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Mastodon: A free, open-source, and decentralized Twitter not owned by anybody

168 points by adamdegas 5y ago

dleslie 5y ago
Be warned: joining servers that relay other public servers is a quick way to unwittingly encounter pornographic content that is illegal to possess in many countries. The tech isn't safe outside of heavily moderated and/or small instances.
- Enhex 5y ago
  how centralized services deal with that? filtering AI?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - babelfish 5y ago
    CSAM scanning - comparing content hashes with known hashes of CSAM material, usually provided by a law enforcement agency
- chefandy 5y ago
  I know they have blurred previews for content marked sensitive and I imagine porn marketers or people sharing content that's illegal anyway are more than happy to ignore that. I wonder if you can blur, or even better, not load any images and display them selectively? Or not load any images from people you don't follow?
- mathlover2 5y ago
  There are many ways to avoid encountering illegal pornographic content on Mastodon. Indeed the one you linked to does just that, by having a mod staff that can block offending accounts and suspend interactions with instances.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    I can't think of any other major platform where avoiding illegal pornography is something users explicitly have to think about and take actions to protect themselves. I find it worrying that this is even an issue, but then again it's not surprising - if you build a platform explicitly against witch hunts, you'll end up with 1% principled legitimate users that use it to make a statement and 99% witches.
    - mathlover2 5y ago
      Actually, even Twitter has a CP problem. I've seen it discussed before, where various accounts with CP were reported, but action on said accounts was delayed due to unknown issues on the side of Twitter. Meanwhile, the moderation on Mastodon instances varies from being more lax than Twitter to being more strict (IIRC that instance you linked is slightly more strict than Twitter). Also, Mastodon wasn't built "explicitly against witch hunts". A lot of people go there because they don't like the hellscape that is Twitter, or because they simply want a different audience. Heck, there are many people --- myself included --- with both Twitter and Mastodon handles. The people who go to Mastodon after a Twitter ban usually end up on more toxic fringe instances, like radical.town (tankie) or social.quodverum.com (MAGA). Depending on which part of Mastodon you are on, you can still find witch hunts, usually on the fringier instances.
- jrnichols 5y ago
  and even moderated instances still have huge issues with it. There was one called "Sinblr" that had a user from another domain (in Japan, I think) overwhelmed it to the point that the hobbyist mods couldn't keep up with actual illegal porn content (underage material.) Seems law enforcement caught wind of it, and Sinblr has ceased to exist, along with any user accounts on it.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 5y ago
I like the idea of Mastodon and I'm glad it exists, but I've yet to find a particular niche for which there is a server where I want to participate. Usually these days I'll just stick to a Slack workspace, a Discord server, or a Facebook group if I want to engage with a community publicly, and I'm already off of Twitter altogether. I'm guessing it's just a cold start problem. What the best way of discovering active Mastodon communities one might want to be part of?
- tomrod 5y ago
  You echo my sentiments. It seems good discoverability is hard, so the path of least resistance is centralization!
  - silverpepsi 5y ago
    Imo ideal would be like a plugin for Chrome that injects external content automatically into my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Can you imagine how awesome adoption could be? Your favorite account just got banned? Go look up their decentralized domain style uncensorable ID and bam seamlessly have at least one uncensored bit showing up on your bread and butter sites without having to change your habits much immediately.
- 0x0000000 5y ago
  Along these lines, how would folks feel about their local town/county/state running a Mastodon instance? It's a community you belong to, and it would create a sort of "digital public square" as opposed to the privatized walled gardens we have today. Is something like this realistic?
  - javajosh 5y ago
    I don't think most people would want unmoderated contact with their city. I am not joking.
    - recuter 5y ago
easrng 5y ago
This submission should really be https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org, the site of the project itself and not just Eugen's instance.
darkotic 5y ago
Can you block topics you're not interested in seeing?
- makeworld 5y ago
  Yes, you can block by keyword.
nikolay 5y ago
How scalable is Mastodon though? I mean, it's written in Ruby a la Twitter. Update: It is used by both Gab and Truth Social, which are centralized, not distributed.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  It is a decentralized social media site, so it will surely scale well enough to meet realistic user numbers at least.
  - nikolay 5y ago
    The most popular instance has 200K users. This is still way too little for a distrubted system given Facebook has over 2 billion users.
- clajiness 5y ago
  Ask GitHub, Basecamp, Shopify, Zendesk, Netflix, etc, etc. This notion that Rails is slow and doesn’t scale is misinformed at best.
  - suyash 5y ago
    Netflix runs Java heavily on the backend to scale their platform. Twitter ditched Ruby on Rails and moved to JVM (Sala) for the same reasons. Any benchmark comparison for programming language performs will show Java beating Ruby on Rails, Python etc by huge margin.
    - TruthWillHurt 5y ago
      The main thing Java beats other langs in by a huge margin is memory consumption.
      - nikolay 5y ago
        Which isn't a little advantage!
chefandy 5y ago
I dismissed the importance of copywriters for important one-word labels until Mastodon deemed their posts "toots." Adoption is critical for social media, and cachet is critical for mass adoption. "Tooting" isn't the radio-friendly Big Bang Theory flavor of dorky— it's Segway-with-knee-pads dorky. I'll probably deploy an instance for kicks and giggles, but I can't see it taking off until it's a little more image savvy. Dorkiness can be an insurmountable obstacle. Just ask google glass.
- RhysU 5y ago
