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I've hosted a mastodon instance since 2017 and I see one general misunderstanding over and over, on mastodon or on fediverse related subreddits. People think i

I've hosted a mastodon instance since 2017 and I see one general misunderstanding over and over, on mastodon or on fediverse related subreddits. People think it's a completely new concept. People seem to have forgotten, or not been part of, all the message boards we used to have during the late 90s and all throughout the 2000s. The ONLY thing Mastodon brings to this is federation. You used to have accounts on over a dozen message boards, sometimes with different avatar names. Most were special interest groups. All of those boards were hosted by someone. Having lived through that I view Mastodon as a different kind of PunBB software with federation. Because I view it from the perspective of the hoster.

kowlo 6y ago
I thought Mastodon was closer to Twitter than it is to the classic BBS. How is your instance going - did you build a community around it?
- INTPenis 6y ago
  It's close to twitter in features but it's important to understand the hosting aspect. Facebook and Twitter have been hosting our social media for years, in a centralized way. Federation makes this possible for every person, denctralized. So essentially we're back to 12-15 years ago when private people were still hosting message boards for each other. All that changes is that those message boards can now federate content. And everyone who remembers those days know that hosting a message board that became popular was a struggle. Which is why I've opted to keep my instance small through various steps I won't say here but they aren't ground breaking or secret. I just don't want to give away my identity because this is my secret account on HN. After 4 years on the fediverse, listening to issues, reading threads, my opinion is that we should focus on many smaller instance rather than a few huge ones.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Mastodon and the Fediverse have often been advertised as "microblogging" tools, and the post length is mainly around the same as one would see on Twitter. That is a big difference from old-time message boards, where longform text was welcome and normal. (Even if the Fediverse does support long post lengths, that matters little if the community has not embraced it.)
- TheJoYo 6y ago
  writefreely has a better UI for reading long form posts and is quite popular among the academic communities on the fediverse. personally I host a gitea server and link to my longer documentation on my federated account. that gives me a bit more freedom to edit the content and easier to reference. matrix servers are also great for hosting federated long form content.
  - kitotik 6y ago
    Could you expound on using matrix for long form content? I host a synapse homeserver, and feel like I’m not using it to its full potential.
    - TheJoYo 6y ago
      The recent Bluesky report is hosted on matrix.org I don't host content on a matrix service but I imagine it's similar to Slack in that regard. I could be way off on matrix' utility here as I don't use it for my primary publication.
    - rglullis 6y ago
      AFAIK, there is no implementation beyond some proof-of-concepts, but the idea is that Matrix (via bridges) can receive and send activitypub updates and treat them as messages in a room. So you could follow and respond to people on a room and they would receive updates on their ActivityPub server. It This idea is not new, really. Movim (https://movim.eu https://movim.eu) is running a federated social network on top of XMPP for over a decade already.
  - moksha256 6y ago
    > matrix servers are also great for hosting federated long form content. Can you elaborate on that a bit? In my experience, Matrix implementations tend to be Slack/IRC-style chat interfaces. Are you saying you find such interfaces to be good for long-form content, or are there other Matrix implementations that work out well for long-form content?
novok 6y ago
You don't have 'sort by most recent replied to topic' and a forum subtopic view like most message boards do although. There is a hard enforcement of posts sorted by initial post time.
- TheJoYo 6y ago
  Posts can be sorted any which way the frontend is configured to do so. There isn't going to be a fediverse wide "topic" because of the nature of nodes but whatever the instance can see can be presented in any matter desired.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
I don't see how it's the same. Message boards are all silos that don't mingle with each other in any way. You're saying the only part where Mastodon diverges is this thing that makes it markedly unlike message boards. I don't see the connection at all, not even to Proboards/Ezboard which had one global account across many boards. I'd summarize Mastodon as a confusing version of Twitter that most technical people don't even understand. Drawing such a bad analogy like "it's basically like 2000s message boards" just drives this home even further. It's like nobody can explain what it is. Though I suspect it's like monads where people need to drop the belabored metaphors and use simple language. Though then you just end up with something like "it's Twitter but the same UI shows people registered elsewhere."
- andrewzah 6y ago
  I really don't get why the concept of mastodon is so confusing. It's basically twitter/microblogging* with multiple hosts, and you can see posts from other hosts. So instead of just @andrewzah, my handle becomes @andrewzah@<host-I-chose>. You could visualize twitter as @andrewzah@twitter.com, but it's redundant as twitter is the only host. This is basically how email works, no? The only other difference is federation, so you have two timelines instead of one: the entire** federated timeline, and the local timeline to your host. Plus the timeline of users you follow. So unlike twitter, the user must decide what host they want to use. Or they can self-host an instance. I'm not sure if it's up to date, but https://instances.social https://instances.social has a wizard for this. *: IIRC mastodon's default limit is 500 chars, and pleroma's is 2,000. **: One exception: Hosts can block other hosts. So if you use i.e. mastodon.social, you won't see posts from users on blocked hosts unless you specifically follow them.
  - bluesign 6y ago
    I guess problem lies in this part mainly. Choosing host is more important than it should be. Mainly because hosts are trying to do 2 things at the same time: being identity provider and being some kind of content host in federated environment (moderation etc). Because of this when you choosing a host, you are investing too much. Their future policy changes etc will effect you, you cannot afaik move to another host. (like moving your email) When you give people choice, things are much harder. On other platforms we have few choices depending on what you will publish (media type mainly), but here more like topic based separation, which is making things tricky, as we are humans with many different sides.
richard_todd 6y ago
Fidonet used to provide the federation across message boards in the BBS era, so there is literally nothing new. Really the new thing was smartphones opening up microblogging to average people who want to track celebrities and pretend what they had for lunch is worth sharing. (Edited to clarify fidonet was in the BBS era)
- TheJoYo 6y ago
  I agree but I think there's potential for celebrity owned and managed federated instances. Twitter doesn't really give handlers the tools to manage their celebrity client, otherwise we would have seen things with Trump go very differently. An owned and managed instance can invest heavily into moderation and image cultivation in ways that Facebook and Twitter will never provide. The whole thing with Wil Wheaton on mastodon.cloud was a good example of what goes wrong, however.
  - riffic 6y ago
    I'd really like to see Twitter white-label their app as a managed SaaS on custom domains. Perhaps that's what Bluesky is intended to be.
    - TheJoYo 6y ago
      I don't have much hope for Bluesky. Twitter could re-enable RSS if they really wanted to show that their interest was genuine.
      - riffic 6y ago
        > I don't have much hope for Bluesky. me neither. I think, based on Twitter's track record, people should remain skeptical until shown otherwise. They haven't delivered much to prove they're willing to do the right thing.
- skybrian 6y ago
  Fidonet boards exchanged messages overnight so the propagation delay was much longer. Also, the topology was different. I don't think the idea of each user publishing a public stream of messages that others subscribe to was a thing back then? Instead you would post messages in forums.
throwaway894345 6y ago
Can I browse another server from mastodon? it seems I can only choose from my feed (people i follow), the local feed (my server), or the global feed. This is a really rough experience because my server is one of the big generic servers so there is no specific discussion and indeed it’s mostly people and bots screaming into the void, and of course the global feed is the same except the volume of posts is much larger and now half of the feed is in a foreign language.
- TheJoYo 6y ago
  You don't need an account on an instance to view the instance. Mastodon, for example, can be configured to display popular users of that instance. https://mastodon.social/explore/popular https://mastodon.social/explore/popular

