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I'm running pleroma not mastodon but experience here (if I recall) is the same. I think the friend of a friend is a manifestation of "the whole known universe",
by mxuribe 6y ago
I'm running pleroma not mastodon but experience here (if I recall) is the same. I think the friend of a friend is a manifestation of "the whole known universe", unless I'm not remembering correctly.The discovery challenge I reference is very much an initial thing before following that person who then trigger the friend of a friend cascade. At least as I recall. (I went directly from Gnu Social to pleroma so memory is nebulous.)
- WorldMaker 6y agoThe person above you asked if friend-of-a-friend was even possible, and it definitely is. The discovery tools of boost/reply aren't always perfect, but they are a somewhat naturally formed friend-of-a-friend discovery protocol honed from much Twitter experience. Anyway, yes, the initial bootstrap is always the toughest to get those first few accounts to even have friends-of-friends to explore. Like I said, I used a Twitter bridge that let people link their Mastodon and Twitter accounts and if you signed in with Twitter it would show you everyone you followed who had a Mastodon account connected. Unfortunately, that bridge (which was a part of joinmastodon.org) got shut down a couple years back due to maintenance headaches (Twitter API shifts). Asking friends on existing social media if they use Mastodon is still probably the key bootstrap tool even with fewer direct bridges. There've been some "follow me on Mastodon" threads here on HN, too, and I have seen at least a few Mastodon addresses in HN profiles (and more rarely in Twitter profiles and on blogs and elsewhere). It's also a bit of a shame that Keybase's Mastodon support only really supports the Big Instances by design since instances have to be added manually by Keybase staff last I checked.