18 ms·

Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

189 points by buovjaga 4y ago

cratermoon 4y ago
Who do Mastodon's boosters believe is going to be installing and running Mastodon servers?
- lostfocus 4y ago
  Nerds
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    Before they are bought by bigwigs with cash.
    - zikduruqe 4y ago
      Then we'll move to Yddgrasil. https://yggdrasil-network.github.io https://yggdrasil-network.github.io https://letsdecentralize.org https://letsdecentralize.org
      - remram 4y ago
        This appears to be a transport layer... It is not a social network, and would still require people to run always-on "instances" of software to be usable as one.
- r721 4y ago
  Who is running current 5k servers? Same kind of people. http://demo.fedilist.com/instance?q=&ip=&software=mastodon&registrations=&sort=mau http://demo.fedilist.com/instance?q=&ip=&software=mastodon&r...
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    And most of those servers stopped registrations when the exodus from Twitter began. One reason, so that communities wouldn't get diluted. The other, it's expensive to run this.
    - cratermoon 4y ago
      I wouldn't say "most". According to that site, of the 4880 instances list, 1909 are close and another ~300 are invite-only. > it's expensive to run this As the hype about Mastodon spiked after Musk bought twitter, I looked at it to see if I could set up an instance, just to experiment. I'm an experienced programmer and systems administrator. After perusing the requirements and installation process, I decided that it was too much work for a little one-person experiment. This is why I ask about who is running instances. Yes, I had a strong hunch it would be all nerds, but I didn't expect it to be require so much sophistication and outlay. One very dedicated person could certainly set up and run an instance, but most likely any instance of moderate popularity is going to require a team.
      - r721 4y ago
        On the topic of costs I saw this today in my Mastodon feed: >The costs were already ~$35/month even with reserved instances; back-of-the-envelope is that the new costs would be in the ballpark of ~$50/month. https://toot.cafe/@nolan/109295574721909717 https://toot.cafe/@nolan/109295574721909717 toot.cafe is #216 (by MAU) in the list above, MAU=315 - there's a data point.
        zimpenfish 4y ago
        They should migrate to Pleroma and reduce their monthly costs.
      - zimpenfish 4y ago
        > After perusing the requirements and installation process Was that the original Mastodon? That does have a reputation of being faffy to install and resource-hungry. Pleroma is much easier and less resource-hungry. Even I managed to spin up a Pleroma server without any trouble. > most likely any instance of moderate popularity is going to require a team. It'll need a team for coverage of moderation, support, perhaps 24/7 ops - but then anything with a lot of users will, surely?
- crocowhile 4y ago
  I am a scientist and I've setup a mastodon instance on my own server, with remote file hosting on S3. It was pretty painless and in a few days 200 non tech-savvy people have joined and started contributed. Some migrating from twitter, some joining social media for the first time. It is great.
- twmiller 4y ago
  The same sort of people who decided it'd be interesting and/or fun to snag an extra phone line and set up a BBS back in the day, I suspect.
- Kye 4y ago
  Someone is. Instance count is growing in proportion to user count.
- davoneus 4y ago
  Yeah, it's a major issue (to some at least). Lots of fly by night servers, stood up by (probably well meaning) people that have no idea if how hard it is to run and administer a server like that. Point in fact the "Mastodon.technology"(MT) server If you read the heartfelt post from the MT owners/op on why it had to be shutdown. How much it took of his life to run it, and the choices he made. It doesn't matter that a new "like that" MT server is being stood up as a replacement. The MT server admins post shows the burden of running a server like that. For free (unless Patreon'ed I guess). Activity Pub is a well designed protocol, but to my eye it has some major warts(). Add in it's decentralized nature and it shows how hard it will be to institute major changes, even if the community supported it. I'd like to find a nice, professionally run Mastodon server, with clear rules and a believable investment in infrastructure and people. Absent that, I certainly can't see myself advocating for it, it recommending it to others. Shame too. () Lack of encryption, lack of non-server discovery, lack of consistent, user controled server migration.p
amelius 4y ago
Wasn't it the idea of Musk to give everyone on Twitter absolute freedom of (amplification of) speech?
- tomrod 4y ago
  Hard to do with an ad-driven platform.
- metadat 4y ago
  He stated his true plans privately, these comms were unveiled by the discovery process from the Twitter lawsuit. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33475031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33475031 for more details and sources. p.s. thanks to Dan Luu for putting it all online!
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    That actually seems… pretty reasonable and probably a net good? Why are people so mad about this? The Twitter status quo seems incredibly toxic.
    - metadat 4y ago
      Maybe, it's still too early to discern what the end state will be. I feel disdain for the dishonesty and poor treatment of / regard for human beings in his sphere, though. So far it's a case study demonstration of poor and uninspiring leadership.
    - tomrod 4y ago
      Jack Dorsey seems to be describing Mastodon, unless I misunderstand.
    - bergenty 4y ago
      There’s a lot of incredibly racist commentary now. The toxicity is at a whole other level at this point.
      - 4y ago
woah 4y ago
The uptick of interest in Mastodon due to Musk buying Twitter doesn’t make sense. Only the left is angry about the acquisition. The right is gleeful. What the left is angry and the right is gleeful about is the idea that Musk is a “free speech absolutist” and might unban Donald Trump and other right wing / fascist media personalities. Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the first place. Sure, leftist servers could have stop syndicating his posts, but this would not have had much more of an effect than individuals blocking him on Twitter if he had never been banned there. Further, Musk hasn’t actually unbanned him yet. If this mastodon push was somehow successful, and everyone switched over, then Trump would be truly unbannable. He would run his own instance, and it would syndicated to all his fans. The people who are mad about Musk might not syndicate Trump’s posts but this wouldn’t matter.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Left wing people would live in their silo and Trump people would live in theirs. It's not a terrible idea until you have to ban or unban 5,000 instances depending on their social point of view on ever changing issues and than you realize it is like outdated docs
