78 ms·

Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

646 points by srvmshr 4y ago

srvmshr 4y ago
A nifty tool that I came across to find Twitter peers registered with Mastodon federated servers. Requires authentication though
encryptluks2 4y ago
Surely there has to be another way to do this besides logging in with Twitter. Heck, they could just have you post a verification tween on your Twitter account.
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  You can't view an account's followers/following without being logged in. And if you try to back a service using a single bot account, you're going to get instantly banned b/c of suspicious traffic.
  - sigmar 4y ago
    Keybase somehow manages to do verification through a twitter post, surely there could be a similar method for Mastodon?
    - bpodgursky 4y ago
      You can see a person's latest tweets without a login. Just play around in incognito and you can see: https://twitter.com/elonmusk https://twitter.com/elonmusk
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- spaceywilly 4y ago
  Maybe they can create a specific pattern people can enter in their Twitter bio, then build a crawler
throwaway221017 4y ago
michaelwww 4y ago
I find this whole situation to be incredibly depressing, especially with Musk tweeting out a fact free insinuation about Paul Pelosi (since deleted without apology.) The proverbial shit is going to hit the fan on Twitter on election night Nov 8 in America and I don't think Musk is prepared to handle it. I'd love to live in a country where we could have nice things, but apparently America is not it.
- Zigurd 4y ago
  It also isn't as if Elon was just thumbing his nose at naysayers. A day earlier he pledged to advertisers Twitter would not become a "free for all hellscape." Now that's the new tagline.
  - michaelwww 4y ago
    It will be easy to switch to another platform and there will be tools to help as this post indicates. 4chan users are having fun saying the N word on Twitter and Le Bron James is complaining about it. And this is only day 2. I certainly think people should be able to exercise free speech, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to it. I can go somewhere else if Twitter gets too depressing.
    - leereeves 4y ago
      > I certainly think people should be able to exercise free speech, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to it. Would that be different on Mastodon? I've never used it, but as a decentralized service, I assume it won't have a central authority banning users?
      - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
        The difference is that each node has its own set of moderators. So jerks will get moderated there. And when they do that, they'll probably jump servers. And so get cordoned off into wherever federated node that they isolate themselves into. Note that each server decides which other servers it will federate and share content with. So eventually nodes that collect jerks will just get cut from most of the rest of the federation. It's certainly vulnerable to abuse. But it also leaves more room for community response. And it also doesn't have a recommendation "algorithm". You see the content you explicitly subscribe to. In chronological order. So dark patterns that arise out of feeding people rage tweets and engagement hacking and amplifying "controversial" crap for engagement... doesn't happen. So the platform isn't going to give an outsized "recommended" audience for crap just because it has high "likes" -- that's not how the platform works.
Timja 4y ago
Twitter is the only platform I know where you can search for people who share your interests and then connect with them. The whole #buildinpublic community is just insanely great. Everybody is building something. Everybody is having similar issues to talk about. You can make so many great connections and help each other out. But I feel that with Twitter becoming a private company owned by a single controversial person, Twitter lost a lot of its appeal. It could be very unfortunate (if Twitter just goes down the drain without a replacement) or it could be the start of something new, if a new way to interact comes up. If the community moves to another form of communication, I hope it will be something decentralized that can not be taken away from us again. That is the reason why I am not enthusiastic about Mastodon. Mastodon is not decentralized. Unless you run your own instance, you do not own your social graph.
- twblalock 4y ago
  Wait and see what happens. The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have not changed. It is a free service that needs to convert user engagement into advertising dollars. Unless Twitter moves to a paid model, that will always be true no matter who owns it. And if Twitter fails, any potential replacement will need to deal with the same incentives and solve the same problems Twitter did.
  - nsvd 4y ago
    In contrast, most fediverse communities are run on donations or by the private funds of an individual. There aren't perverse financial incentives in the same way. This is one advantage of having many, smaller servers.
  - Timja 4y ago
    A replacement could be just a protocol. If you signed your message with "This is a reply to msg 33398198 by Timja. Signed: twblalock", then nobody could take this converstion away from us again. I could copy it and put it on any server. Owned by myself or run by some service provider. And it would always be clear to everybody that this conversation really took place between the two of us.
twblalock 4y ago
Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized platform over a federated platform? The centralized platform made it very easy to find people. Now people who are moving to a federated platform miss the value of centralization, so they are writing a tool that will leverage that value and import it into the federated platform. Maybe if Mastodon was a centralized Twitter-style platform it would be more usable, and more popular.
- detaro 4y ago
  Not really, no. Imagine the reversed situation: Everyone is on Mastodon, and now this cool new thing called "Twitter" comes along and some people are switching to it. "find everyones Twitter account and follow it" would still be a useful thing to have, over manually checking for every single person you follow if they have an account, if they maybe have an account with a different username, ... and following those you find.
  - colesantiago 4y ago
    But we all know this hypothetical isn't the case. Centralisation is more convenient in almost ALL cases, even in email (nobody except people on HN host their own email)
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      It proves the value of centralized search and discovery, but it says nothing about centralized hosting in moderation. There is probably quite a bit of value in a system where decentralized instances can volunteer to submit their own discovery database to a central search platform, and where individual users could opt in to being part of that database.
      - nopenopenopeno 4y ago
        This is commonplace for decentralized protocols. Torrents are probably the most obvious example.
    - 4y ago
pigeons 4y ago
Often mastodon servers either intentionally or naturally have a "theme", which is really helpful for discovering interesting content and users.
- wraptile 4y ago
  it's also easier to start socializing as you can hop into the local timeline and instantly find relatable topics.
martythemaniak 4y ago
You know, I think Reddit is actually the best positioned Twitter alternative. You can use your real name, or anonymous account. You go there to follow particular subreddits, but there no reason why I shouldn't also be able to follow people and see their non-topic (ie, not part of any subreddit) microblogs interweaved with posts from subreddits. They deal with spam and trolls reasonably well. They have all the pieces, they just have to put them together tastefully.
- augustuspolius 4y ago
  Feels like Reddit is closer to Mastodon than to Twitter. Each Mastodon server is like a subreddit with its own rules, moderation, user base, etc.
  - celdon25 4y ago
    Not really. There's a centralized committee that will blacklist or even dump your subreddit down the memory hole if it doesn't meet its standards of moderation.
- celdon25 4y ago
  Reddit's censorship is even worse than Twitter's, so I would expect Reddit to be next on the list of places to liberate on the Internet.
  - malermeister 4y ago
    "Censorship" has always been a dog whistle for "not letting propaganda and incitement run rampant".
    - celdon25 4y ago
      Comrade, don't forget about the satirical news by the Babylon Bee. They are a danger after all, because if a subject thinks you are funny, you cannot control them.
    - 4y ago
yosito 4y ago
Someone should build an app like this that is integrated with all the social networks. Give it a sexy UI, and a catchy feature or two to keep people checking in. Eventually, it could serve as a federated contacts hub that links people between networks. A vital piece of infrastructure to support mandated interoperability.
- klyrs 4y ago
  We had Trillian back in the day, but then the messaging services locked down their protocols. I don't expect such an app would survive the cat&mouse with major players for long.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    I'm not sure about your standard social media, but for direct messaging, several Matrix-based companies have popped up that allow for service interoperability. The European Union is also working on breaking open the messenger space, forcing tech companies to either leave the EU or work on an interoperable standard. I believe an IEEE working group is already developing a protocol to serve this purpose, even with encryption available if I recall correctly.
    - zaik 4y ago
      Is there any information on this working group? I had hopes for the IETF standard XMPP, since the largest IM provider WhatsApp uses it internally.
      - jeroenhd 4y ago
        Apologies; it turns out I was mistaken in believing the IEEE was working on a standard, it's actually the IETF. Abbreviations are hard :( I believe this is the relevant draft: https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-mahy-mimi-identity-01.html https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-mahy-mimi-identity-01.html Edit: I should add that as far as I know, the working group hasn't done much as of yet. I heard about this on Matrix because some of the Matrix folks are trying to get (parts of) the federated Matrix protocol into the standard, or probably at least parts of it.
masukomi 4y ago
ugh. this has a killer flaw > Looking for Mastodon users progress, scanned 867 of 867 users you follow on Twitter. Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon who have previously linked their Twitter and Mastodon accounts by logging into Twitodon. WHO HAVE PREVIOUSLY LINKED ACCOUNTS... BY LOGGING IN TO TWITODON the odds of that having happened for any notable subset are so low as to make this useless.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Brakenshire 4y ago
  It would be much more useful to search using the “people you follow” filter.
- styfle 4y ago
  Instead of creating a new service, it would be better if this read from https://keybase.io https://keybase.io since those mappings already exist.
- drc500free 4y ago
  It seems that this tool is fairly equivalent to everyone posting their mastodon and twitter handles to this thread.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ikari_pl 4y ago
  I mean, that's something you can say about any tool or social network at its beginning. Imagine downdetector with 5 users being considered useless forever.
letier 4y ago
I never cared much about twitter. But I’d be very happy to get a couple of good tech profiles on Mastodon recommended. :)
- commoner 4y ago
  FediFollows (@FediFollows@mastodon.online) recommends interesting accounts to follow on Mastodon. Many of these accounts are tech and FOSS-related. https://mastodon.online/@FediFollows https://mastodon.online/@FediFollows They've also listed all of their recommendations in a directory: https://fedi.directory https://fedi.directory
  - letier 4y ago
    Thanks that seems like a great starting point!
- sundarurfriend 4y ago
  You can also hashtag search the tech you're interested in, and find people that way.
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
