13 ms·

Mastodon: AGPLv3 FOSS social network server

324 points by jeroenheijmans 5y ago

FalconSensei 5y ago
I really wanted to like it, but it's just so difficult to actually find people and content, considering you can only search for hashtags and all...
- rglullis 5y ago
  Most instances have an open directory which lets you browse through the most active/recent profiles, but yeah, bootstrapping any new network is difficult. Even more so due to the fragmentation of the fediverse. In any case, I have running and managing a instance of Mastodon (and Matrix, and XMPP) as a side-project for some time. Some of my users asked about having a twitter bridge, where they could at least follow who they are used to from one single client. Would that help you?
  - FalconSensei 5y ago
    > Most instances have an open directory which lets you browse through the most active/recent profiles which is useless, unless it's a niche instance. mastodon.social is generalist, so most people there are not posting anything I want to see. But finding a good niche instance is really hard - in terms of the niche, rules, and actually being fast and working well.
    - rglullis 5y ago
      You don't need to join the instance to see its directory. When I started my own instance, I went to a handful of different instances and looked at the directory. Then I started following the ones that seemed interesting. That was enough for me to bootstrap my feed to the point of something useful.
- gargron 5y ago
  We definitely want to improve content/people discovery. One recent addition was the follow suggestions you get when you first sign up. It pulls up the most popular/proactive accounts in your language. Trending tags should also help, but we want to explore more options for discovery and are open to ideas.
  - rapnie 5y ago
    I think a lot depends on having an onboarding experience that sets the expectations right. Good guidance text may come a long way already. For those who don't know: Mastodon works differently in how you build your social graph than Twitter, where much is automated by the recommendation algorithms kicking in. I think that once one properly grasps how to go from 'empty timelines' to having some first fine people in 'following' the process of building further can very intuitive and be a refreshing and liberating experience where one feels in control. As for ideas and feedback.. "follow suggestions [based on] most popular/proactive accounts in your language". I would be careful here, to not get to a point where Fediverse / Mastodon becomes dominated by influencers that are focal points of activity and sees this feature becoming part of their SEO marketing toolkit. While it may help uptake and network effects, it may hurt and degrade fedi culture over time. You might consider integrating something similar to Trunk [0] so people can directly follow others that have explicitly expressed an interest in a particular topic and are open for discovery. They can peruse the timeline of these accounts and then checkmark the ones to follow based on that. This keeps social graph building natural and organic, not algorithm-driven. As for "trending hashtags", another algorithm driven engagement feature. There may be a Hashtag Directory to browse, sort and filter and an indicator of post counts to each of them. Long inactive hashtags need not be shown, but the directory shows way more entries than just what's trending and doesn't directly push you to that. Another idea might be to have account profiles be able to have a list of the top 3 or top 5 other accounts most valued by a person, in a friend-of-a-friend kind of way. Maybe it only becomes available once a mutual follow relationship is established, and allows further discovery of the FOAF graph. [0] https://communitywiki.org/trunk https://communitywiki.org/trunk
    - FalconSensei 5y ago
- UseStrict 5y ago
  Same, most of my friends aren't on Mastodon, many of the content creators I'm interested in aren't either. And trying to explain Mastodon to random non-technical people is frustrating, they don't want to think about the social service, they just want to use it. Having to think about providers and federation and compatibility is too much effort for posting cat photos. So they stay on Facebook.
- howenterprisey 5y ago
  Check out https://communitywiki.org/trunk/ https://communitywiki.org/trunk/ and https://sizeof.cat/post/mastodon-accounts/ https://sizeof.cat/post/mastodon-accounts/.
  - FalconSensei 5y ago
    The second link is useless: 'interesting accounts' with no information on what they post, or what makes them interesting. But the first is very nice, and that's kinda what I was looking for, thanks!!!
crate_barre 5y ago
Trump’s upcoming social network app is using Mastadon. https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-accused-ripping-code-social-network-mastodon-truth-site-1641343?amp=1 https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-accused-ripping-code-s... Not trying to get political, but this site is obviously going to be the biggest Mastadon showcase.
- commoner 5y ago
  Gab already forked Mastodon, and it's not clear whether Truth Social would surpass Gab in popularity. Unlike Truth Social, Gab actually complies with Mastodon's AGPLv3 license by publishing its source code, though in an obnoxious way (password-protected archive file): https://code.gab.com/gab/gab-open-source https://code.gab.com/gab/gab-open-source
  - colesantiago 5y ago
    So basically Truth Social can do the same thing and be compliant?
    - commoner 5y ago
      Yes. The other major requirement is that Truth Social must also be licensed under AGPLv3. > c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
34l4lzarg 5y ago
[dead]
commoner 5y ago
Mastodon recently hit 1 million active users. It has about 2.89 million total users among 3,400+ servers. https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon
- ampdepolymerase 5y ago
  Are they including Gab users in the MAU count?
  - commoner 5y ago
    No, since Gab does not federate with mainline Mastodon instances anymore.* I'm not sure if Gab discloses its stats the same way other instances do. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25715513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25715513
  - gfosco 5y ago
    Gab is separate, and significantly larger than the entire fediverse combined.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - tga_d 5y ago
      Do you have a source for that? My impression is that Gab is significantly smaller than the Fediverse (Wikipedia says ~100,000 active users).
      - gfosco 5y ago
        Well I'm the CTO there so I am a source... but you don't have to trust me really, you can check https://www.similarweb.com/website/gab.com/ https://www.similarweb.com/website/gab.com/ and https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/gab.com#section_traffic https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/gab.com#section_traffic and draw your own conclusions. For some things, Wikipedia is a really bad source. Especially about things they hate.
makeworld 5y ago
Title needs a correction. It is AGPLv3, not GPLv3. I suspect this was posted today because Trump's new social network was outed as using Mastodon, likely illegally. https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgm5k/truth-social-is-mastodon-trump https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgm5k/truth-social-is-masto...
- jeroenheijmans 5y ago
  TIL about the AGPL license, thx for the tip.
- russellbeattie 5y ago
