15 ms·

Mastodon Explained

253 points by ano-ther 4y ago

artificial 4y ago
Glad to see more people dip toes into federated networks. Instance owners can read DMs. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  Also, instance owners can unilaterally control what you see and who may follow you (by blocking individual users and whole servers from federating with theirs). Whether or not such a block exists is transparent to you as a user (this is different from earlier, similar approaches, like NNTP-Servers, where it was pretty clear when a particular group was not being distributed by your server - also, differently from Mastodon, NNTP did not represent your identity identifier - using different servers for different groups was perfectly usable with the same identity (which came down to your email address). They sell this as a feature and celebrate when "undesirable" servers get blocked. Mastodon is a good idea turned bad by building in pretty dystopian functionality.
  - guipsp 4y ago
    No thanks, I don't want illegal stuff on my feed
    - lrvick 4y ago
      Then do not follow people that post illegal stuff.
      - nkrisc 4y ago
        When I first created an account on some instance, I saw other people’s content even though I hadn’t followed anyone yet, so that advice seems insufficient.
        lrvick 4y ago
        You can choose to look at instance wide content but that is a firehose of potentially illegal nonsense on any large server. You can stream illegal content from the firehose on Twitter too btw. https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/some-twitter-users-are-exploiting-illegal-images-of-children-3693085.html https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/some-twitter-us... In general just following topics or people that interest you is a safer bet on any platform with user generated media.
      - systemicdanna 4y ago
        Content from all federated instances is added to the feed in your instance, so you personally don't need to follow illegal stuff for it to appear in your feed. This is actually the most off-putting feature of Mastodon for me.
        drewzero1 4y ago
        Sure, on the federated feed; that one can be a bit of a free-for-all. Once you follow a good handful of people you can spend most of your time on the home feed and only see stuff from people you follow and the things they boost.
        systemicdanna 4y ago
        Have you ever tried to follow anyone from an instance that your instance refused to federate with? I am wondering how big of a problem this is. Not that I have encountered it, mostly just see this as potential a drawback of Mastodon's approach to federation.
        drewzero1 4y ago
        Good question! I hadn't tried, but just found a random user on an instance that mine doesn't federate with and clicked Follow. It took me through the remote follow and that user did appear on my list and showed up in searches when they didn't before. Unfortunately I seem to have chosen an abandoned or dormant account for my test, so I can't say for certain whether posts will show up in Home, but I would expect so given the other visibility changes. Hopefully someone else with some fedi experience can chime in.
        DocTomoe 4y ago
        Given how discovery in Mastodon works, by following "boosted" (think: re-tweeted) content creator or reading new people in a discussion, you wouldn't even know these accounts exist - sure, you can manually enter a mastodon id in the search bar to go directly to an account somewhere else (and thus try to access a potentially blocked node), but that's not the common use-case. Now, if that increases or decreases the problem space is a philosophical question. I personally do have issues with blocking instances as a whole because one admin disagrees with another admin on unrelated issues. If I get denied access to other people to organise around, e.g. building our own zen retreat because my admin and their admin disagree on political factions or because one admin nuked the connection to another instance for not being trigger-happy enough against their own users, everyone loses. Such technical possibilities and - in fact - recommendations run against the ideas of a civil society.
    - DoItToMe81 4y ago
      For all its faults, I've never exactly seen masses of greatly illegal content on Mastodon.
      - jrnichols 4y ago
        unfortunately I have. an instance was brigaded and flooded with very illegal content. and then the instance was taken down forever by authorities. all the instance users could do was try to flag everything they could but it was too much. edit: it was called sinblr and rumors are that it was an instance called pawoo that flooded it with seriously illegal content.
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
        An open question is whether this property will persist through growth.
  - moron4hire 4y ago
    It's pretty easy to migrate your account from one instance to another. So if you don't like the policies of your current instance, there isn't anything keeping you there.
    - nickthegreek 4y ago
      Just the pain of actually figuring out its going on or atively monitoring, and the the non-zero hassle of finding, choosing and transferring to another instance. And then be prepared to do it all again. This is not stuff the average user wants to ever be bothered with.
      - moron4hire 4y ago
        But Mastodon instances do tell you what is going on. They provide lists of the other instances they have banned from their own, with a statement on why. Here's the one I'm on right now: https://mstdn.social/about https://mstdn.social/about (scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section). Centralized social media platforms also control everything you see, to the point that it can be very difficult to see the full range of posts from accounts in good standing that you follow within their platform, in favor of posts they think would keep you more "engaged". And they are famously opaque on how they do that. If you can guess at what they've done and decide you don't like it, you don't have any recourse. After you've spent time to build a network of people you follow and follow you, they have you locked into their platform, holding your subscriptions hostage against you. I guess I don't understand what you want. Twitter is too much censorship, right? But we don't know how Twitter censors content, and even if we did, what would you do about it? Mastodon instances censor content, yeah. Why not? It's a person running their own site, they can let whatever they want through it. But they tell you how, when, and why they censor. And if you don't like it, you don't have to put up with it.
        eduction 4y ago
        > scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section Wow. As much as I disliked Twitter deciding who I can and can’t follow (via bans), and what people can and can’t say, at least they put some rigor into it. I don’t think I’d ever want some self anointed little server god king banning so many peers for such soft reasons. I thought it would be csam, armed groups - this has reasons like “Trump fanbase”, “offensive content”, and over and over again “a-holes”. No thanks.
  - mcv 4y ago
    Calling it dystopian is a bit harsh. Some degree of moderation is unavoidable or you end up with 4chan (actually, even 4chan had moderation, I think; it's just unavoidable). Ultimately of course you're supposed to choose a server that you like and trust. At least here you have that choice. On Twitter or Facebook you don't. Of course it should have had end to end encryption. It sounds like a massive omission. I found a discussion about adding that to ActivityPub[0] where someone points out that if you don't want server admins able to read messages, you can't store private keys on the server, which sounds to me like it would hurt usability. Makes you wonder how unbreakable the end-to-end encryption of other systems really is. I'm not enough of an encryption guru to say how big of a problem this really is. [0] https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/225 https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/225
  - jackthetab 4y ago
    Then don't go to those servers. Isn't that what "freedom of association" is about? Also, is the functionality dystopian or the application thereof?
    - ok123456 4y ago
      That breaks the idea of having a federated network, if you have no guarantees that sending a message on one end of it reaches its recipient. Now we just have all the same problems of email but with the mechanics of a multicast medium. Eventually, you'll reach the point where a duopoly will effectively control who is allowed to be part of the larger network. And this was the original problem people were trying to solve by creating a federated network.
      - stormbrew 4y ago
        > That breaks the idea of having a federated network What fresh nonsense is this? There's never been a federated system with anything like a perfect guarantee of connectivity to literally anything. There are always limits, both social and technical. Where do people get these ideas?
        syntheweave 4y ago
        The argument is a case of begging the question: Start with your conclusion, then reason backwards to the justification. It's the case that a federation tends to erode. Likewise, it's the case that a centralized system tends to collapse. The question to ask is really one of backing a horse to ride on to be pragmatically useful; winning the technical argument is academic. The fediverse has a few core principles in mind, and they tend to get centered in Mastodon's marketing. So it does make some sense that it gets attacked for being an imperfect realization of those principles, and for being unprincipled in other respects. But in a head-to-head comparison with other implementations of social media it can still claim to be more principled on those things it tried to pursue.
        ok123456 4y ago
        Having the inability to know if a message is propagated federation wide, based on an arbitrary value judgement based on ????, renders it useless as a communication medium. For this to work it needs to be treated as a common carrier, and not a social network.