I was skeptical on Mastodon. But I'm actually realling enjoying it. It's having a surge in popularity the last few days. When I checked it out a couple years ago it didn't click with me. But now I'm liking it, and I think there's potential there. It won't "replace" Twitter. But a good crowd of people has collected around there, and there's quite a bit of enjoyable content coming through.
- augustuspolius 4y ago
  Is there a non-niche general Mastodon instance that's really popular? That would be the easiest way for me personally to embrace it. I checked a few instances and it's all very niche and very empty. (To clarify, I don't mind niche instances, just at this stage there isn't enough discussion or interesting profiles to follow.)
  - agentultra 4y ago
    It’s also pretty easy to have alts. Most good clients can log onto and track several accounts. You can then flip between various communities; post about work stuff on one, alt for your hobbies or shitposting.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    mastodon.social is by far the largest, but the recommendation is generally to find the one that has interests & people on it you find interesting to start. you'll get content from people on mastodon.social anyways.
    - augustuspolius 4y ago
      This looks great, definitely more active and offers a good variety of topics/profiles.
      - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
        I went with indieweb.social. I think some people from hackernews might find a vibe they like generally there.
Cyberdog 4y ago
Obligatory reminder that Mastodon is a user interface for a defederated network commonly called the Fediverse, and that referring to the Fediverse as "Mastodon" is like referring to the web as Chrome. Spitting into the wind at this point, I know, but it still bothers me.
- nsvd 4y ago
  For example, you can view posts on a Pleroma server with a Mastodon client.
- xigoi 4y ago
  How do posts from other Fediverse networks work on Mastodon?
  - Cyberdog 4y ago
    Think of Fediverse as akin to the email system, where there are thousands if not millions of different servers out there hosting email and exchanging them to each other. Now consider Mastodon as an email client which is hosted on a web site, like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail. That web site gives you an interface with which to interact with the network of email servers, but people using other servers with other interfaces can still see messages from each other; someone using Yahoo! Mail can send and receive messages with someone using Gmail. The difference is that Mastodon is open source, so that anyone can download the code and run their own Mastodon instance (whereas nobody can download and run their own Gmail instance), but that instance can still exchange messages with instances running any of the several other Fediverse interfaces there are out there, such as Pleroma, Misskey, Soapbox, etc. (Unless an instance at either end has "defederated" the other; that is, the administrators have configured it to not exchange messages with the other server.)
    - xigoi 4y ago
      E-mail, although it has different clients, is still fundamentally the same thing — you send a message with a subject, body and attachments. However, it seems that social networks built on ActivityPub are fundamentally different — Mastodon is an imitation of Twitter, with short low-effort posts, Friendica is an imitation of Facebook, then there are ways to link blogs… So what I don't understand is, how does this all work together when the formats are completely different?
NelsonMinar 4y ago
Another new tool in this vein is Fedifinder. It works by scanning Twitter bios of accounts you follow for strings that look like Mastodon addresses: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ 5 years ago there was a neat tool called Mastodon Bridge that did what Twitodon says it does but much better, I think because it didn't require everyone opt in. It stopped working because of some change Twitter made to their API terms of use. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-bridge https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-bridge There's also Moa Party, but it's so complicated I have never used it. https://moa.party/ https://moa.party/
- HellsMaddy 4y ago
  Why does Moa need so many permissions? I don't want to give it +RW on both my accounts.
  - icy 4y ago
    It’s a cross-poster. It quite literally needs +rw to post to both accounts.
    - HellsMaddy 4y ago
      Oh, duh. "bridge" makes sense now.
GeckoEidechse 4y ago
On the topic of Twiter, Mastodon, and the Fediverse, why do federated FOSS alternatives to popular platforms not offer a read-only version of said platform as one of its instances to augment its lack of content? In the example of Twitter, Nitter already exists as an alternative front-end. Now what if there's a Mastodon instance that uses Nitter to wrap official Twitter content and serve it as if it where the twitter.com mastodon instance? Again it would need to be a read-only version as Twitter is not Mastodon but it would help fill the content gap for sure. Now Mastodon might not have a content issue but PeerTube for example very well has and in that case masquerading YouTube as a PeerTube instance would become very interesting.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  There is a lot of Twitter content out there. Too much for a single instance to proxy. I believe there are projects to mirror specific Twitter accounts to a (personal) Mastodon server so you can switch apps without needing two apps. I'm not sure what the implication would be for privacy/data usage regulations if you open those messages to the public, though; blindly reposting everything may actually violate data privacy laws (yes, even if that information is publicly available). Engagement with the audience also is a significant factor for making social media enjoyable. A read-only mirror of Twitter would be very boring, because you can respond/tag/whatever you want for all eternity, but the Twitter authors would never notice. Such a system would work for people primarily using Mastodon that cross-post to Twitter; you could add Twitter replies to the Mastodon replies and get a mixed content stream (that Twitter users might miss half of when discussions respond to as-of-yet unproxied messages).
  - hedora 4y ago
    None of this addresses the question: Nitter exists and it is open source. Why not add a mastodon API to it? The existence of such a thing in no way has anything to do with existing mastodon instances TOS / acceptable use relationship with twitter (if such a relationship even exists).0
  - jeena 4y ago
    Interestingly I started using Twitter as a write only medium, which means I didn't have any interactions there with anyone. This led to the subscribers stagnating, everyone who already was subscribed stayed subscribed but no new people would subscribe for years.
linuxhansl 4y ago
Heresy: Why do we need a replacement for Twitter? There was a world and a life before Twitter, and there is one without Twitter as well. I deleted my Twitter account about a year ago and have not missed anything. People and topics I am interested in I can updated on by many different means.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  I don't think Mastodon is meant to be a replacement for Twitter, or will ever be that. It would be a mistake to treat it that way. It's more like this place than Twitter, in a way. Or, it's kind of similar to how Usenet was in the early 90s. It's a simple linear feed of who've subscribed to, or what the people you've subscribed to have "boosted". So you find the interest groups you're into and join a node that matches that, then find the people you like on various nodes, and follow them. There's no recommendations really. There's hashtags, but few ways to "discover" them and they don't seem to get heavily used right now. It's maybe like Twitter when it first launched. Certainly not what it became (which I never personally participated in). It certainly doesn't have the level of "action" or "engagement" you'd find on Twitter. And that's probably a good thing.
- howinteresting 4y ago
  Networking.
- cgh 4y ago
  I follow various scientists, authors and so forth and I like to read their thoughts or see their recommended reading. And as silly as it sounds, it's wild to see eg William Gibson and Gerry Conway, two guys responsible for some of my formative adolescent reading, interact with one another at random.
  - hedora 4y ago
    For academics, why not read peer reviewed work? For authors, other communities exist as well.
    - 4y ago
augustuspolius 4y ago
This maybe a noob question - does Mastodon allow replies? The few profiles referenced in this thread that I visited look like announcement boards, with no way to comment or start a discussion. I am interested in electronic music and followed several links from fedi.directory. E.g. https://mastodon.art/@merle https://mastodon.art/@merle, https://mastodon.cc/@Sevish https://mastodon.cc/@Sevish, https://sonomu.club/@luka https://sonomu.club/@luka. Is that normal that there are no discussions? Also one of the links led to https://v.basspistol.org/a/setto/video-channels https://v.basspistol.org/a/setto/video-channels, which looks completely different, like a personal page from the 90s, not a Twitter-like app. I thought Mastodon was a Twitter replacement, but was surprised by how uninviting and empty the entire recommended directory for electronic music is.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  It certainly does. From your example accounts: https://mastodon.art/@merle/105821287332308089 https://mastodon.art/@merle/105821287332308089 I think there are just fewer people active on these platforms, which isn't great for interaction. As for v.basspistol.org, that's not a Mastodon instance but a Peertube (derived) instance. Both are part of the so-called Fediverse, but Mastodon (and similar) intent to replace/extend Twitter/Facebook whereas Peertube intends to replace/extend Youtube. Edit: perhaps worth mentioning is that both types of social media share a protocol called ActivityPub. This is how several social media systems (Twitter replacements, Reddit replacements, Youtube replacements, etc.) can all communicate with each other. NextCloud, for instance, also has an ActivityPub system integrated, which means your toots and the shared files/comments may end up in the same system, all with some manner of interoperability.
  - augustuspolius 4y ago
    Interesting. Wonder if it could be clearer if they were still showing a comment field or a reply button to non-logged in users. Just to surface the feature. Thanks for the info on Peertube, I heard the name before but didn't realize it's a federated app. Reply to the edit: thanks for the pointer! Reading about ActivityPub made me feel pretty excited both about the technology and about Mastodon.
wrycoder 4y ago
You would want to think very carefully about giving Twitodon these rights to your Twitter account: Things this App can view... People who follow you and people who you follow. All the Tweets you can view, including Tweets from protected accounts. Any account you can view, including protected accounts.
- kache_ 4y ago
  How do you expect it to work without that data? :P Also, I'm _pretty_ sure you can point the twitter API at any user you want to scan followers and following. I did it on some twitter accounts I'm interested in when I started out to find some accounts to follow.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    Even protected accounts?
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      As far as I'm aware, the default state of a protected account is that its tweets can only be viewed by followers, but anyone is free to follow it. It's also possible to prevent people from following your account without your approval.
- hedora 4y ago
  Twitter just handed that and more to a plutocrat. I'm not seeing why anyone should assume an internet rando is less trustworthy.
  - malermeister 4y ago
    Oligarch might be a good term to describe Musk and his ilk, too
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
anigbrowl 4y ago