  > 54-46 was my number. Right now, someone else has that number. Dorkiness does not legitimately enter into discussing "Toots" no matter Mastodon's intent.
  - chefandy 5y ago
    I hate to say it, but we're 2 years closer to the spirit of 2069.
- krapp 5y ago
  Google Glass didn't fail because it was dorky, it failed because people understand Google to be a surveillance and advertising company and the prospect of Glass serving as an always on, always streaming, always interpreting Panopticon was too much for people to take. You're right about "toots," though. At least "tweets" make sense for a site named Twitter, but what is a "toot," a mastodon farting?
  - brimble 5y ago
    As in "to toot a horn". Like a trunk. Of an elephant. Or a mastodon.
    - SkyMarshal 5y ago
      Krapp is right though, "tooting" is also slang in some places for farting. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZUvuvfDQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZUvuvfDQg It's also old slang for a drinking bender: https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/on+a+toot https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/on+a+toot Mastadon really should have done a little more due dilligence before deciding on that term.
3np 5y ago
Note that while Mastodon is the most widespread implementation, and kind of sets the de-facto standard like IE did with HTML in the 90s, there are a many other fully compatible implementations to run a Fediverse server and federate over ActivityPub. You can join or self-host any implemention and follow and communicate with users on other servers. There are moderation tools and admins can set policies for federation; some servers are picky with how they federate, some more free-speech-oriented. Fully unmoderated servers with open registration that try to federate promiscuously tend to get siloed of from the rest fairly quickly. The network is not full-mesh by design, so typically either one of two servers (or user on it) needs to either manually follow users from that server or have content forwarded from already followed actors to ingest it. The neat thing with this is how you can natively and seamlessly follow vloggers on Peertube on your personal Friendica instance, and boost it to your followers on Mastodon. People interested in FLOSS and Linux may be interested in checking out the fosstodon.org instance. I'm on a small not very active Pleroma instance hosted by friends (bio). Some people have accounts on many servers. https://fediverse.party/ https://fediverse.party/
rabite 5y ago
Mastodon is not "decentralized". Federation is not decentralization. If that were the case, SMTP would be a decentralized protocol. Something that has a point of centralization is not decentralized. The Mastodon node is the point of centralization. Decentralized protocols generally have a continuous graph, not individual centralized shards.
- mdoms 5y ago
  (De)centralization is a spectrum, not a boolean.
  - rabite 5y ago
    Mastodon is nowhere on the entire spectrum of decentralized. No component of it provides decentralization.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  Well anyone can run an instance. Theoretically every user can run their own instance. So it's not architecturally incapable of being decentralized, but social behavior leaves it in it's current state. To me that's good enough, make something that can be as decentralized as people want it to be and let people use it how they use it.
  - rabite 5y ago
    If everyone ran their own SMTP server, SMTP would still not be decentralized. There are additional points of failure on simple federation that are outside of the owner-operator's control. Their domain name can be frozen or stolen by the registrar (this actually happened extensively to many websites, most notoriously The Daily Stormer which was suspended by dozens of "free speech" registrars and dozens of national ccTLDs). They can be denied IP transit or transport, or blackholed by specific ASNs. Decentralized protocols will provide graph access in absence of centralized resources.
- wallfacer120 5y ago
  People get very excited by the word decentralized - I think its because it gives the feeling of BOTH being part of a group and not being controlled or restricted.
loonshi 5y ago
https://jointhefedi.com https://jointhefedi.com gives a good list of instances to join. Check out https://soapbox.pub/ https://soapbox.pub/ as a great frontend for pleroma. https://fediverse.express https://fediverse.express https://yarrps.xyz/ https://yarrps.xyz/ (domain expired) https://web.archive.org/web/20210817035751/https://yarrps.xyz/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210817035751/https://yarrps.xy... https://install-app.yunohost.org/?app=pleroma https://install-app.yunohost.org/?app=pleroma LukeSmith.xyz 's take on Federation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOiCACmjKBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOiCACmjKBM
- 3np 5y ago
  In the spirit of Fediverse: the guy has a PeerTube channel with the same content, you should probably link that instead of YT :p
- nightpool 5y ago
  Note: This may not matter for everybody, but Soapbox is built and maintained by far-right trolls who were ostracized from the rest of the network for their hatred of trans people and "the transgender ideology" (their words). Additionally, even within the Pleroma project (which evolved out of *chan culture and often acts as a refuge for those shunned by other parts of the fediverse), Alex has alienated all of the other major maintainers, and pissed them off enough that he eventually ended up banned from the project entirely (if I remember correctly): https://hacktivis.me/articles/Update%20on%20Pleroma%20Maintainance https://hacktivis.me/articles/Update%20on%20Pleroma%20Mainta.... (Note: I have some small involvement with the maintenance of Mastodon, mostly in an advisory role these days, and I'm speaking up because I've witnessed the effects of Gleason's behavior first hand. Think carefully before you throw your lot in with him and his, he has a long history of burning his bridges)
Nextgrid 5y ago
This comment on an older Mastodon thread is just as relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789302 I've also commented before as to why I don't believe decentralization is a solution to the problems of current social media and instead introduces problems of its own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513
- throwaway82652 5y ago