  - duhtritus 4y ago
    Just wait for the Anti Defamation League or another partisan organization to release a dynamic blocklist of Mastodon servers to allow leftist admins to outsource all their moderation decisions. Leave it to the Twitter secessionists/expats to build a whole layer of centralization and control on top of a decentralized, federated system.
- Ericson2314 4y ago
  It's not god that Elon can see ones DMs. I'm on the left and it's also just a fine time to promote things like federation that are otherwise hard to get non-technical people to care about, regardless of what Twitter ends up doing. Never let a crisis go to waste!
  - 4y ago
chatterhead 4y ago
- sseagull 4y ago
  And yet, lots of people are on there at this moment just having fun. Even if it doesn’t last, oh well. These complaints remind me of the famous dropbox comment, as well as this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/359/ https://xkcd.com/359/
  - chatterhead 4y ago
meesterdude 4y ago
I didn't think Mastodon would make sense for me as any kind of twiter alternative, but then I found someone created ruby.social and now it actually makes sense for me, and offers something twitter doesn't.
fredgrott 4y ago
I think most of us are missing where things are converging: 1. Easier to do ads as overlay on vid clips than 12 character content 2. User base is getting to trained to expect and WANT short vid clip content 3. Ease and reach of story telling via short vid clips 4. Move off of social graph to AI graph 5. Automated moderation but open where you can see what posts were moderated and why pertaining to the rules of the SM platform. What we are seeing is the move to Social 2.0. 1. Mark Z has the problem of how to turn FB into instagram and AI graph @. Youtube has smaller problem of just adjusting their feed impl to AI graph 3. Twitter has the most work out of the three in that it's their full imp and infrastructure that has to change to get back to revelance. True P2P has never ever won in the market of over almost 40 years. But people keep rehashing the same way of doing and structuring P2P both tech wise and business wise and losing.
- ahelwer 4y ago
  Who cares about "winning the market". Join a server and talk with your friends, colleagues, and like-minded people. Have a good time. Kick a few bucks at your instance for hosting costs maybe. Let the back-alley knife fight for the right to spy on & manipulate you happen somewhere else, never even crossing your mind.
coffeefirst 4y ago
In theory federated social media seems like a great idea. You can hand-wave a lot of impossible moderation problems away just by not being so damn big. It seems like I could join for music and geeky history without being inundated with The Current Thing ragebait culture. I'd try that out! In practice it's still a desert. The problem isn't how to sign up, it's that with the exception of a few active communities, there's not much going on once you do.
- tomrod 4y ago
  I finally joined yesterday to a niche (academic) community that is moving from Twitter. 18k migrants in the 30 hours since it opened up with virtually linear growth. I can search other similar niche communities and they are seeing similar growth. It's not seeming like much of a desert, and is just starting to benefit from network effects as some of the more known members of the community announce their moves.
  - OscarCunningham 4y ago
    Right. I'm on the mathematics server https://mathstodon.xyz/ https://mathstodon.xyz/ and it's already feeling like a big community.
    - arjvik 4y ago
      How do you get invited?
      - OscarCunningham 4y ago
        Existing users can generate an invite link: https://mathstodon.xyz/invite/5nKykTB6 https://mathstodon.xyz/invite/5nKykTB6 If it doesn't work then check back in a day or two, many servers are struggling at the moment but the mathstodon admins are scaling up now. Or you can join any other instance since any account can follow any other account regardless of instance. The main advantage of mathstodon is LaTeX support.
    - deleted 4y ago
leobg 4y ago
samsepi0l 4y ago
I dont think Mastodon will gain mainstream adoption because of the naming, and they call messages "Toots". Normal people will baulk at the branding of it all.
- OscarCunningham 4y ago
  Posts are just call 'posts' in the latest versions of the software.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  I remember complaining the “iPad” sounded like a menstrual product. Seemed to do fine.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    This reminds me of the super old joke "iPod, iPad, iPaid"
  - extheat 4y ago
    The i-line of products was already well known by the general public at the time to be synonymous with Apple. iTunes, iPod, iPhone ... those were normal english words prefixed with an "i". People wonder why Apple didn't call their watch the iWatch. This is a much different thing with "mastrodon". It's not a word people are familiar with, has enough syllables to sound funny, and gets combined with other nonsense words people aren't familiar with. Compare that with something like youtube subscribers, posters, tweets, etc. which are all basic words. Mastrodon's situation is that it reeks of being engineer designed. That's not a good thing if your goal is to reach a mainstream audience.
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      I think you're skipping past the word "pad" which is what people thought was weird, not the I. Toot is as much a basic word as tweet, I think you are just reflecting your own bias towards words from products you already know.
  - 4y ago
newaccount2021 4y ago
nemo44x 4y ago
Just wait until the journalists find out Trumps Truth Social is the biggest Mastodon server out there.
- abhinavk 4y ago
  It's based on Mastodon project but it's not part of the Mastodon network. I don't think you can follow a Truth.social user.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- jrnichols 4y ago
  I think Gab is running on a mastodon fork as well.
- Klonoar 4y ago
  This isn’t new news, it’s just not remotely interesting news.
Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
I really want to like Mastodon, and every few years I make an attempt to join. But then, I am faced with the decision of choosing a server - if I like cooking and golf, do I join the cooking server or the golf server? What if I choose wrong? - and the choice overload makes me just give up. And even if I really joined, then apparently my server's administrator would be able to silently prevent me from seeing other "enemy" servers' messages, and they could even read my DMs. I think I see the point of Mastodon, and I think it can be really advantageous for certain uses (e.g. for relatively tight communities, that want to have bonds within the community but also connections to the outside) but I just don't see its fit for the average user and especially as a replacement for the generalistic, unstructured network that is Twitter.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  I think you're just putting way too much thought into it: Any server will do just fine (you can always move later, but only if you feel really attached to a given community), and any well-established server really just blocks servers full of Nazis and anime child porn.
- zaik 4y ago
  You should join a server you think has a reasonable approach to moderating other servers. On any other service the administrator can also prevent you from seeing posts, this is not specific to Mastodon at all. For private messaging other standards exist, for example XMPP+OMEMO.
  - raarts 4y ago
    How do you find out if that is the case? Believe what they say? What happens if they die, or throw you out? Do you need to get another handle? Will this drop you from other people's contact lists? These are things I worry about.
    - 4y ago
qualudeheart 4y ago
Predictions: Mastodon becomes platform for technically minded center left. Tribel Social becomes lower brow left version of Parler. Twitter loses customers to aforementioned platforms but survives.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  I feel like most people I know on the left have essentially abandoned social media as inherently unproductive and instead gather in local group chats which can only be found by being active in a community. So the only people who will really be hanging around are probably techno optimists
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    That’s pretty much what their opposition wants. Previously they controlled what was allowed to be said on the mainstream platforms and that was influential. Scattering off to 1000 different Balkanized ghettos puts them back on the margins. This was what happened to the far right already.
    - Bud 4y ago
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- imhoguy 4y ago
  Prediction: masses get into Mastodon, governments mandate protocol tapping to filter out some ActivityPub traffic, for "kids good" or to "stop terrorism". Hosting companies and ISPs start to disallow hosting social networks in their T&C, kind like torrent or crypto mining.
  - qualudeheart 4y ago
    That won’t happen unless Mastodon becomes a hub for socialists and communists. The average Twitter user switching to Mastodon isn’t radical enough for that. Western governments won’t censor ideas within their overton windows, so they won’t censor anything from centre left to centre right. You won’t see censorship of Mastodon until anarchists and communists use it to coordinate protests at scale.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
Ben Thompson put well why “Twitter, more than any social network, is sui generis: First, the service emerged at a time and place where a text-based network was cutting edge… Second, Twitter grew up in an environment where it was normal to publicly broadcast whatever it was you had to say… Third, because Twitter was first, it became ground zero for everyone who was textual and had something to say, even if those folks had diametrically opposing viewpoints on everything from Donald Trump to LeBron James.” https://stratechery.com/2022/musks-twitter-blue-a-twitter-subscription-revisited-apple-earnings/ https://stratechery.com/2022/musks-twitter-blue-a-twitter-su...
beardedman 4y ago
Mastodon is too fragmented to work... well. For example; this tweet: https://twitter.com/joinmastodon/status/1585756076305444864 https://twitter.com/joinmastodon/status/1585756076305444864. Would you really host your email on a server that some dude in rural Canada runs in his spare time? I don't think so. Not just for reliability reasons, but for privacy reasons as well.
- imhoguy 4y ago
  As with email hosting, what stops you to choose instance served by a company? Let's imagine Google Fedi+, MS Fedilook or Proton Fedi hosted from some bunker in Switzerland.
  - beardedman 4y ago
    > what stops you to choose instance served by a company That when the goodwill of said company runs out, there is very little incentive for them to maintain the service (other than trying to monetize it).
    - imhoguy 4y ago
      There is no free lunch. Somebody has to pay electricity bills and spend resources (time) on administration. But you have a choice: so you trust the dude in rural Canada who pays the server bills with his harvest earnings, or you agree with monetization T&C by giving up your privacy to ads corporation, or you pay a hosting company who manages your instance on VPS, or you setup your own instance, or you participate in coop scheme where you share instance with some common interest group, or you find some rich and trusted philanthropist. Otherwise the owner can't sustain the operations and may need to shut down one day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33120136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33120136)
      - beardedman 4y ago
        I think I will trust/use/invest in the company whose business model depends on me using the platform.
riffic 4y ago
Eugen is playing almost all roles singlehandedly and last said he was making around 35k a year. "I do software development, devops, accounting, customer support, project management, product design, public relations, and moderation for 36K per year..." please help fund the project to ensure further stability. https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109260715240000670 https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109260715240000670
the-printer 4y ago
Is there any space nowadays for tech that is essentially free of politicized rhetoric? I really don't care about democracy or decentralization on my social media platform. When I first discovered Tumblr, MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga, AIM, and Twitter I didn't care about any of their techno-political underpinnings.