When are Mastodon stans going to figure out that the reason people like Twitter is that it's (nominally) flat and you can interact with anyone unless they've blocked you for some reason? It's easy to build silos, which is what most instances are. Mastodon just reinvented single sign-on. It's not a terrible thing to build, but whenever you make a product that's just imitating someone else (Twitter has 'tweets' but Mastodon has 'toots' because the logo is an elephant!) then it needs to be way better, not just a slight improvement. Longer messages are a good thing on Mastodon, though Facebook already does that. But what else does it offer that offsets the confusion of finding target instances, or conversely not being easily findable by people you don't want to converse with? 99.9% of users do not care about federation as a principle, it's just another level of technical gabble that they don't wish to be distracted by. Virtually every decentralized service struggles with this issue. Decentralization is primarily of interest to nerds, and for online services that requires you to be a bit of a computer and a bit of a politics nerd, shrinking your already small target pool. Twitter's original win was that it was staggeringly simple, just asking new users to post about 'what they're doing right now' and offering simple controls to reply, repeat, or express approval. They realized that people felt more connected to a scrolling ticker of headline-style status updates than a newspaper.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  > (Twitter has 'tweets' but Mastodon has 'toots' because the logo is an elephant!) It's a mastodon, not an elephant!!
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    Oh noes I invalidated my whole argument ToT edit: y'all are taking this exchange much too seriously.
  - rvz 4y ago
    Even worse when Mastodons are extinct creatures. Probably tells us about the platform itself being used by little to no one, other than just techies that won't admit that they still lurk on Twitter.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mephos 4y ago
Interesting tool. This reminds me of the initial steps in the vampire attack idea. https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2022/04/16/vampire-attack-twitter.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2022/04/16/vampi...
jonny_eh 4y ago
> Enter your Mastodon host's web address: What?
- remram 4y ago
  Do you not have a Mastodon account?
  - jonny_eh 4y ago
    Nope
    - remram 4y ago
      If you're not trying to log in, what's the problem?
      - jonny_eh 4y ago
        As someone that is now no longer using Twitter, I'm open to alternatives, but was turned off by this up-front complexity.
        remram 4y ago
        You can't log in before you sign up. I think bringing up complexity of the sign-up is fair, but I don't understand how you can be "turned off" by the second step before you looked into the first step.
EamonnMR 4y ago
Gonna repost my standard question on Mastodon articles: cool, how do I get into it?
- friend_and_foe 4y ago
  Go to a server and sign up. Http://fediverse.party
BryanBeshore 4y ago
No
WesSouza 4y ago
> Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon
- remram 4y ago
  Maybe you were the first one of your network, now the others will get to find you.
- AndroidKitKat 4y ago
  Mine found the 2 people I'd already followed on Mastodon. Maybe one day more people will be on it, but if not, it's not that big of a deal.
fleddr 4y ago
Twitter's appeal is outrage and controversy. Their users are addicted to it, even if they don't care to admit it. That's why no significant migration to Mastodon will take place. Even if you do manage to lift and shift your bubble (you won't), you'll then find yourself in a calm and slow place where nothing happens. For a bubble to exist and thrive, it needs a common enemy. With the enemy removed, it collapses. Everybody inside couldn't care if they never heard from you ever again. They were never a friend, just people who agreed. If you want a group of like-minded people sharing stuff, there's a million options. Go to Discord, start a Whatsapp group, a subreddit, whichever. But that's clearly not the point. Hardcore Twitter users want their hot take to be heard in public, with "enemies" listening in.
- mjhagen 4y ago
  That was how twitter was and that was how I liked twitter.
- Nokinside 4y ago
  > That's why no significant migration to Mastodon will take place. This sounds great. If we can leave 99% behind and get all substantive people, like John Carlos Baez, into Mastodon, its the best possible world. People think that all partitions are between people with different opinions, but that's not always the case. Sometimes people with substance from every corner flock into the same arena. For a little time everything is good, then eternal September once again.
  - silisili 4y ago
    Google had that. I don't even remember it's name now...plus maybe? Seemed a lot of tech people wrote there. Very peaceful, no outrage. It died. I think OP is right.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    "For a little time everything is good..." I hear what you're saying. There used to be a time and place where perhaps you could join some niche, a "non-political" one if you will. That barely holds up these days. People do not separate their politics from the niche topic, it's all intersectional and performative. Absurd examples are the "knitting wars" and "noodle lady". Besides constant outrage, many topics are engagement-farmed. I've said it before: Twitter rewards exactly the wrong thing. Reasonable and good faith people keep losing. And yet when I come back to my original point, in case they do make things fair and more calm, a major appeal is lost.
edmcnulty101 4y ago
lookagain 4y ago
I saw someone familiar walking around my neighborhood. The view from my window is partially obscured by the garden. So as I turn my gaze, I see a man wearing a hat loosely. The hat was positioned far back on his head, exposing a protruding forehead whose silhouette was amplified by a receding hairline. As the man walked by, it looked like a bald mounds pubis floating along the balcony. The things one can see from their home, right? Who the fuck needs social media when looking for a good laugh?
davidork 4y ago
Embrace the fragmentation. The economic situation seems to be getting worse, there's tons of people without jobs that could get lots of exposure and experience working in tech related field by moderating all these small federated instances. Plenty of networking opportunities as well. There are going to be a lot more niche and diverse internet communities, and with things being spread out among the various instances it'll be a lot harder for trolls to summon concentrated attacks. Communities will be smaller and higher quality while still being able to co-mingle via federation. Unfortunately that stuff may also apply to more nefarious communities online and they may benefit by hiding amongst all of the other federated instances.
- collegeburner 4y ago
  - kupopuffs 4y ago
    This post reeks of deeply rooted, unfounded assumptions and biases. You're saying janitors/unemployed peoples are a demographic? Come now. Anyone can be unemployed or a janitor.
    - collegeburner 4y ago
      sorry jannie is a derogatory term for a internet moderator who does it for free. nothing at all against actual janitors who have real jobs. sometimes i get too zoomer for hn.
  - davidork 4y ago
    Moderating content, while mundane is valid and valuable experience, not only in the technology aspects but in the human skills that you'd find in any sort of consumer relations focused career. Hopefully people would choose wisely and at least try to have some feel of a community before deciding to take on moderation duties
    - dmix 4y ago
arduinomancer 4y ago
Does Mastodon have the same moderation that the twitter users are used to?
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Server admins each moderate as they see fit. Users can block users as well as blocking whole servers if they disagree with that servers moderation.
qwertox 4y ago
If Elon would migrate Twitter onto Mastodon, with the post history and all, now that would be a change for the history books. It would change social networks forever.
- hedora 4y ago
  Ars Technica ran a "how to download your twitter account" article on Friday. Surely, there is a way to upload it you your own mastodon instance, right?
- xyzzy123 4y ago
  Without some way to capture value it would also be one of the biggest acts of capital destruction in recent tech history.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Banks would hate him! They might even sue him.
- plazmatic 4y ago
- mattacular 4y ago
  Why would he do that. What about anything he's ever done makes you think that is even a remote possibility
  - qwertox 4y ago
    He did make Tesla's patens available for anyone to use for free. Also, with its weight, Twitter would become the first popular open social network, a beacon among them. It would still be a very valuable brand.
    - mattacular 4y ago
      He was sued into buying it for way more than it was worth. The first changed announced so far (in addition to printed code reviews by senior Tesla engineers) is to charge a subscription fee for verification.
shagie 4y ago
In a "ok, maybe I'll look at this..." Grab a client, launch it... it has a login and create account. Ok, create an account. It takes me to https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org - find a server... and I see a list of foreign language, LGBT+, activism, technology, and furry. Looking at the technology ones... they seem to be aligned with the foreign language, LGBT+, and activism themes. The ones that look slightly interesting / "I just want generic news" have a waitlist. I scroll down this post and see mastodon.social being mentioned... I try that, and it is closed to new sign ups. indieweb.social has a wait list... I look at what its feed looks like... https://indieweb.social/public https://indieweb.social/public and its linked in posts (that I avoid going to linked in to see). In the category of "low friction, something to say 'here is where I chat'", mastodon is rather high friction and at this time looks to be more self promotion than topics of conversation. I realize there's a general "everyone off twitter" feeling going on, but for someone who isn't active on twitter in the first place, mastodon looks to be decidedly worse in terms of signing up and the content. I do acknowledge that this may be just my "spend a few minutes looking at it" but for the casual reader, this doesn't appear to be something I'll be sinking any time into and will more likely shrug my shoulders if twitter falls into disrepair rather than seeking out a replacement for it.
- dimitrios1 4y ago
  > I realize there's a general "everyone off twitter" feeling going on Is there? I guess it kind of depends on what bubble you are in. I try to get myself into a wide range. Seems like where they are losing some, they are picking up some, and people who have come to depend on it (journos, researchers, political heads) aren't going anywhere.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Mastodon has been averaging about 1000 new users an hour for the last 3 or 4 days. Compared to a few dozen a month ago. It's not mainstream, and never will be, but it's in the process of becoming quite vibrant, TBH.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Almost like people with the will and knowledge to build distributed platforms like mastadon are out of touch with the average user of modern social media.
greesil 4y ago
Fuck it, I'm going back to usenet.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tkk23 4y ago
  @haunter wrote: >According to some 3rd party services [0] a 2000 user instance will cost me ~$90+taxes/month How efficient is the usenet protocol? I would expect that it would require far less resources. What's the technical reason for not using the usenet protocol for a federated social network?
  - greesil 4y ago
    I'm not an expert, but by default -no way to moderate content. you may see this as good or bad, but spam can be annoying. it'd probably be a lot worse us it became more mainstream. -costs due to bandwidth if you are part of the infrastructure are driven by people posting binary data, far larger in bytes vs actual text. this is apparently why there are so many paid services. -no way to authenticate identity I'm probably missing a couple of items. There are ways to cope with these things, people use this every day, but it's not perfect.
haunter 4y ago
