!!
- ikt 6y ago
  > Which server is it? I have no idea, it is not shown in my profile. It's in your username and the domain, eg.: @username@fosstodon.org, so the server is fosstodon.org. What's your username and that should tell you.
  - fernly 6y ago
    Thank you! I appear to be at mastodon.social.
charliebrownau 6y ago
Dont expect to get tell the truth IQ RACE GENDER REGION JEWS on any Mastodon pod/server Its heavly censored by Global Leftists, sjw and feminists that cant handle factual debate
charliebrownau 6y ago
I recommend open minded people consider using * Gab * Minds * Bitchute
Yizahi 6y ago
Tried Mastodon several times, but I came from Facebook and LJ, not from Twitter. UI is artificially limited both in characters and in physical size, timelines is a chaos of disconnected posts which behave essentially like stories - if you've missed it then it's gone. No search, no prioritization, no groups. And picking an instance is as hard today as it was years ago. What if I'm not interested in the specifically FOSS Linux area of computer technology or in the LGBT?
criddell 6y ago
Is there such a thing as a meta-server where I could join all the servers to get a Twitter-like experience?
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Every server lets you follow (just about) whoever you want, that's the important nature of Federation. If you mean specifically "the firehose" of the public Twitter feed, the Federated Timeline of an instance is generally pretty close firehose of its own (it shows every public toot known to the instance from all the servers it "sees"), depending on instance size you join. Join a large instance and the Local and Federated Timelines both can give you a Twitter-like "firehose". Some of the crazier, larger instances even have bots trying to follow every public account on every server they can find to make their Federated Timeline "as complete as possible". I don't personally recommend joining an instance like that I don't really see a point in that, but such servers exist.
  - criddell 6y ago
    > I don't personally recommend joining an instance like that I don't really see a point in that, but such servers exist. I think the point is to make it as close to Twitter as possible. Internally, Twitter itself must be a federation of servers, right?
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      That's just it, though, I don't understand why you'd want to "make it as close to Twitter as possible". From at least one point of view, the whole point to move to something like Mastodon is to move to something improved over Twitter and recreating incidental parts of Twitter like a single "public master feed" isn't necessary. It's that centralized, combined fire hose of a "public feed" that I don't understand the point of in 2020 (other than for ethically questionable reasons). In fact, as a Twitter early adopter I watched the public feed go from a useless but sometimes interesting curio that sometimes had fun surprises to a useless fire hose full of uninteresting garbage and not worth sifting through. The Federated Timeline on every Mastodon instance gets that wild that most people turn off or ignore the Federated Timeline. I certainly find it even more pointless to use bots to try to ramp that fire hose all the way up to "as much of the network as possible at all times". I just cannot see an ethical use of that today, and I cannot see why someone would want that when Twitter itself proves that a single massive public feed is way more of a bug than a feature.
Smithalicious 6y ago
Is Pleroma competitive with Mastodon? It's seems to be much smaller, is there a large enough selection of viable servers?

173 points by carlesfe 6y ago

Twitter used to be like you are describing 10-12 years ago. At least in my country, which is not small, it kinda felt like everybody knew everybody. With time it just turned into... well, what Twitter is now, so I left years ago. I've wanted to find an alternative to it (and IRC), but I don't think a clone with even more draconian moderation rules is the way to go. Also, as I get older I just don't feel like dealing with this kind of stuff.

holler 6y ago
another new project in this space is sqwok.im, small beta test community atm but growing

gojomo 6y ago

Twitter lists could conceivably provide the same benefit - curated collections of people likely to enjoy discovering each other – but Twitter's neglect of that feature, and other problems with Twitter, prevent lists from reaching their full potential. Bundling "hosting server" with "shared interests" and "shared norms" has clearly been helpful to a certain style of Mastodon usage, but in the long-term/long-view, still strikes me as a bug not a feature. It still places such usage, and group-formation, at the mercy of a feudal federation of sysop-lords, "my land my rules". The creation of lists/communities-of-commonality that can transcend any one server/delivery-path choice seems the purest option, with the most headroom for generative expansions. It should be most possible in identity-based, server-oblivious systems, like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB).

