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People used to think the network effect for MySpace and Friendster were insurmountable. I played around with Mastodon last night and I think it has some bad bu

People used to think the network effect for MySpace and Friendster were insurmountable. I played around with Mastodon last night and I think it has some bad but not insurmountable ergonomic wrinkles, but I worry its decentralization will prevent it from ever becoming mainstream. Centralization makes it easier to deal with "bad" actors. Also Discovery is a huge problem: how do I discover people I know? How do content creators who want to build an audience (and so create content that would attract users to the platform) get discovered? I think discovery is a bigger catch 22 than "nobody is on it."

WorldMaker 4y ago
> Centralization makes it easier to deal with "bad" actors. Moderation is a problem that scales terribly. We haven't actually solved moderation at scale, no matter how many algorithms and ML models we throw at it. That was part of the ridiculous opening salvo by Musk, if you'll recall, that Twitter was full of unmoderated bots and if they just sent him a ton of their data his engineers would find a better way to moderate over lunch. They did and his engineers didn't and he reneged on the deal at that point and became a morass for the courts. Moderation is labor. The number of moderators you need per volume doesn't scale well, no matter how many tools you throw at it. This seems to be the repeating lesson of both Twitter and Facebook. We have too much data from Facebook that auto-moderation tools plus scale make the labor of moderation terrifyingly worse: instead of moderation being a continuous background process of seeing 97% fine posts and the occasional 3% of bad actor posts, moderators are fed streams of the opposite: 97% content from bad actors. This has huge mental health issues with many reports of PTSD and worse from Facebook's human moderators. Decentralization necessitates more moderators and naturally spreads out the work of moderators to give individual moderators less to do "in their local neighborhood". It returns to a background activity where moderating the bad actors is a small effort compared to other things going on in an instance. Instances may be invite-only, further minimizing the role of a moderator on a small instance versus the threat of bad actors. Reports of bad activity often get seen by at least two moderators: a moderator on your local instance and a moderator on the remote instance where the bad actor is. Mastodon provides a number of tools to moderators on both sides of that: the local moderator may silence all of a bad actor's content locally and can escalate that to silence or blocking a remote instance if the implication is the remote instance tolerates too many bad actors. The remote instance can put bad actors on probation or kick bad actors. Most of these tools are both quite easy to work with and powerful enough for most needs on Mastodon today. Decentralization also shrinks the "blast radius" of a potential bad actor: bad actors can create all the instances they want, certainly, but if no one is following those instances, does anyone really notice? It's a tree falls in the forest problem. There's often a lot of "fediblock" drama when new instances from entirely bad actors show up, but often the "fediblock" messages themselves are much more viral than any possible bad actor (because admins/moderators care for each other in a decentralized manner). > how do I discover people I know? How do you discover someone's email address? How do you discover someone's blog? How do you discover someone's mailing list or Discord or YouTube Channel or Twitch Channel or …? Discovery could obviously be better on Mastodon, but discovery is also an on-going process people do decentralized all the time, through word of mouth, through friend's recommendations, through other channels, through in person events, through friends' retweets (boosts in Mastodon) of other interesting people that they follow. Some of the "huge problem" of discovery on Mastodon has nothing to do with Mastodon and everything to do with network effects. Not enough people use Mastodon so not enough people think to put Mastodon handles on their business or social cards. Not enough people think to add "follow me on Mastodon" after the usual "Like and Subscribe" in a YouTube video. Etc and so forth. From a network effects perspective discovery on Mastodon isn't a bigger catch-22 than "nobody is on it", discovery on Mastodon is the exact same catch-22. That's what makes it a catch-22: nobody is on Mastodon so nobody is talking/sharing about Mastodon so nobody is on Mastodon. Discovery on its own isn't a catch-22, it's a bootstrap problem. It's network effects that make discovery a catch-22. > How do content creators who want to build an audience (and so create content that would attract users to the platform) get discovered? How does anyone market anything on any platform? Discovery is marketing. Marketing is getting discovered. It's no different and arguably much better than (from a tooling standpoint) from the early days of Twitter when hashtags were just a search convention and not a built-in feature. All the usual tools from Twitter generally apply to Mastodon: virality and hash tags. Going viral is much harder on Mastodon with no "algorithms" to cajole and machines doing your work for you, just people to convince to boost you. Also, yes, there are a lot of instances that are defiantly allergic to obvious and outright marketing for major corporations or celebrities or general "influencing"/brands/branding. (Though many of those same instances adore small creators working independently and who wear their hearts on their sleeves, so long as they keep their marketing "human" and plain dealing and don't spam it.)
philipov 4y ago
Centralization makes it harder to deal with bad actors, because the cost of moderating a huge platform is massive, and the centralized social media platforms we have today have been unable or unwilling to do it. Federal platforms like Reddit and Discord are able to moderate effectively, on the other hand, because the cost of moderation is devolved to the municipal governments: subreddits and servers. Moderation at this scale works; it works right now on this forum.