Does Mastodon the software support ads? I always see the platform more akin to Reddit or Discord than Twitter tbh. Say I want to make an instance and want to host it. According to some 3rd party services [0] a 2000 user instance will cost me ~$90+taxes/month. That’s a lot if you compare it to a reddit sub or Discord server which are free and where I’d say a similar sized sub/server are quite small (not all 2000 users are active all the time ofc) It’s really hard to make people pay. Is there a plan to support ads or anything else besides begging for donations? 0, https://masto.host/pricing/ https://masto.host/pricing/
- krainboltgreene 4y ago
  No, the open source software Mastodon does not have any ad mechanism, but obviously you could change that.
  - empyrrhicist 4y ago
    A model where Ad agencies work with content creators seems like it would work better, like how podcast ads can target users by picking shows - no tracking required. Side note, it blows my mind that Reddit shits the bed so hard at this. So many niche sub's would be the perfect venue for niche advertisers.
- kitkat_new 4y ago
  I am glad it doesn't. Ads are unethical
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- andrewkdinh 4y ago
  Mastodon doesn’t support ads, but since it’s FOSS, you could add it yourself. However, if people find value in your instance, they will donate. For example, see Fosstodon (which even has an excess amount of funds): https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/ https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/
cathy651 4y ago
- cathy651 4y ago
scrollaway 4y ago
How reasonable an idea is it to run your own mastodon instance for solo purposes? (eg. as one would run their own email server, or at least point a host's mx to their own domain) How much would this cost, and is it possible to reliably secure an instance to run as a one-person federated instance easily?
- riffic 4y ago
  Run a wordpress instead and put the ActivityPub plugin on it. There are many places you can host PHP/MySQL very effectively and it is much lighter in weight than Mastodon's stack.
dmode 4y ago
Why isn’t there a no login moweb version of this ? Would love to check out before downloading the app
- remram 4y ago
  You can check any instance's public feed but there is no way to aggregate multiple feeds or build your own from specific users and hashtags without creating an account somewhere. For example: https://social.linux.pizza/public https://social.linux.pizza/public
Thorentis 4y ago
If Mastodon takes off because of Musk ill be pretty amused. There is an irony to Mastdon, a more open platform than Twitter, becoming more popular because people thought Musk would make Twitter... more open.
- tasuki 4y ago
  > If Mastodon takes off because of Musk ill be pretty amused. Iirc, Elon Musk said social networking should not be centralized but distributed. Perhaps he bought Twitter just to shut it down so that ActivityPub would become more popular?
  - psychphysic 4y ago
    You've only got to look at the inconvenience of setting up a matrix home server and soon think "centralised it is". Mastodon is even worse. I can't see it taking off.
    - infinitezest 4y ago
      As someone that recently set up a Matrix server, I'm not sure what you're talking about.
      - psychphysic 4y ago
        Which server? Synapse needs dual core with 8GB ram. You don't call that inconvenient? Even then you might have timeouts joining some rooms. Most will not meet that spec and won't be able to join popular rooms. God help you should you not replace the standard sqlite dB.
      - lutoma 4y ago
        „recently“ being the key word here. For the first few weeks/months, my Matrix server worked great too, but it’s becoming increasingly brittle as time goes on.
    - ekianjo 4y ago
rogerb 4y ago
:( Looking for Mastodon users progress, scanned 366 of 366 users you follow on Twitter. Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon who have previously linked their Twitter and Mastodon accounts by logging into Twitodon.
- shapefrog 4y ago
  Given that there are (rounded to the nearest meaningful number) 0 users on Mastodon at the moment the scan is not going to take very long to find 0!
- tethys 4y ago
  Was a bit surprised that it found 5 matches (out of 1659 people I'm following). A bit inconvenient that I can't just see these matches though, but have to download a CSV file first.
kramerger 4y ago
I use Twitter to follow fellow engineers and honestly all the politics (regardless of the new guy in charge) was getting annoying. I might as well use this opportunity to become more active on mastadon. Can anyone recommend a good android client? Preferably from f-droid?
- dairylee 4y ago
  > all the politics was getting annoying Dumb question but why would this be any different on Mastodon?
  - kgwxd 4y ago
    It’s not, I followed a prominent Clojure dev on there and it was mostly politics. Politics I mostly agreed with but it was too much to keep following. That’s not the only example, but it’s the one I think of every time I think of going back. I don’t think twitter needs a replacement, just quitting was good enough for me and that was long before mastodon came around.
  - chx 4y ago
    That depends on the instance owner and the moderator team they have.
- emaro 4y ago
  I can recommend Tusky or the official Mastodon app. Both are available in F-Droid.
- infinitezest 4y ago
  Fedilab has been pretty nice to use
- stiltzkin 4y ago
  Not only politics but non-related topics you follow, I wonder if in-tags of tweets would solve this.
- sprokolopolis 4y ago
  I think Tusky is the most polished android client.
TsukiZombina 4y ago
"Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon" :'(
langsoul-com 4y ago
I wonder if there's something like Twitter but a feed (RSS or otherwise) of interesting people's blog, YouTube, podcast or creative work? I feel the value of Twitter would be a feed of interesting people. But 280 characters is just knee jerk thoughts. Something to easily discover people, like Twitter, whist showing their content, seems more valuable. Right now, the discovery part sucks. It's possible to find interesting people and sub to the RSS, but not everyone has that (like my blog). Not to mention how spread out content is, someone might release a podcast, or interesting YouTube vid, instead of just blog articles. It's just too much work.
- Duralias 4y ago
  Isn't that what the Twitter founder is making with Blue Sky? An RSS feed, but for social media.
- nicopappl 4y ago
  You may be interested in Fraidycat. Per the description: > Fraidycat is a desktop app or browser extension for Firefox or Chrome. I use it to follow people (hundreds) on whatever platform they choose - Twitter, a blog, YouTube, even on a public TiddlyWiki. This doesn't solve the problem of discoverability, but it solves half of what you described. https://fraidyc.at/ https://fraidyc.at/
- michaelbrooks 4y ago
  People can add ActivityPub to their websites/blogs, and it will be a part of the fediverse. WordPress has a plugin for this, and you can add your own implementation as well.
  - stefandesu 4y ago
    I wish there was a way to integrate ActivityPub into static sites. As far as I know, you can't just add ActivityPub to your site hosted on GitHub Pages, for example.
- anderspitman 4y ago
  We need to decouple discovery and distribution of content. Discovery is much easier to manage with centralized platforms. Distribution is better decentralized. And since we have URLs there's no reason for them to be tied together.
goodpoint 4y ago
Anything similar for Facebook?
tomashubelbauer 4y ago
Is there a way to find the Mastodon instance you yourself signed up on? I am pretty sure I already made a Mastodon account, but not on mastodon.social and based on the list of instances, nothing rings a bell. :-/ Edit: it was mastodon.social, the password reset email just took 15 minutes to arrive… Good tip in the comments though, thanks!
- Aissen 4y ago
  Search your emails for "Welcome to Mastodon".
- Kye 4y ago
  >> "Edit: it was mastodon.social, the password reset email just took 15 minutes to arrive…" They're waiting on a new database server to handle the load. https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109262705755044079 https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109262705755044079
- anderspitman 4y ago
  What we really need is for selfhosting to be as easy and secure as installing an app on your phone. Somewhat related: there should be a way to have a Mastodon ID based on a domain you control, regardless of what instance it's hosted on.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    Webfinger technically supports that sort of delegation today in its spec: you can drop a /.well-known/webfinger JSON file on the domain's web server (or a cgi-bin app of some sort if you need to support more than one user because the protocol uses GET request parameters to differentiate) and tell ActivityPub servers "if you are looking for user anexample@thisdomain.com please forward to the inbox or check the outbox for anexample@mastodon.social". That works today for things like @ mentions or DMs of an account sending the right notifications. Unfortunately, this isn't yet the best experience because in many places including follows/follow requests Mastodon users will always see the forwarded address everywhere "anexample@mastodon.social" instead of the delegating address and so far as I'm aware there's no easy way to send messages addressed as the delegating address. It would be nice to see this improved.
ivanhoe 4y ago
What happens if/when Mastodon gets mainstream and gets plagued by all the same problems as twitter? It being the distributed platform there's a very little options to fight fake news, hate speech, bots, etc. on Internet-wide level. Is there any option other than users gravitating to servers hosted by like-minded people, creating a clear separation into social bubbles?
- qprofyeh 4y ago
  AFAIK you can block individual users, entire servers, and servers can also block other bad rep servers. I think a federation of servers with open source software is better equipped to fight fake news and bots not in spite of but because of decentralized protocols and how solutions must involve democratic values by definition.
- rpgbr 4y ago
  Admins share lists of extremist instances and block them. This strategy helps to not viralize hateful/illegal content.
- NelsonMinar 4y ago
  I think social bubbles is sort of built-in to the fediverse concept. There's some hope that a decentralized moderation problem will be more tractable than a centralized-for-profit-company moderation problem.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    Good moderation is labor (and likely forever will be) and Mastodon by its very nature has a lot higher moderators per consuming users ratio than Twitter ever had (even on messages originating on and "not leaving" Mastodon's biggest instances). (Just like if you are evaluating school districts you want a higher teachers per students ratio.)
sundarurfriend 4y ago
For anyone considering which instance to join, the section "Tell me more about this magical community-building feature you love" in this post [1] and the section after that "What should I look for in an instance to join?" have pretty useful information that explains the subtleties beyond "federation works like email". It explained a lot of things about content visibility that confused me for a long time. There's also a tool [2] that lets you preview what the Local (within-instance) and Federated ("all" instances, though not really, as the mentioned post explains) timelines look from each instance. Keep in mind that you can always filter out users or whole instance domains, so the presence/visibility of interesting posts is more important to look for than the absence of a few spammy/non-your-language accounts. [1] https://wordsmith.social/elilla/a-futuristic-mastodon-introduction-for-2021 https://wordsmith.social/elilla/a-futuristic-mastodon-introd... [2] http://www.unmung.com/mastoview?url=qoto.org&view=local http://www.unmung.com/mastoview?url=qoto.org&view=local
lazzlazzlazz 4y ago
I've been wanting decentralized social networks for a long time. Unfortunately, Mastodon and other federated networks are really awful and I hope people learn that sooner than later.
- oftenbluemostly 4y ago
  Wait, why are they really awful?
doener 4y ago
With this tool I only found 15 accounts on Mastodon. With this one I found 98: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ https://fedifinder.glitch.me/