vkou 6y ago
> The creation of lists/communities-of-commonality that can transcend any one server/delivery-path choice seems the purest option, with the most headroom for generative expansions. It should be most possible in identity-based, server-oblivious systems, like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB). Who will moderate these cross-instance communities?
- gojomo 6y ago
  I imagine some would be moderated by their founders, and others might adopt conventions where their members moderate. Moderation in such server-oblivious systems would chiefly be a label applied: "this conforms to our norms" or "this doesn't conform". Being a member-in-good-standing of a community would be a standing default that one's messaging is presumed conformant. Violations beyond the tolerance of the community would flip that "presumed conformant" bit to "presumed in violation", so that software wanting to show the community-conformant view knows what to do. (This only requires cryptographic identities & messaging, not centralized server sysops with delete privileges.)
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Presumably it would be like classic mailing list moderation where the email server hosting the list might not be the server hosting any of the participants.

itronitron 6y ago

Discord feels like it is filling this niche. I try to get interested in Mastodon occasionally but I am consistently put off from it as I never quite know what I am looking at.

criddell 6y ago

If Mastodon is easy to use incorrectly, then maybe the problem isn't entirely on the user's end.

andrewrothman 6y ago

I have a Mastodon account. I just tried visiting the local timeline of a different instance, as recommended, and I have to say it was a much more engaging experience than I had had before on my account's instance. Is there any chance for a federated interaction to effectively replace the local timeline? It'd be cool to be able to jump into a "community timeline" without that being tied to your account's "instance" (ie. using one account for multiple interests). Thanks for the tip!

rhn_mk1 6y ago
How to check a local timeline before registering?
- bubersson 6y ago
  Usually it's under /public link. For example https://fosstodon.org/public https://fosstodon.org/public .

stingraycharles 6y ago

“ The problem most people have with Mastodon is that they "get bored" with it quickly. I've seen it a lot, and it means one thing: the person created their account on the wrong server.” And this is exactly why I haven’t created an account yet. I went to Mastadon, and saw that I needed to choose a community. There are many communities I may like, and I have no idea how each community behaves until I actually join it. I use Linux and I like FOSS and I am still an oldschool BSD nerd, and I also like regional communities. So which one do I choose? I cannot even explore a server’s users and posts from the community list. And then I created an account in the wrong server, and then what? Can I migrate my account to another server? Mastadon gives me a bit of the nostalgic feelings of the early internet of the 90s. In The Netherlands we had something called “The Digital City” (de Digitale Stad) which Mastadon reminds me of, combined with the IRC geekiness. But at least with IRC I could join multiple servers and a whole plethora of channels from a single client, so I didn’t have to “commit” to a single server and make the wrong choice. All in all I want to try Mastadon, but the choices I need to make (and fear of making the wrong choice!) before I can even join and experience it scares me.

vdddv 6y ago
"I use Linux and I like FOSS and I am still an oldschool BSD nerd, and I also like regional communities." FOSStodon is the obvious choice https://fosstodon.org/public https://fosstodon.org/public But I think the article actually misses the main point about Mastodon. You an follow and interact with people on any instances.
- stingraycharles 6y ago
  But then why is it so important to choose the right server? The author asserts that choosing the right server is essential to your experience of Mastadon, is that not the case? Also the author says that I should choose a community between 500 and 5000 people, which fosstodon exceeds. All in all, my point is, there are so many choices and decisions to make before I can even create an account and experience it. It’s fairly common knowledge that people actually don’t like choice. When you go to a restaurant and see a menu with 100 choices, people actually enjoy their meal less than when there would be little choice; they have this nagging feeling of “was that other choice perhaps better?” For me, Mastadon has the same problem. Too much choice is a bug, not a feature.