  I adore that the network is named "Pravda" and has a clause that says you can't criticize the service or its founders! Classic! One has to really give a shout out to Trump's Russian handlers. They apparently have a great sense of humor and/or irony. They also know conservative right wing Americans are too stupid to notice or care. It's almost artistic, really.
- wyager 5y ago
  Interesting. Is it protocol-compatible with other mastodon instances? (I'm not very familiar with how these fediverse sites work.)
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    I'd think it'll just disable the federation API. Mastodon already has blacklists to prevent abuse from certain servers, and given Trump's target audience, the block would probably be mutual.
  - karmanyaahm 5y ago
    It is compatible since it's using the exact same codebase, but practically everyone on the mainstream fediverse has blocked them, and I suspect they probably will turn off federation.
- babelfish 5y ago
  Discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945733
PaybackTony 5y ago
Background: I've been building a growing commercial social network. There are things about what I want to do that made that the better option for what my target market is. With that said, I really like what Mastodon has done and as far as federated and open social networks go (ActivityPub!). It's in a class of its own IMO.
- nrclark 5y ago
  Please tell me you're not building Truth. If you are, you should stop right now and consider the effects that your actions will have. No amount of money is worth your soul.
  - knicholes 5y ago
    I'm not familiar with Truth Social except for what I've read in the comments here. What makes you say that building this will cost a soul? How does this differ from other social networks? (Or do you believe working on Twitter/FB also cost one one's soul?). What effects do you think the builders would have?
  - pkulak 5y ago
    Well, Truth isn't so much growing as it's collapsing.
    - john_moscow 5y ago
      Hold your horses, it hasn't been launched yet.
    - indig0g0 5y ago
      But the SPAC associated with TMTG almost quadrupled today.
  - karmanyaahm 5y ago
    That's just a stolen and license-violating Mastodon, not much building involved
mathnmusic 5y ago
How do things stand on account portability? If I sign up at a mastodon server, build an audience and network there, but later if the server admin changes its policies in unfavorable directions, can I migrate to a new server with all my contacts and reputation intact - even without the old admin's cooperation?
- commoner 5y ago
  Mastodon has a "profile move" feature that moves all of your followers (on instances that support the protocol) to your new account. However, it will not move your toots (posts). All of your account data can be exported, and everything except for toots (and media) can be imported. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
  - FalconSensei 5y ago
    > However, it will not move your toots (posts). I would say that moving the posts is what worries me more about moving the account. I can refollow everyone, but I can't post hundreds (or thousands) of posts in their original datetime
  - pangolinplayer 5y ago
    Post is called a toot? Tf
    - outside1234 5y ago
      "Truth in advertising"
    - commoner 5y ago
      The bird app (Twitter) calls them tweets, so the Mastodon service decided to call them toots. But, they did rename them to "posts" earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26882318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26882318 I guess this isn't reflected in joinmastodon.org yet. Each instance can also choose to call posts whatever they want: https://www.reddit.com/r/mastodon_social/comments/9mhzu8/how_do_i_change_the_name_of_toots/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mastodon_social/comments/9mhzu8/how...
Zababa 5y ago
There are lots of files at the root level, which means I have to do 5/6 complete scrolls to get at the beginning of the readme. I see this pattern a lof with Go project. I've always wondered if it has an impact on the popularity of the project. If anybody from Github is reading this, that could be a blog post idea. Something like an invisible pixel at the top of the readme, and the number of top level files + directories, and see if there's any correlation.
- Kye 5y ago
  There's a way too hard to notice Readme link on the sidebar of repositories with the file. It's right between the tags and license.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    Thank you! I never saw that link before.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
riffic 5y ago
I'm one of the moderators of the /r/Mastodon subreddit, and folks are more than welcome to stop by and share their experiences using and operating this software.
indig0g0 5y ago
Right after read an article on WAPO about Truth Social likely violating Mastodon's license, I hop on HN and find this as the first post.
- leppr 5y ago
  To learn more about this: https://twitter.com/VValkyriePub/status/1451035108266233863?s=20 https://twitter.com/VValkyriePub/status/1451035108266233863?...
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    I e-mailed them requesting a copy of the source. We'll see, I suppose.
  - debacle 5y ago
    There's no evidence provided anywhere at all that any of these screenshots are of Trump's new platform.
    - mikeyouse 5y ago
      There were dozens of people who created accounts and were generally trolling the new platform. They didn't lockdown the mobile site (https://mobile.tmediatech.io/ https://mobile.tmediatech.io/) which let people register accounts and post to the platform. The links / screenshots are definitely to his site. https://www.dailydot.com/debug/trump-truth-media-platform-shuts-down-trolling/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/trump-truth-media-platform-sh...
    - nabakin 5y ago
      I don't know why you're so unwilling to believe those screenshots are from Trump's social network. Dozens of different people independently posted screenshots of the network, including some trusted reporters. It would be quite a conspiracy to suppose all of them coordinated and lied about those images. Such little to gain. Such massive consequences. If you need more evidence, here [0] is the archived login page from the mobile version of the site before it was taken down (because it was flooded and trolled). By comparing it visually to other mastodon instances and inspecting the source itself, you can confirm there was a mobile mastodon instance up at the given archival time. Additionally, the press release [1] links to the social media website [2] which links to the app store page [3] which has preview images that are very similar to the images posted on Twitter. [0] http://web.archive.org/web/20211021014524/https://mobile.tmediatech.io/auth/sign_in http://web.archive.org/web/20211021014524/https://mobile.tme... [1] https://thedeskofdonaldtrump.com/announcing-trump-media-technology-group/ https://thedeskofdonaldtrump.com/announcing-trump-media-tech... [2] https://www.truthsocial.com/ https://www.truthsocial.com/ [3] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/truth-social/id1586018825 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/truth-social/id1586018825
kixiQu 5y ago
I admin and use a Mastodon instance. It takes a while to get used to the differences from Twitter, but it's far more polished than people seem to expect. The reading I tend to recommend if people have questions is Darius Kazemi's https://runyourown.social/ https://runyourown.social/
- INTPenis 5y ago