646 points by srvmshr 4y ago

A nifty tool that I came across to find Twitter peers registered with Mastodon federated servers. Requires authentication though

encryptluks2 4y ago

Surely there has to be another way to do this besides logging in with Twitter. Heck, they could just have you post a verification tween on your Twitter account.

bpodgursky 4y ago
You can't view an account's followers/following without being logged in. And if you try to back a service using a single bot account, you're going to get instantly banned b/c of suspicious traffic.
- sigmar 4y ago
  Keybase somehow manages to do verification through a twitter post, surely there could be a similar method for Mastodon?
  - bpodgursky 4y ago
    You can see a person's latest tweets without a login. Just play around in incognito and you can see: https://twitter.com/elonmusk https://twitter.com/elonmusk
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
spaceywilly 4y ago
Maybe they can create a specific pattern people can enter in their Twitter bio, then build a crawler

throwaway221017 4y ago

michaelwww 4y ago

I find this whole situation to be incredibly depressing, especially with Musk tweeting out a fact free insinuation about Paul Pelosi (since deleted without apology.) The proverbial shit is going to hit the fan on Twitter on election night Nov 8 in America and I don't think Musk is prepared to handle it. I'd love to live in a country where we could have nice things, but apparently America is not it.

Zigurd 4y ago
It also isn't as if Elon was just thumbing his nose at naysayers. A day earlier he pledged to advertisers Twitter would not become a "free for all hellscape." Now that's the new tagline.
- michaelwww 4y ago
  It will be easy to switch to another platform and there will be tools to help as this post indicates. 4chan users are having fun saying the N word on Twitter and Le Bron James is complaining about it. And this is only day 2. I certainly think people should be able to exercise free speech, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to it. I can go somewhere else if Twitter gets too depressing.
  - leereeves 4y ago
    > I certainly think people should be able to exercise free speech, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to it. Would that be different on Mastodon? I've never used it, but as a decentralized service, I assume it won't have a central authority banning users?
    - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      The difference is that each node has its own set of moderators. So jerks will get moderated there. And when they do that, they'll probably jump servers. And so get cordoned off into wherever federated node that they isolate themselves into. Note that each server decides which other servers it will federate and share content with. So eventually nodes that collect jerks will just get cut from most of the rest of the federation. It's certainly vulnerable to abuse. But it also leaves more room for community response. And it also doesn't have a recommendation "algorithm". You see the content you explicitly subscribe to. In chronological order. So dark patterns that arise out of feeding people rage tweets and engagement hacking and amplifying "controversial" crap for engagement... doesn't happen. So the platform isn't going to give an outsized "recommended" audience for crap just because it has high "likes" -- that's not how the platform works.

Timja 4y ago

Twitter is the only platform I know where you can search for people who share your interests and then connect with them. The whole #buildinpublic community is just insanely great. Everybody is building something. Everybody is having similar issues to talk about. You can make so many great connections and help each other out. But I feel that with Twitter becoming a private company owned by a single controversial person, Twitter lost a lot of its appeal. It could be very unfortunate (if Twitter just goes down the drain without a replacement) or it could be the start of something new, if a new way to interact comes up. If the community moves to another form of communication, I hope it will be something decentralized that can not be taken away from us again. That is the reason why I am not enthusiastic about Mastodon. Mastodon is not decentralized. Unless you run your own instance, you do not own your social graph.

twblalock 4y ago
Wait and see what happens. The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have not changed. It is a free service that needs to convert user engagement into advertising dollars. Unless Twitter moves to a paid model, that will always be true no matter who owns it. And if Twitter fails, any potential replacement will need to deal with the same incentives and solve the same problems Twitter did.
- nsvd 4y ago
  In contrast, most fediverse communities are run on donations or by the private funds of an individual. There aren't perverse financial incentives in the same way. This is one advantage of having many, smaller servers.
- Timja 4y ago
  A replacement could be just a protocol. If you signed your message with "This is a reply to msg 33398198 by Timja. Signed: twblalock", then nobody could take this converstion away from us again. I could copy it and put it on any server. Owned by myself or run by some service provider. And it would always be clear to everybody that this conversation really took place between the two of us.

twblalock 4y ago

Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized platform over a federated platform? The centralized platform made it very easy to find people. Now people who are moving to a federated platform miss the value of centralization, so they are writing a tool that will leverage that value and import it into the federated platform. Maybe if Mastodon was a centralized Twitter-style platform it would be more usable, and more popular.

detaro 4y ago
Not really, no. Imagine the reversed situation: Everyone is on Mastodon, and now this cool new thing called "Twitter" comes along and some people are switching to it. "find everyones Twitter account and follow it" would still be a useful thing to have, over manually checking for every single person you follow if they have an account, if they maybe have an account with a different username, ... and following those you find.
- colesantiago 4y ago
  But we all know this hypothetical isn't the case. Centralisation is more convenient in almost ALL cases, even in email (nobody except people on HN host their own email)
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    It proves the value of centralized search and discovery, but it says nothing about centralized hosting in moderation. There is probably quite a bit of value in a system where decentralized instances can volunteer to submit their own discovery database to a central search platform, and where individual users could opt in to being part of that database.
    - nopenopenopeno 4y ago
      This is commonplace for decentralized protocols. Torrents are probably the most obvious example.
  - 4y ago

pigeons 4y ago

Often mastodon servers either intentionally or naturally have a "theme", which is really helpful for discovering interesting content and users.

wraptile 4y ago
it's also easier to start socializing as you can hop into the local timeline and instantly find relatable topics.

martythemaniak 4y ago

You know, I think Reddit is actually the best positioned Twitter alternative. You can use your real name, or anonymous account. You go there to follow particular subreddits, but there no reason why I shouldn't also be able to follow people and see their non-topic (ie, not part of any subreddit) microblogs interweaved with posts from subreddits. They deal with spam and trolls reasonably well. They have all the pieces, they just have to put them together tastefully.

augustuspolius 4y ago
Feels like Reddit is closer to Mastodon than to Twitter. Each Mastodon server is like a subreddit with its own rules, moderation, user base, etc.
- celdon25 4y ago
  Not really. There's a centralized committee that will blacklist or even dump your subreddit down the memory hole if it doesn't meet its standards of moderation.
celdon25 4y ago
Reddit's censorship is even worse than Twitter's, so I would expect Reddit to be next on the list of places to liberate on the Internet.
- malermeister 4y ago
  "Censorship" has always been a dog whistle for "not letting propaganda and incitement run rampant".
  - celdon25 4y ago
    Comrade, don't forget about the satirical news by the Babylon Bee. They are a danger after all, because if a subject thinks you are funny, you cannot control them.
  - 4y ago

yosito 4y ago

Someone should build an app like this that is integrated with all the social networks. Give it a sexy UI, and a catchy feature or two to keep people checking in. Eventually, it could serve as a federated contacts hub that links people between networks. A vital piece of infrastructure to support mandated interoperability.

klyrs 4y ago
We had Trillian back in the day, but then the messaging services locked down their protocols. I don't expect such an app would survive the cat&mouse with major players for long.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  I'm not sure about your standard social media, but for direct messaging, several Matrix-based companies have popped up that allow for service interoperability. The European Union is also working on breaking open the messenger space, forcing tech companies to either leave the EU or work on an interoperable standard. I believe an IEEE working group is already developing a protocol to serve this purpose, even with encryption available if I recall correctly.
  - zaik 4y ago
    Is there any information on this working group? I had hopes for the IETF standard XMPP, since the largest IM provider WhatsApp uses it internally.
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      Apologies; it turns out I was mistaken in believing the IEEE was working on a standard, it's actually the IETF. Abbreviations are hard :( I believe this is the relevant draft: https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-mahy-mimi-identity-01.html https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-mahy-mimi-identity-01.html Edit: I should add that as far as I know, the working group hasn't done much as of yet. I heard about this on Matrix because some of the Matrix folks are trying to get (parts of) the federated Matrix protocol into the standard, or probably at least parts of it.

masukomi 4y ago

ugh. this has a killer flaw > Looking for Mastodon users progress, scanned 867 of 867 users you follow on Twitter. Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon who have previously linked their Twitter and Mastodon accounts by logging into Twitodon. WHO HAVE PREVIOUSLY LINKED ACCOUNTS... BY LOGGING IN TO TWITODON the odds of that having happened for any notable subset are so low as to make this useless.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Brakenshire 4y ago
It would be much more useful to search using the “people you follow” filter.
styfle 4y ago
Instead of creating a new service, it would be better if this read from https://keybase.io https://keybase.io since those mappings already exist.
drc500free 4y ago
It seems that this tool is fairly equivalent to everyone posting their mastodon and twitter handles to this thread.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ikari_pl 4y ago
I mean, that's something you can say about any tool or social network at its beginning. Imagine downdetector with 5 users being considered useless forever.

letier 4y ago

I never cared much about twitter. But I’d be very happy to get a couple of good tech profiles on Mastodon recommended. :)

commoner 4y ago
FediFollows (@FediFollows@mastodon.online) recommends interesting accounts to follow on Mastodon. Many of these accounts are tech and FOSS-related. https://mastodon.online/@FediFollows https://mastodon.online/@FediFollows They've also listed all of their recommendations in a directory: https://fedi.directory https://fedi.directory
- letier 4y ago
  Thanks that seems like a great starting point!
sundarurfriend 4y ago
You can also hashtag search the tech you're interested in, and find people that way.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

I was skeptical on Mastodon. But I'm actually realling enjoying it. It's having a surge in popularity the last few days. When I checked it out a couple years ago it didn't click with me. But now I'm liking it, and I think there's potential there. It won't "replace" Twitter. But a good crowd of people has collected around there, and there's quite a bit of enjoyable content coming through.

augustuspolius 4y ago
Is there a non-niche general Mastodon instance that's really popular? That would be the easiest way for me personally to embrace it. I checked a few instances and it's all very niche and very empty. (To clarify, I don't mind niche instances, just at this stage there isn't enough discussion or interesting profiles to follow.)
- agentultra 4y ago
  It’s also pretty easy to have alts. Most good clients can log onto and track several accounts. You can then flip between various communities; post about work stuff on one, alt for your hobbies or shitposting.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  mastodon.social is by far the largest, but the recommendation is generally to find the one that has interests & people on it you find interesting to start. you'll get content from people on mastodon.social anyways.
  - augustuspolius 4y ago
    This looks great, definitely more active and offers a good variety of topics/profiles.
    - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      I went with indieweb.social. I think some people from hackernews might find a vibe they like generally there.