- VectorLock 4y ago
  That makes Mastodon more of an attractive alternative to Discord rather than a replacement of the "digital commons" aspect of Twitter. But as some people have stated, maybe Mastodon doesn't want to _be_ that, but some people hope that there can be something that can assume that mantle.
  - philipov 4y ago
    What if the only thing that exists that can do that is (gag) Facebook?
    - VectorLock 4y ago
      I think the thing that helped Facebook grow and survive (as long as it did) in this way was its focus on real identities.
  - toofy 4y ago
    a bit of a tangent, but, this “digital commons” marketing strikes me as a bit hilarious. there is nothing “commons” about a privately owned space owned by a billionaire. and even worse, elon is trying to make us believe one can meaningfully discuss anything in 280 characters? this whole “digital commons” really reinforces my concerns that hes just doing more manipulation and relying on the fact that few people stop to actually think how ludicrous the idea is from the ground up.
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
It doesn't need to be mainstream, nor do I want to be mainstream. I just use it to follow a number of interesting people and to write my thoughts here and there. A bit like how Twitter was in its early days. (Except without the stupid short word limits which encouraged pithy one liners.) I don't need it to have celebrities or big media organizations. That is literally the worst part of Twitter. I don't need my mom on there, or to get in an argument with the jackass down the street who is angry because underpaid education workers are going on strike. Or to hear random people's uninformed 200 character "hot-takes" on complicated issues. Further I resent that the tech industry seems to have cultured its own weird industry-celebrity culture of short-thought hit'n'run tech-thoughts in the form of tweets. I have no desire to "show off" my engineering work on twitter in that form or follow people who do so. But I've seen some nice content on Mastodon of people doing neat things and talking about it; the 500 word limit is far better for this. Twitter is/was a toxic cesspool of narcissism and engagement. I had no desire to have that in my life and didn't really use it... But I am enjoying checking Mastodon a few times a day and engaging there. A few thousand people leaving Twitter and contributing to that is good. I don't expect them all to stay, but hopefully the good ones do.
- VectorLock 4y ago
  Sounds like you're happy with a vBulletin / blog experience. Mastodon wants to be Twitter, or at least really tries to ape Twitter. Some people like the big commons experience of Twitter and would like to see that somewhere else.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Nope, it sounds like you want Mastodon to be twitter. Or think that it should be trying to be? They have a blog & followers and some nomenclature in common. But they're really not that similar at all. If they weren't using @ notation and "followers" etc people would complain it's too different. But because they're using those things, people also complain that it's not similar enough. Tough situation. It's just best to think of it as something else. It's federated activity feeds.
stewbrew 4y ago
I don't think these are just ergonomic wrinkles. I was surprised to learn that it seems to matter which instance you join. I assumed "decentralized" means "it doesn't matter where you're located". To me this is rather a basic, philosophical flaw. I would also expect a decentralized network to easily support multiple identities. At least the default client seemingly does not. Twitter on the other hand allows switching between profiles. I think these two issues are connected. It seems to me the mastodon community (or parts of it) leans towards a rather weird understanding of identity and community.
- VectorLock 4y ago
  >It seems to me the mastodon community (or parts of it) leans towards a rather weird understanding of identity and community. I get that sense too. It feels mostly like vBulletin with Birdsite skin with some cross-forum RSS built in.
- ilyt 4y ago
  I expected XMPP-like federation where it really does not matter from where you are but it's kinda disappointing. Software ecosystem is also less "decentralized" and more "schizophrenic"
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > I would also expect a decentralized network to easily support multiple identities. At least the default client seemingly does not. The official iOS client certainly does. Long press on the profile icon at the bottom right to switch/add.
  - stewbrew 4y ago
    oh well. speak about discoverability. many thanks for this hint.
    - SyrupThinker 4y ago
      Tried the iOS app for the first time today and I got a prompt right after login with a small overlay pointing at the profile icon explaining this.
ilyt 4y ago
> People used to think the network effect for MySpace and Friendster were insurmountable. That was also long time ago and it was much easier to compete back then. I think now only way for that to happen is if big network fucks up, not if the better competition comes up
- mempko 4y ago
  Ok, what about Google+?
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Google really timed that badly. Launching it branded that way precisely when their own brand was starting to become "uncool" and at a time when Facebook was in heavy ascendance. But it was a better product, to me, and I enjoyed the groups and such I was on in G+. I think if it was around today, maybe with different branding, it would actually be doing quite well. Internally @ Google most Googler's resented G+ for the way Vic ran the project and the way L&S let that happen. But it was implemented fairly well. I think it mainly confused the public because it was not Facebook and not Twitter, a bit nerdy, and it did poorly at the kind of network-effect "friends gathering" thing that boosted Facebook in its growth phase (and MySpace and Friendster before that...)
  - Zak 4y ago