- cgranier 4y ago
  I did not know this...
  - zaik 4y ago
    If you are about to write a DM you will see this warning: Posts on Mastodon are not end-to-end encrypted. Do not share any sensitive information over Mastodon.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - fazfq 4y ago
    What did you expect? Messages have to be stored on the server, and the instance owner has access to the server...
    - icelancer 4y ago
      Normal users do not understand what federation is, much less how messages are stored.
      - stormbrew 4y ago
        This has nothing to do with federation. It's just a fact of life on any hosted internet service.
        yarg 4y ago
        Not if end-to-end encryption is available.
        stormbrew 4y ago
        If you don't own the key exchange (and you don't, even on the services most people consider secure), you're still, on some level or another, just relying on trust that this is the case. At any rate, mastodon is a web app, not an IM client. No one who's ever raised this has even begun to explain how you could work e2e into something like it. Certainly no other microblogging platform has e2e anything, because that's not actually a thing that makes sense.
- LeonB 4y ago
  Same is true on Twitter, only you’re not earned about it.
  - judge2020 4y ago
    But there's also less of a reason for anyone with permission to read DMs @ Twitter to do so, possibly with logging for any audits into unauthorized access. For mastodon, chances are your instance is focused around some general interest and thus getting on an admin's bad side could mean abusing their power to extract personal information/DMs from your account. The only real issue with this wrt Twitter is that such failure of their internal employee auth allows malicious attackers to access DMs as well: https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/22/twitter-admits-hackers-accessed-dms-of-dozens-of-high-profile-accounts/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/22/twitter-admits-hackers-acc...
    - ori_b 4y ago
      > But there's also less of a reason for anyone with permission to read DMs @ Twitter to do so, possibly with logging for any audits into unauthorized access. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/12/exclusive-extract-facebooks-engineers-spied-women/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/12/exclusive-extrac... I'd expect there to be many Facebookers who weren't caught, and I'd expect the same to be true of Twitter.
    - lrvick 4y ago
      Insider attacks happened at twitter. State actors love to read DMs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitter
    - heavyset_go 4y ago
      People pay employees and contractors at social media companies to delve into others' accounts and messages all of the time. Some of them do it on their own without any outside influence, as well.
- criddell 4y ago
  Is it possible for instance owners to impersonate people on their server?
  - johannes1234321 4y ago
    Yes (just like with email, or Twitter where the owner could impersonate anybody)
    - jefftk 4y ago
      It isn't really the same as email, because with the email it doesn't matter if you are on the same domain as other people. You can avoid this risk by hosting your own email but running your own Mastodon instance just for yourself wouldn't make much sense.
      - johannes1234321 4y ago
        My Mastodon instance can exchange messages with yours, similar to my mail server sending you messages to you. See ActivityPub protocol.
        jefftk 4y ago
        Mastodon is federated, but by running an instance just for yourself you give up on per-instance culture
      - deadbunny 4y ago
        It's exactly the same as an email server. Whomever owns the server can send email from your address therefore impersonating you as per the original question.
        jefftk 4y ago
        It's the same in that way, yes: both are federated protocols where you need to trust the owner of your server. But with Mastodon there are within-server interactions like the local timeline (https://cfenollosa.com/blog/you-may-be-using-mastodon-wrong.html https://cfenollosa.com/blog/you-may-be-using-mastodon-wrong....) that have no equivalent in email, so if you decide to try to avoid this risk by self-hosting you're giving up something that a lot of Mastodon users really enjoy.
- jameshart 4y ago
  Forget about what instance owners can do within the confines of the common Mastodon server codebase - Mastodon in the end is a protocol, so there are NO guarantees about the behavior of individual instances. It seems like Mastodon assumes that misbehaving nodes will be cut off and just ignored by well-behaved ones - but that assumes that abuse is detectable and that standards of behavior will be enforced even if it means cutting off potentially large communities.
  - remram 4y ago
    Whatever your software, the person running it can read your messages. Unless you're using a non-web client that does E2EE, of which there are none right now.
    - LanternLight83 4y ago
      > a non-web client that does E2EE Yeah, I guess secure scuttlebutt comes to mind? But it's kinda it's own thing, notably with it's own scaling issues when it comes to widespread use.
    - woojoo666 4y ago
      Does mastodon even support E2EE? If you want encrypted chat rooms, isn't that what Matrix is for
      - remram 4y ago
        The server has the bits to do it [1], but clients need to implement it (they are the "ends" in "end-to-end encryption" after all). However this hasn't seen much interest from app developers and users. [1]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/13820 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/13820
    - Drblessing 4y ago
      > non-web client that does E2EE Signal?
      - 4y ago
- pygy_ 4y ago
  As can Twitter and Facebook employees
  - systemicdanna 4y ago
    AFAIK if you access a user's private info at Facebook your employee's ID will be immediately flagged leading to very severe consequences (instant firing in most cases).
- stormbrew 4y ago
  > Instance owners can read DMs. "Admins of <website> can read data on <website>" is just a tautology. It's true of everything you use on the internet where you don't own the server, and even then it's dubious. If people don't get that about mastodon they probably don't get it about everything else they use either, so this recurring argument just seems like FUD... [note: Edited <service> to <website> above because people keep coming at this from the angle of chat clients that run on your phone, and we're talking about websites here - a website can't have "e2e" encryption because it is both ends. That said, some of y'all believe way too hard in the perfectness of e2e in general and I addressed that in some of my replies]
  - vgel 4y ago
    yeah, but on twitter you're probably a nobody, the staff have no incentive to read your dms. on mastodon, you're at least a friend-of-a-friend of the operator unless you're on a huge instance.
    - stormbrew 4y ago
      Others have pointed out that this is fallacious -- even on big services sometimes employees are creepy stalkers, sometimes they're malicious actors of other sorts -- but even if you ignore that on twitter you are a target of advertising and if you think they aren't slurping up all the data they can about you and storing it in a database somewhere, you're fooling yourself. Anyways, down this logic path is an internet where we somehow put all our trust in megacorporations and absolutely none in our fellow human beings and I dunno about you but one of those sounds a lot more dystopian to me than the other.
      - vgel 4y ago
        twitter has hundreds of millions of users and 7,000 (less now, unfortunately) employees, not all of which have production access. i don't know anyone at twitter, so them accessing my data would need to be a random choice from the whole userbase. they'd need to evade internal checks (which, however weak they are, are infinitely stronger than the average fediverse instance). could it happen? could i be eaten by an escaped zoo leopard during my morning walk? having my data "read" by a non-sentient advertising model, while irritating, is nowhere near the same as having it read by a human being. that is a false equivalence. i made no argument about the absolute merit of twitter vs the fediverse. this is simply a downside of small communities that people excitedly migrating to the fediverse with little understanding of how it works or experience with its predecessors will soon run into—twitter is neutral ground, on mastodon you might be arguing with the instance admin's friend and find yourself retaliated against. anyone who used a forum or IRC in the 90's/00's knows what i'm talking about.
- SergeAx 4y ago
  Twitter owner can read DMs to, with extra effort. So what?
- ck2 4y ago
  Pretty sure some google employees can read others gmail. I know yahoo employees read email, I got my account back once by telling them recent subject lines.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    In a sense, yes. Email contents in gmail are technically accessible to Google. But they are protected like hell via a bunch of dedicated systems that make it very difficult to access this material without an explicit auditable ticket associated with helping that user with some problem and permission to access their gmail contents. Attempts to circumvent this will get people fired. This does rely on you trusting Google to implement and use these systems. The question is whether you trust a major tech company or whatever Mastodon server owner more to not peek at your DMs.
- sitta 4y ago
  I really don't like that ActivityPub does not support encryption. I wanted to setup an instance of one of these platforms for friends and family to use, but hated the thought of having to tell them that, by the way I can read all of your messages. I wouldn't, but I hate that that's even possible. So, instead I'm trying to twist Matrix to work more like a social media platform. It's janky, but totally workable, so long as you're not looking for global engagement.