Cyberdog 4y ago

Obligatory reminder that Mastodon is a user interface for a defederated network commonly called the Fediverse, and that referring to the Fediverse as "Mastodon" is like referring to the web as Chrome. Spitting into the wind at this point, I know, but it still bothers me.

nsvd 4y ago
For example, you can view posts on a Pleroma server with a Mastodon client.
xigoi 4y ago
How do posts from other Fediverse networks work on Mastodon?
- Cyberdog 4y ago
  Think of Fediverse as akin to the email system, where there are thousands if not millions of different servers out there hosting email and exchanging them to each other. Now consider Mastodon as an email client which is hosted on a web site, like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail. That web site gives you an interface with which to interact with the network of email servers, but people using other servers with other interfaces can still see messages from each other; someone using Yahoo! Mail can send and receive messages with someone using Gmail. The difference is that Mastodon is open source, so that anyone can download the code and run their own Mastodon instance (whereas nobody can download and run their own Gmail instance), but that instance can still exchange messages with instances running any of the several other Fediverse interfaces there are out there, such as Pleroma, Misskey, Soapbox, etc. (Unless an instance at either end has "defederated" the other; that is, the administrators have configured it to not exchange messages with the other server.)
  - xigoi 4y ago
    E-mail, although it has different clients, is still fundamentally the same thing — you send a message with a subject, body and attachments. However, it seems that social networks built on ActivityPub are fundamentally different — Mastodon is an imitation of Twitter, with short low-effort posts, Friendica is an imitation of Facebook, then there are ways to link blogs… So what I don't understand is, how does this all work together when the formats are completely different?

NelsonMinar 4y ago

Another new tool in this vein is Fedifinder. It works by scanning Twitter bios of accounts you follow for strings that look like Mastodon addresses: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ 5 years ago there was a neat tool called Mastodon Bridge that did what Twitodon says it does but much better, I think because it didn't require everyone opt in. It stopped working because of some change Twitter made to their API terms of use. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-bridge https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-bridge There's also Moa Party, but it's so complicated I have never used it. https://moa.party/ https://moa.party/

HellsMaddy 4y ago
Why does Moa need so many permissions? I don't want to give it +RW on both my accounts.
- icy 4y ago
  It’s a cross-poster. It quite literally needs +rw to post to both accounts.
  - HellsMaddy 4y ago
    Oh, duh. "bridge" makes sense now.

GeckoEidechse 4y ago

On the topic of Twiter, Mastodon, and the Fediverse, why do federated FOSS alternatives to popular platforms not offer a read-only version of said platform as one of its instances to augment its lack of content? In the example of Twitter, Nitter already exists as an alternative front-end. Now what if there's a Mastodon instance that uses Nitter to wrap official Twitter content and serve it as if it where the twitter.com mastodon instance? Again it would need to be a read-only version as Twitter is not Mastodon but it would help fill the content gap for sure. Now Mastodon might not have a content issue but PeerTube for example very well has and in that case masquerading YouTube as a PeerTube instance would become very interesting.

jeroenhd 4y ago
There is a lot of Twitter content out there. Too much for a single instance to proxy. I believe there are projects to mirror specific Twitter accounts to a (personal) Mastodon server so you can switch apps without needing two apps. I'm not sure what the implication would be for privacy/data usage regulations if you open those messages to the public, though; blindly reposting everything may actually violate data privacy laws (yes, even if that information is publicly available). Engagement with the audience also is a significant factor for making social media enjoyable. A read-only mirror of Twitter would be very boring, because you can respond/tag/whatever you want for all eternity, but the Twitter authors would never notice. Such a system would work for people primarily using Mastodon that cross-post to Twitter; you could add Twitter replies to the Mastodon replies and get a mixed content stream (that Twitter users might miss half of when discussions respond to as-of-yet unproxied messages).
- hedora 4y ago
  None of this addresses the question: Nitter exists and it is open source. Why not add a mastodon API to it? The existence of such a thing in no way has anything to do with existing mastodon instances TOS / acceptable use relationship with twitter (if such a relationship even exists).0
- jeena 4y ago
  Interestingly I started using Twitter as a write only medium, which means I didn't have any interactions there with anyone. This led to the subscribers stagnating, everyone who already was subscribed stayed subscribed but no new people would subscribe for years.

linuxhansl 4y ago

Heresy: Why do we need a replacement for Twitter? There was a world and a life before Twitter, and there is one without Twitter as well. I deleted my Twitter account about a year ago and have not missed anything. People and topics I am interested in I can updated on by many different means.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
I don't think Mastodon is meant to be a replacement for Twitter, or will ever be that. It would be a mistake to treat it that way. It's more like this place than Twitter, in a way. Or, it's kind of similar to how Usenet was in the early 90s. It's a simple linear feed of who've subscribed to, or what the people you've subscribed to have "boosted". So you find the interest groups you're into and join a node that matches that, then find the people you like on various nodes, and follow them. There's no recommendations really. There's hashtags, but few ways to "discover" them and they don't seem to get heavily used right now. It's maybe like Twitter when it first launched. Certainly not what it became (which I never personally participated in). It certainly doesn't have the level of "action" or "engagement" you'd find on Twitter. And that's probably a good thing.
howinteresting 4y ago
Networking.
cgh 4y ago
I follow various scientists, authors and so forth and I like to read their thoughts or see their recommended reading. And as silly as it sounds, it's wild to see eg William Gibson and Gerry Conway, two guys responsible for some of my formative adolescent reading, interact with one another at random.
- hedora 4y ago
  For academics, why not read peer reviewed work? For authors, other communities exist as well.
  - 4y ago

augustuspolius 4y ago

This maybe a noob question - does Mastodon allow replies? The few profiles referenced in this thread that I visited look like announcement boards, with no way to comment or start a discussion. I am interested in electronic music and followed several links from fedi.directory. E.g. https://mastodon.art/@merle https://mastodon.art/@merle, https://mastodon.cc/@Sevish https://mastodon.cc/@Sevish, https://sonomu.club/@luka https://sonomu.club/@luka. Is that normal that there are no discussions? Also one of the links led to https://v.basspistol.org/a/setto/video-channels https://v.basspistol.org/a/setto/video-channels, which looks completely different, like a personal page from the 90s, not a Twitter-like app. I thought Mastodon was a Twitter replacement, but was surprised by how uninviting and empty the entire recommended directory for electronic music is.

jeroenhd 4y ago
It certainly does. From your example accounts: https://mastodon.art/@merle/105821287332308089 https://mastodon.art/@merle/105821287332308089 I think there are just fewer people active on these platforms, which isn't great for interaction. As for v.basspistol.org, that's not a Mastodon instance but a Peertube (derived) instance. Both are part of the so-called Fediverse, but Mastodon (and similar) intent to replace/extend Twitter/Facebook whereas Peertube intends to replace/extend Youtube. Edit: perhaps worth mentioning is that both types of social media share a protocol called ActivityPub. This is how several social media systems (Twitter replacements, Reddit replacements, Youtube replacements, etc.) can all communicate with each other. NextCloud, for instance, also has an ActivityPub system integrated, which means your toots and the shared files/comments may end up in the same system, all with some manner of interoperability.
- augustuspolius 4y ago
  Interesting. Wonder if it could be clearer if they were still showing a comment field or a reply button to non-logged in users. Just to surface the feature. Thanks for the info on Peertube, I heard the name before but didn't realize it's a federated app. Reply to the edit: thanks for the pointer! Reading about ActivityPub made me feel pretty excited both about the technology and about Mastodon.

wrycoder 4y ago

You would want to think very carefully about giving Twitodon these rights to your Twitter account: Things this App can view... People who follow you and people who you follow. All the Tweets you can view, including Tweets from protected accounts. Any account you can view, including protected accounts.

kache_ 4y ago
How do you expect it to work without that data? :P Also, I'm _pretty_ sure you can point the twitter API at any user you want to scan followers and following. I did it on some twitter accounts I'm interested in when I started out to find some accounts to follow.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  Even protected accounts?
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    As far as I'm aware, the default state of a protected account is that its tweets can only be viewed by followers, but anyone is free to follow it. It's also possible to prevent people from following your account without your approval.
hedora 4y ago
Twitter just handed that and more to a plutocrat. I'm not seeing why anyone should assume an internet rando is less trustworthy.
- malermeister 4y ago
  Oligarch might be a good term to describe Musk and his ilk, too
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

anigbrowl 4y ago

When are Mastodon stans going to figure out that the reason people like Twitter is that it's (nominally) flat and you can interact with anyone unless they've blocked you for some reason? It's easy to build silos, which is what most instances are. Mastodon just reinvented single sign-on. It's not a terrible thing to build, but whenever you make a product that's just imitating someone else (Twitter has 'tweets' but Mastodon has 'toots' because the logo is an elephant!) then it needs to be way better, not just a slight improvement. Longer messages are a good thing on Mastodon, though Facebook already does that. But what else does it offer that offsets the confusion of finding target instances, or conversely not being easily findable by people you don't want to converse with? 99.9% of users do not care about federation as a principle, it's just another level of technical gabble that they don't wish to be distracted by. Virtually every decentralized service struggles with this issue. Decentralization is primarily of interest to nerds, and for online services that requires you to be a bit of a computer and a bit of a politics nerd, shrinking your already small target pool. Twitter's original win was that it was staggeringly simple, just asking new users to post about 'what they're doing right now' and offering simple controls to reply, repeat, or express approval. They realized that people felt more connected to a scrolling ticker of headline-style status updates than a newspaper.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
> (Twitter has 'tweets' but Mastodon has 'toots' because the logo is an elephant!) It's a mastodon, not an elephant!!
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Oh noes I invalidated my whole argument ToT edit: y'all are taking this exchange much too seriously.
- rvz 4y ago
  Even worse when Mastodons are extinct creatures. Probably tells us about the platform itself being used by little to no one, other than just techies that won't admit that they still lurk on Twitter.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mephos 4y ago