    The problem with G+ was Google being Google. Launching new products is rewarded; iterating on them long enough to gain popularity is not.
  - treis 4y ago
    Ultimately Google+ was Facebook but slightly different. There wasn't really a compelling reason to switch. But while Facebook has been around we've seen Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, Vine, WhatsApp, Reddit, Discord, and a handful of other smaller or regional sites rise. There's very little lock in. You've just got to do something other than "Facebook but different".
  - Kadin 4y ago
    Google bungled the G+ rollout quite badly. They seemed to forget that the thing that made Facebook gain traction initially was a very gradual rollout targeting affinity groups (colleges and college students) at first, with quasi-private networks, before they opened it up to everyone. Google did the invite-only thing for a while but then IMO tried to grow too quickly too fast, and it felt like a Potemkin village situation. My feeling is that if you want to launch a social network, you need to concentrate on an actual existing social group and get substantial penetration into that group, then slowly branch out. Trying to get anyone and everyone to sign up from the beginning is almost guaranteed failure, or at least a very hard uphill battle with trying to please everyone at once.
defulmere 4y ago
> Also Discovery is a huge problem: how do I discover people I know? How do content creators who want to build an audience (and so create content that would attract users to the platform) get discovered? Hashtags play a huge role on Mastodon - discover people by following hashtags and include hashtags in your posts so that people can discover you.
- VectorLock 4y ago
  I don't think the hashtags are a great experience. Common hashtags get overloaded with junk, how do you know which hashtags to use, you need to register with some external service (and find out about it) like fediverse.info which I've found to be a pretty clunky experience. These are the kind of ergonomic wrinkles I was thinking about.
  - defulmere 4y ago
    You use the hashtags that match your interests, eg I wanted more Python content in my timeline so I typed #python into the search box at mastodon.online and followed the tag. I didn't need to use an external site for this, just the Mastodon site. Now I'm seeing posts from people discussing Python stuff which gives me a pool of people to choose to follow. Now that I've got some people populating my timeline I can unfollow the tag if I decide it gets too noisy.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > Hashtags play a huge role on Mastodon - discover people by following hashtags I'm probably twiddling the wrong buttons or something but whenever I've clicked on a Fediverse hashtag, it's always just been the hashtag on the originating server. Is there a way to get a wider view that I've missed?
  - fsflover 4y ago
    "The original server" should also show relevant posts from other servers, unless they are blacklisted.
aloisdg 4y ago
> how do I discover people I know? The twitodon can help: https://twitodon.com/ https://twitodon.com/
_chu1 4y ago
"Bad" actors don't need to be dealt with, just block them. Content creators get discovered just like on Twitter, a link.
- VectorLock 4y ago
  Block each of a million individual spam bots manually. I'll wait. The obvious retort is "I just block everything by default." You have now closed yourself off and the spambots have won.
  - mikro2nd 4y ago
    On Mastodon there's a setting "Require follow requests : Manually control who can follow you by approving follow requests" so you get to whitelist Real People. Not as onerous as you suggest.
    - VectorLock 4y ago
      Block each of a million individual spam bots manually. I'll wait.
  - Zak 4y ago
    Server admins block other servers that do not effectively prevent the creation of spam accounts. Could this become a problem if the network grows fast enough to be a profitable target for spammers? Probably. Is it a problem now? Not that I've seen.
  - Kadin 4y ago
    No, the idea is that you block entire instances where the admins are lax about allowing spam or bot accounts. If you run an instance and don't do active moderation and just let any putz sign up and post crap, you'll end up getting de-federated and your real users will probably leave (Masto makes it easy to migrate your stuff from one account to another). This is one of the reasons why having lots of instances is a good thing, and one of the risks of Mastodon's federated structure is having a lot of users sign up to one or two big generic instances. I'm hoping that more sites that have existing user communities will start offering Mastodon instances for their already-vetted users. The instance I use (SDF.org) is largely but not exclusively for existing SDF members, and this seems to work quite well. I don't know how the mainline Mastodon server's authentication system works, but hopefully it's reasonably straightforward to plug into an already-existing user database for auth purposes.
sundarurfriend 4y ago
I agree, discovery was my biggest problem for a long time with Mastodon. Fortunately, most of the recent Twitter emigrés have been doing #introduction posts with tags about their interests, which makes them easy to find. Via the internal search, and with sites like https://fediverse.info/explore/people https://fediverse.info/explore/people if they register for it. And people have also been sharing services like * https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ and https://twitodon.com/ https://twitodon.com/ to find people you were following on Twitter, and * https://fedi.directory/ https://fedi.directory/ and https://communitywiki.org/trunk https://communitywiki.org/trunk which have users categorized by interests and what they usually post. Just randomly clicking around these exposed me to new areas of interests (eg. generative art) that I had no clue existed on Mastodon. These follows then serve as your gateway into discovering more users, via their boosts (retweets in Twitter parlance). My timeline is a lot richer than it was even a couple days ago, and it seems this trend of creating external tools to solve Fediverse-wide issues is growing and catching momentum. Which was sorely needed, as it means you don't have to depend on the Mastodon project or instance admins dedicating even more of their time. Instead, the problem gets solved through collaborative effort, as it's meant to be.