  Another admin here, and yes I agree. But one major aspect of fediverse, that people rarely talk about when promoting it, is the spam. To summarize my impressions over the last 5 years I'd say there is no way to run a big open instance without funding. The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account. And even then I'd suggest using Geo blocking to fence off your instance from certain parts of the world. My personal wish is to see the fediverse made up of smaller, localized instances that federate across borders. So for example a Finnish instance that only accepts finnish users, but it federates with every other instance. And ontop of that more ActivityPub relays to facilitate federation.
  - nivenkos 5y ago
    > My personal wish is to see the fediverse made up of smaller, localized instances that federate across borders. So for example a Finnish instance that only accepts finnish users, but it federates with every other instance. This would be great to stop the American-influence dominating every conversation like happens on Reddit, etc.
    - Kye 5y ago
      While English is the majority by server stats, there are plenty in other languages. You can filter out English toots. The filter isn't perfect, but it works well enough.
  - SamWhited 5y ago
    > To summarize my impressions over the last 5 years I'd say there is no way to run a big open instance without funding. The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account. I really like the way social.coop, a cooperatively run instance, handles this. Because we're all just pooling a little bit of money (1GBP/yr for most people) we can run a service cheaper than we could run it ourselves if we're renting a VPS and there are enough people interested to create a rotating moderation team, so we rarely get too much spam from other instances. So far a cooperative model has worked very well for us; no donations required, just splitting up costs in the cheapest possible way so that no one gets burned out or feels like their money is carrying the instance!
SavantIdiot 5y ago
I've been trying to set this up for years and it continues to defeat me. Even the Docker method is still fraught. I hope they can dumb it down at some point, or clean up the docker setup. There's a LOT of different frameworks & tooling at play in this ecosystem to debug when things go wrong. But I guess it is close to rocket science.
- Kye 5y ago
  The go-to managed hosting option is masto.host if you have $7/month and no great urge to run your own.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    Thanks, I didn't know this existed.
  - Zigurd 5y ago
    I used that for a client project. Excellent service.
- kixiQu 5y ago
  I had similar trouble when I was trying to make it work on a Fedora VM. When I gave up, admitted to myself I was a pleb, and switched to Ubuntu, it was entirely smooth. Dunno how/why.
zekrioca 5y ago
Does anyone know if there is a client to automate and (timely) measure operations (i.e., add user, add comment, add like, etc) in a local Mastodon server?
betwixthewires 5y ago
People interested in this stuff should check out alternate software as well. Hometown is a fork of mastodon that has a few extra features but one very interesting one in particular: you can post to the local server only, which is an excellent community building feature. There's also pleroma, which I've run and is pretty great and low on resource requirements. And there are tons of other social UX paradigms like link aggregators and even Peertube which is a tube site server on the same network as mastodon using the same ActivityPub protocol. I'd love to see people implement novel types of social sites besides functional clones of existing social media, there are some significant architectural and UX differences in a distributed, federated social architecture that can be leveraged to great effect.
- riffic 5y ago
  Watchlist for ActivityPub applications: https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-for-activitypub-apps https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo... This is the wide assortment of applications that speak the same common protocol that Mastodon does, as part of an interoperable social cloud. There's a Cambrian explosion of diversity in this space. Let's see more content management systems adopting this system for self-sufficient publication.
  - rapnie 5y ago
    For developers there is another watchlist at https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/Watchlist-for-ActivityPub-developer-resources https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/Watchlist-fo...
- saurik 5y ago
  > ...you can post to the local server only, which is an excellent community building feature. The idea of building a local community that you have to have an account and associated identity on a specific server to access is the kind of mal-aligned incentive that tends to cause federated systems to become de-facto centralized silos and, eventually, return to the status quo of a controlling oligopoly :(.
toastercat 5y ago
As much as I'd love to use Mastodon, both times I tried, I got bored and gave up because I couldn't find interesting people to follow. All of the people I do find interesting are only on Twitter.
- toastal 5y ago
  That's the most difficult part is finding who to follow (likely strangers) when you first start. You could watch the global timeline or search some #hashtags for things you are interested in or try to pick the right server with a like-minded userbase from the get-go. However, these issues aren't too different than any other social media tbf. And eventually you find interesting people exclusive to the Fediverse or post different content on it that is more interesting. Mastodon and others never force being social and following others though.
  - galaxyLogic 5y ago
    Should we follow people, or topics?
    - FalconSensei 5y ago
      I guess both work. On Instagram and Tumblr I can follow people and hashtags, on Twitter I can follow people and topics. On forums, you basically navigated by topic, without following any specific person.
- EleanorKonik 5y ago
  I really enjoy the scholar.social instance for my particular usecase, but yeah the network effects are real :(
- INTPenis 5y ago
  Yeah that's how it is now. The federation sort of blends into the background so disregarding that part I feel like I'm using a big message board in the early 2000s. But actually worse, because at least those message boards had better defined topics. I can follow some hashtags that I enjoy but in the web gui it's very limited. I've been thinking about writing my own software to help me follow tags alone. Just to participate in relevant discussion. Otherwise you're just watching people rant in the public feed and if you're lucky you might catch the occasional interesting post. But I persist because I truly believe in the fediverse concept.
EamonnMR 5y ago
Anyone have a tutorial on how to use mastodon as an end user? Are there servers worth joining? Does the fediverse make the server you join irrelevant? Has SDF got an instance? Are there clients people prefer? I'd love an alternative social media platform but when I join them they often end up dead (wt.social, etc)
- Brendinooo 5y ago
  > Are there servers worth joining? Fosstodon's alright. > Does the fediverse make the server you join irrelevant? In theory, yes. But in practice, joining a server means the UI gives you a global feed for that server that you don't otherwise get. And for the niche communities that have a global feed you can keep up with, you want to be able to access that.