kowlo 6y ago

I thought Mastodon was closer to Twitter than it is to the classic BBS. How is your instance going - did you build a community around it?

INTPenis 6y ago
It's close to twitter in features but it's important to understand the hosting aspect. Facebook and Twitter have been hosting our social media for years, in a centralized way. Federation makes this possible for every person, denctralized. So essentially we're back to 12-15 years ago when private people were still hosting message boards for each other. All that changes is that those message boards can now federate content. And everyone who remembers those days know that hosting a message board that became popular was a struggle. Which is why I've opted to keep my instance small through various steps I won't say here but they aren't ground breaking or secret. I just don't want to give away my identity because this is my secret account on HN. After 4 years on the fediverse, listening to issues, reading threads, my opinion is that we should focus on many smaller instance rather than a few huge ones.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

Mastodon and the Fediverse have often been advertised as "microblogging" tools, and the post length is mainly around the same as one would see on Twitter. That is a big difference from old-time message boards, where longform text was welcome and normal. (Even if the Fediverse does support long post lengths, that matters little if the community has not embraced it.)

TheJoYo 6y ago
writefreely has a better UI for reading long form posts and is quite popular among the academic communities on the fediverse. personally I host a gitea server and link to my longer documentation on my federated account. that gives me a bit more freedom to edit the content and easier to reference. matrix servers are also great for hosting federated long form content.
- kitotik 6y ago
  Could you expound on using matrix for long form content? I host a synapse homeserver, and feel like I’m not using it to its full potential.
  - TheJoYo 6y ago
    The recent Bluesky report is hosted on matrix.org I don't host content on a matrix service but I imagine it's similar to Slack in that regard. I could be way off on matrix' utility here as I don't use it for my primary publication.
  - rglullis 6y ago
    AFAIK, there is no implementation beyond some proof-of-concepts, but the idea is that Matrix (via bridges) can receive and send activitypub updates and treat them as messages in a room. So you could follow and respond to people on a room and they would receive updates on their ActivityPub server. It This idea is not new, really. Movim (https://movim.eu https://movim.eu) is running a federated social network on top of XMPP for over a decade already.
- moksha256 6y ago
  > matrix servers are also great for hosting federated long form content. Can you elaborate on that a bit? In my experience, Matrix implementations tend to be Slack/IRC-style chat interfaces. Are you saying you find such interfaces to be good for long-form content, or are there other Matrix implementations that work out well for long-form content?

novok 6y ago

You don't have 'sort by most recent replied to topic' and a forum subtopic view like most message boards do although. There is a hard enforcement of posts sorted by initial post time.