jwildeboer 6y ago

Nah. Just go masto.host with your own sub domain and pay the few bucks a month to enjoy true decentralisation. Meet me as jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net.

olah_1 6y ago
If it really was a few bucks per month, I would consider it. Frankly though, I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone that thinks their random thoughts are worth $8 USD per month.
- andrewzah 6y ago
  That's not quite accurate. Parent comment was referring to self-hosting their own instance (as opposed to joining a hosted instance like mastodon.social, or whatever). It costs nothing to join those, but some people like having their own node on the federated network. If you have a raspberry pi you can self-host pleroma and still follow mastodon users that you like. Mastodon is a bit resource intensive for a pi still, I believe.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  The way I saw it I probably saw way more than $8/month in ads per month on Twitter before I quit Twitter for Mastodon (especially when you count brands getting retweeted everywhere for essentially free marketing on their part), and as an "ad removal" fee, Masto.host or someone else is still a good idea to own your own social media with basically no brands trying for "engagement" and definitely no ads or "Promoted Posts". It's not that the stuff I post is worth that much a month to spin it out into the network, but that it has been worth it to have so much control over what I receive from the network, including no ads and no "brands".

jb1991 6y ago

> Mastodon is to Linux what Twitter is to Windows. Weird phrasing there! I think the author meant: Mastodon is to Twitter what Linux is to Windows.

rhn_mk1 6y ago
It checks out though! Let ML be the difference between Mastodon and Linux, and Twitter and Windows differ by ML too. That reflects the original sentence. Let's call MT the difference between Mastodon and Twitter. From the first sentence, Linux is separated from Mastodon by ML, and from Twitter by both ML and MT, and from Windows by ML, and MT, and ML again. But because Twitter and Windows difference is analogous but opposite to Linux and Mastodon difference, we can ignore them, so Linux is separated from Windows by MT, the separation of Mastodon to Twitter. Which is exactly what the reworded version says.
- jb1991 6y ago
  Sigh.
carlesfe 6y ago
Thanks! Fixed

olah_1 6y ago

> Mastodon, instead, has an extra layer between your network and the whole world: messages from people on your server. This is called the local timeline. This is not the right way to do decentralized social media imo. Why not just use a real social graph? If I want to branch out, just show me all of my 2nd degree contacts (friends of friends) and their content?

andrewzah 6y ago
I believe the idea is like-minded people will join the same node as you. E.g. fosstodon, ruby.social, writing.exchange probably have people interested in those things. Or non-English speaking instances, etc. Not to mention people interested in the same rules like nudity being outright forbidden or being hidden by a spoiler tag.
- maddyboo 6y ago
  The biggest issue for me is that I have more than one serious interest. I don’t want to pick just one. I feel this design encourages monoculture and echo chambers rather than diversity of ideas.
  - kixiQu 6y ago
    this is why it's very common for people to have multiple alts on mastodon, different from twitter where I basically only see alts for nsfw content.
  - enneff 6y ago
    On the contrary I think this design encourages a lot of different cultures to develop. Each instance had its own rules and etiquette, so the diversity of tone and topic across mastodon is greater than on twitter ime.
mxuribe 6y ago
May i infer from your question that you have not experienced the fediverse (nor software like Mastodon) yet? If not, may i invite you to kindly give it a try. Beyond the users of one's network and the local timeline, there is also what is known as the "whole known network". At some points, it is quite broad and doses not address the perceived shortcoming that you asked/commented on. At other times - because of how the different instaces and their relevant users are connected - it may in effect operate in a fashion that you noted. No offense to you, but normally, i would not go out of my way to invite folks to the fediverse...but it sounds like your question is legitimate so i really wish to invite you so that you can learn for yourself how deep the rabbit hole can go. Please visit https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse Enjoy!