dleslie 4y ago
In my experience, federation is like email, except in the early days before gmail was email, and if your ISP could arbitrarily and without notice subscribe you to a fire hose of illegal content.
- endor5639 4y ago
  This is the part that never made sense to me. The way mastodon is built the server automatically downloads all content you federate with to your own server. That means if someone on your instance hits follow on any account, boom you're now legally responsible for hosting and disseminating everything that account posts. It's just not practical to moderate every post from every account anyone on your server follows. Even one seriously egregious image squeaks through and you're looking at the possibility of actual jail time. I always wondered if the expectation could be flipped to expect the frontend client to fetch the majority of content remotely from the followees' servers on the fly. The architecture is so complex in a federated scenario though that could be a total mess or not even technically feasible at all.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Hmm, but isn't this lack of moderation also what is supposed to protect hosts from legal problems, just like it does for ISPs ? (Why wouldn't an ISP be legally bothered about transferring an illegal file ?)
    - lrvick 4y ago
      SMTP servers host and transmit piles of illegal content, but so long as server operators make best efforts to use spam lists it is never a legal problem.
  - lrvick 4y ago
    Kind of like you can send an email attachment containing illegal content to thousands of people and their SMTP servers will automatically download and store it. This is not a new problem. Shared spam lists and block lists are already emerging on mastodon, matrix, and other decentralized systems too.
chatterhead 4y ago
It's not a Federation otherwise you wouldn't be able to disconnect from other instances. It is in reality a Confediverse. Edit: All Elon has to do is send out a Tweet with something to the effect of "The Left's alternative to Twitter is Mastodon a Confederacy. Now that's what I call ironic." and watch them lose their minds.
- tfsh 4y ago
  A cursory search on Google yields four results pertaining to the "confediverse". Being such a niche I wonder whether it's wise to label technology with such contrieved descriptions. I think it would be useful if you could explain the anatomy of such a term? My reading [1] on the matter indicates that it can't be defined as a fediverse because the content is not owned by individual posters, indeed if I were to post something on a mastodon instance, I do not retain sole ownership of the data - a moderator could delete it, and thus "censor" my opinions. But I question, is this a true critisism? And does federation require each client connected to a distributed node to in it's own right retain absolute sovereignty over the content posted on that federated instance? 1: https://evbogue.com/howtosavetwitter https://evbogue.com/howtosavetwitter
  - chatterhead 4y ago
    Federation means you go from many to one. Confederation means you act as one but remain many. Instances can block other instances. That's not a Federation. Instances can have other rules and allow other content. That's not a Federation. Mastodon is a confederacy by definition.
    - guipsp 4y ago
      What a useless distinction - no server is going to allow all content
      - chatterhead 4y ago
        A very important distinction. The prevailing system people subscribe to should be known and properly labelled. Otherwise it's just a bait and switch.
EGreg 4y ago
Mastodon is great, but think Web 2.0 needs more open source alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, Telegram et al that have all their features and are just as easy to use, or the public won’t join. With Zuck and Elon now owning some of the world’s largest public forums, their policies have to satisfy everyone, which is impossible. Not to mention that governments can pressure them into stuff. So we once again get to this same conversation. We need open source alternatives like Mastodon. But it is difficult to match the ease of use and network effect of current Big Tech. Federation for example makes it so that downloading 50 avatars from 50 different sites much slower than if they were all stored om central site. For me personally, I have spent around 10 years and reinvested $1 million of our revenues to build this open source platform, which I think will help liberate people from privately owned Big Tech platgorms the way Web 1.0 helped liberate them from AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, MSN, MiniTel etc. and opened up new business models like Software As a Service and E-Commerce. All the big companies, from PayPal to EBay, Google, Facebook, Amazon, only became possible because the Web was open and permissionless. AOL wouldn’t allow any of these business models to permanently be built on top of it (keyword: Facebook LOL). Web 1.0 has a hugely adopted open source solution: Wordpress. NYTimes was one of the first investors. To publish something, people can choose from a free market of hosting companies, and plugin developers can sell directly to them, and no one can get deplatformed. But for Web 2.0, I’m sorry but Mastodon and Matrix are not at the level consumers expect after being spoiled by Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, etc. That’s why we built Qbix… it’s supposed to be an open source alternative that lets you assemble your own community apps, if you want you can quickly stand up an alternative to what Zuck and Elon run: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform If you want to play around with it, it’s free to use. The platform is ready for use but needs a lot more tutorials and needs to be packaged for hosting companies… ultimately the goal is to incorporate micropayments: https://qbix.com/ecosystem https://qbix.com/ecosystem If you’re interested, here is more on why it’s needed: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ Edit: 4 downvotes in 4 minutes. That’s not enough time to even read the comment or look thru the link, let alone try it. Why such a vehement response to what is essentially free software, which is intended to help humanity? Mastodon and Matrix are in the same category… I would definitely appreciate any TEXT accompanying the downvotes, so that I can learn what you are thinking.
FreeTrade 4y ago
Federation is fine for groups of like minded people who want to discuss topics in echo chambers. That might be most of the discussion that happens online. It's absolutely fine. However we also need a public square online. One where anyone may speak and anyone may respond and challenge the ideas. A place where anyone can put their claims on the record. It's not a place for sharing holiday photos. It is a place for public figures, journalists and politicians. Twitter has already been moving out of this space with it's various 'snowflake protection' policies and I hope Mr. Musk can restore this public square and strengthen it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- systemicdanna 4y ago
  This comparison of Twitter to some fantasy public square will never stop bewildering me. What was the global public square before Twitter? When did we have a place where every person on the planet could freely express themselves? This is just a purely imaginary space which for some reason even very smart people keep bringing up.
  - FreeTrade 4y ago
    The internet allows for new things that didn't exist before.
    - systemicdanna 4y ago
      > However we also need a public square online Why? What is this notion based on? A global public square never existed in the history of our species, why do we keep bringing up the idea of a public square as something completely reasonable?
      - bobsmooth 4y ago
        I guess some people like the free exchange of ideas and others do not.
fazfq 4y ago
Mastodon is an interesting case because it was a splinter of Twitter but it basically had the same moderation policies so it was the same thing and imo had no appeal of its own. Now with Musk it's possible that things will change in Twitter's policies so Mastodon may become useful, but we'll see.
phosphorco 4y ago
I just have such a hard time trying to understand why DeSo hasn't caught on. Seems to solve every single one of these problems in a more elegant way. What am I missing here?
- FreeTrade 4y ago
  Bitclout's main flaw is that it is not decentralized. It's also difficult to move a userbase because of network effects.
moron4hire 4y ago
The underlying protocol is called ActivityPub. https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/ Here is the spec: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ I haven't read the whole thing yet, but it doesn't look very complex.
lawgimenez 4y ago
That was funny, one of her posts she also mentioned Jeremy Renner app. Damn I remember that app.
tonetheman 4y ago
Mastadon to me so far is just an empty nothing. I think I have signed up like maybe 3 times on different servers (who knows where those are). On the one I can still login there is no one on it. Mastadon is NOT a replacement for twitter in its current form. I actually cant tell you what it is. But the text on this story is pretty close... just unintelligent gobblygook.
- lostgame 4y ago
  Huh. My server (tech.lgbt) is awesome, populated; and the content is relevant to my interests. I'm truly enjoying it. I've been here less than a week and already have 26 followers and I'm following 20. But I'm also a queer programmer; so...maybe it's just really dependant on the particular server you're using and your interests?
  - systemicdanna 4y ago
    LGBT communities are mostly very supportive and welcoming (which I envy as a straight man). Also they are not niche in the same sense as some music genre communities, which I am trying to be a part of but the discussion is just not happening.
footlose_3815 4y ago
[dead]
earth2mars 4y ago
