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Twitter features Mastodon is better for not having
- nnopepe 4y agomastodons biggest shortcoming remains the lack of e2e encrypted DM's. Giving volunteer internet janitors access to your private messages is a recipe for disaster
- VectorLock 4y agoThe internet is awash in encrypted private messaging systems, why does Mastodon need one too?
- pavlov 4y agoAgreed. IMO the Mastodon DM system doesn’t need to do much more than to enable: “Here’s my handle on messaging service X, let’s continue there.”
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Karunamon 4y agoHaving person-to-person messages be unencrypted is irresponsible in 2022, the same way offering a web service for public consumption without TLS is. Encryption should be the default and the user should not have to even consider the threat of their messages being read by unauthorized parties.
- politician 4y ago> the user should not have to even consider the threat of their messages being read. Could you clarify whom you hope that a message should be able to be read by? - the intended recipient(s) - parties involved in the intermediate storage system - middleboxes / parties in the transmission path - unintended recipients that the intended recipients forwarded the message to accidentally - unintended recipients that the intended recipients forwarded the message to maliciously
- Karunamon 4y agoWhichever follows the principle of least astonishment. 1 is obvious and I think it is bad faith that you are asking.
- politician 4y agoI just included it as a default case. If you want to assume malintent, that's on you. The more interesting cases are the last two because they reveal that messaging cannot be made private because you cannot prevent the counterparty from leaking information.
- tptacek 4y agoThe most irresponsible thing you can do is make a security promise you can't keep. Mastadon's usage is overwhelmingly browser-based; achieving reliably end-to-end security between users of browser-based apps remains an open problem. Taking a short step back from that: if you're going to try to give people secure messaging, you should have that goal from the start. Matrix is a good case study in what happens when you don't do this. You can still high-horse Mastodon: just tell them they shouldn't have private messaging at all. That seems like a reasonable take.
- xypage 4y agoSince matrix is an open standard and everything would it be possible to build a matrix client into mastodon? That would be really interesting, if it became a plug and play messaging client for open source projects that include some sort of DMs.
- stevage 4y agoBecause of the friction starting a public convo, going to DM, then negotiating which private messaging system to then switch to again. Most people won't bother.
- yogthos 4y agoThere are plenty of actual chat apps out there like Signal or Matrix that you should be using for this sort of thing. Neither Twitter or Mastodon are the right tool for this.
- webmobdev 4y agoConclusion: nonprofit social media enables healthier design
- throw_m239339 4y ago> Conclusion: nonprofit social media enables healthier design Twitter is(was?) popular because it was not healthy at first place, it was just that it used to be a "safe space" for a certain category of people. I quote the blogpost: > Now that a narcissistic billionaire bought Twitter and will likely make it Nazi-friendly (or otherwise ruin it) These (also narcissistic) people aren't interested in healthy design, they want an exclusive megaphone, while denying their ideological opponent the same thing. They aren't interested in Mastodon or they would have moved to Mastodon a long time ago, when the people they denied the megaphone moved to alternative social media.
- l1n 4y agohttps://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter/ https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter/ adds a lot of these UX tweaks.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago>Now that a narcissistic billionaire bought Twitter and will likely make it Nazi-friendly (or otherwise ruin it) I don't think Mastodon servers will become popular if these are the type of characters that populate them.
- ceejayoz 4y agoThe whole point of Mastodon is there's not just one server. Pick one you like; hell, Gab is built on Mastodon.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y agoSo it is fair to say Mastodon is already nazi friendly since nazis can just host their own servers?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ahelwer 4y agoJust like phpbb is nazi friendly because nazis can run their own phpbb forum server.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y agoYes, that is a fair assessment. Unfortunately, I don't know what the solution to this is.
- Cyberdog 4y agoThe solution is mentioned above. Unironic nazis/white nationalists/white supremacists will only last long on free-speech-oriented instances which are likely to be defederated from any instances which explicitly disallow hate speech. Pick one of those latter instances as your home, and you will most likely never see a "nazi" on your timeline unless you go out of your way to go hunting for one.