- Grumbledour 5y ago
  >> Does the fediverse make the server you join irrelevant? In theory, but in the beginning, an instance aligned with your interests will make it easier to find like-minded people to follow. The instances may also have different rules how you should behave. And you can run into problems when your instance admin bans another instance with which you would like to communicate, or you instance gets banned by them. Just the perils of online drama in small communities I guess. Running your own instance could help here, though. >> Has SDF got an instance? https://mastodon.sdf.org/ https://mastodon.sdf.org/
EleanorKonik 5y ago
What's the best way to find interesting people if you've already got an account and don't want to switch instances but your local instance is a little slow these days and you'd like to liven up your feed?
- mariusor 5y ago
  The way I do it is to follow the hashtags I'm interested in, see the people that post under it regularly and decide if they're interesting enough to follow. This has a chicken and egg downside, as these people won't appear at all if nobody on your instance follows them, which is unfortunate. :( To circumvent that you can use mastodon social's tag page, but it's less user friendly. See here an example: https://mastodon.social/tags/activitypub https://mastodon.social/tags/activitypub
EGreg 5y ago
At the risk of shilling my own project: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform It does a few things differently ;-) Feedback welcome!
russdpale 5y ago
I want to like mastodon, but it needs a single sign on feature and usually every server I look at it is totally dead.
- anaganisk 5y ago
  Putting a centralised auth that depends on Big Tech for a software which was supposed to be decentralised and against BigTech principles?
- SamWhited 5y ago
  Define "totally dead"? A lot of big servers I've looked at (Fosstodon, social.coop, mastodon.social, etc.) seem very active. Also, "dead" may have to be defined differently in a federated world where it will in fact be quite common (probably even the majority of servers) to have 2 users on an instance that are active, but of course most activity is through federation so the service itself may look like it just has a few posts a day.
sitzkrieg 5y ago
beware mastodon downloads and mirrors all federated media to instance users, which is whatever, but the admin tools do not correctly keep track of removing old media. hell, if an instance goes offline without nuking itself proper, mastodon will leave all of the media on your drive. it requires a ton of babysitting to run on bound storage, and the issues around this are still open. i highly highly recommend pleroma over it, it uses 1/10th the system resources and doesn't download federated accounts data locally
- gargron 5y ago
  It is not that the admin tools do not correctly keep track of old media, it is that the judgement over what to keep is left to the admin since it is not so simple to programmatically decide whether a resource being currently unavailable through the network means it's gone forever, and whether it's gone intentionally or unintentionally. A server that went down might come back after a month of downtime, all sorts of things happen. If you don't care about such minutea you may simply setup a cronjob to run the `tootctl media remove` utility every week and then your primary concern for unbounded storage growth are files uploaded by your own users, which is something you have to deal with regardless of whether you choose Mastodon or Pleroma. Pleroma may save storage by not downloading federated media locally, but hotlinking to 3rd party servers leaves your users vulnerable to tracking by malicious operators, leeches off the bandwidth of remote servers, and, far more practically, does not guarantee that the media that needs to be displayed is in a file format that is playable on the users' devices. For example, as Pleroma makes no effort to convert user-uploaded files to browser-compatible formats, if Mastodon didn't go through the trouble of converting formats, Mastodon users on iOS would not be able to see many "GIFs" and videos uploaded by Pleroma users in the popular WebM format that is not available on iOS (yet). You may prefer one or the other but there are definitely reasons for why Mastodon does it that way.
  - gaius_baltar 5y ago
    > but hotlinking to 3rd party servers leaves your users vulnerable to tracking by malicious operators, leeches off the bandwidth of remote servers, And goatse attacks. Nothing ensures that the media that was there when the post was shared to the local instance will be the same at the moment it is shown to an user. An instance can turn evil and replace nice user-generated images with ads once they are shared all across the fediverse.
adminscoffee 5y ago
now mix it with pion and we're cooking
crocodiletears 5y ago
Are there any actively maintained Activitypub/Mastodon clients that don't integrate their own blacklists? Someone recommended Husky to me, but it's been dead for a minute.
messo 5y ago
Mastodon was hard to "sell" to my peers when I tried to explain how it works. Recently I changed my approach by not explaining all the great technical features related to federation, and instead focused on the fact that it is ad-free, do not use an algorithm (feed is chronological) and is community run. Mastodon is what Twitter once was, before it got ruined by ads and algorithms. A friend who is an artist was frustrated with the experience on Instagram, and finally signed up on an art-related community in the fediverse, and found it to be a breath of fresh air, with more meaningfull interactions, not just likes.
nathias 5y ago
Federation really seems to combine the downsides of centralization with the downsides of decentralization.
wombatmobile 5y ago
From slate.com Everything That Went Wrong With Donald Trump’s New Social Network in the First 24 Hours > Truth Social will be a lot like Twitter, with the primary interface consisting of a feed of short posts from users you follow. However, these posts will be called “truths” instead of “tweets,” and reshares will be known a “retruths.” While the platform wasn’t supposed to have its soft launch until next month, users found a way to access the site and were setting up accounts within hours of the announcement. (One vandal claimed the @donaldjtrump handle and posted a picture of a pig with extremely large testicles.) Truth Social eventually cut off access, though screenshots of the interface taken before then suggest that the platform is basically just a fork of Mastodon, the open-access software that allows users to make spinoff social media networks. Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko has said that he will be seeking legal counsel since Truth Social appears to be breaking his product’s terms of use by not sharing the code or license with the public. Truth Social’s terms further claim that the source code is proprietary, which could also violate Mastodon’s license. https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/donald-trump-true-social-launch-problems.html https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/donald-trump-true-socia...
DoItToMe81 5y ago
I love the concept of Mastodon, but I feel it inherits many of the problems of Twitter. I only used it for about a month, but I encountered far too much mob mentality and pearl clutching for my health and left. I like free discussion, and I feel the current Mastodon userbase means I'd have to host my own echo chamber to avoid theirs.