This stuff never going to be successful. If people have to explain it or write articles about, mass adoption is unlikely. Why cant it be simple to use
- javajosh 4y ago
  It's possible that it is simple to use, but the community hasn't been able to explain it yet. My attempt: Mastadon is Twitter with far fewer users. The self-hosting and federation stuff is really detail to most people, much like most of email infrastructure.
  - moron4hire 4y ago
    I don't think it's correct or useful to make an equivalence between Twitter and Mastodon. Mastodon is software. It implements the ActivityPub protocol. People run Mastodon instances of their own to connect to other ActivityPub systems. There are other ActivityPub implementations, Mastodon is just one. It's not a platform like Twitter any more than WordPress is like the NYTimes.
    - alkonaut 4y ago
      I’m technical (as most people are on HN), but I don’t care how it works. I don’t care whether it’s a service or a protocol. I don’t care if it’s centralized or federated. What I want to know is how I use it as easily as possible. If that requires me to know the details - it failed. By “failed” in this context I mean “to be a viable Twitter alternative”. There may be other goals such as being a viable social network/protocol on a different scale or with other goals than being a Twitter competitor - but I don’t think most are interested in Mastodon for any purpose other than as a Twitter alternative.
    - javajosh 4y ago
      If you read the TFA you'd realize that your second paragraph is precisely what she's criticizing. It's possible that some concepts or tools can't be simplified or there's no point. Try explaining Webpack to an end-user. Such categories of things exist, in which case they are not products but components of other products. If Mastodon can't be understood simply, then it will only catch on with those who understand complexity, and be used in a product that is itself simple.
kasajian 4y ago
This made me laugh.
nemo44x 4y ago
Mastodon is like the 1990’s internet came back. It’s the balkanization of social, just like it used to be. The problem is that each group will eventually split for w/e reason into 2 smaller groups. Rinse and repeat. The irony being the end state is a server for each individual as a group! Federation is not the answer ultimately because centralization is how money is made. It’s also how the world works, but with certain expectations based on context. Mastodon is like Linux on the desktop - it won’t work for most people.
- wlll 4y ago
  > Mastodon is like the 1990’s internet came back. Don't you threaten me with a good time!
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    Yeah won’t argue that. What a golden age we messed up!
- NayamAmarshe 4y ago
  > Linux on the desktop - it won’t work for most people. Assumptions for this to be true: - Windows and MacOS are a UX champions and most people can use them without any issues. (Not objectively true) - People will be unable to comprehend GUIs like Gnome or KDE. (Not objectively true) - Linux Desktop is incapable of doing things other Operating Systems are doing. (Not objectively true) - Linux Desktop is based on a rigid idea and represents unusable software. (Couldn't be more wrong) - Linux cannot be used for consumer use. (Again false, Google Chromebooks) I don't even get how you're comparing Mastodon to Linux Desktop. Linux Desktop is functional, great for everyone who doesn't have an exclusive bias against open soruce software. Mastodon is FOSS, that's the only similarity. Anybody who tells me that Linux distros like ZorinOS "won't work for most people" is either lying to themselves or being ignorant on purpose.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    And yet, approximately nobody is using linux on the desktop.
robertwt7 4y ago
I don’t get it. Can anyone eli5 to me please?
- systemicdanna 4y ago
  Register on website A -> you can post at and follow people from website A. Go to website B and follow a person from that website without registering. Now you can also see their updates on website A.
8bitsrule 4y ago
For 3 months I visited the Fosstodon server daily (and tried to participate, but ...) My overall impression: there were few incidences of conversation going on. It was like a blog for a group of hundreds of people who had somewhat related interests ... but (unlike HN) no sense of community. I left disappointed; the technology worked, the experience pleasant enough (if museum-like) but something very essential was missing. (A critical mass? Forums?)
- systemicdanna 4y ago
  I have the same experience so far but also acknowledge that it will take a very long time for communities to form around individual Mastodon instances. Of course, that might never happen at scale (a large number of instances with functioning communities). Twitter (and Reddit, IG, etc) certainly benefited from mixing different people together and not being limited to a specific niche. On the other hand, niche forums and discussion boards in the 90s and early 2000s had a wide variety of amazing communities. So maybe it's just a question of time.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  Just tried fosstodon and the european commission has an account there?? Cant these political creeps stay the heck out of our daily lives? I dont want to see government propaganda creeping into foss, please! Even if its the eu - sets a precedent for others to follow. Keep politics out of all this.
  - lokedhs 4y ago
    The EU has their own instance. You likely saw messages from that one that was federated with your instance. They may also have created an account before their instance was live, but their posts should all be from their instance now so if you don't want to see it you can just block the EU instance
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - 4y ago
yrgulation 4y ago
Same garbage as twitter but federated. I did a search for #gaming on a local server and sure enough it yielded crypto, politics and identity politics results. No means to ban people from showing up for a particular hash. I just wanted to see bloody gaming setups and gaming videos. How hard is it?
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  Come on, this is a meaningless test. No-one tags their posts with "relevant" hashtags unless they have something to sell.
  - yrgulation 4y ago
    How do you find posts then? Follow everyone?
    - LeoPanthera 4y ago
      You follow people you know. Friends. Family. Anyone you're a fan of. That's the best way to get the most out of any social network.
- DoItToMe81 4y ago
  I think you're jumping the gun. I don't like Mastodon's dominant culture, but gaming communities (also in Pleroma) have been some of the few hobby places I've seen that haven't been dominated by culture war infighting.
  - yrgulation 4y ago
    I hope you are right because i cant stand the mess social networks are in. I really with we had something cool we can use for topics we like. I really really really dont care about politics. It’s all going down the drain anyway might as well make it enjoyable.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Do people really tag such posts with #gaming? I figure it's mostly marketers and middle age women who use hash tags in everday posts unironically.
CyanLite4 4y ago
I mean, can no one else throw together a 280-character Twitter clone in the next few days?
- bragr 4y ago
  Superficially? Yes. Practically and scalably? No.
- systemicdanna 4y ago
  There you go: just clone and deploy https://github.com/RisingGeek/twitter-clone https://github.com/RisingGeek/twitter-clone.
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  Well, not 280 character specifically, but I can deploy a myriad of forums and image/text boards in minutes. I suppose in the config file I could limit text posts to 280 characters but I would rather leave it a bit bigger. Forums can be federated on the backend with database replication or LDAP which is also basically database replication. I suppose tooling could be created to manage LDAP branches so that people could replicate sub-sets of data read-only and some sub-sets read-write. I know I just made some admins heave a bit. Using one of the now-sanctioned Russian forks of OpenLDAP ReOpenLDAP [1] the federation could scale to several million users so at some point that code would have to evolve again to reach Twitter scale. What is their active user count? Some IRC daemons can also use LDAP for identity. No idea if Matrix can support LDAP. [1] - https://abf.io/erthink/ReOpenLDAP https://abf.io/erthink/ReOpenLDAP
afterburner 4y ago
When my favourite Twitter people migrate (a handful of news types, basically), I'm sure I'll switch. Until then.................
yomritoyj 4y ago
For me Twitter is mainly a substitute to RSS: a central location to consume interesting content from diverse sources. In that role having an algorithmically curated as opposed to a strictly chronological feed is essential. For most people/entities I follow I'm interested in only a fraction of their tweets and I can rely on Twitter to do a good enough job of surfacing them for me. By following about a thousand accounts I can reliably hear about the latest trends in the areas that interest me by spending about half an hour each day. On the other hand, right now I follow only a few dozen accounts on Mastodon and I'm already drowning in irrelevant posts. It can at best be a glorified group chat.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  You mean you see posts by other people than those you follow? On Twitter I just follow say 100 people and my client shows me their posts in chronological order and nothing else, with no ads. If a feed tried to algorithmically insert a post I’d stop using that service in a hurry. What I have seen from mastodon is that there is such a feed available so by the look of it, so far so good.
qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
This is the equivalent of “I am moving to Canada if so and so wins”. In my opinion after all the stages of grief are complete, everyone will still be in the USofA