  As someone who's been on and off various Mastodon servers for the last 5 years, you're absolutely correct. Geeks building this stuff seem to be completely dismissive of the power of network effects towards Facebook and Twitter's dominance, they would rather pretend it's not real and just keep building inside their little bubble. Social media users just want to talk to their friends and meet cool new people, they don't care about dealing with stupid server/moderator drama which there is an absurd amount of in the fediverse. Any exposure to that at all is a huge anti-feature but it's unavoidable on a decentralized system. People attempting to romanticize the old days of usenet and IRC always seem to mysteriously downplay that part. I don't miss that at all, it was truly truly awful. I have a lot of respect for the founder of Mastodon but I suspect even he knows this is a losing game in the long term.
TruthWillHurt 5y ago
If you ever wondered what anarchy looks like, or had complaints about Facebook moderators - check this out.
QuikAccount 5y ago
Mastodon is something I want to like but it honestly find it complicated and annoying to use. Do I need a new account for each instance being the main question? If so that just sounds tedious. It's one the main benefits of Reddit, needing one account to interact with many "forums." Also, generally speaking, I found a lot of people on Mastodon are the type of people that were banned from Twitter. It's like Reddit and Voat.
- throwanem 5y ago
  Well, you don't need an account on each instance you want to interact with, but you might need multiple accounts (but it's not clear where) if the instance you choose has defederated (or defederates in future from) another instance for reasons which may be known only to the moderators of your instance, who are not bound to share those reasons or even the instances from which they've defederated or in future choose to defederate. "Defederation" is like blocking on Twitter, except it's more like a Twitter block list, except block lists and the automated propagation thereof are actually a hugely divisive issue within the community of fediverse users, oh and speaking of which it's more correct to call it "the fediverse" instead of "Mastodon" because Mastodon is really just the most widely known implementation of the underlying ActivityPub protocol, and this is also divisive because... [three hours later] ...and that's the short intro to what's important to know about the fediverse! Now, let's get you an - wait where'd you go? Most folks I know who still believe in the value of any of this for its own sake have moved on to considering that this kind of refractory opacity is actually good because it prevents entry by anyone who isn't likewise invested. Ironically, those who preach the value of investment are also almost universally those who don't need to worry about leveraging a social media presence into any form of income or, y'know, social life. Almost everyone who does care about these things has likewise moved on - in this case, back to Twitter.
  - rapnie 5y ago
    > Ironically, those who preach the value of investment are also almost universally those who don't need to worry about leveraging a social media presence into any form of income or, y'know, social life Also ironically, social life existed before social media, and no one earned a living from it then. But in your case you might separate social life from professional career. Use Mastodon for the first and Twitter, Insta, what-have-you for the latter.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
encryptluks2 5y ago
One issue with Mastodon is that one of the servers I was part of shutdown unexpectedly. Now I can't transfer that account. Can't they find a way to create something actually a bit more decentralized so that you're not tied to a single server? I think Mastodon is a great first step, but unfortunately doesn't go far enough.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  can't you set up your own mastoden and then sort of "federate" with other mastodon instances you want to share your stuff with? I thought that was mostly the big advantage of it, outside of it not being twitter
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    Set it up how exactly? Mastodon as far as I know isn't exactly meant to run individual instances for whatever device you're connecting from. I could be wrong, but it is a bit more complex than that and if that was the case why don't they just let you backup whatever keys you need yourself to migrate accounts?
skybrian 5y ago
I'm on my third Mastodon server, which is mastodon.social. The first one was Drew Devault's server, which he advertised here. (I didn't know who he was at the time.) One day it disappeared without notice. Admittedly, I wasn't using it much. The second one was schelling.pt, which I picked solely for the cool name. It started having weird brownouts after a while, where nothing would update and images were broken. So, don't do as I did and pick a Mastodon server on a whim, without checking out the person running it and what they're willing to commit to. I guess mastodon.social is probably safe, but it would be nice if there were professional hosting. (You could also self-host, but I don't care enough about the Fediverse to do that.)
Taek 5y ago
What bothers me the most is how difficult it is to compete with the incumbents. We all want something better. We all have ideas of what better looks like. We've all (or many of us anyway) have tried alternatives. But you essentially can't overcome the network effects. There's no way to gradually build a social network when everyone is already on a different one. We have to change that. Facebook should be required to let other platforms consume content produced by its users. If you do that, you suddenly can cold start a competitor, because switching off of Facebook does not mean giving up talking to your grandmother.
- nilsandrey 5y ago
  This is exactly the problem we all always have with trying new services and dealing with relatives, friends, coworkers, and new networking pales which is ultimately the daily communication targets.
- jakecopp 5y ago