- blueflow 4y ago> Now that a narcissistic billionaire bought Twitter and will likely make it Nazi-friendly (or otherwise ruin it) ... Kindergarden-style namecalling in the first paragraph. Can we some-when grow out of this?
- mhh__ 4y agoI wasn't aware kindergarten aged kids had political views?
- blueflow 4y agoYou don't need political views to call people you dislike names.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y agoAge is just a social construct, you can be 35 years old and still be kindergarten aged.
- smcleod 4y agoIsn't age simply the number of years that have passed since your birth?
- TeMPOraL 4y agoIt is, but this is such a reductionist, materialist view of the human condition that only bad techbros up to no good would want to talk about it. Of course Age is about your temporal identity and the intersection of it with social structures of discrimination and oppression. This important fact is not yet well-known, but worry not, soon we'll have a field of study and several journals dedicated to it.
- echelon 4y agoAge is a useful construct for humans. It's an easy to communicate concept based on a shared wall clock we can reference. It abstracts away a lot of more complicated and nuanced factors. People can accrue all sorts of physical changes at different rates (that still fall within a tight distribution). Some people mentally mature faster than others due to experience, biochemical differences, etc. Some people biologically age faster due to genes, stress, injury, illness, or disease. The volume of UV exposure one receives changes your appearance. Age happens to closely correlate with so many societal concepts we care about: schooling, maturity and behavioral expectations, dating and marriage, career, having children, getting cancer, dying, etc. Age is universally useful and interesting to us.
- trentgreene 4y agoDid anyone else have to read this title several times to parse it? "Twitter features _that_ Mastodon is better for not having" is better, but still seems strange edit: I think what trips me up is that "features" is used here as a noun but because of it's placement in the sentence I want to read it like a verb
- johnchristopher 4y agoI am not a native speaker and I have always found US news headlines to be weirdly constructed to the point I can't tell if it's a normal headline or if there's a mistake in it. What's worse is that in my native language I also notice a decline in the quality of writing, to the point where sometimes whole sentences are indecipherable. In this case I only needed to read it once. I often feel like "that" and "and" words are dropped in headlines. I suppose it saves some precious bytes. /s
- pavlov 4y agoWhy not go all the way to “Twitter features Mastodon good no have”? Headline impact improved 27%, promotions all around!
- technoooooost 4y agoGot it 5th time
- chippy 4y ago
- mikeryan 4y agoAs much as twitter, Reddit and Facebook don’t like to admit it, it seems all would tell you that “spirited debate” drives significant engagement and traffic. God knows I’m guilty of it. I’ve seen “thoughtful” conversation platforms succeed but they tend to be fairly niche and/or heavily moderated. I’m sure the suggestions here would make Twitter something different. But I’m not sure it would be “better”.
- sfink 4y agoI wish I could believe the implication of the article, that the Mastodon UX improves the quality of discourse, but I strongly suspect that there's one much more important Twitter feature that Mastodon lacks that is vastly more important than any mentioned: Twitter just has far more users. Eliminating classes of problematic behavior and incentives by way of avoiding or altering technical features is always going to be a game of whack-a-mole. When you get above some threshold—maybe it's some sort of 'relationship distance', or maybe just a raw number of people—then people will always find a way to game the system. I don't think it's a bug or misfeature in the system, though the system can certainly contribute to where the threshold lies. It's a bug in collective human behavior. So far, the most likely solution to the problem of a mass point-to-point communication system is to not have a mass point-to-point communication system. Shard it down until people are able to behave reasonably well, even if that means you can't communicate with just anybody. That completely breaks some use cases, but it turns out that anything that allows those use cases turns into a cesspool. Maybe somebody can invent something someday, but I'm doubtful that technical measures or UX can ever compete with our rage and other base urges.