253 points by ano-ther 4y ago

Glad to see more people dip toes into federated networks. Instance owners can read DMs. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079

DocTomoe 4y ago
Also, instance owners can unilaterally control what you see and who may follow you (by blocking individual users and whole servers from federating with theirs). Whether or not such a block exists is transparent to you as a user (this is different from earlier, similar approaches, like NNTP-Servers, where it was pretty clear when a particular group was not being distributed by your server - also, differently from Mastodon, NNTP did not represent your identity identifier - using different servers for different groups was perfectly usable with the same identity (which came down to your email address). They sell this as a feature and celebrate when "undesirable" servers get blocked. Mastodon is a good idea turned bad by building in pretty dystopian functionality.
- guipsp 4y ago
  No thanks, I don't want illegal stuff on my feed
  - lrvick 4y ago
    Then do not follow people that post illegal stuff.
    - nkrisc 4y ago
      When I first created an account on some instance, I saw other people’s content even though I hadn’t followed anyone yet, so that advice seems insufficient.
      - lrvick 4y ago
        You can choose to look at instance wide content but that is a firehose of potentially illegal nonsense on any large server. You can stream illegal content from the firehose on Twitter too btw. https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/some-twitter-users-are-exploiting-illegal-images-of-children-3693085.html https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/some-twitter-us... In general just following topics or people that interest you is a safer bet on any platform with user generated media.
    - systemicdanna 4y ago
      Content from all federated instances is added to the feed in your instance, so you personally don't need to follow illegal stuff for it to appear in your feed. This is actually the most off-putting feature of Mastodon for me.
      - drewzero1 4y ago
        Sure, on the federated feed; that one can be a bit of a free-for-all. Once you follow a good handful of people you can spend most of your time on the home feed and only see stuff from people you follow and the things they boost.
        systemicdanna 4y ago
        Have you ever tried to follow anyone from an instance that your instance refused to federate with? I am wondering how big of a problem this is. Not that I have encountered it, mostly just see this as potential a drawback of Mastodon's approach to federation.
        drewzero1 4y ago
        Good question! I hadn't tried, but just found a random user on an instance that mine doesn't federate with and clicked Follow. It took me through the remote follow and that user did appear on my list and showed up in searches when they didn't before. Unfortunately I seem to have chosen an abandoned or dormant account for my test, so I can't say for certain whether posts will show up in Home, but I would expect so given the other visibility changes. Hopefully someone else with some fedi experience can chime in.
        DocTomoe 4y ago
        Given how discovery in Mastodon works, by following "boosted" (think: re-tweeted) content creator or reading new people in a discussion, you wouldn't even know these accounts exist - sure, you can manually enter a mastodon id in the search bar to go directly to an account somewhere else (and thus try to access a potentially blocked node), but that's not the common use-case. Now, if that increases or decreases the problem space is a philosophical question. I personally do have issues with blocking instances as a whole because one admin disagrees with another admin on unrelated issues. If I get denied access to other people to organise around, e.g. building our own zen retreat because my admin and their admin disagree on political factions or because one admin nuked the connection to another instance for not being trigger-happy enough against their own users, everyone loses. Such technical possibilities and - in fact - recommendations run against the ideas of a civil society.
  - DoItToMe81 4y ago
    For all its faults, I've never exactly seen masses of greatly illegal content on Mastodon.
    - jrnichols 4y ago
      unfortunately I have. an instance was brigaded and flooded with very illegal content. and then the instance was taken down forever by authorities. all the instance users could do was try to flag everything they could but it was too much. edit: it was called sinblr and rumors are that it was an instance called pawoo that flooded it with seriously illegal content.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      An open question is whether this property will persist through growth.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  It's pretty easy to migrate your account from one instance to another. So if you don't like the policies of your current instance, there isn't anything keeping you there.
  - nickthegreek 4y ago
    Just the pain of actually figuring out its going on or atively monitoring, and the the non-zero hassle of finding, choosing and transferring to another instance. And then be prepared to do it all again. This is not stuff the average user wants to ever be bothered with.
    - moron4hire 4y ago
      But Mastodon instances do tell you what is going on. They provide lists of the other instances they have banned from their own, with a statement on why. Here's the one I'm on right now: https://mstdn.social/about https://mstdn.social/about (scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section). Centralized social media platforms also control everything you see, to the point that it can be very difficult to see the full range of posts from accounts in good standing that you follow within their platform, in favor of posts they think would keep you more "engaged". And they are famously opaque on how they do that. If you can guess at what they've done and decide you don't like it, you don't have any recourse. After you've spent time to build a network of people you follow and follow you, they have you locked into their platform, holding your subscriptions hostage against you. I guess I don't understand what you want. Twitter is too much censorship, right? But we don't know how Twitter censors content, and even if we did, what would you do about it? Mastodon instances censor content, yeah. Why not? It's a person running their own site, they can let whatever they want through it. But they tell you how, when, and why they censor. And if you don't like it, you don't have to put up with it.
      - eduction 4y ago
        > scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section Wow. As much as I disliked Twitter deciding who I can and can’t follow (via bans), and what people can and can’t say, at least they put some rigor into it. I don’t think I’d ever want some self anointed little server god king banning so many peers for such soft reasons. I thought it would be csam, armed groups - this has reasons like “Trump fanbase”, “offensive content”, and over and over again “a-holes”. No thanks.
- mcv 4y ago
  Calling it dystopian is a bit harsh. Some degree of moderation is unavoidable or you end up with 4chan (actually, even 4chan had moderation, I think; it's just unavoidable). Ultimately of course you're supposed to choose a server that you like and trust. At least here you have that choice. On Twitter or Facebook you don't. Of course it should have had end to end encryption. It sounds like a massive omission. I found a discussion about adding that to ActivityPub[0] where someone points out that if you don't want server admins able to read messages, you can't store private keys on the server, which sounds to me like it would hurt usability. Makes you wonder how unbreakable the end-to-end encryption of other systems really is. I'm not enough of an encryption guru to say how big of a problem this really is. [0] https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/225 https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/225
- jackthetab 4y ago
  Then don't go to those servers. Isn't that what "freedom of association" is about? Also, is the functionality dystopian or the application thereof?
  - ok123456 4y ago
    That breaks the idea of having a federated network, if you have no guarantees that sending a message on one end of it reaches its recipient. Now we just have all the same problems of email but with the mechanics of a multicast medium. Eventually, you'll reach the point where a duopoly will effectively control who is allowed to be part of the larger network. And this was the original problem people were trying to solve by creating a federated network.
    - stormbrew 4y ago
      > That breaks the idea of having a federated network What fresh nonsense is this? There's never been a federated system with anything like a perfect guarantee of connectivity to literally anything. There are always limits, both social and technical. Where do people get these ideas?
      - syntheweave 4y ago
        The argument is a case of begging the question: Start with your conclusion, then reason backwards to the justification. It's the case that a federation tends to erode. Likewise, it's the case that a centralized system tends to collapse. The question to ask is really one of backing a horse to ride on to be pragmatically useful; winning the technical argument is academic. The fediverse has a few core principles in mind, and they tend to get centered in Mastodon's marketing. So it does make some sense that it gets attacked for being an imperfect realization of those principles, and for being unprincipled in other respects. But in a head-to-head comparison with other implementations of social media it can still claim to be more principled on those things it tried to pursue.
      - ok123456 4y ago
        Having the inability to know if a message is propagated federation wide, based on an arbitrary value judgement based on ????, renders it useless as a communication medium. For this to work it needs to be treated as a common carrier, and not a social network.