I really wanted to like it, but it's just so difficult to actually find people and content, considering you can only search for hashtags and all...

rglullis 5y ago
Most instances have an open directory which lets you browse through the most active/recent profiles, but yeah, bootstrapping any new network is difficult. Even more so due to the fragmentation of the fediverse. In any case, I have running and managing a instance of Mastodon (and Matrix, and XMPP) as a side-project for some time. Some of my users asked about having a twitter bridge, where they could at least follow who they are used to from one single client. Would that help you?
- FalconSensei 5y ago
  > Most instances have an open directory which lets you browse through the most active/recent profiles which is useless, unless it's a niche instance. mastodon.social is generalist, so most people there are not posting anything I want to see. But finding a good niche instance is really hard - in terms of the niche, rules, and actually being fast and working well.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    You don't need to join the instance to see its directory. When I started my own instance, I went to a handful of different instances and looked at the directory. Then I started following the ones that seemed interesting. That was enough for me to bootstrap my feed to the point of something useful.
gargron 5y ago
We definitely want to improve content/people discovery. One recent addition was the follow suggestions you get when you first sign up. It pulls up the most popular/proactive accounts in your language. Trending tags should also help, but we want to explore more options for discovery and are open to ideas.
- rapnie 5y ago
  I think a lot depends on having an onboarding experience that sets the expectations right. Good guidance text may come a long way already. For those who don't know: Mastodon works differently in how you build your social graph than Twitter, where much is automated by the recommendation algorithms kicking in. I think that once one properly grasps how to go from 'empty timelines' to having some first fine people in 'following' the process of building further can very intuitive and be a refreshing and liberating experience where one feels in control. As for ideas and feedback.. "follow suggestions [based on] most popular/proactive accounts in your language". I would be careful here, to not get to a point where Fediverse / Mastodon becomes dominated by influencers that are focal points of activity and sees this feature becoming part of their SEO marketing toolkit. While it may help uptake and network effects, it may hurt and degrade fedi culture over time. You might consider integrating something similar to Trunk [0] so people can directly follow others that have explicitly expressed an interest in a particular topic and are open for discovery. They can peruse the timeline of these accounts and then checkmark the ones to follow based on that. This keeps social graph building natural and organic, not algorithm-driven. As for "trending hashtags", another algorithm driven engagement feature. There may be a Hashtag Directory to browse, sort and filter and an indicator of post counts to each of them. Long inactive hashtags need not be shown, but the directory shows way more entries than just what's trending and doesn't directly push you to that. Another idea might be to have account profiles be able to have a list of the top 3 or top 5 other accounts most valued by a person, in a friend-of-a-friend kind of way. Maybe it only becomes available once a mutual follow relationship is established, and allows further discovery of the FOAF graph. [0] https://communitywiki.org/trunk https://communitywiki.org/trunk
  - FalconSensei 5y ago
UseStrict 5y ago
Same, most of my friends aren't on Mastodon, many of the content creators I'm interested in aren't either. And trying to explain Mastodon to random non-technical people is frustrating, they don't want to think about the social service, they just want to use it. Having to think about providers and federation and compatibility is too much effort for posting cat photos. So they stay on Facebook.
howenterprisey 5y ago
Check out https://communitywiki.org/trunk/ https://communitywiki.org/trunk/ and https://sizeof.cat/post/mastodon-accounts/ https://sizeof.cat/post/mastodon-accounts/.
- FalconSensei 5y ago
  The second link is useless: 'interesting accounts' with no information on what they post, or what makes them interesting. But the first is very nice, and that's kinda what I was looking for, thanks!!!

crate_barre 5y ago

Trump’s upcoming social network app is using Mastadon. https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-accused-ripping-code-social-network-mastodon-truth-site-1641343?amp=1 https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-accused-ripping-code-s... Not trying to get political, but this site is obviously going to be the biggest Mastadon showcase.

commoner 5y ago
Gab already forked Mastodon, and it's not clear whether Truth Social would surpass Gab in popularity. Unlike Truth Social, Gab actually complies with Mastodon's AGPLv3 license by publishing its source code, though in an obnoxious way (password-protected archive file): https://code.gab.com/gab/gab-open-source https://code.gab.com/gab/gab-open-source
- colesantiago 5y ago
  So basically Truth Social can do the same thing and be compliant?
  - commoner 5y ago
    Yes. The other major requirement is that Truth Social must also be licensed under AGPLv3. > c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html
  - deleted 5y ago
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commoner 5y ago

Mastodon recently hit 1 million active users. It has about 2.89 million total users among 3,400+ servers. https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon

ampdepolymerase 5y ago
Are they including Gab users in the MAU count?
- commoner 5y ago
  No, since Gab does not federate with mainline Mastodon instances anymore.* I'm not sure if Gab discloses its stats the same way other instances do. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25715513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25715513
- gfosco 5y ago
  Gab is separate, and significantly larger than the entire fediverse combined.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - tga_d 5y ago
    Do you have a source for that? My impression is that Gab is significantly smaller than the Fediverse (Wikipedia says ~100,000 active users).
    - gfosco 5y ago
      Well I'm the CTO there so I am a source... but you don't have to trust me really, you can check https://www.similarweb.com/website/gab.com/ https://www.similarweb.com/website/gab.com/ and https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/gab.com#section_traffic https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/gab.com#section_traffic and draw your own conclusions. For some things, Wikipedia is a really bad source. Especially about things they hate.

makeworld 5y ago

Title needs a correction. It is AGPLv3, not GPLv3. I suspect this was posted today because Trump's new social network was outed as using Mastodon, likely illegally. https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgm5k/truth-social-is-mastodon-trump https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgm5k/truth-social-is-masto...