- silverwasthere 4y ago
  Some servers enforce a rule where political messages are hidden behind a content warning. Check the CoC before you sign up.
  - the-printer 4y ago
    That rule itself implies the sort of underpinnings that repel me from certain alternative social networks.
varelse 4y ago
[dead]
mozman 4y ago
Centralized systems are very dangerous, moderation is a huge problem and has a massive chilling effect. I support civil discourse and disagreements, I actively want to see both sides and not just an echo chamber. We all have different beliefs and the only way to move forward as society is to foster open and honest conversation. This is especially applicable to politically correct language and culture. Some things are uncomfortable and that’s ok. It should be.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  > We all have different beliefs and the only way to move forward as society is to foster open and honest conversation. This presupposes every "belief" and discussion is in good faith. It also presupposes that there's no second order effects from the amplification of "beliefs". A bigot is not interested in learning about whatever it is they're bigoted against. They just want to amplify their message. Trolls and shit posters just want to troll and shit post. If you eliminate moderation then all you'll get is people using your platform to scream at everyone else. Assuming everyone is interested in actual conversation is childishly naïve.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Mastodon is not a platform and does have moderation.
    - giantrobot 4y ago
      Individual instances do which is what the GP was talking about. Also individual instances are where an outside link is going to point at.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
m3kw9 4y ago
Imagine you need to choose a server every time you wanted to surf the net and some server you may not see certain things
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  It's called your ISP, the only difference is you don't get a choice.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kstrauser 4y ago
  Imagine you need to choose a server every time you want to email your someone, and that server may have spam filters.
- darthrupert 4y ago
  Or having to pick the best option from a million different mail providers.
- weberer 4y ago
  >Imagine you need to choose a server every time you wanted to surf the net ??? I don't have to imagine. That's exactly what happens when you enter a URL.
  - m3kw9 4y ago
    That url is the actual content, I meant an intermediary say a proxy
    - mcv 4y ago
      Like your ISP? I've been thinking that, just like your ISP provides you with an email address (do they all still do that? Mine does), maybe they should also automatically provide you with a social network account. It's a bit odd how everything today still links back to email, which many consider dated, but we still don't have a good replacement for it. This might be ready for a new universal distributed communication system.
dannyphantom 4y ago
Twitter is a great place for creatives to pitch their shows and get scooped up into a studio if you can put out some high-quality work. Mastodon doesn't seem like it has any solid use case to that end. Craig McCracken, the creator of PPG and Fosters Home has consistently used his Twitter following to boost other creatives by retweeting their work and LaikaStudios has been a great place to see BTS work on their stop-motion projects. These sites all seem to have some grandiose plan but at the end of the day, the long-standing use case is just a place to build a community, collaborate with like-minded people, and ultimately just take a break from real life for a few moments by scrolling down your feed to consume some content.
- cphuntington97 4y ago
  "Craig McCracken, the creator of PPG and Fosters Home has consistently used his Twitter following to boost other creatives by retweeting their work" This is exactly how Mastodon works.
lakomen 4y ago
I said it before, I'm not paying so Mastodon gets popular. It's either open source no strings attached I can change what I want or nothing.
- Kye 4y ago
  I'm not sure what your issue is. Mastodon is open source. You can download it right now and stand up a server without payment or permission.
tinyhouse 4y ago
I tried looking for people today and it was so slow, nothing worked. Can they really scale?
jscipione 4y ago
7e 4y ago
Reddit should just clone Twitter and solve everyone’s problems.
- someNameIG 4y ago
  They have most of the basics required to do so already. Just have a tab that is a feed of the u/ you follow.
lrvick 4y ago
For those not sure who to follow on Mastodon, I have been curating my follow list for years. Mostly people into tech, security, privacy, and digital sovereignty. https://mastodon.social/@lrvick/following https://mastodon.social/@lrvick/following
sazz 4y ago
Things we are currently seeing going on is social debt, not technical debt. Therefore another technical solution won't fix the issue. It will just relay the social issues to a new platform which will start over again very soon. You can't fix people by giving them new software.
Vaslo 4y ago
My anti-tech wife looked at this for 5 minutes and was horribly confused. Her friends all feel the same way - why can’t they just sign in and see all the people they want to see? What is an instance, why cant the instance be just one? Which one do they join? They all went back to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
- remram 4y ago
  > why cant the instance be just one > They all went back to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram Do they not have the same problem with those 3 instances, each with their separate networks and separate user handles?
- mariusor 4y ago
  Instead of trying to sell them an alternative to Twitter, maybe try to sell them a prettier email provider.
rowanG077 4y ago
If anything the last few days have shown that people aren't willing to pay even 8$ for twitter. How mastodon will think it will make without users or investors willing to pay for hosting is beyond me.
moistly 4y ago
It would probably help Mastodon a lot if they contacted some of the smarter celebrities and set them up with their own personal server. You’d subscribe to Stephen King or Ryan Reynolds by subscribing to their server. They can afford to run popular servers, and there are enough of them that they can absorb a lot of the load.
marquislek 4y ago
Mastodon feels like if discord and twitter were going through a web3 phase and had a child

