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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 a

• 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.
    • deberon 4y ago
      If these are your concerns you may be well served by hosting an instance on a domain you own.
• allan-a 4y ago
  Just a small note, you can't really choose wrong because you can participate across the fediverse, with other "servers", and even non-mastodon federated social media. However if it irks one to join a specific community, there does exist general purpose instances.
  • DavidSJ 4y ago
    If I can’t choose wrong then why am I forced to choose at all? The user experience doesn’t add up.
    • xaduha 4y ago
      Who should decide it for you then? Did someone mention blockchain already? But seriously though, if you start to make it more distributed than it already is it will look even less like Twitter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(protocol)
      • phire 4y ago
        Most users don't care how distributed it is, or what it's architecture looks like. They just want to sign up, and get an out-of-the box experience more or less like twitter.
        • xaduha 4y ago
          If they don't care, then they should stay on Twitter. There isn't a better option right now than Mastodon/ActivityPub.
        • lrvick 4y ago
          If Mastodon was fully centralized like Twitter and offered that experience, it would need an immense source of funding, and need ads, and shareholders, and would be losing money rapidly until some billionare bought it out... like Twitter. Mastodon is built so that there is no single point of failure, but that means users have no single point of signup. It is like email, or matrix. Host your own on your own domain for a few dollars a month or join a friendly server paying the bill for you. It is really not that hard, but people are just not used to having choices on the internet anymore. At some point someone you know picked Twitter and you did too. Maybe find some friends or public figures you like on Mastodon and see what server they are on.
• Joeboy 4y ago
  Two big, vanilla instances are https://mastodon.social https://mastodon.social and https://mas.to https://mas.to. Unfortunately they've both been struggling to keep up with demand lately. If you're paralyzed by choice, I'd say just go for one of those if / when they're accepting new users. I think Mastodon would get more signups if interested people were just pointed at like ten working, non-specialized, non-tiny instances, rather than being confronted with hundreds of weird / non-working options. I realize this feels a bit contrary to the goals of federation, but the current situation seems to be causing a lot of potential users to retreat in annoyance and confusion.
  • whimsicalism 4y ago
    They're wasting a massive opportunity. Mastodon should have been built to scale from the start because huge viral growth is exactly how social networks like this make it big. As it stands right now, I am struggling to join because every mastodon instance I've checked is struggling with scaling.
    • gbraad 4y ago
      Mastodon can scale, but it costs money. Most instances are hosted by people out of an interest to do good. Servers cost money... And for F/OSS project there aren't big pocket investors ... only funds, grants and hopefully donations.
      • whimsicalism 4y ago
        Yes, when I say scalable, I mean ability to scale without having to spend bucketloads on new servers. Many of the mastodon servers I am seeing pause new registration/break down are at a few thousand members, maybe 8k max. I dont know how Mastodon is implemented, but my intuition is that a well written C++, Rust, or even Java service should be able to handle that many users on a single instance.
        • lrvick 4y ago
          Twitter makes -200m a year hosting their solution. Mastodon by contrast spreads out this load to servers paid for by users, not by ads. If you cannot join any servers, pay for a managed hosting provider to spin one up, or host yourself on a vps or a home server.
• elcapitan 4y ago
  Also, besides choosing a server, how do you figure out which other servers that server "federates" with or blocks entirely?
  • geoffeg 4y ago
    Many Mastodon servers list which other instances they block or limit. Check out the "Moderated servers" list at the bottom of https://mastodon.social/about https://mastodon.social/about
  • tedunangst 4y ago
    Live and learn? It astonishes me that people would get so worked up about the possibility that somebody somewhere is posting and you might not see it. Guess what? They're already posting today and you're not seeing their posts.
    • elcapitan 4y ago
      Oh, I have no intention or reason to move away from twitter. My interest ist purely theoretical.
    • allenu 4y ago
      You have a point, but think about it from the newbies perspective. They have no idea how many posts they won't see. Everybody is used to centralized where they see everything and now they're being told to check out this alternative where you might not see everything. Okay, does that mean 50% of what gets posted won't be seen? 25%? 5%? Will I be able to see what my favorite celeb posts? There's zero context for a newbie to understand what they're missing out on. Much easier to say "too complicated" than to give it a try.
      • tedunangst 4y ago
        Honestly, I think it's concern trolling. Newbies don't know federation is incomplete, so it's not a problem for them. It's only on the HN threads full of mastodon haters that the topic even gets mentioned, but these are not newbies. They're people looking for reasons to be unhappy.
• geoffeg 4y ago
  How is that different from email though? Email providers will block whole swaths of IPs without telling you but you don't really notice it because it's very likely those IPs are only being used maliciously. We're in a weird time right now though. Most people choose an email provider based on word of mouth or what their friends use but not enough people know about Mastodon to make that possible. Maybe Mastodon itself isn't the right answer, but I hope that a federated/distributed system is.