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  > Instead, the problem gets solved through collaborative effort, as it's meant to be. Exactly. It's the world wide web, people. It's about discovery and distribution and linkage. Centralization on this medium is not necessary; just convenient. This is what the early net was like when I got on it in 1990/1991. I ran a personal UUCP node on my Atari ST. When I got a telnet connection, I went and found lists of MUDs and MOOs and IRC servers to connect to. I used Archie and Veronica and Gopher. When the WWW first came along, I used directory services like Yahoo, etc. And then things got more convenient as Google, etc. came to dominate. And for a while the compromises that came with that were fine. But systems like Facebook and Twitter are really counter to the networked spirit that drove the excitement in the first place. They want all the marbles in one place. I don't want to play that game, seeing how it's gone. I think others are seeing now just how bad it can get. Mastodon isn't my dream system. I'd rather see something synchronous and dynamic and programmable... like LambdaMOO, but federated. But that ship sailed in the early 90s. I'm enjoying the bump in activity in Mastodon right now.
christkv 4y ago
How do you even know the person you found is the person you wanted? Also if people flock to specific instances it will just keel over and die.
- Kadin 4y ago
  Mastodon has a nice feature where you can prove ownership of a link in your profile by setting a backlink on it (implying you at least control the content of that page). So, if you don't want to set up your own Mastodon instance under your domain, you can instead link your Mastodon account to your homepage running on a domain of your choice. It's not something I bother to do, because I'm nobody important, but if I was e.g. Taylor Swift or something, I could show that my Mastodon account was affiliated with www.taylorswift.com, and thus give you a pretty good idea that I'm actually the real deal. From the Edit Profile page on Mastodon (v3.5.3): > You can verify yourself as the owner of the links in your profile metadata. For that, the linked website must contain a link back to your Mastodon profile. The link back must have a rel="me" attribute. The text content of the link does not matter.
Kadin 4y ago
Twitter didn't really have much of a discovery mechanism in its early years, and that's when it really built the userbase that is its main competitive advantage right now. I'm not sure that's a huge impediment, particularly since Twitter could be the de facto discovery mechanism for people on their way out the door ("Hey, I'm leaving for Mastodon, where I'll be foo@bar.org"). I do think there's an unmet demand for aggregator accounts on Mastodon right now, though. Like if I'm interested in esports (just f.ex.), there should probably be someone I could follow who boosts significant content related to that subject to aid people in finding new people to follow. (To be honest that probably already exists; like early Twitter, Mastodon is pretty tech heavy. There are a lot of gaps though.)
- VectorLock 4y ago
  The experience with twitodon.com is very clunky. Since people seem to be putting their mastodon tags in their Twitter "name" fields now it seems like it'd be a much more streamlined process to just scrape that.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    That's the approach tools like Fedi Finder have been using: scraping handles out of Twitter display names and Bios.
anotherrandom 4y ago
The technical barrier to entry ensures "normies" will not be able to use or understand (or at least enjoy) Mastodon. This will prevent it from becoming as huge as Twitter
- VectorLock 4y ago
  One man's bug is another man's feature I suppose.
claudiawerner 4y ago
It's worth looking at why people who are already on Twitter don't want to use Mastodon/Fediverse. The last time this topic came up on Twitter with Musk's first proposal to buy Twitter, several concerns were raised (and well-liked by thousands of other users) in several threads I noticed: * Migrating one's account and tweets to Mastodon * Finding people on Mastodon * General confusion about what federation is, or what it means * Stories of people who once used a Mastodon belonging to a friend group, had a falling out with whoever happened to be running the server, and was kicked off/had their account deleted * The fact that DMs aren't private, and can be read by an instance admin, or by the instance admin of the instance of the user you send them to. This particularly seemed to unnerve people because you're more likely to interact and know who the instance admin is than you are with Twitter support/SWEs. * The difficulty of choosing an instance. * The difficulty of avoiding certain people and certain content, usually spoken of in terms of principle: that is, abusive messages and content which admins must agree to filter, but some admins may not want to block that content, leaving the users on an instance known for harboring that kind of content * On the flip side, rampant defederation and the formation of cliques which become increasingly isolated social bubbles. * The name of the software and its default interface * The names of various instances which range from the whimsical to the offensive (e.g. 'wolfgirl.engineering' to 'fuckonthefirst.date'). * GDPR concerns and personal data privacy concerns - how do I delete media and text that I've uploaded that's now been shared across multiple instances? How do instance owners cope with this under the law? I've seen very, very few responses to any of these problems; some of them I object to myself, but it seems short-sighted to say that the only reason people aren't jumping ship is because of network effects and not genuine concerns with the technology and the community as it exists today.
- VectorLock 4y ago
  This is a great list, practically summed up every issue I've found in my few days of poking around.