  As far as I understand, the new EU Digital Markets Act [1] will support this - forcing big platforms to allow interoperability. Awesome for platforms like Matrix [2] which are all about supporting federation and bridges to other services (such as Signal, which is hostile to federation [3]). [1]: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/03/25/interoperability-without-sacrificing-privacy-matrix-and-the-dma https://matrix.org/blog/2022/03/25/interoperability-without-... [2]: https://matrix.org https://matrix.org [3]: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Never heard of that. I don't see facebook not pulling out of a market requiring it to share posts and such, especially in private groups and whatnot. Seems like users won't like their posts going wider than facebook either.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      Facebook can't afford to pull out of the EU, it's a massive market, and IMHO the cat will be out of the bag and other jurisdictions will follow suit with similar regulations anyways.
mulmen 5y ago
I always ask the same question when Mastodon comes up specifically and the fediverse in general. With Mastodon and/or the Fediverse am I locked in to an instance or an app? Can I sign up on any Mastodon instance and take my identity elsewhere? Can I opt to self-host later? If I upload a bunch of photos to one of the Instagram-alikes can I relocate them easily? Is the storage plane separate from the apps? My understanding of the Fediverse is that it is a federated protocol but apps and instances are still sticky. Am I totally off base here?
- easrng 5y ago
  You can move your account to a new instance, but only if your current instance is cooperative. There's no app lockin, I can switch from the official webui to pinafore.social to tusky and back and it doesn't change anything, they're just different UIs for the Mastodon API.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    For the Mastodon API but not the Fediverse, right? Can I post a vacation photo to the Fediverse and have it visible to my followers on the Instagram-alike and the Twitter-alike?
    - 3np 5y ago
      AP is a bit underspecified in terms of semantics, but yes, that is both the intention and (in absence of bugs or mismatch) reality. IME yes, so far I haven't experienced issues federating across implementations listed on fediverse.party and when they have come up in the past, devs and maintainers tend to treat it as bugs and want solve it.
- 3np 5y ago
  Today it works kind of similar to e-mail (except there's some notion in servers for migration), so yes, you'd generally get a new public identifier as you move servers. So server admins do have a lot of practical authority in that sense. It's a tricky one to solve properly (see Zooko's Triangle). The only solutions I've seen so far rely on distributed ledgers, to which there is cultural resistance. We do need to arrive at a DiD solution, though. Matrix needs to solve the same issue, so ideally we'll find something that works in general. Perhaps the W3C proposal is viable. Devs and admins in the ecosystem realize this and other ways that the current state of ActivityPub is not ideal. If you're interested in following discussions on how to improve and evolve the Fediverse protocols and ecosystem, some people are congregating here (and yeah, we should dogfood better). https://pad.public.cat/8yNgnlxmSsGYk3TfIau46A?view https://pad.public.cat/8yNgnlxmSsGYk3TfIau46A?view #socialcoding-foundations:matrix.org https://codeberg.org/fediverse https://codeberg.org/fediverse
arnmac 5y ago
I am already a part of several Mastadon instances. Each with several thousand users. The great thing is you can create your own environment where just your own users can communicate with each other or you can federate with other mastadon systems to be able to communicate with those off your server. This is not about branding or making it big. It is more about being able to control your own ability to control your communication channels. No canceling no deplatforming. Just communication. If you don't like someone you can block them. If you don't like the content from their server you can just choose not to federate with them. This is a platform talked about all the time on the No Agenda podcast. They have used this for several years successfully. ITM.
bluepoint 5y ago
with a very unappealing name… sorry.
- zaik 5y ago
  Don't worry, there are other implementations of the ActivityPub protocol if you don't like the name.
stereoradonc 5y ago
How important is this Mastodon in the asymmetric world of Twitter? Its missing one critical component: Network effects.
3np 5y ago
For those of you raising issues with ways in which the AP-speaking fediverse is lacking at this point, many of these points are acknowledged by members and implementers of the community. If you're actually interested in exploring constructive conversation on how to move forward to where we don't need to rely on centralized authoritarian incumbents and getting a healthier ecosystem, come join in. Very budding and recent so please be nice and not too dismissive. https://codeberg.org/fediverse https://codeberg.org/fediverse #socialcoding-foundations:matrix.org https://pad.public.cat/8yNgnlxmSsGYk3TfIau46A?view https://pad.public.cat/8yNgnlxmSsGYk3TfIau46A?view
8bitsrule 5y ago
Tried Mastodon for a few months. Maybe I signed onto the wrong instance (Fosstodon) but IME it was mostly a home for short blog-posts ... all over the spectrum. There were far less stupid posts, but little sense of community (unlike HN), little (substantial) discussion. Hoped for more than FOSS Twitter ... more techy, but mostly unsatisfying.
- rapnie 5y ago
  Then Lemmy might be more your thing. It is a federated Reddit / HN like link aggregator, where instances host multiple communities on specific topics and with their own moderators. Lemmy also federates with Mastodon, so mastodon users that comment for their own UI to your post will show up in your comment thread and likewise they'll see your response from Lemmy. Their Likes become Lemmy upvotes. Their boosts (retweets) help your post / comment reach a broader audience.
  - 8bitsrule 5y ago
    Great tip, thanks!
grandpoobah 5y ago
It irks me that when Gab rebuilt their platform on Mastadon and joined the fediverse, existing instance owners teamed up and blacklisted Gab from being able to meaningfully interact. It seems inherently anti-free-and-open-source to me.
adrianwaj 5y ago
Where's its search engine?
nightsd01 5y ago
This is an old failing site, it’s gonna fail for the same reason that Diaspora and app.net failed, and it’s the same reason web3 is going to fail. Real world users don’t care if their social network is on a “distributed” platform. And they definitely don’t want to pay for it. Relying on some tiny minority to donate….just to avoid the horrifying, almost indescribable pain of some social network using your data to show your better ads (the horror)…really? Maybe we techies need to re-evaluate our priorities in life….