189 points by buovjaga 4y ago

cratermoon 4y ago

Who do Mastodon's boosters believe is going to be installing and running Mastodon servers?

lostfocus 4y ago
Nerds
- Ygg2 4y ago
  Before they are bought by bigwigs with cash.
  - zikduruqe 4y ago
    Then we'll move to Yddgrasil. https://yggdrasil-network.github.io https://yggdrasil-network.github.io https://letsdecentralize.org https://letsdecentralize.org
    - remram 4y ago
      This appears to be a transport layer... It is not a social network, and would still require people to run always-on "instances" of software to be usable as one.
r721 4y ago
Who is running current 5k servers? Same kind of people. http://demo.fedilist.com/instance?q=&ip=&software=mastodon&registrations=&sort=mau http://demo.fedilist.com/instance?q=&ip=&software=mastodon&r...
- dmitriid 4y ago
  And most of those servers stopped registrations when the exodus from Twitter began. One reason, so that communities wouldn't get diluted. The other, it's expensive to run this.
  - cratermoon 4y ago
    I wouldn't say "most". According to that site, of the 4880 instances list, 1909 are close and another ~300 are invite-only. > it's expensive to run this As the hype about Mastodon spiked after Musk bought twitter, I looked at it to see if I could set up an instance, just to experiment. I'm an experienced programmer and systems administrator. After perusing the requirements and installation process, I decided that it was too much work for a little one-person experiment. This is why I ask about who is running instances. Yes, I had a strong hunch it would be all nerds, but I didn't expect it to be require so much sophistication and outlay. One very dedicated person could certainly set up and run an instance, but most likely any instance of moderate popularity is going to require a team.
    - r721 4y ago
      On the topic of costs I saw this today in my Mastodon feed: >The costs were already ~$35/month even with reserved instances; back-of-the-envelope is that the new costs would be in the ballpark of ~$50/month. https://toot.cafe/@nolan/109295574721909717 https://toot.cafe/@nolan/109295574721909717 toot.cafe is #216 (by MAU) in the list above, MAU=315 - there's a data point.
      - zimpenfish 4y ago
        They should migrate to Pleroma and reduce their monthly costs.
    - zimpenfish 4y ago
      > After perusing the requirements and installation process Was that the original Mastodon? That does have a reputation of being faffy to install and resource-hungry. Pleroma is much easier and less resource-hungry. Even I managed to spin up a Pleroma server without any trouble. > most likely any instance of moderate popularity is going to require a team. It'll need a team for coverage of moderation, support, perhaps 24/7 ops - but then anything with a lot of users will, surely?
crocowhile 4y ago
I am a scientist and I've setup a mastodon instance on my own server, with remote file hosting on S3. It was pretty painless and in a few days 200 non tech-savvy people have joined and started contributed. Some migrating from twitter, some joining social media for the first time. It is great.
twmiller 4y ago
The same sort of people who decided it'd be interesting and/or fun to snag an extra phone line and set up a BBS back in the day, I suspect.
Kye 4y ago
Someone is. Instance count is growing in proportion to user count.
davoneus 4y ago
Yeah, it's a major issue (to some at least). Lots of fly by night servers, stood up by (probably well meaning) people that have no idea if how hard it is to run and administer a server like that. Point in fact the "Mastodon.technology"(MT) server If you read the heartfelt post from the MT owners/op on why it had to be shutdown. How much it took of his life to run it, and the choices he made. It doesn't matter that a new "like that" MT server is being stood up as a replacement. The MT server admins post shows the burden of running a server like that. For free (unless Patreon'ed I guess). Activity Pub is a well designed protocol, but to my eye it has some major warts(). Add in it's decentralized nature and it shows how hard it will be to institute major changes, even if the community supported it. I'd like to find a nice, professionally run Mastodon server, with clear rules and a believable investment in infrastructure and people. Absent that, I certainly can't see myself advocating for it, it recommending it to others. Shame too. () Lack of encryption, lack of non-server discovery, lack of consistent, user controled server migration.p

amelius 4y ago

Wasn't it the idea of Musk to give everyone on Twitter absolute freedom of (amplification of) speech?

tomrod 4y ago
Hard to do with an ad-driven platform.
metadat 4y ago
He stated his true plans privately, these comms were unveiled by the discovery process from the Twitter lawsuit. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33475031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33475031 for more details and sources. p.s. thanks to Dan Luu for putting it all online!
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  That actually seems… pretty reasonable and probably a net good? Why are people so mad about this? The Twitter status quo seems incredibly toxic.
  - metadat 4y ago
    Maybe, it's still too early to discern what the end state will be. I feel disdain for the dishonesty and poor treatment of / regard for human beings in his sphere, though. So far it's a case study demonstration of poor and uninspiring leadership.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Jack Dorsey seems to be describing Mastodon, unless I misunderstand.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    There’s a lot of incredibly racist commentary now. The toxicity is at a whole other level at this point.
    - 4y ago

woah 4y ago

The uptick of interest in Mastodon due to Musk buying Twitter doesn’t make sense. Only the left is angry about the acquisition. The right is gleeful. What the left is angry and the right is gleeful about is the idea that Musk is a “free speech absolutist” and might unban Donald Trump and other right wing / fascist media personalities. Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the first place. Sure, leftist servers could have stop syndicating his posts, but this would not have had much more of an effect than individuals blocking him on Twitter if he had never been banned there. Further, Musk hasn’t actually unbanned him yet. If this mastodon push was somehow successful, and everyone switched over, then Trump would be truly unbannable. He would run his own instance, and it would syndicated to all his fans. The people who are mad about Musk might not syndicate Trump’s posts but this wouldn’t matter.