  • charcircuit 4y ago
    >Email providers will block whole swaths of IPs without telling you but you don't really notice it because it's very likely those IPs are only being used maliciously. Most blocked instances in Mastodon are typically not being blocked for being malicious instances, but instead because they don't like the kind of tweets that are from there. Email servers are typically much more neutral and block IPs mostly to prevent spam instead of because they disagree with the speech contained in the emails originating from that IP.
• Lendal 4y ago
  The people come first, not the technology. I didn't really start using Twitter until I first knew some people I wanted to communicate with. It will be the same with Mastodon, or whatever. Then the choice of server will become much simpler. Until then, I'm not moving from Twitter. Sure I'm using Twitter less these days, due to the chaos, but I'm not joining anything else until I see where others are going. Does that make me a sheeple? Yes, it does. Sue me.
• btown 4y ago
  > 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. There's an interesting problem here - how do you know that your server's software and configuration hasn't been modified in a way that subtly lets these things happen? I've always wanted a PaaS, operated by a too-big-to-make-exceptions security-hardened company (here's looking at you, Google!), that lets you deploy any image or set of images, but has a centrally managed ingress that ensures that the only access is over HTTPS (so no direct access to any requisitioned databases) and furthermore reports a hash of the image(s) as an HTTP response header with every single response, with no way to change or suppress this You could then have, say, a Mastodon implementation that also reports all appropriate central configuration (say, blocklists, or disabling the ability of users to port out) at a public endpoint, and, importantly, is trusted to report that accurately, because you could validate what code it's running via the HTTP response. You could audit that security updates are being applied, that nobody is running a fork that gives them access to your DMs, and, if Mastodon gave visibility into this, you could also validate whether administrators all have 2FA enabled and how many of them there are (and hold your server admins to account socially). Of course, you do have to trust the PaaS provider not to make exceptions to the rules, but no more so than we currently trust any certificate authority. Does anyone know if anything like this exists right now?
• bboygravity 4y ago
  Am I the only one who doesn't get why chosing a server is necesary? I just don't get it at all from a user experience perspective. Do we need to pick servers with Bittorrent? no. Just tell it what file you want (magnet link). Do we need to pick servers with Tox? no. Just tell it what friend you want to talk to (contact ID). Or to pick a centralized example: do we need to pick a server on Twitter? no. duh. Then why is there any necesity or excuse ever to have to pick servers for "social" apps? Is this the 80's?! How do these "decentralized" advocates think they can get away with a "harder to use app with more steps"? Especially when it's not a technical necesity?
  • alex_duf 4y ago
    You need to pick servers (providers) for emails. But we don't really think about it this much because we're used to it. The fediverse is built on a very similar type of network: federated servers, similarly to how gmail talks to yahoo and hotmail.
  • mcv 4y ago
    You also have to pick a phone or email provider. Would you prefer if those had only a single option available? You don't pick a server with Bittorrent because it runs locally, which you can also do with Mastodon or other distributed networks. Though if you want others to be able to reach you, you probably need to set up a domain name and leave your server on. The problem with using a Bittorrent-like setup is that you don't have a persistent identity there. You don't need to pick a server for Twitter because there is only one. You have no choice. Mastodon and other distributed social networks offer choice. Imagine, if you didn't like how Twitter moderated their content, and you thought you could do that better, you could simply spin up your own Twitter server and still communicate with everybody on Twitter? But you're right that being forced to make this choice on little information is still an extra step, and not a great one. Maybe there should be a single default choice? Maybe assign one randomly for those who don't know? Because it honestly doesn't matter that much which server you pick. You can still see and follow everything. The only difference is really the moderation/blocking policy. Just pick a big one and you're probably fine.
• _hypx 4y ago
  It is a lot like email. There is no centralized email network either. Ultimately, people will realize that they are really looking for a specific community rather than joining "Mastodon" itself.
• kornhole 4y ago
  from @SilverEagle@pony.social People treating cell phones like they treat Mastodon: "ok...so you're saying I get a phone number, but I have to pick a provider? wtf that sounds like work...but I can call you even if you're using a different one, because they all talk to each other? so f*ing confused rn"
• moistly 4y ago
  IMO, I should be directed to a federal-level or provincial-level provider for my primary id. And it should be easy to select a “better” one later, as I learn about the service. Or better if I could buy a plug-n-play wall wart that would provide a secure server for friends and family, with some way to filter/receive the rest of the fediverse. Maybe I’m the oddball but I care way more about twittering with/to friends and family, than following a celeb or journalist.
• crossroadsguy 4y ago
  > and they could even read my DMs. Child patents are strangely completely ignoring this point for some reason. Some have added an absurd “but what about email” though. I never thought about it. This ought to be DoA for many in today’s world.