WorldMaker 4y ago

> Centralization makes it easier to deal with "bad" actors. Moderation is a problem that scales terribly. We haven't actually solved moderation at scale, no matter how many algorithms and ML models we throw at it. That was part of the ridiculous opening salvo by Musk, if you'll recall, that Twitter was full of unmoderated bots and if they just sent him a ton of their data his engineers would find a better way to moderate over lunch. They did and his engineers didn't and he reneged on the deal at that point and became a morass for the courts. Moderation is labor. The number of moderators you need per volume doesn't scale well, no matter how many tools you throw at it. This seems to be the repeating lesson of both Twitter and Facebook. We have too much data from Facebook that auto-moderation tools plus scale make the labor of moderation terrifyingly worse: instead of moderation being a continuous background process of seeing 97% fine posts and the occasional 3% of bad actor posts, moderators are fed streams of the opposite: 97% content from bad actors. This has huge mental health issues with many reports of PTSD and worse from Facebook's human moderators. Decentralization necessitates more moderators and naturally spreads out the work of moderators to give individual moderators less to do "in their local neighborhood". It returns to a background activity where moderating the bad actors is a small effort compared to other things going on in an instance. Instances may be invite-only, further minimizing the role of a moderator on a small instance versus the threat of bad actors. Reports of bad activity often get seen by at least two moderators: a moderator on your local instance and a moderator on the remote instance where the bad actor is. Mastodon provides a number of tools to moderators on both sides of that: the local moderator may silence all of a bad actor's content locally and can escalate that to silence or blocking a remote instance if the implication is the remote instance tolerates too many bad actors. The remote instance can put bad actors on probation or kick bad actors. Most of these tools are both quite easy to work with and powerful enough for most needs on Mastodon today. Decentralization also shrinks the "blast radius" of a potential bad actor: bad actors can create all the instances they want, certainly, but if no one is following those instances, does anyone really notice? It's a tree falls in the forest problem. There's often a lot of "fediblock" drama when new instances from entirely bad actors show up, but often the "fediblock" messages themselves are much more viral than any possible bad actor (because admins/moderators care for each other in a decentralized manner). > how do I discover people I know? How do you discover someone's email address? How do you discover someone's blog? How do you discover someone's mailing list or Discord or YouTube Channel or Twitch Channel or …? Discovery could obviously be better on Mastodon, but discovery is also an on-going process people do decentralized all the time, through word of mouth, through friend's recommendations, through other channels, through in person events, through friends' retweets (boosts in Mastodon) of other interesting people that they follow. Some of the "huge problem" of discovery on Mastodon has nothing to do with Mastodon and everything to do with network effects. Not enough people use Mastodon so not enough people think to put Mastodon handles on their business or social cards. Not enough people think to add "follow me on Mastodon" after the usual "Like and Subscribe" in a YouTube video. Etc and so forth. From a network effects perspective discovery on Mastodon isn't a bigger catch-22 than "nobody is on it", discovery on Mastodon is the exact same catch-22. That's what makes it a catch-22: nobody is on Mastodon so nobody is talking/sharing about Mastodon so nobody is on Mastodon. Discovery on its own isn't a catch-22, it's a bootstrap problem. It's network effects that make discovery a catch-22. > How do content creators who want to build an audience (and so create content that would attract users to the platform) get discovered? How does anyone market anything on any platform? Discovery is marketing. Marketing is getting discovered. It's no different and arguably much better than (from a tooling standpoint) from the early days of Twitter when hashtags were just a search convention and not a built-in feature. All the usual tools from Twitter generally apply to Mastodon: virality and hash tags. Going viral is much harder on Mastodon with no "algorithms" to cajole and machines doing your work for you, just people to convince to boost you. Also, yes, there are a lot of instances that are defiantly allergic to obvious and outright marketing for major corporations or celebrities or general "influencing"/brands/branding. (Though many of those same instances adore small creators working independently and who wear their hearts on their sleeves, so long as they keep their marketing "human" and plain dealing and don't spam it.)

philipov 4y ago

Centralization makes it harder to deal with bad actors, because the cost of moderating a huge platform is massive, and the centralized social media platforms we have today have been unable or unwilling to do it. Federal platforms like Reddit and Discord are able to moderate effectively, on the other hand, because the cost of moderation is devolved to the municipal governments: subreddits and servers. Moderation at this scale works; it works right now on this forum.