BeetleB 6y ago

I joined Mastodon some years ago, but I did not use it for long. I eventually realized the same - you need to find an instance with people/content that you like/relate to. The thing is: Do I really want another time sink? I've been on the Internet for over 20 years, and I think whatever gains I could have gotten from online forums/discussions have been attained. Time is a premium, and I'm actively trying to quash sites where I just browse for new content. I spend way too much time on HN as it is, and at some point I'll probably find a way to temporarily disable my account for a year or so (e.g. set a password that is a pain to access).

tartoran 6y ago
Just my thougts as well. I guess we are simply another category. There is a variety out there, it’s a good thing. Aside form timesinks, communities are a necessary part of the human development, I am hopeful to see a changing trend where people move the part of the community in the real world and use the technology part to solve the logistics
musingsole 6y ago
> Do I really want another time sink? Most probably not, but I think the argument is it's a better time sink than the other social platforms it competes with.

barkingcat 6y ago

There's no way to use a website "wrong" ... clickbait title.

dinkleberg 6y ago
I thought it was a much less clickbait title than the standard “you are using X wrong”

amelius 6y ago

Mastodon should implement "events" as they exist in Facebook. And provide a scraper for FB events which users can run.

TobTobXX 6y ago
Unfamiliar with FB. What are those "Events"?
- amelius 6y ago
  Organizations post events. Users indicate that they go to these events by clicking the "Going" button. Friends of these users then know where to go to see their friends (or to find the best place to go to see most of their friends).
input_sh 6y ago
FramaSoft is building exactly that (minus the scraping): https://joinmobilizon.org/en/ https://joinmobilizon.org/en/ Supports federation, so you should be able to RSVP using Mastodon or any other compatible software.
- mxuribe 6y ago
  Oops, i guess i should have refreshed before my posting. :-)
- amelius 6y ago
  Interesting. How do they plan to solve the problem of the "network effect" (i.e. event organizers posting events only to FB because it has the most users?)
mxuribe 6y ago
The fediverse has the beginnings of (federated) events - and associated software. There is great desire for this functionality all around. Not sure if @Gargron (the creator and main contributor of Mastodon) will be implementing this on his Mastodon software or if he'll incorporate what others accomplish around the standard/protocol (also, not sure if ActiviyPub does or does not include events already). Here are some fediverse platforms that are already making forays into events (which will/should eventually be used by platforms such as Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.): https://joinmobilizon.org/en/faq https://joinmobilizon.org/en/faq https://gettogether.community/about/ https://gettogether.community/about/

arkanciscan 6y ago

Mastodon doesn't prevent censorship. If anything it makes it worse. Instead of dealing with professional community managers operating with clear rules, you are at the mercy of some random nerd running a server from his mom's basement. You can run your own instance, but then you're just talking to yourself. Nothing is stopping you from building your own Twitter, hell we had blogs for years before Twitter. You go to Twitter so you don't have to promote yourself to get an audience, and abiding by Twitter's censorship policies is the cost of admission.

kixiQu 6y ago
Literally nothing about this article is about censorship. (Also, I have a ~single-user instance and... follow and have followers through federation? As is the essential point of the software)
- arkanciscan 6y ago
  > Yes, some users really do migrate there to avoid censorship or bullying Literally
  - kixiQu 6y ago
    > ....but, for most of us, that will not be the case. Article then written 100% about Not That. Really: thinking this had anything to do with censorship would only be defensible in the context of a realllll naive bag-of-words model, not a human brain.
67868018 6y ago
I run my own instance and talk to thousands of people on their own instances every day. I don't think you know how this works. Its federation, like email. People with GMail accounts can communicate with Yahoo users in case you missed that...
- arkanciscan 6y ago
  Gmail can also ban you

kixiQu 6y ago

* You can move your account to a different local server * If you use a personal server for privacy reasons, you can still get into Mastodon! My tactic was to look at the profile of anyone who was boosted onto my timeline a couple times and to be very liberal with follows... and then to unfollow anyone whose posts ended up being more annoying than valuable. It's not as a big deal because you will only see that person's content; if you end up following someone you don't like, it won't "pollute your recommendations" or whatever.