168 points by adamdegas 5y ago

Be warned: joining servers that relay other public servers is a quick way to unwittingly encounter pornographic content that is illegal to possess in many countries. The tech isn't safe outside of heavily moderated and/or small instances.

Enhex 5y ago
how centralized services deal with that? filtering AI?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- babelfish 5y ago
  CSAM scanning - comparing content hashes with known hashes of CSAM material, usually provided by a law enforcement agency
chefandy 5y ago
I know they have blurred previews for content marked sensitive and I imagine porn marketers or people sharing content that's illegal anyway are more than happy to ignore that. I wonder if you can blur, or even better, not load any images and display them selectively? Or not load any images from people you don't follow?
mathlover2 5y ago
There are many ways to avoid encountering illegal pornographic content on Mastodon. Indeed the one you linked to does just that, by having a mod staff that can block offending accounts and suspend interactions with instances.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  I can't think of any other major platform where avoiding illegal pornography is something users explicitly have to think about and take actions to protect themselves. I find it worrying that this is even an issue, but then again it's not surprising - if you build a platform explicitly against witch hunts, you'll end up with 1% principled legitimate users that use it to make a statement and 99% witches.
  - mathlover2 5y ago
    Actually, even Twitter has a CP problem. I've seen it discussed before, where various accounts with CP were reported, but action on said accounts was delayed due to unknown issues on the side of Twitter. Meanwhile, the moderation on Mastodon instances varies from being more lax than Twitter to being more strict (IIRC that instance you linked is slightly more strict than Twitter). Also, Mastodon wasn't built "explicitly against witch hunts". A lot of people go there because they don't like the hellscape that is Twitter, or because they simply want a different audience. Heck, there are many people --- myself included --- with both Twitter and Mastodon handles. The people who go to Mastodon after a Twitter ban usually end up on more toxic fringe instances, like radical.town (tankie) or social.quodverum.com (MAGA). Depending on which part of Mastodon you are on, you can still find witch hunts, usually on the fringier instances.
jrnichols 5y ago
and even moderated instances still have huge issues with it. There was one called "Sinblr" that had a user from another domain (in Japan, I think) overwhelmed it to the point that the hobbyist mods couldn't keep up with actual illegal porn content (underage material.) Seems law enforcement caught wind of it, and Sinblr has ceased to exist, along with any user accounts on it.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 5y ago

I like the idea of Mastodon and I'm glad it exists, but I've yet to find a particular niche for which there is a server where I want to participate. Usually these days I'll just stick to a Slack workspace, a Discord server, or a Facebook group if I want to engage with a community publicly, and I'm already off of Twitter altogether. I'm guessing it's just a cold start problem. What the best way of discovering active Mastodon communities one might want to be part of?

tomrod 5y ago
You echo my sentiments. It seems good discoverability is hard, so the path of least resistance is centralization!
- silverpepsi 5y ago
  Imo ideal would be like a plugin for Chrome that injects external content automatically into my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Can you imagine how awesome adoption could be? Your favorite account just got banned? Go look up their decentralized domain style uncensorable ID and bam seamlessly have at least one uncensored bit showing up on your bread and butter sites without having to change your habits much immediately.
0x0000000 5y ago
Along these lines, how would folks feel about their local town/county/state running a Mastodon instance? It's a community you belong to, and it would create a sort of "digital public square" as opposed to the privatized walled gardens we have today. Is something like this realistic?
- javajosh 5y ago
  I don't think most people would want unmoderated contact with their city. I am not joking.
  - recuter 5y ago

easrng 5y ago

This submission should really be https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org, the site of the project itself and not just Eugen's instance.

darkotic 5y ago

Can you block topics you're not interested in seeing?

makeworld 5y ago
Yes, you can block by keyword.

nikolay 5y ago

How scalable is Mastodon though? I mean, it's written in Ruby a la Twitter. Update: It is used by both Gab and Truth Social, which are centralized, not distributed.

bee_rider 5y ago
It is a decentralized social media site, so it will surely scale well enough to meet realistic user numbers at least.
- nikolay 5y ago
  The most popular instance has 200K users. This is still way too little for a distrubted system given Facebook has over 2 billion users.
clajiness 5y ago
Ask GitHub, Basecamp, Shopify, Zendesk, Netflix, etc, etc. This notion that Rails is slow and doesn’t scale is misinformed at best.
- suyash 5y ago
  Netflix runs Java heavily on the backend to scale their platform. Twitter ditched Ruby on Rails and moved to JVM (Sala) for the same reasons. Any benchmark comparison for programming language performs will show Java beating Ruby on Rails, Python etc by huge margin.
  - TruthWillHurt 5y ago
    The main thing Java beats other langs in by a huge margin is memory consumption.
    - nikolay 5y ago
      Which isn't a little advantage!

chefandy 5y ago

I dismissed the importance of copywriters for important one-word labels until Mastodon deemed their posts "toots." Adoption is critical for social media, and cachet is critical for mass adoption. "Tooting" isn't the radio-friendly Big Bang Theory flavor of dorky— it's Segway-with-knee-pads dorky. I'll probably deploy an instance for kicks and giggles, but I can't see it taking off until it's a little more image savvy. Dorkiness can be an insurmountable obstacle. Just ask google glass.