jeroenheijmans 5y ago
TIL about the AGPL license, thx for the tip.
russellbeattie 5y ago
I adore that the network is named "Pravda" and has a clause that says you can't criticize the service or its founders! Classic! One has to really give a shout out to Trump's Russian handlers. They apparently have a great sense of humor and/or irony. They also know conservative right wing Americans are too stupid to notice or care. It's almost artistic, really.
wyager 5y ago
Interesting. Is it protocol-compatible with other mastodon instances? (I'm not very familiar with how these fediverse sites work.)
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  I'd think it'll just disable the federation API. Mastodon already has blacklists to prevent abuse from certain servers, and given Trump's target audience, the block would probably be mutual.
- karmanyaahm 5y ago
  It is compatible since it's using the exact same codebase, but practically everyone on the mainstream fediverse has blocked them, and I suspect they probably will turn off federation.
babelfish 5y ago
Discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945733

PaybackTony 5y ago

Background: I've been building a growing commercial social network. There are things about what I want to do that made that the better option for what my target market is. With that said, I really like what Mastodon has done and as far as federated and open social networks go (ActivityPub!). It's in a class of its own IMO.

nrclark 5y ago
Please tell me you're not building Truth. If you are, you should stop right now and consider the effects that your actions will have. No amount of money is worth your soul.
- knicholes 5y ago
  I'm not familiar with Truth Social except for what I've read in the comments here. What makes you say that building this will cost a soul? How does this differ from other social networks? (Or do you believe working on Twitter/FB also cost one one's soul?). What effects do you think the builders would have?
- pkulak 5y ago
  Well, Truth isn't so much growing as it's collapsing.
  - john_moscow 5y ago
    Hold your horses, it hasn't been launched yet.
  - indig0g0 5y ago
    But the SPAC associated with TMTG almost quadrupled today.
- karmanyaahm 5y ago
  That's just a stolen and license-violating Mastodon, not much building involved

mathnmusic 5y ago

How do things stand on account portability? If I sign up at a mastodon server, build an audience and network there, but later if the server admin changes its policies in unfavorable directions, can I migrate to a new server with all my contacts and reputation intact - even without the old admin's cooperation?

commoner 5y ago
Mastodon has a "profile move" feature that moves all of your followers (on instances that support the protocol) to your new account. However, it will not move your toots (posts). All of your account data can be exported, and everything except for toots (and media) can be imported. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
- FalconSensei 5y ago
  > However, it will not move your toots (posts). I would say that moving the posts is what worries me more about moving the account. I can refollow everyone, but I can't post hundreds (or thousands) of posts in their original datetime
- pangolinplayer 5y ago
  Post is called a toot? Tf
  - outside1234 5y ago
    "Truth in advertising"
  - commoner 5y ago
    The bird app (Twitter) calls them tweets, so the Mastodon service decided to call them toots. But, they did rename them to "posts" earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26882318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26882318 I guess this isn't reflected in joinmastodon.org yet. Each instance can also choose to call posts whatever they want: https://www.reddit.com/r/mastodon_social/comments/9mhzu8/how_do_i_change_the_name_of_toots/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mastodon_social/comments/9mhzu8/how...

Zababa 5y ago

There are lots of files at the root level, which means I have to do 5/6 complete scrolls to get at the beginning of the readme. I see this pattern a lof with Go project. I've always wondered if it has an impact on the popularity of the project. If anybody from Github is reading this, that could be a blog post idea. Something like an invisible pixel at the top of the readme, and the number of top level files + directories, and see if there's any correlation.

Kye 5y ago
There's a way too hard to notice Readme link on the sidebar of repositories with the file. It's right between the tags and license.
- Zababa 5y ago
  Thank you! I never saw that link before.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

riffic 5y ago

I'm one of the moderators of the /r/Mastodon subreddit, and folks are more than welcome to stop by and share their experiences using and operating this software.

indig0g0 5y ago

Right after read an article on WAPO about Truth Social likely violating Mastodon's license, I hop on HN and find this as the first post.

leppr 5y ago
To learn more about this: https://twitter.com/VValkyriePub/status/1451035108266233863?s=20 https://twitter.com/VValkyriePub/status/1451035108266233863?...
- smoldesu 5y ago
  I e-mailed them requesting a copy of the source. We'll see, I suppose.
- debacle 5y ago
  There's no evidence provided anywhere at all that any of these screenshots are of Trump's new platform.
  - mikeyouse 5y ago
    There were dozens of people who created accounts and were generally trolling the new platform. They didn't lockdown the mobile site (https://mobile.tmediatech.io/ https://mobile.tmediatech.io/) which let people register accounts and post to the platform. The links / screenshots are definitely to his site. https://www.dailydot.com/debug/trump-truth-media-platform-shuts-down-trolling/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/trump-truth-media-platform-sh...
  - nabakin 5y ago
    I don't know why you're so unwilling to believe those screenshots are from Trump's social network. Dozens of different people independently posted screenshots of the network, including some trusted reporters. It would be quite a conspiracy to suppose all of them coordinated and lied about those images. Such little to gain. Such massive consequences. If you need more evidence, here [0] is the archived login page from the mobile version of the site before it was taken down (because it was flooded and trolled). By comparing it visually to other mastodon instances and inspecting the source itself, you can confirm there was a mobile mastodon instance up at the given archival time. Additionally, the press release [1] links to the social media website [2] which links to the app store page [3] which has preview images that are very similar to the images posted on Twitter. [0] http://web.archive.org/web/20211021014524/https://mobile.tmediatech.io/auth/sign_in http://web.archive.org/web/20211021014524/https://mobile.tme... [1] https://thedeskofdonaldtrump.com/announcing-trump-media-technology-group/ https://thedeskofdonaldtrump.com/announcing-trump-media-tech... [2] https://www.truthsocial.com/ https://www.truthsocial.com/ [3] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/truth-social/id1586018825 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/truth-social/id1586018825

kixiQu 5y ago

I admin and use a Mastodon instance. It takes a while to get used to the differences from Twitter, but it's far more polished than people seem to expect. The reading I tend to recommend if people have questions is Darius Kazemi's https://runyourown.social/ https://runyourown.social/