betwixthewires 6y ago

For me that would mean I see one other person and a bot. I do like my instance though, the other person is the admin and is a reasonable person. I've been on larger instances with more interesting people before. I've found following certain instances and looking for people that interest you works better.

grishka 6y ago

Sorry but I have to disagree. Most connections most people have on social media are with those they already know. This is what Mastodon ignores. Mastodon assumes you want to follow random like-minded people, but offers absolutely no tools for the overwhelmingly more relevant use case of finding your existing friends in the fediverse and following them. In other words, it offers no sensible way to bootstrap your network. This leads to a weird UX: you pick an instance, you sign up, you flip through the onboarding, and now what? This lack of discernible way forward drives people away. They sign up, play with it for a bit, like some cat pictures Eugen boosts, and abandon their account. Virtually all social services that had any semblance of success offered at least one of two ways to bootstrap your network when you signed up: a global search of some sort, or importing your contact list form somewhere else (Facebook/Twitter, phonebook, etc). Mastodon offers none. Now, I understand that it's a technical challenge to have anything resembling globally-searchable account directory in a decentralized environment, but it's certainly solvable. I'm thinking of DHT for my fediverse project for example.

wan23 6y ago
> Most connections most people have on social media are with those they already know This definitely depends on what kind of social media you like. Facebook is for following people you know. Twitter is for following people you're interested in hearing from but don't necessarily know personally. Tiktok is for watching videos that you find entertaining from anyone who posts that type of video. Tumblr is about following your interests and finding people who post content you like and potentially interacting with them anonymously.

alkonaut 6y ago

I still don’t get it. If the author is into FOSS and could choose between one of the FOSS servers or the Catalan one... how would you choose? On Twitter I have 3 groups of people I follow (tech, sports, politics). Choosing one topic for a server wouldn’t that mean my local timeline would have people going on and on about one of my topics, but virtually nothing about the others? That would be extremely boring.

spiffytech 6y ago
My impression is Mastodon expects you to join a server oriented towards some particular interest group, then to find and follow individual users from other Mastodon servers who you want to hear from. But it seems to be designed with the expectation that most of your read/write will be inside your chosen server. That doesn't sound well-aligned with common use cases.
- lokedhs 6y ago
  I'm not sure it was ever designed with that in mind. Almost all my interaction is with people on other instances, and I'm pretty sure that's true for most people (unless you're on gab, as they are blocked by everybody)
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  I feel like this is a common fallacy about Mastodon and something I disagree with the article here about. In my view the local timeline is a mostly useless red herring that sometimes causes new users to the network to suffer analysis paralysis (you see several comments here about "but which one do I join???"). For what it is worth, I'm a solo user of a personal instance and my local timeline is indeed useless and just everything I've posted. Though I agree with the article that the Federated timeline is also useless. (Who reads the public Everything on Twitter feed? It's a fast scrolling mess of useless. Federated is that.) The only timeline that matters is the Home timeline where you see the people you follow, and who they boost (if you like). That's just like Twitter. The whole point of Federation is that it doesn't matter which instance you are on you should be able to follow just about anyone you want. As others point out, focusing people on the local timeline forces people to "pick a lunch table in high school" before feeling like they can use the network. It's a distraction when picking an instance, and it's a "sunk cost fallacy" feeling that leads to so much of the angst about "portable identity" because it puts the cart before the horse. It ties you identity to something someone else owns "the cafeteria table", rather that the classic answer in federated systems: if you want a portable identity that you own/control, get your own domain name. (Yes, that's a tough answer for non-technical average users, but there are solutions to that too, just as "custom domain email host" is just about googleable to solve today there are a couple of Mastodon hosts that will run just about everything for you and BYOD or buy one through an affiliate link with them.)