ipaddr 4y ago
Left wing people would live in their silo and Trump people would live in theirs. It's not a terrible idea until you have to ban or unban 5,000 instances depending on their social point of view on ever changing issues and than you realize it is like outdated docs
- duhtritus 4y ago
  Just wait for the Anti Defamation League or another partisan organization to release a dynamic blocklist of Mastodon servers to allow leftist admins to outsource all their moderation decisions. Leave it to the Twitter secessionists/expats to build a whole layer of centralization and control on top of a decentralized, federated system.
Ericson2314 4y ago
It's not god that Elon can see ones DMs. I'm on the left and it's also just a fine time to promote things like federation that are otherwise hard to get non-technical people to care about, regardless of what Twitter ends up doing. Never let a crisis go to waste!
- 4y ago

chatterhead 4y ago

sseagull 4y ago
And yet, lots of people are on there at this moment just having fun. Even if it doesn’t last, oh well. These complaints remind me of the famous dropbox comment, as well as this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/359/ https://xkcd.com/359/
- chatterhead 4y ago

meesterdude 4y ago

I didn't think Mastodon would make sense for me as any kind of twiter alternative, but then I found someone created ruby.social and now it actually makes sense for me, and offers something twitter doesn't.

fredgrott 4y ago

I think most of us are missing where things are converging: 1. Easier to do ads as overlay on vid clips than 12 character content 2. User base is getting to trained to expect and WANT short vid clip content 3. Ease and reach of story telling via short vid clips 4. Move off of social graph to AI graph 5. Automated moderation but open where you can see what posts were moderated and why pertaining to the rules of the SM platform. What we are seeing is the move to Social 2.0. 1. Mark Z has the problem of how to turn FB into instagram and AI graph @. Youtube has smaller problem of just adjusting their feed impl to AI graph 3. Twitter has the most work out of the three in that it's their full imp and infrastructure that has to change to get back to revelance. True P2P has never ever won in the market of over almost 40 years. But people keep rehashing the same way of doing and structuring P2P both tech wise and business wise and losing.

ahelwer 4y ago
Who cares about "winning the market". Join a server and talk with your friends, colleagues, and like-minded people. Have a good time. Kick a few bucks at your instance for hosting costs maybe. Let the back-alley knife fight for the right to spy on & manipulate you happen somewhere else, never even crossing your mind.

coffeefirst 4y ago

In theory federated social media seems like a great idea. You can hand-wave a lot of impossible moderation problems away just by not being so damn big. It seems like I could join for music and geeky history without being inundated with The Current Thing ragebait culture. I'd try that out! In practice it's still a desert. The problem isn't how to sign up, it's that with the exception of a few active communities, there's not much going on once you do.

tomrod 4y ago
I finally joined yesterday to a niche (academic) community that is moving from Twitter. 18k migrants in the 30 hours since it opened up with virtually linear growth. I can search other similar niche communities and they are seeing similar growth. It's not seeming like much of a desert, and is just starting to benefit from network effects as some of the more known members of the community announce their moves.
- OscarCunningham 4y ago
  Right. I'm on the mathematics server https://mathstodon.xyz/ https://mathstodon.xyz/ and it's already feeling like a big community.
  - arjvik 4y ago
    How do you get invited?
    - OscarCunningham 4y ago
      Existing users can generate an invite link: https://mathstodon.xyz/invite/5nKykTB6 https://mathstodon.xyz/invite/5nKykTB6 If it doesn't work then check back in a day or two, many servers are struggling at the moment but the mathstodon admins are scaling up now. Or you can join any other instance since any account can follow any other account regardless of instance. The main advantage of mathstodon is LaTeX support.
  - deleted 4y ago

leobg 4y ago

samsepi0l 4y ago

I dont think Mastodon will gain mainstream adoption because of the naming, and they call messages "Toots". Normal people will baulk at the branding of it all.

OscarCunningham 4y ago
Posts are just call 'posts' in the latest versions of the software.
ceejayoz 4y ago
I remember complaining the “iPad” sounded like a menstrual product. Seemed to do fine.
- jacooper 4y ago
  This reminds me of the super old joke "iPod, iPad, iPaid"
- extheat 4y ago
  The i-line of products was already well known by the general public at the time to be synonymous with Apple. iTunes, iPod, iPhone ... those were normal english words prefixed with an "i". People wonder why Apple didn't call their watch the iWatch. This is a much different thing with "mastrodon". It's not a word people are familiar with, has enough syllables to sound funny, and gets combined with other nonsense words people aren't familiar with. Compare that with something like youtube subscribers, posters, tweets, etc. which are all basic words. Mastrodon's situation is that it reeks of being engineer designed. That's not a good thing if your goal is to reach a mainstream audience.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    I think you're skipping past the word "pad" which is what people thought was weird, not the I. Toot is as much a basic word as tweet, I think you are just reflecting your own bias towards words from products you already know.
- 4y ago

newaccount2021 4y ago

nemo44x 4y ago

Just wait until the journalists find out Trumps Truth Social is the biggest Mastodon server out there.

abhinavk 4y ago
It's based on Mastodon project but it's not part of the Mastodon network. I don't think you can follow a Truth.social user.
- deleted 4y ago
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jrnichols 4y ago
I think Gab is running on a mastodon fork as well.
Klonoar 4y ago
This isn’t new news, it’s just not remotely interesting news.

Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago

I really want to like Mastodon, and every few years I make an attempt to join. But then, I am faced with the decision of choosing a server - if I like cooking and golf, do I join the cooking server or the golf server? What if I choose wrong? - and the choice overload makes me just give up. And even if I really joined, then apparently my server's administrator would be able to silently prevent me from seeing other "enemy" servers' messages, and they could even read my DMs. I think I see the point of Mastodon, and I think it can be really advantageous for certain uses (e.g. for relatively tight communities, that want to have bonds within the community but also connections to the outside) but I just don't see its fit for the average user and especially as a replacement for the generalistic, unstructured network that is Twitter.

deleted 4y ago
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ocdtrekkie 4y ago
I think you're just putting way too much thought into it: Any server will do just fine (you can always move later, but only if you feel really attached to a given community), and any well-established server really just blocks servers full of Nazis and anime child porn.
zaik 4y ago
You should join a server you think has a reasonable approach to moderating other servers. On any other service the administrator can also prevent you from seeing posts, this is not specific to Mastodon at all. For private messaging other standards exist, for example XMPP+OMEMO.
- raarts 4y ago
  How do you find out if that is the case? Believe what they say? What happens if they die, or throw you out? Do you need to get another handle? Will this drop you from other people's contact lists? These are things I worry about.
  - 4y ago

qualudeheart 4y ago

Predictions: Mastodon becomes platform for technically minded center left. Tribel Social becomes lower brow left version of Parler. Twitter loses customers to aforementioned platforms but survives.

SQueeeeeL 4y ago
I feel like most people I know on the left have essentially abandoned social media as inherently unproductive and instead gather in local group chats which can only be found by being active in a community. So the only people who will really be hanging around are probably techno optimists
- nemo44x 4y ago
  That’s pretty much what their opposition wants. Previously they controlled what was allowed to be said on the mainstream platforms and that was influential. Scattering off to 1000 different Balkanized ghettos puts them back on the margins. This was what happened to the far right already.
  - Bud 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
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imhoguy 4y ago
Prediction: masses get into Mastodon, governments mandate protocol tapping to filter out some ActivityPub traffic, for "kids good" or to "stop terrorism". Hosting companies and ISPs start to disallow hosting social networks in their T&C, kind like torrent or crypto mining.
- qualudeheart 4y ago
  That won’t happen unless Mastodon becomes a hub for socialists and communists. The average Twitter user switching to Mastodon isn’t radical enough for that. Western governments won’t censor ideas within their overton windows, so they won’t censor anything from centre left to centre right. You won’t see censorship of Mastodon until anarchists and communists use it to coordinate protests at scale.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

Ben Thompson put well why “Twitter, more than any social network, is sui generis: First, the service emerged at a time and place where a text-based network was cutting edge… Second, Twitter grew up in an environment where it was normal to publicly broadcast whatever it was you had to say… Third, because Twitter was first, it became ground zero for everyone who was textual and had something to say, even if those folks had diametrically opposing viewpoints on everything from Donald Trump to LeBron James.” https://stratechery.com/2022/musks-twitter-blue-a-twitter-subscription-revisited-apple-earnings/ https://stratechery.com/2022/musks-twitter-blue-a-twitter-su...

beardedman 4y ago

Mastodon is too fragmented to work... well. For example; this tweet: https://twitter.com/joinmastodon/status/1585756076305444864 https://twitter.com/joinmastodon/status/1585756076305444864. Would you really host your email on a server that some dude in rural Canada runs in his spare time? I don't think so. Not just for reliability reasons, but for privacy reasons as well.

imhoguy 4y ago
As with email hosting, what stops you to choose instance served by a company? Let's imagine Google Fedi+, MS Fedilook or Proton Fedi hosted from some bunker in Switzerland.
- beardedman 4y ago
  > what stops you to choose instance served by a company That when the goodwill of said company runs out, there is very little incentive for them to maintain the service (other than trying to monetize it).
  - imhoguy 4y ago
    There is no free lunch. Somebody has to pay electricity bills and spend resources (time) on administration. But you have a choice: so you trust the dude in rural Canada who pays the server bills with his harvest earnings, or you agree with monetization T&C by giving up your privacy to ads corporation, or you pay a hosting company who manages your instance on VPS, or you setup your own instance, or you participate in coop scheme where you share instance with some common interest group, or you find some rich and trusted philanthropist. Otherwise the owner can't sustain the operations and may need to shut down one day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33120136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33120136)
    - beardedman 4y ago
      I think I will trust/use/invest in the company whose business model depends on me using the platform.

riffic 4y ago

Eugen is playing almost all roles singlehandedly and last said he was making around 35k a year. "I do software development, devops, accounting, customer support, project management, product design, public relations, and moderation for 36K per year..." please help fund the project to ensure further stability. https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109260715240000670 https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109260715240000670

the-printer 4y ago

Is there any space nowadays for tech that is essentially free of politicized rhetoric? I really don't care about democracy or decentralization on my social media platform. When I first discovered Tumblr, MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga, AIM, and Twitter I didn't care about any of their techno-political underpinnings.