TheJoYo 6y ago
Posts can be sorted any which way the frontend is configured to do so. There isn't going to be a fediverse wide "topic" because of the nature of nodes but whatever the instance can see can be presented in any matter desired.

hombre_fatal 6y ago

I don't see how it's the same. Message boards are all silos that don't mingle with each other in any way. You're saying the only part where Mastodon diverges is this thing that makes it markedly unlike message boards. I don't see the connection at all, not even to Proboards/Ezboard which had one global account across many boards. I'd summarize Mastodon as a confusing version of Twitter that most technical people don't even understand. Drawing such a bad analogy like "it's basically like 2000s message boards" just drives this home even further. It's like nobody can explain what it is. Though I suspect it's like monads where people need to drop the belabored metaphors and use simple language. Though then you just end up with something like "it's Twitter but the same UI shows people registered elsewhere."

andrewzah 6y ago
I really don't get why the concept of mastodon is so confusing. It's basically twitter/microblogging* with multiple hosts, and you can see posts from other hosts. So instead of just @andrewzah, my handle becomes @andrewzah@<host-I-chose>. You could visualize twitter as @andrewzah@twitter.com, but it's redundant as twitter is the only host. This is basically how email works, no? The only other difference is federation, so you have two timelines instead of one: the entire** federated timeline, and the local timeline to your host. Plus the timeline of users you follow. So unlike twitter, the user must decide what host they want to use. Or they can self-host an instance. I'm not sure if it's up to date, but https://instances.social https://instances.social has a wizard for this. *: IIRC mastodon's default limit is 500 chars, and pleroma's is 2,000. **: One exception: Hosts can block other hosts. So if you use i.e. mastodon.social, you won't see posts from users on blocked hosts unless you specifically follow them.
- bluesign 6y ago
  I guess problem lies in this part mainly. Choosing host is more important than it should be. Mainly because hosts are trying to do 2 things at the same time: being identity provider and being some kind of content host in federated environment (moderation etc). Because of this when you choosing a host, you are investing too much. Their future policy changes etc will effect you, you cannot afaik move to another host. (like moving your email) When you give people choice, things are much harder. On other platforms we have few choices depending on what you will publish (media type mainly), but here more like topic based separation, which is making things tricky, as we are humans with many different sides.

richard_todd 6y ago

Fidonet used to provide the federation across message boards in the BBS era, so there is literally nothing new. Really the new thing was smartphones opening up microblogging to average people who want to track celebrities and pretend what they had for lunch is worth sharing. (Edited to clarify fidonet was in the BBS era)

TheJoYo 6y ago
I agree but I think there's potential for celebrity owned and managed federated instances. Twitter doesn't really give handlers the tools to manage their celebrity client, otherwise we would have seen things with Trump go very differently. An owned and managed instance can invest heavily into moderation and image cultivation in ways that Facebook and Twitter will never provide. The whole thing with Wil Wheaton on mastodon.cloud was a good example of what goes wrong, however.
- riffic 6y ago
  I'd really like to see Twitter white-label their app as a managed SaaS on custom domains. Perhaps that's what Bluesky is intended to be.
  - TheJoYo 6y ago
    I don't have much hope for Bluesky. Twitter could re-enable RSS if they really wanted to show that their interest was genuine.
    - riffic 6y ago
      > I don't have much hope for Bluesky. me neither. I think, based on Twitter's track record, people should remain skeptical until shown otherwise. They haven't delivered much to prove they're willing to do the right thing.
skybrian 6y ago
Fidonet boards exchanged messages overnight so the propagation delay was much longer. Also, the topology was different. I don't think the idea of each user publishing a public stream of messages that others subscribe to was a thing back then? Instead you would post messages in forums.

throwaway894345 6y ago

Can I browse another server from mastodon? it seems I can only choose from my feed (people i follow), the local feed (my server), or the global feed. This is a really rough experience because my server is one of the big generic servers so there is no specific discussion and indeed it’s mostly people and bots screaming into the void, and of course the global feed is the same except the volume of posts is much larger and now half of the feed is in a foreign language.

TheJoYo 6y ago
You don't need an account on an instance to view the instance. Mastodon, for example, can be configured to display popular users of that instance. https://mastodon.social/explore/popular https://mastodon.social/explore/popular