cgranier 4y ago
I did not know this...
- zaik 4y ago
  If you are about to write a DM you will see this warning: Posts on Mastodon are not end-to-end encrypted. Do not share any sensitive information over Mastodon.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- fazfq 4y ago
  What did you expect? Messages have to be stored on the server, and the instance owner has access to the server...
  - icelancer 4y ago
    Normal users do not understand what federation is, much less how messages are stored.
    - stormbrew 4y ago
      This has nothing to do with federation. It's just a fact of life on any hosted internet service.
      - yarg 4y ago
        Not if end-to-end encryption is available.
        stormbrew 4y ago
        If you don't own the key exchange (and you don't, even on the services most people consider secure), you're still, on some level or another, just relying on trust that this is the case. At any rate, mastodon is a web app, not an IM client. No one who's ever raised this has even begun to explain how you could work e2e into something like it. Certainly no other microblogging platform has e2e anything, because that's not actually a thing that makes sense.
LeonB 4y ago
Same is true on Twitter, only you’re not earned about it.
- judge2020 4y ago
  But there's also less of a reason for anyone with permission to read DMs @ Twitter to do so, possibly with logging for any audits into unauthorized access. For mastodon, chances are your instance is focused around some general interest and thus getting on an admin's bad side could mean abusing their power to extract personal information/DMs from your account. The only real issue with this wrt Twitter is that such failure of their internal employee auth allows malicious attackers to access DMs as well: https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/22/twitter-admits-hackers-accessed-dms-of-dozens-of-high-profile-accounts/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/22/twitter-admits-hackers-acc...
  - ori_b 4y ago
    > But there's also less of a reason for anyone with permission to read DMs @ Twitter to do so, possibly with logging for any audits into unauthorized access. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/12/exclusive-extract-facebooks-engineers-spied-women/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/12/exclusive-extrac... I'd expect there to be many Facebookers who weren't caught, and I'd expect the same to be true of Twitter.
  - lrvick 4y ago
    Insider attacks happened at twitter. State actors love to read DMs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitter
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    People pay employees and contractors at social media companies to delve into others' accounts and messages all of the time. Some of them do it on their own without any outside influence, as well.
criddell 4y ago
Is it possible for instance owners to impersonate people on their server?
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  Yes (just like with email, or Twitter where the owner could impersonate anybody)
  - jefftk 4y ago
    It isn't really the same as email, because with the email it doesn't matter if you are on the same domain as other people. You can avoid this risk by hosting your own email but running your own Mastodon instance just for yourself wouldn't make much sense.
    - johannes1234321 4y ago
      My Mastodon instance can exchange messages with yours, similar to my mail server sending you messages to you. See ActivityPub protocol.
      - jefftk 4y ago
        Mastodon is federated, but by running an instance just for yourself you give up on per-instance culture
    - deadbunny 4y ago
      It's exactly the same as an email server. Whomever owns the server can send email from your address therefore impersonating you as per the original question.
      - jefftk 4y ago
        It's the same in that way, yes: both are federated protocols where you need to trust the owner of your server. But with Mastodon there are within-server interactions like the local timeline (https://cfenollosa.com/blog/you-may-be-using-mastodon-wrong.html https://cfenollosa.com/blog/you-may-be-using-mastodon-wrong....) that have no equivalent in email, so if you decide to try to avoid this risk by self-hosting you're giving up something that a lot of Mastodon users really enjoy.
jameshart 4y ago
Forget about what instance owners can do within the confines of the common Mastodon server codebase - Mastodon in the end is a protocol, so there are NO guarantees about the behavior of individual instances. It seems like Mastodon assumes that misbehaving nodes will be cut off and just ignored by well-behaved ones - but that assumes that abuse is detectable and that standards of behavior will be enforced even if it means cutting off potentially large communities.
- remram 4y ago
  Whatever your software, the person running it can read your messages. Unless you're using a non-web client that does E2EE, of which there are none right now.
  - LanternLight83 4y ago
    > a non-web client that does E2EE Yeah, I guess secure scuttlebutt comes to mind? But it's kinda it's own thing, notably with it's own scaling issues when it comes to widespread use.
  - woojoo666 4y ago
    Does mastodon even support E2EE? If you want encrypted chat rooms, isn't that what Matrix is for
    - remram 4y ago
      The server has the bits to do it [1], but clients need to implement it (they are the "ends" in "end-to-end encryption" after all). However this hasn't seen much interest from app developers and users. [1]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/13820 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/13820
  - Drblessing 4y ago
    > non-web client that does E2EE Signal?
    - 4y ago
pygy_ 4y ago
As can Twitter and Facebook employees
- systemicdanna 4y ago
  AFAIK if you access a user's private info at Facebook your employee's ID will be immediately flagged leading to very severe consequences (instant firing in most cases).
stormbrew 4y ago
> Instance owners can read DMs. "Admins of <website> can read data on <website>" is just a tautology. It's true of everything you use on the internet where you don't own the server, and even then it's dubious. If people don't get that about mastodon they probably don't get it about everything else they use either, so this recurring argument just seems like FUD... [note: Edited <service> to <website> above because people keep coming at this from the angle of chat clients that run on your phone, and we're talking about websites here - a website can't have "e2e" encryption because it is both ends. That said, some of y'all believe way too hard in the perfectness of e2e in general and I addressed that in some of my replies]
- vgel 4y ago
  yeah, but on twitter you're probably a nobody, the staff have no incentive to read your dms. on mastodon, you're at least a friend-of-a-friend of the operator unless you're on a huge instance.
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    Others have pointed out that this is fallacious -- even on big services sometimes employees are creepy stalkers, sometimes they're malicious actors of other sorts -- but even if you ignore that on twitter you are a target of advertising and if you think they aren't slurping up all the data they can about you and storing it in a database somewhere, you're fooling yourself. Anyways, down this logic path is an internet where we somehow put all our trust in megacorporations and absolutely none in our fellow human beings and I dunno about you but one of those sounds a lot more dystopian to me than the other.
    - vgel 4y ago
      twitter has hundreds of millions of users and 7,000 (less now, unfortunately) employees, not all of which have production access. i don't know anyone at twitter, so them accessing my data would need to be a random choice from the whole userbase. they'd need to evade internal checks (which, however weak they are, are infinitely stronger than the average fediverse instance). could it happen? could i be eaten by an escaped zoo leopard during my morning walk? having my data "read" by a non-sentient advertising model, while irritating, is nowhere near the same as having it read by a human being. that is a false equivalence. i made no argument about the absolute merit of twitter vs the fediverse. this is simply a downside of small communities that people excitedly migrating to the fediverse with little understanding of how it works or experience with its predecessors will soon run into—twitter is neutral ground, on mastodon you might be arguing with the instance admin's friend and find yourself retaliated against. anyone who used a forum or IRC in the 90's/00's knows what i'm talking about.
SergeAx 4y ago
Twitter owner can read DMs to, with extra effort. So what?
ck2 4y ago
Pretty sure some google employees can read others gmail. I know yahoo employees read email, I got my account back once by telling them recent subject lines.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  In a sense, yes. Email contents in gmail are technically accessible to Google. But they are protected like hell via a bunch of dedicated systems that make it very difficult to access this material without an explicit auditable ticket associated with helping that user with some problem and permission to access their gmail contents. Attempts to circumvent this will get people fired. This does rely on you trusting Google to implement and use these systems. The question is whether you trust a major tech company or whatever Mastodon server owner more to not peek at your DMs.
sitta 4y ago
I really don't like that ActivityPub does not support encryption. I wanted to setup an instance of one of these platforms for friends and family to use, but hated the thought of having to tell them that, by the way I can read all of your messages. I wouldn't, but I hate that that's even possible. So, instead I'm trying to twist Matrix to work more like a social media platform. It's janky, but totally workable, so long as you're not looking for global engagement.