RhysU 5y ago
> 54-46 was my number. Right now, someone else has that number. Dorkiness does not legitimately enter into discussing "Toots" no matter Mastodon's intent.
- chefandy 5y ago
  I hate to say it, but we're 2 years closer to the spirit of 2069.
krapp 5y ago
Google Glass didn't fail because it was dorky, it failed because people understand Google to be a surveillance and advertising company and the prospect of Glass serving as an always on, always streaming, always interpreting Panopticon was too much for people to take. You're right about "toots," though. At least "tweets" make sense for a site named Twitter, but what is a "toot," a mastodon farting?
- brimble 5y ago
  As in "to toot a horn". Like a trunk. Of an elephant. Or a mastodon.
  - SkyMarshal 5y ago
    Krapp is right though, "tooting" is also slang in some places for farting. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZUvuvfDQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZUvuvfDQg It's also old slang for a drinking bender: https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/on+a+toot https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/on+a+toot Mastadon really should have done a little more due dilligence before deciding on that term.

3np 5y ago

Note that while Mastodon is the most widespread implementation, and kind of sets the de-facto standard like IE did with HTML in the 90s, there are a many other fully compatible implementations to run a Fediverse server and federate over ActivityPub. You can join or self-host any implemention and follow and communicate with users on other servers. There are moderation tools and admins can set policies for federation; some servers are picky with how they federate, some more free-speech-oriented. Fully unmoderated servers with open registration that try to federate promiscuously tend to get siloed of from the rest fairly quickly. The network is not full-mesh by design, so typically either one of two servers (or user on it) needs to either manually follow users from that server or have content forwarded from already followed actors to ingest it. The neat thing with this is how you can natively and seamlessly follow vloggers on Peertube on your personal Friendica instance, and boost it to your followers on Mastodon. People interested in FLOSS and Linux may be interested in checking out the fosstodon.org instance. I'm on a small not very active Pleroma instance hosted by friends (bio). Some people have accounts on many servers. https://fediverse.party/ https://fediverse.party/

rabite 5y ago

Mastodon is not "decentralized". Federation is not decentralization. If that were the case, SMTP would be a decentralized protocol. Something that has a point of centralization is not decentralized. The Mastodon node is the point of centralization. Decentralized protocols generally have a continuous graph, not individual centralized shards.

mdoms 5y ago
(De)centralization is a spectrum, not a boolean.
- rabite 5y ago
  Mastodon is nowhere on the entire spectrum of decentralized. No component of it provides decentralization.
betwixthewires 5y ago
Well anyone can run an instance. Theoretically every user can run their own instance. So it's not architecturally incapable of being decentralized, but social behavior leaves it in it's current state. To me that's good enough, make something that can be as decentralized as people want it to be and let people use it how they use it.
- rabite 5y ago
  If everyone ran their own SMTP server, SMTP would still not be decentralized. There are additional points of failure on simple federation that are outside of the owner-operator's control. Their domain name can be frozen or stolen by the registrar (this actually happened extensively to many websites, most notoriously The Daily Stormer which was suspended by dozens of "free speech" registrars and dozens of national ccTLDs). They can be denied IP transit or transport, or blackholed by specific ASNs. Decentralized protocols will provide graph access in absence of centralized resources.
wallfacer120 5y ago
People get very excited by the word decentralized - I think its because it gives the feeling of BOTH being part of a group and not being controlled or restricted.

loonshi 5y ago

https://jointhefedi.com https://jointhefedi.com gives a good list of instances to join. Check out https://soapbox.pub/ https://soapbox.pub/ as a great frontend for pleroma. https://fediverse.express https://fediverse.express https://yarrps.xyz/ https://yarrps.xyz/ (domain expired) https://web.archive.org/web/20210817035751/https://yarrps.xyz/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210817035751/https://yarrps.xy... https://install-app.yunohost.org/?app=pleroma https://install-app.yunohost.org/?app=pleroma LukeSmith.xyz 's take on Federation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOiCACmjKBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOiCACmjKBM

3np 5y ago
In the spirit of Fediverse: the guy has a PeerTube channel with the same content, you should probably link that instead of YT :p
nightpool 5y ago
Note: This may not matter for everybody, but Soapbox is built and maintained by far-right trolls who were ostracized from the rest of the network for their hatred of trans people and "the transgender ideology" (their words). Additionally, even within the Pleroma project (which evolved out of *chan culture and often acts as a refuge for those shunned by other parts of the fediverse), Alex has alienated all of the other major maintainers, and pissed them off enough that he eventually ended up banned from the project entirely (if I remember correctly): https://hacktivis.me/articles/Update%20on%20Pleroma%20Maintainance https://hacktivis.me/articles/Update%20on%20Pleroma%20Mainta.... (Note: I have some small involvement with the maintenance of Mastodon, mostly in an advisory role these days, and I'm speaking up because I've witnessed the effects of Gleason's behavior first hand. Think carefully before you throw your lot in with him and his, he has a long history of burning his bridges)

Nextgrid 5y ago

This comment on an older Mastodon thread is just as relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789302 I've also commented before as to why I don't believe decentralization is a solution to the problems of current social media and instead introduces problems of its own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513

throwaway82652 5y ago
As someone who's been on and off various Mastodon servers for the last 5 years, you're absolutely correct. Geeks building this stuff seem to be completely dismissive of the power of network effects towards Facebook and Twitter's dominance, they would rather pretend it's not real and just keep building inside their little bubble. Social media users just want to talk to their friends and meet cool new people, they don't care about dealing with stupid server/moderator drama which there is an absurd amount of in the fediverse. Any exposure to that at all is a huge anti-feature but it's unavoidable on a decentralized system. People attempting to romanticize the old days of usenet and IRC always seem to mysteriously downplay that part. I don't miss that at all, it was truly truly awful. I have a lot of respect for the founder of Mastodon but I suspect even he knows this is a losing game in the long term.