VectorLock 4y ago
That makes Mastodon more of an attractive alternative to Discord rather than a replacement of the "digital commons" aspect of Twitter. But as some people have stated, maybe Mastodon doesn't want to _be_ that, but some people hope that there can be something that can assume that mantle.
- philipov 4y ago
  What if the only thing that exists that can do that is (gag) Facebook?
  - VectorLock 4y ago
    I think the thing that helped Facebook grow and survive (as long as it did) in this way was its focus on real identities.
- toofy 4y ago
  a bit of a tangent, but, this “digital commons” marketing strikes me as a bit hilarious. there is nothing “commons” about a privately owned space owned by a billionaire. and even worse, elon is trying to make us believe one can meaningfully discuss anything in 280 characters? this whole “digital commons” really reinforces my concerns that hes just doing more manipulation and relying on the fact that few people stop to actually think how ludicrous the idea is from the ground up.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

It doesn't need to be mainstream, nor do I want to be mainstream. I just use it to follow a number of interesting people and to write my thoughts here and there. A bit like how Twitter was in its early days. (Except without the stupid short word limits which encouraged pithy one liners.) I don't need it to have celebrities or big media organizations. That is literally the worst part of Twitter. I don't need my mom on there, or to get in an argument with the jackass down the street who is angry because underpaid education workers are going on strike. Or to hear random people's uninformed 200 character "hot-takes" on complicated issues. Further I resent that the tech industry seems to have cultured its own weird industry-celebrity culture of short-thought hit'n'run tech-thoughts in the form of tweets. I have no desire to "show off" my engineering work on twitter in that form or follow people who do so. But I've seen some nice content on Mastodon of people doing neat things and talking about it; the 500 word limit is far better for this. Twitter is/was a toxic cesspool of narcissism and engagement. I had no desire to have that in my life and didn't really use it... But I am enjoying checking Mastodon a few times a day and engaging there. A few thousand people leaving Twitter and contributing to that is good. I don't expect them all to stay, but hopefully the good ones do.

VectorLock 4y ago
Sounds like you're happy with a vBulletin / blog experience. Mastodon wants to be Twitter, or at least really tries to ape Twitter. Some people like the big commons experience of Twitter and would like to see that somewhere else.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Nope, it sounds like you want Mastodon to be twitter. Or think that it should be trying to be? They have a blog & followers and some nomenclature in common. But they're really not that similar at all. If they weren't using @ notation and "followers" etc people would complain it's too different. But because they're using those things, people also complain that it's not similar enough. Tough situation. It's just best to think of it as something else. It's federated activity feeds.

stewbrew 4y ago

I don't think these are just ergonomic wrinkles. I was surprised to learn that it seems to matter which instance you join. I assumed "decentralized" means "it doesn't matter where you're located". To me this is rather a basic, philosophical flaw. I would also expect a decentralized network to easily support multiple identities. At least the default client seemingly does not. Twitter on the other hand allows switching between profiles. I think these two issues are connected. It seems to me the mastodon community (or parts of it) leans towards a rather weird understanding of identity and community.

VectorLock 4y ago
>It seems to me the mastodon community (or parts of it) leans towards a rather weird understanding of identity and community. I get that sense too. It feels mostly like vBulletin with Birdsite skin with some cross-forum RSS built in.
ilyt 4y ago
I expected XMPP-like federation where it really does not matter from where you are but it's kinda disappointing. Software ecosystem is also less "decentralized" and more "schizophrenic"
ceejayoz 4y ago
> I would also expect a decentralized network to easily support multiple identities. At least the default client seemingly does not. The official iOS client certainly does. Long press on the profile icon at the bottom right to switch/add.
- stewbrew 4y ago
  oh well. speak about discoverability. many thanks for this hint.
  - SyrupThinker 4y ago
    Tried the iOS app for the first time today and I got a prompt right after login with a small overlay pointing at the profile icon explaining this.

ilyt 4y ago

> People used to think the network effect for MySpace and Friendster were insurmountable. That was also long time ago and it was much easier to compete back then. I think now only way for that to happen is if big network fucks up, not if the better competition comes up

mempko 4y ago
Ok, what about Google+?
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Google really timed that badly. Launching it branded that way precisely when their own brand was starting to become "uncool" and at a time when Facebook was in heavy ascendance. But it was a better product, to me, and I enjoyed the groups and such I was on in G+. I think if it was around today, maybe with different branding, it would actually be doing quite well. Internally @ Google most Googler's resented G+ for the way Vic ran the project and the way L&S let that happen. But it was implemented fairly well. I think it mainly confused the public because it was not Facebook and not Twitter, a bit nerdy, and it did poorly at the kind of network-effect "friends gathering" thing that boosted Facebook in its growth phase (and MySpace and Friendster before that...)
- Zak 4y ago
  The problem with G+ was Google being Google. Launching new products is rewarded; iterating on them long enough to gain popularity is not.
- treis 4y ago
  Ultimately Google+ was Facebook but slightly different. There wasn't really a compelling reason to switch. But while Facebook has been around we've seen Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, Vine, WhatsApp, Reddit, Discord, and a handful of other smaller or regional sites rise. There's very little lock in. You've just got to do something other than "Facebook but different".
- Kadin 4y ago
  Google bungled the G+ rollout quite badly. They seemed to forget that the thing that made Facebook gain traction initially was a very gradual rollout targeting affinity groups (colleges and college students) at first, with quasi-private networks, before they opened it up to everyone. Google did the invite-only thing for a while but then IMO tried to grow too quickly too fast, and it felt like a Potemkin village situation. My feeling is that if you want to launch a social network, you need to concentrate on an actual existing social group and get substantial penetration into that group, then slowly branch out. Trying to get anyone and everyone to sign up from the beginning is almost guaranteed failure, or at least a very hard uphill battle with trying to please everyone at once.