INTPenis 5y ago
Another admin here, and yes I agree. But one major aspect of fediverse, that people rarely talk about when promoting it, is the spam. To summarize my impressions over the last 5 years I'd say there is no way to run a big open instance without funding. The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account. And even then I'd suggest using Geo blocking to fence off your instance from certain parts of the world. My personal wish is to see the fediverse made up of smaller, localized instances that federate across borders. So for example a Finnish instance that only accepts finnish users, but it federates with every other instance. And ontop of that more ActivityPub relays to facilitate federation.
- nivenkos 5y ago
  > My personal wish is to see the fediverse made up of smaller, localized instances that federate across borders. So for example a Finnish instance that only accepts finnish users, but it federates with every other instance. This would be great to stop the American-influence dominating every conversation like happens on Reddit, etc.
  - Kye 5y ago
    While English is the majority by server stats, there are plenty in other languages. You can filter out English toots. The filter isn't perfect, but it works well enough.
- SamWhited 5y ago
  > To summarize my impressions over the last 5 years I'd say there is no way to run a big open instance without funding. The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account. I really like the way social.coop, a cooperatively run instance, handles this. Because we're all just pooling a little bit of money (1GBP/yr for most people) we can run a service cheaper than we could run it ourselves if we're renting a VPS and there are enough people interested to create a rotating moderation team, so we rarely get too much spam from other instances. So far a cooperative model has worked very well for us; no donations required, just splitting up costs in the cheapest possible way so that no one gets burned out or feels like their money is carrying the instance!

SavantIdiot 5y ago

I've been trying to set this up for years and it continues to defeat me. Even the Docker method is still fraught. I hope they can dumb it down at some point, or clean up the docker setup. There's a LOT of different frameworks & tooling at play in this ecosystem to debug when things go wrong. But I guess it is close to rocket science.

Kye 5y ago
The go-to managed hosting option is masto.host if you have $7/month and no great urge to run your own.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Thanks, I didn't know this existed.
- Zigurd 5y ago
  I used that for a client project. Excellent service.
kixiQu 5y ago
I had similar trouble when I was trying to make it work on a Fedora VM. When I gave up, admitted to myself I was a pleb, and switched to Ubuntu, it was entirely smooth. Dunno how/why.

zekrioca 5y ago

Does anyone know if there is a client to automate and (timely) measure operations (i.e., add user, add comment, add like, etc) in a local Mastodon server?

betwixthewires 5y ago

People interested in this stuff should check out alternate software as well. Hometown is a fork of mastodon that has a few extra features but one very interesting one in particular: you can post to the local server only, which is an excellent community building feature. There's also pleroma, which I've run and is pretty great and low on resource requirements. And there are tons of other social UX paradigms like link aggregators and even Peertube which is a tube site server on the same network as mastodon using the same ActivityPub protocol. I'd love to see people implement novel types of social sites besides functional clones of existing social media, there are some significant architectural and UX differences in a distributed, federated social architecture that can be leveraged to great effect.

riffic 5y ago
Watchlist for ActivityPub applications: https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-for-activitypub-apps https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo... This is the wide assortment of applications that speak the same common protocol that Mastodon does, as part of an interoperable social cloud. There's a Cambrian explosion of diversity in this space. Let's see more content management systems adopting this system for self-sufficient publication.
- rapnie 5y ago
  For developers there is another watchlist at https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/Watchlist-for-ActivityPub-developer-resources https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/Watchlist-fo...
saurik 5y ago
> ...you can post to the local server only, which is an excellent community building feature. The idea of building a local community that you have to have an account and associated identity on a specific server to access is the kind of mal-aligned incentive that tends to cause federated systems to become de-facto centralized silos and, eventually, return to the status quo of a controlling oligopoly :(.

toastercat 5y ago

As much as I'd love to use Mastodon, both times I tried, I got bored and gave up because I couldn't find interesting people to follow. All of the people I do find interesting are only on Twitter.

toastal 5y ago
That's the most difficult part is finding who to follow (likely strangers) when you first start. You could watch the global timeline or search some #hashtags for things you are interested in or try to pick the right server with a like-minded userbase from the get-go. However, these issues aren't too different than any other social media tbf. And eventually you find interesting people exclusive to the Fediverse or post different content on it that is more interesting. Mastodon and others never force being social and following others though.
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  Should we follow people, or topics?
  - FalconSensei 5y ago
    I guess both work. On Instagram and Tumblr I can follow people and hashtags, on Twitter I can follow people and topics. On forums, you basically navigated by topic, without following any specific person.
EleanorKonik 5y ago
I really enjoy the scholar.social instance for my particular usecase, but yeah the network effects are real :(
INTPenis 5y ago
Yeah that's how it is now. The federation sort of blends into the background so disregarding that part I feel like I'm using a big message board in the early 2000s. But actually worse, because at least those message boards had better defined topics. I can follow some hashtags that I enjoy but in the web gui it's very limited. I've been thinking about writing my own software to help me follow tags alone. Just to participate in relevant discussion. Otherwise you're just watching people rant in the public feed and if you're lucky you might catch the occasional interesting post. But I persist because I truly believe in the fediverse concept.