TruthWillHurt 5y ago

If you ever wondered what anarchy looks like, or had complaints about Facebook moderators - check this out.

QuikAccount 5y ago

Mastodon is something I want to like but it honestly find it complicated and annoying to use. Do I need a new account for each instance being the main question? If so that just sounds tedious. It's one the main benefits of Reddit, needing one account to interact with many "forums." Also, generally speaking, I found a lot of people on Mastodon are the type of people that were banned from Twitter. It's like Reddit and Voat.

throwanem 5y ago
Well, you don't need an account on each instance you want to interact with, but you might need multiple accounts (but it's not clear where) if the instance you choose has defederated (or defederates in future from) another instance for reasons which may be known only to the moderators of your instance, who are not bound to share those reasons or even the instances from which they've defederated or in future choose to defederate. "Defederation" is like blocking on Twitter, except it's more like a Twitter block list, except block lists and the automated propagation thereof are actually a hugely divisive issue within the community of fediverse users, oh and speaking of which it's more correct to call it "the fediverse" instead of "Mastodon" because Mastodon is really just the most widely known implementation of the underlying ActivityPub protocol, and this is also divisive because... [three hours later] ...and that's the short intro to what's important to know about the fediverse! Now, let's get you an - wait where'd you go? Most folks I know who still believe in the value of any of this for its own sake have moved on to considering that this kind of refractory opacity is actually good because it prevents entry by anyone who isn't likewise invested. Ironically, those who preach the value of investment are also almost universally those who don't need to worry about leveraging a social media presence into any form of income or, y'know, social life. Almost everyone who does care about these things has likewise moved on - in this case, back to Twitter.
- rapnie 5y ago
  > Ironically, those who preach the value of investment are also almost universally those who don't need to worry about leveraging a social media presence into any form of income or, y'know, social life Also ironically, social life existed before social media, and no one earned a living from it then. But in your case you might separate social life from professional career. Use Mastodon for the first and Twitter, Insta, what-have-you for the latter.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

encryptluks2 5y ago

One issue with Mastodon is that one of the servers I was part of shutdown unexpectedly. Now I can't transfer that account. Can't they find a way to create something actually a bit more decentralized so that you're not tied to a single server? I think Mastodon is a great first step, but unfortunately doesn't go far enough.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
can't you set up your own mastoden and then sort of "federate" with other mastodon instances you want to share your stuff with? I thought that was mostly the big advantage of it, outside of it not being twitter
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Set it up how exactly? Mastodon as far as I know isn't exactly meant to run individual instances for whatever device you're connecting from. I could be wrong, but it is a bit more complex than that and if that was the case why don't they just let you backup whatever keys you need yourself to migrate accounts?

skybrian 5y ago

I'm on my third Mastodon server, which is mastodon.social. The first one was Drew Devault's server, which he advertised here. (I didn't know who he was at the time.) One day it disappeared without notice. Admittedly, I wasn't using it much. The second one was schelling.pt, which I picked solely for the cool name. It started having weird brownouts after a while, where nothing would update and images were broken. So, don't do as I did and pick a Mastodon server on a whim, without checking out the person running it and what they're willing to commit to. I guess mastodon.social is probably safe, but it would be nice if there were professional hosting. (You could also self-host, but I don't care enough about the Fediverse to do that.)

Taek 5y ago

What bothers me the most is how difficult it is to compete with the incumbents. We all want something better. We all have ideas of what better looks like. We've all (or many of us anyway) have tried alternatives. But you essentially can't overcome the network effects. There's no way to gradually build a social network when everyone is already on a different one. We have to change that. Facebook should be required to let other platforms consume content produced by its users. If you do that, you suddenly can cold start a competitor, because switching off of Facebook does not mean giving up talking to your grandmother.

nilsandrey 5y ago
This is exactly the problem we all always have with trying new services and dealing with relatives, friends, coworkers, and new networking pales which is ultimately the daily communication targets.
jakecopp 5y ago
As far as I understand, the new EU Digital Markets Act [1] will support this - forcing big platforms to allow interoperability. Awesome for platforms like Matrix [2] which are all about supporting federation and bridges to other services (such as Signal, which is hostile to federation [3]). [1]: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/03/25/interoperability-without-sacrificing-privacy-matrix-and-the-dma https://matrix.org/blog/2022/03/25/interoperability-without-... [2]: https://matrix.org https://matrix.org [3]: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Never heard of that. I don't see facebook not pulling out of a market requiring it to share posts and such, especially in private groups and whatnot. Seems like users won't like their posts going wider than facebook either.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    Facebook can't afford to pull out of the EU, it's a massive market, and IMHO the cat will be out of the bag and other jurisdictions will follow suit with similar regulations anyways.