dleslie 4y ago

In my experience, federation is like email, except in the early days before gmail was email, and if your ISP could arbitrarily and without notice subscribe you to a fire hose of illegal content.

endor5639 4y ago
This is the part that never made sense to me. The way mastodon is built the server automatically downloads all content you federate with to your own server. That means if someone on your instance hits follow on any account, boom you're now legally responsible for hosting and disseminating everything that account posts. It's just not practical to moderate every post from every account anyone on your server follows. Even one seriously egregious image squeaks through and you're looking at the possibility of actual jail time. I always wondered if the expectation could be flipped to expect the frontend client to fetch the majority of content remotely from the followees' servers on the fly. The architecture is so complex in a federated scenario though that could be a total mess or not even technically feasible at all.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Hmm, but isn't this lack of moderation also what is supposed to protect hosts from legal problems, just like it does for ISPs ? (Why wouldn't an ISP be legally bothered about transferring an illegal file ?)
  - lrvick 4y ago
    SMTP servers host and transmit piles of illegal content, but so long as server operators make best efforts to use spam lists it is never a legal problem.
- lrvick 4y ago
  Kind of like you can send an email attachment containing illegal content to thousands of people and their SMTP servers will automatically download and store it. This is not a new problem. Shared spam lists and block lists are already emerging on mastodon, matrix, and other decentralized systems too.

chatterhead 4y ago

It's not a Federation otherwise you wouldn't be able to disconnect from other instances. It is in reality a Confediverse. Edit: All Elon has to do is send out a Tweet with something to the effect of "The Left's alternative to Twitter is Mastodon a Confederacy. Now that's what I call ironic." and watch them lose their minds.

tfsh 4y ago
A cursory search on Google yields four results pertaining to the "confediverse". Being such a niche I wonder whether it's wise to label technology with such contrieved descriptions. I think it would be useful if you could explain the anatomy of such a term? My reading [1] on the matter indicates that it can't be defined as a fediverse because the content is not owned by individual posters, indeed if I were to post something on a mastodon instance, I do not retain sole ownership of the data - a moderator could delete it, and thus "censor" my opinions. But I question, is this a true critisism? And does federation require each client connected to a distributed node to in it's own right retain absolute sovereignty over the content posted on that federated instance? 1: https://evbogue.com/howtosavetwitter https://evbogue.com/howtosavetwitter
- chatterhead 4y ago
  Federation means you go from many to one. Confederation means you act as one but remain many. Instances can block other instances. That's not a Federation. Instances can have other rules and allow other content. That's not a Federation. Mastodon is a confederacy by definition.
  - guipsp 4y ago
    What a useless distinction - no server is going to allow all content
    - chatterhead 4y ago
      A very important distinction. The prevailing system people subscribe to should be known and properly labelled. Otherwise it's just a bait and switch.

EGreg 4y ago

Mastodon is great, but think Web 2.0 needs more open source alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, Telegram et al that have all their features and are just as easy to use, or the public won’t join. With Zuck and Elon now owning some of the world’s largest public forums, their policies have to satisfy everyone, which is impossible. Not to mention that governments can pressure them into stuff. So we once again get to this same conversation. We need open source alternatives like Mastodon. But it is difficult to match the ease of use and network effect of current Big Tech. Federation for example makes it so that downloading 50 avatars from 50 different sites much slower than if they were all stored om central site. For me personally, I have spent around 10 years and reinvested $1 million of our revenues to build this open source platform, which I think will help liberate people from privately owned Big Tech platgorms the way Web 1.0 helped liberate them from AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, MSN, MiniTel etc. and opened up new business models like Software As a Service and E-Commerce. All the big companies, from PayPal to EBay, Google, Facebook, Amazon, only became possible because the Web was open and permissionless. AOL wouldn’t allow any of these business models to permanently be built on top of it (keyword: Facebook LOL). Web 1.0 has a hugely adopted open source solution: Wordpress. NYTimes was one of the first investors. To publish something, people can choose from a free market of hosting companies, and plugin developers can sell directly to them, and no one can get deplatformed. But for Web 2.0, I’m sorry but Mastodon and Matrix are not at the level consumers expect after being spoiled by Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, etc. That’s why we built Qbix… it’s supposed to be an open source alternative that lets you assemble your own community apps, if you want you can quickly stand up an alternative to what Zuck and Elon run: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform If you want to play around with it, it’s free to use. The platform is ready for use but needs a lot more tutorials and needs to be packaged for hosting companies… ultimately the goal is to incorporate micropayments: https://qbix.com/ecosystem https://qbix.com/ecosystem If you’re interested, here is more on why it’s needed: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ Edit: 4 downvotes in 4 minutes. That’s not enough time to even read the comment or look thru the link, let alone try it. Why such a vehement response to what is essentially free software, which is intended to help humanity? Mastodon and Matrix are in the same category… I would definitely appreciate any TEXT accompanying the downvotes, so that I can learn what you are thinking.

FreeTrade 4y ago

Federation is fine for groups of like minded people who want to discuss topics in echo chambers. That might be most of the discussion that happens online. It's absolutely fine. However we also need a public square online. One where anyone may speak and anyone may respond and challenge the ideas. A place where anyone can put their claims on the record. It's not a place for sharing holiday photos. It is a place for public figures, journalists and politicians. Twitter has already been moving out of this space with it's various 'snowflake protection' policies and I hope Mr. Musk can restore this public square and strengthen it.

deleted 4y ago
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systemicdanna 4y ago
This comparison of Twitter to some fantasy public square will never stop bewildering me. What was the global public square before Twitter? When did we have a place where every person on the planet could freely express themselves? This is just a purely imaginary space which for some reason even very smart people keep bringing up.
- FreeTrade 4y ago
  The internet allows for new things that didn't exist before.
  - systemicdanna 4y ago
    > However we also need a public square online Why? What is this notion based on? A global public square never existed in the history of our species, why do we keep bringing up the idea of a public square as something completely reasonable?
    - bobsmooth 4y ago
      I guess some people like the free exchange of ideas and others do not.

fazfq 4y ago

Mastodon is an interesting case because it was a splinter of Twitter but it basically had the same moderation policies so it was the same thing and imo had no appeal of its own. Now with Musk it's possible that things will change in Twitter's policies so Mastodon may become useful, but we'll see.

phosphorco 4y ago

I just have such a hard time trying to understand why DeSo hasn't caught on. Seems to solve every single one of these problems in a more elegant way. What am I missing here?

FreeTrade 4y ago
Bitclout's main flaw is that it is not decentralized. It's also difficult to move a userbase because of network effects.

moron4hire 4y ago

The underlying protocol is called ActivityPub. https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/ Here is the spec: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ I haven't read the whole thing yet, but it doesn't look very complex.

lawgimenez 4y ago

That was funny, one of her posts she also mentioned Jeremy Renner app. Damn I remember that app.

tonetheman 4y ago

Mastadon to me so far is just an empty nothing. I think I have signed up like maybe 3 times on different servers (who knows where those are). On the one I can still login there is no one on it. Mastadon is NOT a replacement for twitter in its current form. I actually cant tell you what it is. But the text on this story is pretty close... just unintelligent gobblygook.

lostgame 4y ago
Huh. My server (tech.lgbt) is awesome, populated; and the content is relevant to my interests. I'm truly enjoying it. I've been here less than a week and already have 26 followers and I'm following 20. But I'm also a queer programmer; so...maybe it's just really dependant on the particular server you're using and your interests?
- systemicdanna 4y ago
  LGBT communities are mostly very supportive and welcoming (which I envy as a straight man). Also they are not niche in the same sense as some music genre communities, which I am trying to be a part of but the discussion is just not happening.