silverwasthere 4y ago
Some servers enforce a rule where political messages are hidden behind a content warning. Check the CoC before you sign up.
- the-printer 4y ago
  That rule itself implies the sort of underpinnings that repel me from certain alternative social networks.

varelse 4y ago

[dead]

mozman 4y ago

Centralized systems are very dangerous, moderation is a huge problem and has a massive chilling effect. I support civil discourse and disagreements, I actively want to see both sides and not just an echo chamber. We all have different beliefs and the only way to move forward as society is to foster open and honest conversation. This is especially applicable to politically correct language and culture. Some things are uncomfortable and that’s ok. It should be.

giantrobot 4y ago
> We all have different beliefs and the only way to move forward as society is to foster open and honest conversation. This presupposes every "belief" and discussion is in good faith. It also presupposes that there's no second order effects from the amplification of "beliefs". A bigot is not interested in learning about whatever it is they're bigoted against. They just want to amplify their message. Trolls and shit posters just want to troll and shit post. If you eliminate moderation then all you'll get is people using your platform to scream at everyone else. Assuming everyone is interested in actual conversation is childishly naïve.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Mastodon is not a platform and does have moderation.
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    Individual instances do which is what the GP was talking about. Also individual instances are where an outside link is going to point at.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

m3kw9 4y ago

Imagine you need to choose a server every time you wanted to surf the net and some server you may not see certain things

whimsicalism 4y ago
It's called your ISP, the only difference is you don't get a choice.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kstrauser 4y ago
Imagine you need to choose a server every time you want to email your someone, and that server may have spam filters.
darthrupert 4y ago
Or having to pick the best option from a million different mail providers.
weberer 4y ago
>Imagine you need to choose a server every time you wanted to surf the net ??? I don't have to imagine. That's exactly what happens when you enter a URL.
- m3kw9 4y ago
  That url is the actual content, I meant an intermediary say a proxy
  - mcv 4y ago
    Like your ISP? I've been thinking that, just like your ISP provides you with an email address (do they all still do that? Mine does), maybe they should also automatically provide you with a social network account. It's a bit odd how everything today still links back to email, which many consider dated, but we still don't have a good replacement for it. This might be ready for a new universal distributed communication system.

dannyphantom 4y ago

Twitter is a great place for creatives to pitch their shows and get scooped up into a studio if you can put out some high-quality work. Mastodon doesn't seem like it has any solid use case to that end. Craig McCracken, the creator of PPG and Fosters Home has consistently used his Twitter following to boost other creatives by retweeting their work and LaikaStudios has been a great place to see BTS work on their stop-motion projects. These sites all seem to have some grandiose plan but at the end of the day, the long-standing use case is just a place to build a community, collaborate with like-minded people, and ultimately just take a break from real life for a few moments by scrolling down your feed to consume some content.

cphuntington97 4y ago
"Craig McCracken, the creator of PPG and Fosters Home has consistently used his Twitter following to boost other creatives by retweeting their work" This is exactly how Mastodon works.

lakomen 4y ago

I said it before, I'm not paying so Mastodon gets popular. It's either open source no strings attached I can change what I want or nothing.

Kye 4y ago
I'm not sure what your issue is. Mastodon is open source. You can download it right now and stand up a server without payment or permission.

tinyhouse 4y ago

I tried looking for people today and it was so slow, nothing worked. Can they really scale?

jscipione 4y ago

7e 4y ago

Reddit should just clone Twitter and solve everyone’s problems.

someNameIG 4y ago
They have most of the basics required to do so already. Just have a tab that is a feed of the u/ you follow.

lrvick 4y ago

For those not sure who to follow on Mastodon, I have been curating my follow list for years. Mostly people into tech, security, privacy, and digital sovereignty. https://mastodon.social/@lrvick/following https://mastodon.social/@lrvick/following

sazz 4y ago

Things we are currently seeing going on is social debt, not technical debt. Therefore another technical solution won't fix the issue. It will just relay the social issues to a new platform which will start over again very soon. You can't fix people by giving them new software.

Vaslo 4y ago

My anti-tech wife looked at this for 5 minutes and was horribly confused. Her friends all feel the same way - why can’t they just sign in and see all the people they want to see? What is an instance, why cant the instance be just one? Which one do they join? They all went back to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

remram 4y ago
> why cant the instance be just one > They all went back to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram Do they not have the same problem with those 3 instances, each with their separate networks and separate user handles?
mariusor 4y ago
Instead of trying to sell them an alternative to Twitter, maybe try to sell them a prettier email provider.

rowanG077 4y ago

If anything the last few days have shown that people aren't willing to pay even 8$ for twitter. How mastodon will think it will make without users or investors willing to pay for hosting is beyond me.

moistly 4y ago

It would probably help Mastodon a lot if they contacted some of the smarter celebrities and set them up with their own personal server. You’d subscribe to Stephen King or Ryan Reynolds by subscribing to their server. They can afford to run popular servers, and there are enough of them that they can absorb a lot of the load.

marquislek 4y ago

Mastodon feels like if discord and twitter were going through a web3 phase and had a child