Interesting tool. This reminds me of the initial steps in the vampire attack idea. https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2022/04/16/vampire-attack-twitter.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2022/04/16/vampi...

jonny_eh 4y ago

> Enter your Mastodon host's web address: What?

remram 4y ago
Do you not have a Mastodon account?
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  Nope
  - remram 4y ago
    If you're not trying to log in, what's the problem?
    - jonny_eh 4y ago
      As someone that is now no longer using Twitter, I'm open to alternatives, but was turned off by this up-front complexity.
      - remram 4y ago
        You can't log in before you sign up. I think bringing up complexity of the sign-up is fair, but I don't understand how you can be "turned off" by the second step before you looked into the first step.

EamonnMR 4y ago

Gonna repost my standard question on Mastodon articles: cool, how do I get into it?

friend_and_foe 4y ago
Go to a server and sign up. Http://fediverse.party

BryanBeshore 4y ago

WesSouza 4y ago

> Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon

remram 4y ago
Maybe you were the first one of your network, now the others will get to find you.
AndroidKitKat 4y ago
Mine found the 2 people I'd already followed on Mastodon. Maybe one day more people will be on it, but if not, it's not that big of a deal.

fleddr 4y ago

Twitter's appeal is outrage and controversy. Their users are addicted to it, even if they don't care to admit it. That's why no significant migration to Mastodon will take place. Even if you do manage to lift and shift your bubble (you won't), you'll then find yourself in a calm and slow place where nothing happens. For a bubble to exist and thrive, it needs a common enemy. With the enemy removed, it collapses. Everybody inside couldn't care if they never heard from you ever again. They were never a friend, just people who agreed. If you want a group of like-minded people sharing stuff, there's a million options. Go to Discord, start a Whatsapp group, a subreddit, whichever. But that's clearly not the point. Hardcore Twitter users want their hot take to be heard in public, with "enemies" listening in.

mjhagen 4y ago
That was how twitter was and that was how I liked twitter.
Nokinside 4y ago
> That's why no significant migration to Mastodon will take place. This sounds great. If we can leave 99% behind and get all substantive people, like John Carlos Baez, into Mastodon, its the best possible world. People think that all partitions are between people with different opinions, but that's not always the case. Sometimes people with substance from every corner flock into the same arena. For a little time everything is good, then eternal September once again.
- silisili 4y ago
  Google had that. I don't even remember it's name now...plus maybe? Seemed a lot of tech people wrote there. Very peaceful, no outrage. It died. I think OP is right.
- fleddr 4y ago
  "For a little time everything is good..." I hear what you're saying. There used to be a time and place where perhaps you could join some niche, a "non-political" one if you will. That barely holds up these days. People do not separate their politics from the niche topic, it's all intersectional and performative. Absurd examples are the "knitting wars" and "noodle lady". Besides constant outrage, many topics are engagement-farmed. I've said it before: Twitter rewards exactly the wrong thing. Reasonable and good faith people keep losing. And yet when I come back to my original point, in case they do make things fair and more calm, a major appeal is lost.

edmcnulty101 4y ago

lookagain 4y ago

I saw someone familiar walking around my neighborhood. The view from my window is partially obscured by the garden. So as I turn my gaze, I see a man wearing a hat loosely. The hat was positioned far back on his head, exposing a protruding forehead whose silhouette was amplified by a receding hairline. As the man walked by, it looked like a bald mounds pubis floating along the balcony. The things one can see from their home, right? Who the fuck needs social media when looking for a good laugh?

davidork 4y ago

Embrace the fragmentation. The economic situation seems to be getting worse, there's tons of people without jobs that could get lots of exposure and experience working in tech related field by moderating all these small federated instances. Plenty of networking opportunities as well. There are going to be a lot more niche and diverse internet communities, and with things being spread out among the various instances it'll be a lot harder for trolls to summon concentrated attacks. Communities will be smaller and higher quality while still being able to co-mingle via federation. Unfortunately that stuff may also apply to more nefarious communities online and they may benefit by hiding amongst all of the other federated instances.

collegeburner 4y ago
- kupopuffs 4y ago
  This post reeks of deeply rooted, unfounded assumptions and biases. You're saying janitors/unemployed peoples are a demographic? Come now. Anyone can be unemployed or a janitor.
  - collegeburner 4y ago
    sorry jannie is a derogatory term for a internet moderator who does it for free. nothing at all against actual janitors who have real jobs. sometimes i get too zoomer for hn.
- davidork 4y ago
  Moderating content, while mundane is valid and valuable experience, not only in the technology aspects but in the human skills that you'd find in any sort of consumer relations focused career. Hopefully people would choose wisely and at least try to have some feel of a community before deciding to take on moderation duties
  - dmix 4y ago

arduinomancer 4y ago

Does Mastodon have the same moderation that the twitter users are used to?

Gigachad 4y ago
Server admins each moderate as they see fit. Users can block users as well as blocking whole servers if they disagree with that servers moderation.

qwertox 4y ago

If Elon would migrate Twitter onto Mastodon, with the post history and all, now that would be a change for the history books. It would change social networks forever.

hedora 4y ago
Ars Technica ran a "how to download your twitter account" article on Friday. Surely, there is a way to upload it you your own mastodon instance, right?
xyzzy123 4y ago
Without some way to capture value it would also be one of the biggest acts of capital destruction in recent tech history.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Banks would hate him! They might even sue him.
plazmatic 4y ago
mattacular 4y ago
Why would he do that. What about anything he's ever done makes you think that is even a remote possibility
- qwertox 4y ago
  He did make Tesla's patens available for anyone to use for free. Also, with its weight, Twitter would become the first popular open social network, a beacon among them. It would still be a very valuable brand.
  - mattacular 4y ago
    He was sued into buying it for way more than it was worth. The first changed announced so far (in addition to printed code reviews by senior Tesla engineers) is to charge a subscription fee for verification.

shagie 4y ago

In a "ok, maybe I'll look at this..." Grab a client, launch it... it has a login and create account. Ok, create an account. It takes me to https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org - find a server... and I see a list of foreign language, LGBT+, activism, technology, and furry. Looking at the technology ones... they seem to be aligned with the foreign language, LGBT+, and activism themes. The ones that look slightly interesting / "I just want generic news" have a waitlist. I scroll down this post and see mastodon.social being mentioned... I try that, and it is closed to new sign ups. indieweb.social has a wait list... I look at what its feed looks like... https://indieweb.social/public https://indieweb.social/public and its linked in posts (that I avoid going to linked in to see). In the category of "low friction, something to say 'here is where I chat'", mastodon is rather high friction and at this time looks to be more self promotion than topics of conversation. I realize there's a general "everyone off twitter" feeling going on, but for someone who isn't active on twitter in the first place, mastodon looks to be decidedly worse in terms of signing up and the content. I do acknowledge that this may be just my "spend a few minutes looking at it" but for the casual reader, this doesn't appear to be something I'll be sinking any time into and will more likely shrug my shoulders if twitter falls into disrepair rather than seeking out a replacement for it.

dimitrios1 4y ago
> I realize there's a general "everyone off twitter" feeling going on Is there? I guess it kind of depends on what bubble you are in. I try to get myself into a wide range. Seems like where they are losing some, they are picking up some, and people who have come to depend on it (journos, researchers, political heads) aren't going anywhere.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Mastodon has been averaging about 1000 new users an hour for the last 3 or 4 days. Compared to a few dozen a month ago. It's not mainstream, and never will be, but it's in the process of becoming quite vibrant, TBH.
edgyquant 4y ago
Almost like people with the will and knowledge to build distributed platforms like mastadon are out of touch with the average user of modern social media.

greesil 4y ago

Fuck it, I'm going back to usenet.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tkk23 4y ago
@haunter wrote: >According to some 3rd party services [0] a 2000 user instance will cost me ~$90+taxes/month How efficient is the usenet protocol? I would expect that it would require far less resources. What's the technical reason for not using the usenet protocol for a federated social network?
- greesil 4y ago
  I'm not an expert, but by default -no way to moderate content. you may see this as good or bad, but spam can be annoying. it'd probably be a lot worse us it became more mainstream. -costs due to bandwidth if you are part of the infrastructure are driven by people posting binary data, far larger in bytes vs actual text. this is apparently why there are so many paid services. -no way to authenticate identity I'm probably missing a couple of items. There are ways to cope with these things, people use this every day, but it's not perfect.