fernly 6y ago

This post caused me to log in to Mastodon for the first time in quite a while, I joined it from curiosity -- when? I have no idea and that is not shown in my Profile. Let's say, 2018? Well, what server am I on? At the time I picked it because a well-known blogger I follow was on it. The timeline today is not offensive, but not interesting either. Which server is it? I have no idea, it is not shown in my profile. What other servers are available? There is no way to answer that question from the home page (https://mastodon.social/web/timelines/home https://mastodon.social/web/timelines/home). Several links in posts here go to joinMastodon.org, a site that I'd never have known about except for this HN post. While the list at joinmastodon.org/communities is interesting, it is also very shallow (where are "writing", "philosophy", "atheism", "photography" -- to name only a few of my reddit subs?) and, crucially, there is no search box!!

ikt 6y ago
> Which server is it? I have no idea, it is not shown in my profile. It's in your username and the domain, eg.: @username@fosstodon.org, so the server is fosstodon.org. What's your username and that should tell you.
- fernly 6y ago
  Thank you! I appear to be at mastodon.social.

charliebrownau 6y ago

Dont expect to get tell the truth IQ RACE GENDER REGION JEWS on any Mastodon pod/server Its heavly censored by Global Leftists, sjw and feminists that cant handle factual debate

charliebrownau 6y ago

I recommend open minded people consider using * Gab * Minds * Bitchute

Yizahi 6y ago

Tried Mastodon several times, but I came from Facebook and LJ, not from Twitter. UI is artificially limited both in characters and in physical size, timelines is a chaos of disconnected posts which behave essentially like stories - if you've missed it then it's gone. No search, no prioritization, no groups. And picking an instance is as hard today as it was years ago. What if I'm not interested in the specifically FOSS Linux area of computer technology or in the LGBT?

criddell 6y ago

Is there such a thing as a meta-server where I could join all the servers to get a Twitter-like experience?

WorldMaker 6y ago
Every server lets you follow (just about) whoever you want, that's the important nature of Federation. If you mean specifically "the firehose" of the public Twitter feed, the Federated Timeline of an instance is generally pretty close firehose of its own (it shows every public toot known to the instance from all the servers it "sees"), depending on instance size you join. Join a large instance and the Local and Federated Timelines both can give you a Twitter-like "firehose". Some of the crazier, larger instances even have bots trying to follow every public account on every server they can find to make their Federated Timeline "as complete as possible". I don't personally recommend joining an instance like that I don't really see a point in that, but such servers exist.
- criddell 6y ago
  > I don't personally recommend joining an instance like that I don't really see a point in that, but such servers exist. I think the point is to make it as close to Twitter as possible. Internally, Twitter itself must be a federation of servers, right?
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    That's just it, though, I don't understand why you'd want to "make it as close to Twitter as possible". From at least one point of view, the whole point to move to something like Mastodon is to move to something improved over Twitter and recreating incidental parts of Twitter like a single "public master feed" isn't necessary. It's that centralized, combined fire hose of a "public feed" that I don't understand the point of in 2020 (other than for ethically questionable reasons). In fact, as a Twitter early adopter I watched the public feed go from a useless but sometimes interesting curio that sometimes had fun surprises to a useless fire hose full of uninteresting garbage and not worth sifting through. The Federated Timeline on every Mastodon instance gets that wild that most people turn off or ignore the Federated Timeline. I certainly find it even more pointless to use bots to try to ramp that fire hose all the way up to "as much of the network as possible at all times". I just cannot see an ethical use of that today, and I cannot see why someone would want that when Twitter itself proves that a single massive public feed is way more of a bug than a feature.

Smithalicious 6y ago

Is Pleroma competitive with Mastodon? It's seems to be much smaller, is there a large enough selection of viable servers?