- fsflover 4y agoLooks like federation is the solution here: many not-so-big instances.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zerocrates 4y agoYeah, I would say that features of the software can definitely affect the community but there's a limit. If you actually have Mastodon grow to include any significant portion of Twitter's userbase then you're going to get much of those same behaviors. Like, on the "dunking" example: people will just use screenshots. Memorably, Twitter didn't have even retweets well into its life, but the users created a de facto system for doing it. This "pave the cowpaths" feature growth was once a defining aspect of Twitter. Many of the people who like Twitter like to dunk, they like to read dunks, and they'll do it wherever they go.
- valine 4y agoTwitter’s problem is that it encourages engagement with the absolute worst and most divisive users. Don’t agree with an antisemitic tweet? Your best option is to leave a reply and ratio the poster. Twitter desperately needs a public downvote button with a mechanic similar to HN. Flame bait should be pushed to the bottom of everyone’s feed, not the top.
- deworms 4y agoYou can also just close the tab and stop reading. "Antisemitic" doesn't automatically mean "the devil" either.
- was_a_dev 4y agoYou're right. Antisemitism is provably real
- valine 4y agoHave to say I wasn’t expecting “antisemitism is fine” as a counter argument to downvotes. Suffice to say this comment isn’t the slam dunk you think it is.
- deworms 4y agoYes it is, and I don't care about how popular my comments are. In many slavic countries antisemitism is the default and normal opinion. Semitic people are not the sacred cows they are in american culture.
- hnusersarelame 4y ago
- sofixa 4y agoWhich Slavic countries, specifically? I come from one, and even though there are (borderline) antisemitic jokes (an X, Y and Jew go into a bar, or Holocaust-related jokes which i personally choose to interpret as just a specific brand of dark humour), antisemitism is not a "default and normal opinion". It's skinhead/football hooligan fringes. So, which Slavic country has a majority of antisemites, today? The horrors of WW2 have taught all of us better, one would think (idiots such as yourself being the exception, not the norm; clarification: yes, you have to be an idiot to be antisemitic or racist or any other similar description).
- tptacek 4y agoThe "no full-text search" benefit of Mastodon seems unsustainable, if Mastodon succeeds at Twitter's scale; not because the platform will add the feature, but because others will do it for them. Isn't that what happened to Twitter? (I might be misremembering.)
- wmf 4y agoThey might try to slow down search by having major servers transitively de-federate with anyone who's involved with searching.
- snarkypixel 4y ago> Now that a narcissistic billionaire bought Twitter and will likely make it Nazi-friendly Instantly lost credibility for me
- est 4y agoI hope Mastodon (ActivityPub protocol to be precise) could be statically hosted, like a podcast or rss, yes it's only one-way but hell it will accelerate adoption.
- tedunangst 4y agoIt's just a json file, of course you can statically host it.
- mariusor 4y agoUnfortunately that does not work with Mastodon. When you view a user's profile instead of loading their current list of Activities Mastodon will only show you the ones which have already been propagated and cached on the current instance. In the case of a static list of activities that won't work. In my opinion it's a mistake to keep functionality like this, and there is a bug report on their tracker about it but I don't think it gathered enough interest from the devs to make it better.
- alkonaut 4y agoNot so sure about quote bit. I really like the quotes because I follow people for perspective on articles and content. Seeing the article summary and the comment as to why it’s good/bad/recommended reading is perfect. It’s basically hundreds of people being unpaid news aggregators and filters for me. If their tweets were “this is a good article on why X is good [link]” that would be a much worse UX for content aggregation. I have zero interest in discourse (and most people I followed don’t engage in any, nor do I). Also, last time I tried mastodon (many years ago) there was a lot of focus on the distributed/federated thing. I found it hard to emulate the global timeline of posts from just people I follow. Maybe it was just me not understanding the UI, but I failed to create a Twitter feed like experience back then.
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- jonny_eh 4y agoIf it's decentralized, how do they keep the nazis out?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ordiel 4y agoOnly with the first paragraph I know this is a piece of crap of an article