haunter 4y ago

Does Mastodon the software support ads? I always see the platform more akin to Reddit or Discord than Twitter tbh. Say I want to make an instance and want to host it. According to some 3rd party services [0] a 2000 user instance will cost me ~$90+taxes/month. That’s a lot if you compare it to a reddit sub or Discord server which are free and where I’d say a similar sized sub/server are quite small (not all 2000 users are active all the time ofc) It’s really hard to make people pay. Is there a plan to support ads or anything else besides begging for donations? 0, https://masto.host/pricing/ https://masto.host/pricing/

krainboltgreene 4y ago
No, the open source software Mastodon does not have any ad mechanism, but obviously you could change that.
- empyrrhicist 4y ago
  A model where Ad agencies work with content creators seems like it would work better, like how podcast ads can target users by picking shows - no tracking required. Side note, it blows my mind that Reddit shits the bed so hard at this. So many niche sub's would be the perfect venue for niche advertisers.
kitkat_new 4y ago
I am glad it doesn't. Ads are unethical
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
andrewkdinh 4y ago
Mastodon doesn’t support ads, but since it’s FOSS, you could add it yourself. However, if people find value in your instance, they will donate. For example, see Fosstodon (which even has an excess amount of funds): https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/ https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/

cathy651 4y ago

cathy651 4y ago

scrollaway 4y ago

How reasonable an idea is it to run your own mastodon instance for solo purposes? (eg. as one would run their own email server, or at least point a host's mx to their own domain) How much would this cost, and is it possible to reliably secure an instance to run as a one-person federated instance easily?

riffic 4y ago
Run a wordpress instead and put the ActivityPub plugin on it. There are many places you can host PHP/MySQL very effectively and it is much lighter in weight than Mastodon's stack.

dmode 4y ago

Why isn’t there a no login moweb version of this ? Would love to check out before downloading the app

remram 4y ago
You can check any instance's public feed but there is no way to aggregate multiple feeds or build your own from specific users and hashtags without creating an account somewhere. For example: https://social.linux.pizza/public https://social.linux.pizza/public

Thorentis 4y ago

If Mastodon takes off because of Musk ill be pretty amused. There is an irony to Mastdon, a more open platform than Twitter, becoming more popular because people thought Musk would make Twitter... more open.

tasuki 4y ago
> If Mastodon takes off because of Musk ill be pretty amused. Iirc, Elon Musk said social networking should not be centralized but distributed. Perhaps he bought Twitter just to shut it down so that ActivityPub would become more popular?
- psychphysic 4y ago
  You've only got to look at the inconvenience of setting up a matrix home server and soon think "centralised it is". Mastodon is even worse. I can't see it taking off.
  - infinitezest 4y ago
    As someone that recently set up a Matrix server, I'm not sure what you're talking about.
    - psychphysic 4y ago
      Which server? Synapse needs dual core with 8GB ram. You don't call that inconvenient? Even then you might have timeouts joining some rooms. Most will not meet that spec and won't be able to join popular rooms. God help you should you not replace the standard sqlite dB.
    - lutoma 4y ago
      „recently“ being the key word here. For the first few weeks/months, my Matrix server worked great too, but it’s becoming increasingly brittle as time goes on.
  - ekianjo 4y ago

rogerb 4y ago

:( Looking for Mastodon users progress, scanned 366 of 366 users you follow on Twitter. Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon who have previously linked their Twitter and Mastodon accounts by logging into Twitodon.

shapefrog 4y ago
Given that there are (rounded to the nearest meaningful number) 0 users on Mastodon at the moment the scan is not going to take very long to find 0!
tethys 4y ago
Was a bit surprised that it found 5 matches (out of 1659 people I'm following). A bit inconvenient that I can't just see these matches though, but have to download a CSV file first.

kramerger 4y ago

I use Twitter to follow fellow engineers and honestly all the politics (regardless of the new guy in charge) was getting annoying. I might as well use this opportunity to become more active on mastadon. Can anyone recommend a good android client? Preferably from f-droid?

dairylee 4y ago
> all the politics was getting annoying Dumb question but why would this be any different on Mastodon?
- kgwxd 4y ago
  It’s not, I followed a prominent Clojure dev on there and it was mostly politics. Politics I mostly agreed with but it was too much to keep following. That’s not the only example, but it’s the one I think of every time I think of going back. I don’t think twitter needs a replacement, just quitting was good enough for me and that was long before mastodon came around.
- chx 4y ago
  That depends on the instance owner and the moderator team they have.
emaro 4y ago
I can recommend Tusky or the official Mastodon app. Both are available in F-Droid.
infinitezest 4y ago
Fedilab has been pretty nice to use
stiltzkin 4y ago
Not only politics but non-related topics you follow, I wonder if in-tags of tweets would solve this.
sprokolopolis 4y ago
I think Tusky is the most polished android client.

TsukiZombina 4y ago

"Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon" :'(

langsoul-com 4y ago

I wonder if there's something like Twitter but a feed (RSS or otherwise) of interesting people's blog, YouTube, podcast or creative work? I feel the value of Twitter would be a feed of interesting people. But 280 characters is just knee jerk thoughts. Something to easily discover people, like Twitter, whist showing their content, seems more valuable. Right now, the discovery part sucks. It's possible to find interesting people and sub to the RSS, but not everyone has that (like my blog). Not to mention how spread out content is, someone might release a podcast, or interesting YouTube vid, instead of just blog articles. It's just too much work.

Duralias 4y ago
Isn't that what the Twitter founder is making with Blue Sky? An RSS feed, but for social media.
nicopappl 4y ago
You may be interested in Fraidycat. Per the description: > Fraidycat is a desktop app or browser extension for Firefox or Chrome. I use it to follow people (hundreds) on whatever platform they choose - Twitter, a blog, YouTube, even on a public TiddlyWiki. This doesn't solve the problem of discoverability, but it solves half of what you described. https://fraidyc.at/ https://fraidyc.at/
michaelbrooks 4y ago
People can add ActivityPub to their websites/blogs, and it will be a part of the fediverse. WordPress has a plugin for this, and you can add your own implementation as well.
- stefandesu 4y ago
  I wish there was a way to integrate ActivityPub into static sites. As far as I know, you can't just add ActivityPub to your site hosted on GitHub Pages, for example.
anderspitman 4y ago
We need to decouple discovery and distribution of content. Discovery is much easier to manage with centralized platforms. Distribution is better decentralized. And since we have URLs there's no reason for them to be tied together.

goodpoint 4y ago

Anything similar for Facebook?

tomashubelbauer 4y ago

Is there a way to find the Mastodon instance you yourself signed up on? I am pretty sure I already made a Mastodon account, but not on mastodon.social and based on the list of instances, nothing rings a bell. :-/ Edit: it was mastodon.social, the password reset email just took 15 minutes to arrive… Good tip in the comments though, thanks!

Aissen 4y ago
Search your emails for "Welcome to Mastodon".
Kye 4y ago
>> "Edit: it was mastodon.social, the password reset email just took 15 minutes to arrive…" They're waiting on a new database server to handle the load. https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109262705755044079 https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109262705755044079
anderspitman 4y ago
What we really need is for selfhosting to be as easy and secure as installing an app on your phone. Somewhat related: there should be a way to have a Mastodon ID based on a domain you control, regardless of what instance it's hosted on.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  Webfinger technically supports that sort of delegation today in its spec: you can drop a /.well-known/webfinger JSON file on the domain's web server (or a cgi-bin app of some sort if you need to support more than one user because the protocol uses GET request parameters to differentiate) and tell ActivityPub servers "if you are looking for user anexample@thisdomain.com please forward to the inbox or check the outbox for anexample@mastodon.social". That works today for things like @ mentions or DMs of an account sending the right notifications. Unfortunately, this isn't yet the best experience because in many places including follows/follow requests Mastodon users will always see the forwarded address everywhere "anexample@mastodon.social" instead of the delegating address and so far as I'm aware there's no easy way to send messages addressed as the delegating address. It would be nice to see this improved.

ivanhoe 4y ago

What happens if/when Mastodon gets mainstream and gets plagued by all the same problems as twitter? It being the distributed platform there's a very little options to fight fake news, hate speech, bots, etc. on Internet-wide level. Is there any option other than users gravitating to servers hosted by like-minded people, creating a clear separation into social bubbles?

qprofyeh 4y ago
AFAIK you can block individual users, entire servers, and servers can also block other bad rep servers. I think a federation of servers with open source software is better equipped to fight fake news and bots not in spite of but because of decentralized protocols and how solutions must involve democratic values by definition.
rpgbr 4y ago
Admins share lists of extremist instances and block them. This strategy helps to not viralize hateful/illegal content.
NelsonMinar 4y ago
I think social bubbles is sort of built-in to the fediverse concept. There's some hope that a decentralized moderation problem will be more tractable than a centralized-for-profit-company moderation problem.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  Good moderation is labor (and likely forever will be) and Mastodon by its very nature has a lot higher moderators per consuming users ratio than Twitter ever had (even on messages originating on and "not leaving" Mastodon's biggest instances). (Just like if you are evaluating school districts you want a higher teachers per students ratio.)

sundarurfriend 4y ago

For anyone considering which instance to join, the section "Tell me more about this magical community-building feature you love" in this post [1] and the section after that "What should I look for in an instance to join?" have pretty useful information that explains the subtleties beyond "federation works like email". It explained a lot of things about content visibility that confused me for a long time. There's also a tool [2] that lets you preview what the Local (within-instance) and Federated ("all" instances, though not really, as the mentioned post explains) timelines look from each instance. Keep in mind that you can always filter out users or whole instance domains, so the presence/visibility of interesting posts is more important to look for than the absence of a few spammy/non-your-language accounts. [1] https://wordsmith.social/elilla/a-futuristic-mastodon-introduction-for-2021 https://wordsmith.social/elilla/a-futuristic-mastodon-introd... [2] http://www.unmung.com/mastoview?url=qoto.org&view=local http://www.unmung.com/mastoview?url=qoto.org&view=local

lazzlazzlazz 4y ago

I've been wanting decentralized social networks for a long time. Unfortunately, Mastodon and other federated networks are really awful and I hope people learn that sooner than later.

oftenbluemostly 4y ago
Wait, why are they really awful?

doener 4y ago

With this tool I only found 15 accounts on Mastodon. With this one I found 98: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ https://fedifinder.glitch.me/