defulmere 4y ago

> Also Discovery is a huge problem: how do I discover people I know? How do content creators who want to build an audience (and so create content that would attract users to the platform) get discovered? Hashtags play a huge role on Mastodon - discover people by following hashtags and include hashtags in your posts so that people can discover you.

VectorLock 4y ago
I don't think the hashtags are a great experience. Common hashtags get overloaded with junk, how do you know which hashtags to use, you need to register with some external service (and find out about it) like fediverse.info which I've found to be a pretty clunky experience. These are the kind of ergonomic wrinkles I was thinking about.
- defulmere 4y ago
  You use the hashtags that match your interests, eg I wanted more Python content in my timeline so I typed #python into the search box at mastodon.online and followed the tag. I didn't need to use an external site for this, just the Mastodon site. Now I'm seeing posts from people discussing Python stuff which gives me a pool of people to choose to follow. Now that I've got some people populating my timeline I can unfollow the tag if I decide it gets too noisy.
zimpenfish 4y ago
> Hashtags play a huge role on Mastodon - discover people by following hashtags I'm probably twiddling the wrong buttons or something but whenever I've clicked on a Fediverse hashtag, it's always just been the hashtag on the originating server. Is there a way to get a wider view that I've missed?
- fsflover 4y ago
  "The original server" should also show relevant posts from other servers, unless they are blacklisted.

aloisdg 4y ago

> how do I discover people I know? The twitodon can help: https://twitodon.com/ https://twitodon.com/

_chu1 4y ago

"Bad" actors don't need to be dealt with, just block them. Content creators get discovered just like on Twitter, a link.

VectorLock 4y ago
Block each of a million individual spam bots manually. I'll wait. The obvious retort is "I just block everything by default." You have now closed yourself off and the spambots have won.
- mikro2nd 4y ago
  On Mastodon there's a setting "Require follow requests : Manually control who can follow you by approving follow requests" so you get to whitelist Real People. Not as onerous as you suggest.
  - VectorLock 4y ago
    Block each of a million individual spam bots manually. I'll wait.
- Zak 4y ago
  Server admins block other servers that do not effectively prevent the creation of spam accounts. Could this become a problem if the network grows fast enough to be a profitable target for spammers? Probably. Is it a problem now? Not that I've seen.
- Kadin 4y ago
  No, the idea is that you block entire instances where the admins are lax about allowing spam or bot accounts. If you run an instance and don't do active moderation and just let any putz sign up and post crap, you'll end up getting de-federated and your real users will probably leave (Masto makes it easy to migrate your stuff from one account to another). This is one of the reasons why having lots of instances is a good thing, and one of the risks of Mastodon's federated structure is having a lot of users sign up to one or two big generic instances. I'm hoping that more sites that have existing user communities will start offering Mastodon instances for their already-vetted users. The instance I use (SDF.org) is largely but not exclusively for existing SDF members, and this seems to work quite well. I don't know how the mainline Mastodon server's authentication system works, but hopefully it's reasonably straightforward to plug into an already-existing user database for auth purposes.