footlose_3815 4y ago

[dead]

earth2mars 4y ago

This stuff never going to be successful. If people have to explain it or write articles about, mass adoption is unlikely. Why cant it be simple to use

javajosh 4y ago
It's possible that it is simple to use, but the community hasn't been able to explain it yet. My attempt: Mastadon is Twitter with far fewer users. The self-hosting and federation stuff is really detail to most people, much like most of email infrastructure.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  I don't think it's correct or useful to make an equivalence between Twitter and Mastodon. Mastodon is software. It implements the ActivityPub protocol. People run Mastodon instances of their own to connect to other ActivityPub systems. There are other ActivityPub implementations, Mastodon is just one. It's not a platform like Twitter any more than WordPress is like the NYTimes.
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    I’m technical (as most people are on HN), but I don’t care how it works. I don’t care whether it’s a service or a protocol. I don’t care if it’s centralized or federated. What I want to know is how I use it as easily as possible. If that requires me to know the details - it failed. By “failed” in this context I mean “to be a viable Twitter alternative”. There may be other goals such as being a viable social network/protocol on a different scale or with other goals than being a Twitter competitor - but I don’t think most are interested in Mastodon for any purpose other than as a Twitter alternative.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    If you read the TFA you'd realize that your second paragraph is precisely what she's criticizing. It's possible that some concepts or tools can't be simplified or there's no point. Try explaining Webpack to an end-user. Such categories of things exist, in which case they are not products but components of other products. If Mastodon can't be understood simply, then it will only catch on with those who understand complexity, and be used in a product that is itself simple.

kasajian 4y ago

This made me laugh.

nemo44x 4y ago

Mastodon is like the 1990’s internet came back. It’s the balkanization of social, just like it used to be. The problem is that each group will eventually split for w/e reason into 2 smaller groups. Rinse and repeat. The irony being the end state is a server for each individual as a group! Federation is not the answer ultimately because centralization is how money is made. It’s also how the world works, but with certain expectations based on context. Mastodon is like Linux on the desktop - it won’t work for most people.

wlll 4y ago
> Mastodon is like the 1990’s internet came back. Don't you threaten me with a good time!
- nemo44x 4y ago
  Yeah won’t argue that. What a golden age we messed up!
NayamAmarshe 4y ago
> Linux on the desktop - it won’t work for most people. Assumptions for this to be true: - Windows and MacOS are a UX champions and most people can use them without any issues. (Not objectively true) - People will be unable to comprehend GUIs like Gnome or KDE. (Not objectively true) - Linux Desktop is incapable of doing things other Operating Systems are doing. (Not objectively true) - Linux Desktop is based on a rigid idea and represents unusable software. (Couldn't be more wrong) - Linux cannot be used for consumer use. (Again false, Google Chromebooks) I don't even get how you're comparing Mastodon to Linux Desktop. Linux Desktop is functional, great for everyone who doesn't have an exclusive bias against open soruce software. Mastodon is FOSS, that's the only similarity. Anybody who tells me that Linux distros like ZorinOS "won't work for most people" is either lying to themselves or being ignorant on purpose.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  And yet, approximately nobody is using linux on the desktop.

robertwt7 4y ago

I don’t get it. Can anyone eli5 to me please?

systemicdanna 4y ago
Register on website A -> you can post at and follow people from website A. Go to website B and follow a person from that website without registering. Now you can also see their updates on website A.

8bitsrule 4y ago

For 3 months I visited the Fosstodon server daily (and tried to participate, but ...) My overall impression: there were few incidences of conversation going on. It was like a blog for a group of hundreds of people who had somewhat related interests ... but (unlike HN) no sense of community. I left disappointed; the technology worked, the experience pleasant enough (if museum-like) but something very essential was missing. (A critical mass? Forums?)

systemicdanna 4y ago
I have the same experience so far but also acknowledge that it will take a very long time for communities to form around individual Mastodon instances. Of course, that might never happen at scale (a large number of instances with functioning communities). Twitter (and Reddit, IG, etc) certainly benefited from mixing different people together and not being limited to a specific niche. On the other hand, niche forums and discussion boards in the 90s and early 2000s had a wide variety of amazing communities. So maybe it's just a question of time.
yrgulation 4y ago
Just tried fosstodon and the european commission has an account there?? Cant these political creeps stay the heck out of our daily lives? I dont want to see government propaganda creeping into foss, please! Even if its the eu - sets a precedent for others to follow. Keep politics out of all this.
- lokedhs 4y ago
  The EU has their own instance. You likely saw messages from that one that was federated with your instance. They may also have created an account before their instance was live, but their posts should all be from their instance now so if you don't want to see it you can just block the EU instance
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 4y ago

yrgulation 4y ago

Same garbage as twitter but federated. I did a search for #gaming on a local server and sure enough it yielded crypto, politics and identity politics results. No means to ban people from showing up for a particular hash. I just wanted to see bloody gaming setups and gaming videos. How hard is it?

LeoPanthera 4y ago
Come on, this is a meaningless test. No-one tags their posts with "relevant" hashtags unless they have something to sell.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  How do you find posts then? Follow everyone?
  - LeoPanthera 4y ago
    You follow people you know. Friends. Family. Anyone you're a fan of. That's the best way to get the most out of any social network.
DoItToMe81 4y ago
I think you're jumping the gun. I don't like Mastodon's dominant culture, but gaming communities (also in Pleroma) have been some of the few hobby places I've seen that haven't been dominated by culture war infighting.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  I hope you are right because i cant stand the mess social networks are in. I really with we had something cool we can use for topics we like. I really really really dont care about politics. It’s all going down the drain anyway might as well make it enjoyable.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
Do people really tag such posts with #gaming? I figure it's mostly marketers and middle age women who use hash tags in everday posts unironically.

CyanLite4 4y ago

I mean, can no one else throw together a 280-character Twitter clone in the next few days?

bragr 4y ago
Superficially? Yes. Practically and scalably? No.
systemicdanna 4y ago
There you go: just clone and deploy https://github.com/RisingGeek/twitter-clone https://github.com/RisingGeek/twitter-clone.
LinuxBender 4y ago
Well, not 280 character specifically, but I can deploy a myriad of forums and image/text boards in minutes. I suppose in the config file I could limit text posts to 280 characters but I would rather leave it a bit bigger. Forums can be federated on the backend with database replication or LDAP which is also basically database replication. I suppose tooling could be created to manage LDAP branches so that people could replicate sub-sets of data read-only and some sub-sets read-write. I know I just made some admins heave a bit. Using one of the now-sanctioned Russian forks of OpenLDAP ReOpenLDAP [1] the federation could scale to several million users so at some point that code would have to evolve again to reach Twitter scale. What is their active user count? Some IRC daemons can also use LDAP for identity. No idea if Matrix can support LDAP. [1] - https://abf.io/erthink/ReOpenLDAP https://abf.io/erthink/ReOpenLDAP

afterburner 4y ago

When my favourite Twitter people migrate (a handful of news types, basically), I'm sure I'll switch. Until then.................

yomritoyj 4y ago

For me Twitter is mainly a substitute to RSS: a central location to consume interesting content from diverse sources. In that role having an algorithmically curated as opposed to a strictly chronological feed is essential. For most people/entities I follow I'm interested in only a fraction of their tweets and I can rely on Twitter to do a good enough job of surfacing them for me. By following about a thousand accounts I can reliably hear about the latest trends in the areas that interest me by spending about half an hour each day. On the other hand, right now I follow only a few dozen accounts on Mastodon and I'm already drowning in irrelevant posts. It can at best be a glorified group chat.

alkonaut 4y ago
You mean you see posts by other people than those you follow? On Twitter I just follow say 100 people and my client shows me their posts in chronological order and nothing else, with no ads. If a feed tried to algorithmically insert a post I’d stop using that service in a hurry. What I have seen from mastodon is that there is such a feed available so by the look of it, so far so good.

qwertyuiop_ 4y ago

This is the equivalent of “I am moving to Canada if so and so wins”. In my opinion after all the stages of grief are complete, everyone will still be in the USofA