EamonnMR 5y ago

Anyone have a tutorial on how to use mastodon as an end user? Are there servers worth joining? Does the fediverse make the server you join irrelevant? Has SDF got an instance? Are there clients people prefer? I'd love an alternative social media platform but when I join them they often end up dead (wt.social, etc)

Brendinooo 5y ago
> Are there servers worth joining? Fosstodon's alright. > Does the fediverse make the server you join irrelevant? In theory, yes. But in practice, joining a server means the UI gives you a global feed for that server that you don't otherwise get. And for the niche communities that have a global feed you can keep up with, you want to be able to access that.
Grumbledour 5y ago
>> Does the fediverse make the server you join irrelevant? In theory, but in the beginning, an instance aligned with your interests will make it easier to find like-minded people to follow. The instances may also have different rules how you should behave. And you can run into problems when your instance admin bans another instance with which you would like to communicate, or you instance gets banned by them. Just the perils of online drama in small communities I guess. Running your own instance could help here, though. >> Has SDF got an instance? https://mastodon.sdf.org/ https://mastodon.sdf.org/

EleanorKonik 5y ago

What's the best way to find interesting people if you've already got an account and don't want to switch instances but your local instance is a little slow these days and you'd like to liven up your feed?

mariusor 5y ago
The way I do it is to follow the hashtags I'm interested in, see the people that post under it regularly and decide if they're interesting enough to follow. This has a chicken and egg downside, as these people won't appear at all if nobody on your instance follows them, which is unfortunate. :( To circumvent that you can use mastodon social's tag page, but it's less user friendly. See here an example: https://mastodon.social/tags/activitypub https://mastodon.social/tags/activitypub

EGreg 5y ago

At the risk of shilling my own project: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform It does a few things differently ;-) Feedback welcome!

russdpale 5y ago

I want to like mastodon, but it needs a single sign on feature and usually every server I look at it is totally dead.

anaganisk 5y ago
Putting a centralised auth that depends on Big Tech for a software which was supposed to be decentralised and against BigTech principles?
SamWhited 5y ago
Define "totally dead"? A lot of big servers I've looked at (Fosstodon, social.coop, mastodon.social, etc.) seem very active. Also, "dead" may have to be defined differently in a federated world where it will in fact be quite common (probably even the majority of servers) to have 2 users on an instance that are active, but of course most activity is through federation so the service itself may look like it just has a few posts a day.

sitzkrieg 5y ago

beware mastodon downloads and mirrors all federated media to instance users, which is whatever, but the admin tools do not correctly keep track of removing old media. hell, if an instance goes offline without nuking itself proper, mastodon will leave all of the media on your drive. it requires a ton of babysitting to run on bound storage, and the issues around this are still open. i highly highly recommend pleroma over it, it uses 1/10th the system resources and doesn't download federated accounts data locally

gargron 5y ago
It is not that the admin tools do not correctly keep track of old media, it is that the judgement over what to keep is left to the admin since it is not so simple to programmatically decide whether a resource being currently unavailable through the network means it's gone forever, and whether it's gone intentionally or unintentionally. A server that went down might come back after a month of downtime, all sorts of things happen. If you don't care about such minutea you may simply setup a cronjob to run the `tootctl media remove` utility every week and then your primary concern for unbounded storage growth are files uploaded by your own users, which is something you have to deal with regardless of whether you choose Mastodon or Pleroma. Pleroma may save storage by not downloading federated media locally, but hotlinking to 3rd party servers leaves your users vulnerable to tracking by malicious operators, leeches off the bandwidth of remote servers, and, far more practically, does not guarantee that the media that needs to be displayed is in a file format that is playable on the users' devices. For example, as Pleroma makes no effort to convert user-uploaded files to browser-compatible formats, if Mastodon didn't go through the trouble of converting formats, Mastodon users on iOS would not be able to see many "GIFs" and videos uploaded by Pleroma users in the popular WebM format that is not available on iOS (yet). You may prefer one or the other but there are definitely reasons for why Mastodon does it that way.
- gaius_baltar 5y ago
  > but hotlinking to 3rd party servers leaves your users vulnerable to tracking by malicious operators, leeches off the bandwidth of remote servers, And goatse attacks. Nothing ensures that the media that was there when the post was shared to the local instance will be the same at the moment it is shown to an user. An instance can turn evil and replace nice user-generated images with ads once they are shared all across the fediverse.

adminscoffee 5y ago

now mix it with pion and we're cooking

crocodiletears 5y ago

Are there any actively maintained Activitypub/Mastodon clients that don't integrate their own blacklists? Someone recommended Husky to me, but it's been dead for a minute.

messo 5y ago

Mastodon was hard to "sell" to my peers when I tried to explain how it works. Recently I changed my approach by not explaining all the great technical features related to federation, and instead focused on the fact that it is ad-free, do not use an algorithm (feed is chronological) and is community run. Mastodon is what Twitter once was, before it got ruined by ads and algorithms. A friend who is an artist was frustrated with the experience on Instagram, and finally signed up on an art-related community in the fediverse, and found it to be a breath of fresh air, with more meaningfull interactions, not just likes.

nathias 5y ago

Federation really seems to combine the downsides of centralization with the downsides of decentralization.

wombatmobile 5y ago

From slate.com Everything That Went Wrong With Donald Trump’s New Social Network in the First 24 Hours > Truth Social will be a lot like Twitter, with the primary interface consisting of a feed of short posts from users you follow. However, these posts will be called “truths” instead of “tweets,” and reshares will be known a “retruths.” While the platform wasn’t supposed to have its soft launch until next month, users found a way to access the site and were setting up accounts within hours of the announcement. (One vandal claimed the @donaldjtrump handle and posted a picture of a pig with extremely large testicles.) Truth Social eventually cut off access, though screenshots of the interface taken before then suggest that the platform is basically just a fork of Mastodon, the open-access software that allows users to make spinoff social media networks. Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko has said that he will be seeking legal counsel since Truth Social appears to be breaking his product’s terms of use by not sharing the code or license with the public. Truth Social’s terms further claim that the source code is proprietary, which could also violate Mastodon’s license. https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/donald-trump-true-social-launch-problems.html https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/donald-trump-true-socia...

DoItToMe81 5y ago

I love the concept of Mastodon, but I feel it inherits many of the problems of Twitter. I only used it for about a month, but I encountered far too much mob mentality and pearl clutching for my health and left. I like free discussion, and I feel the current Mastodon userbase means I'd have to host my own echo chamber to avoid theirs.