sundarurfriend 4y ago

I agree, discovery was my biggest problem for a long time with Mastodon. Fortunately, most of the recent Twitter emigrés have been doing #introduction posts with tags about their interests, which makes them easy to find. Via the internal search, and with sites like https://fediverse.info/explore/people https://fediverse.info/explore/people if they register for it. And people have also been sharing services like * https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ and https://twitodon.com/ https://twitodon.com/ to find people you were following on Twitter, and * https://fedi.directory/ https://fedi.directory/ and https://communitywiki.org/trunk https://communitywiki.org/trunk which have users categorized by interests and what they usually post. Just randomly clicking around these exposed me to new areas of interests (eg. generative art) that I had no clue existed on Mastodon. These follows then serve as your gateway into discovering more users, via their boosts (retweets in Twitter parlance). My timeline is a lot richer than it was even a couple days ago, and it seems this trend of creating external tools to solve Fediverse-wide issues is growing and catching momentum. Which was sorely needed, as it means you don't have to depend on the Mastodon project or instance admins dedicating even more of their time. Instead, the problem gets solved through collaborative effort, as it's meant to be.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
> Instead, the problem gets solved through collaborative effort, as it's meant to be. Exactly. It's the world wide web, people. It's about discovery and distribution and linkage. Centralization on this medium is not necessary; just convenient. This is what the early net was like when I got on it in 1990/1991. I ran a personal UUCP node on my Atari ST. When I got a telnet connection, I went and found lists of MUDs and MOOs and IRC servers to connect to. I used Archie and Veronica and Gopher. When the WWW first came along, I used directory services like Yahoo, etc. And then things got more convenient as Google, etc. came to dominate. And for a while the compromises that came with that were fine. But systems like Facebook and Twitter are really counter to the networked spirit that drove the excitement in the first place. They want all the marbles in one place. I don't want to play that game, seeing how it's gone. I think others are seeing now just how bad it can get. Mastodon isn't my dream system. I'd rather see something synchronous and dynamic and programmable... like LambdaMOO, but federated. But that ship sailed in the early 90s. I'm enjoying the bump in activity in Mastodon right now.

christkv 4y ago

How do you even know the person you found is the person you wanted? Also if people flock to specific instances it will just keel over and die.

Kadin 4y ago
Mastodon has a nice feature where you can prove ownership of a link in your profile by setting a backlink on it (implying you at least control the content of that page). So, if you don't want to set up your own Mastodon instance under your domain, you can instead link your Mastodon account to your homepage running on a domain of your choice. It's not something I bother to do, because I'm nobody important, but if I was e.g. Taylor Swift or something, I could show that my Mastodon account was affiliated with www.taylorswift.com, and thus give you a pretty good idea that I'm actually the real deal. From the Edit Profile page on Mastodon (v3.5.3): > You can verify yourself as the owner of the links in your profile metadata. For that, the linked website must contain a link back to your Mastodon profile. The link back must have a rel="me" attribute. The text content of the link does not matter.

Kadin 4y ago

Twitter didn't really have much of a discovery mechanism in its early years, and that's when it really built the userbase that is its main competitive advantage right now. I'm not sure that's a huge impediment, particularly since Twitter could be the de facto discovery mechanism for people on their way out the door ("Hey, I'm leaving for Mastodon, where I'll be foo@bar.org"). I do think there's an unmet demand for aggregator accounts on Mastodon right now, though. Like if I'm interested in esports (just f.ex.), there should probably be someone I could follow who boosts significant content related to that subject to aid people in finding new people to follow. (To be honest that probably already exists; like early Twitter, Mastodon is pretty tech heavy. There are a lot of gaps though.)

VectorLock 4y ago
The experience with twitodon.com is very clunky. Since people seem to be putting their mastodon tags in their Twitter "name" fields now it seems like it'd be a much more streamlined process to just scrape that.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  That's the approach tools like Fedi Finder have been using: scraping handles out of Twitter display names and Bios.

anotherrandom 4y ago

The technical barrier to entry ensures "normies" will not be able to use or understand (or at least enjoy) Mastodon. This will prevent it from becoming as huge as Twitter

VectorLock 4y ago
One man's bug is another man's feature I suppose.

claudiawerner 4y ago

It's worth looking at why people who are already on Twitter don't want to use Mastodon/Fediverse. The last time this topic came up on Twitter with Musk's first proposal to buy Twitter, several concerns were raised (and well-liked by thousands of other users) in several threads I noticed: * Migrating one's account and tweets to Mastodon * Finding people on Mastodon * General confusion about what federation is, or what it means * Stories of people who once used a Mastodon belonging to a friend group, had a falling out with whoever happened to be running the server, and was kicked off/had their account deleted * The fact that DMs aren't private, and can be read by an instance admin, or by the instance admin of the instance of the user you send them to. This particularly seemed to unnerve people because you're more likely to interact and know who the instance admin is than you are with Twitter support/SWEs. * The difficulty of choosing an instance. * The difficulty of avoiding certain people and certain content, usually spoken of in terms of principle: that is, abusive messages and content which admins must agree to filter, but some admins may not want to block that content, leaving the users on an instance known for harboring that kind of content * On the flip side, rampant defederation and the formation of cliques which become increasingly isolated social bubbles. * The name of the software and its default interface * The names of various instances which range from the whimsical to the offensive (e.g. 'wolfgirl.engineering' to 'fuckonthefirst.date'). * GDPR concerns and personal data privacy concerns - how do I delete media and text that I've uploaded that's now been shared across multiple instances? How do instance owners cope with this under the law? I've seen very, very few responses to any of these problems; some of them I object to myself, but it seems short-sighted to say that the only reason people aren't jumping ship is because of network effects and not genuine concerns with the technology and the community as it exists today.

VectorLock 4y ago
This is a great list, practically summed up every issue I've found in my few days of poking around.