mulmen 5y ago

I always ask the same question when Mastodon comes up specifically and the fediverse in general. With Mastodon and/or the Fediverse am I locked in to an instance or an app? Can I sign up on any Mastodon instance and take my identity elsewhere? Can I opt to self-host later? If I upload a bunch of photos to one of the Instagram-alikes can I relocate them easily? Is the storage plane separate from the apps? My understanding of the Fediverse is that it is a federated protocol but apps and instances are still sticky. Am I totally off base here?

easrng 5y ago
You can move your account to a new instance, but only if your current instance is cooperative. There's no app lockin, I can switch from the official webui to pinafore.social to tusky and back and it doesn't change anything, they're just different UIs for the Mastodon API.
- mulmen 5y ago
  For the Mastodon API but not the Fediverse, right? Can I post a vacation photo to the Fediverse and have it visible to my followers on the Instagram-alike and the Twitter-alike?
  - 3np 5y ago
    AP is a bit underspecified in terms of semantics, but yes, that is both the intention and (in absence of bugs or mismatch) reality. IME yes, so far I haven't experienced issues federating across implementations listed on fediverse.party and when they have come up in the past, devs and maintainers tend to treat it as bugs and want solve it.
3np 5y ago
Today it works kind of similar to e-mail (except there's some notion in servers for migration), so yes, you'd generally get a new public identifier as you move servers. So server admins do have a lot of practical authority in that sense. It's a tricky one to solve properly (see Zooko's Triangle). The only solutions I've seen so far rely on distributed ledgers, to which there is cultural resistance. We do need to arrive at a DiD solution, though. Matrix needs to solve the same issue, so ideally we'll find something that works in general. Perhaps the W3C proposal is viable. Devs and admins in the ecosystem realize this and other ways that the current state of ActivityPub is not ideal. If you're interested in following discussions on how to improve and evolve the Fediverse protocols and ecosystem, some people are congregating here (and yeah, we should dogfood better). https://pad.public.cat/8yNgnlxmSsGYk3TfIau46A?view https://pad.public.cat/8yNgnlxmSsGYk3TfIau46A?view #socialcoding-foundations:matrix.org https://codeberg.org/fediverse https://codeberg.org/fediverse

arnmac 5y ago

I am already a part of several Mastadon instances. Each with several thousand users. The great thing is you can create your own environment where just your own users can communicate with each other or you can federate with other mastadon systems to be able to communicate with those off your server. This is not about branding or making it big. It is more about being able to control your own ability to control your communication channels. No canceling no deplatforming. Just communication. If you don't like someone you can block them. If you don't like the content from their server you can just choose not to federate with them. This is a platform talked about all the time on the No Agenda podcast. They have used this for several years successfully. ITM.

bluepoint 5y ago

with a very unappealing name… sorry.

zaik 5y ago
Don't worry, there are other implementations of the ActivityPub protocol if you don't like the name.

stereoradonc 5y ago

How important is this Mastodon in the asymmetric world of Twitter? Its missing one critical component: Network effects.

3np 5y ago

For those of you raising issues with ways in which the AP-speaking fediverse is lacking at this point, many of these points are acknowledged by members and implementers of the community. If you're actually interested in exploring constructive conversation on how to move forward to where we don't need to rely on centralized authoritarian incumbents and getting a healthier ecosystem, come join in. Very budding and recent so please be nice and not too dismissive. https://codeberg.org/fediverse https://codeberg.org/fediverse #socialcoding-foundations:matrix.org https://pad.public.cat/8yNgnlxmSsGYk3TfIau46A?view https://pad.public.cat/8yNgnlxmSsGYk3TfIau46A?view

8bitsrule 5y ago

Tried Mastodon for a few months. Maybe I signed onto the wrong instance (Fosstodon) but IME it was mostly a home for short blog-posts ... all over the spectrum. There were far less stupid posts, but little sense of community (unlike HN), little (substantial) discussion. Hoped for more than FOSS Twitter ... more techy, but mostly unsatisfying.

rapnie 5y ago
Then Lemmy might be more your thing. It is a federated Reddit / HN like link aggregator, where instances host multiple communities on specific topics and with their own moderators. Lemmy also federates with Mastodon, so mastodon users that comment for their own UI to your post will show up in your comment thread and likewise they'll see your response from Lemmy. Their Likes become Lemmy upvotes. Their boosts (retweets) help your post / comment reach a broader audience.
- 8bitsrule 5y ago
  Great tip, thanks!

grandpoobah 5y ago

It irks me that when Gab rebuilt their platform on Mastadon and joined the fediverse, existing instance owners teamed up and blacklisted Gab from being able to meaningfully interact. It seems inherently anti-free-and-open-source to me.

adrianwaj 5y ago

Where's its search engine?

nightsd01 5y ago

This is an old failing site, it’s gonna fail for the same reason that Diaspora and app.net failed, and it’s the same reason web3 is going to fail. Real world users don’t care if their social network is on a “distributed” platform. And they definitely don’t want to pay for it. Relying on some tiny minority to donate….just to avoid the horrifying, almost indescribable pain of some social network using your data to show your better ads (the horror)…really? Maybe we techies need to re-evaluate our priorities in life….