21 ms·

Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

327 points by app4soft 4y ago

radium3d 4y ago
- Vaslo 4y ago
  Only in the tech world will this be popular. The system is not friendly for people want a simple experience.
stevens37 4y ago
No. I went back to twitter. The direction is promising.
fazfq 4y ago
- PointA2B 4y ago
  Sources familiar with the matter confirm it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jrnichols 4y ago
I think a lot of instances are about to experience their own version of the Eternal September.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  I agree. It’s going to be the worst thing that happened to some of the communities there. Scam and Spam in particular have fresh greenfield with little to stop them. That is if the entire thing doesn’t fall over.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The smart instances have closed the doors hard (or invite-only) to try to mitigate the destruction. The waves will pass, but some servers will have suffered fatal damage from it.
  - jrnichols 4y ago
    the fediverse has also been a safe haven for some otherwise marginalized communities too, and I am concerned that a flood of other users that are not familiar with the culture could overwhelm things and change the vibe significantly. Also worried about what happens when advertisers & corporate money finds its way to the fediverse. Where users go, advertisers always follow, sadly. We'll see how long this new surge lasts. I have 2 accounts on different instances and watched a 3rd that I used a lot vanish along with the instance itself when it became flooded with very illegal content.
    - Kye 4y ago
      I'm not sure I would call it a safe haven. The same infighting that plagues marginalized communities on Twitter is there on Mastodon. I've had to block entire instances of people I otherwise agree with because they spent all their time making callouts, many quite questionable.
jmann99999 4y ago
If this BBC story doesn't indicate that there is an overreaction to new Twitter management, I don't know what will. It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An intelligent employee brought up that an average business person would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it. Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough reach.
- colordrops 4y ago
  Not having enough reach is a chicken and egg problem. Mastodon-like protocols could have the ubiquity and ease of use of the similarly decentralized email protocol with wide enough adoption.
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  It is not for you, or a fair news organization, to decide what is an "overreaction".
- Eji1700 4y ago
  Having it brought to my attention, and as someone who never got into twitter, I figured I'd give it a shot and see if it fit my desires better. So far it mostly just doesn't work, so that's neat.
  - sigmar 4y ago
    What specifically do you mean by "mostly just doesn't work"?
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      Pretty much all instances are having massive issues keeping up with the new traffic.
      - gpm 4y ago
        I've had pretty much no issues, but the (10k user) instance I've been on has been closed to new user registration except by invite (from any existing user) the whole time this twitter thing has been happening. Generally I'd assume that any big open instance is going to have scaling pains right now, but not all instances.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
raytube 4y ago
Is this a good explainer? There is a barrier to most tech. I remember joining a server and not going much further a few years back. Seen lots of people saying this is me I think on Mastodon.
nemo44x 4y ago
The “Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus” is in overdrive this weekend, now providing manuals on how to sign up for a different social network that none of them heard of last week because of Current Thing. We’re going to hear exaggerated stories about how no one uses Twitter anymore and everyone who is anyone is on Mastodon. The articles will be tweeted, of course.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  Wake me up when people start publishing RSS feeds again and I'll accept the claims of federated platform.
  - gpm 4y ago
    Mastodon publishes RSS feeds, take a username and server and make a url that looks like this: https://octodon.social/users/fasterthanlime.rss https://octodon.social/users/fasterthanlime.rss
    - bombcar 4y ago
      You can import https://twitter.com/elonmusk https://twitter.com/elonmusk directly into an RSS reader if you want, still.
  - etchalon 4y ago
    A lot of places never stopped publishing RSS feeds. It's just not a lot of people read them anymore.
audessuscest 4y ago
For most people it means trusting unknown people with their data and trusting them to not delete your account or turn off the instance eventually, which doesn't make it really better than twitter. Ideally everyone should run its own instance but it won't be the case.
- rem7 4y ago
  How’s that different from trusting Twitter? You can export your data everyday and back it up if you want. Move to another server and restore.
  - audessuscest 4y ago
    > How’s that different from trusting Twitter? that's not, exactly my point
primeradical 4y ago
Pretty clear a good portion of the Twitter users moving to Mastodon don't understand that it's a federated application, and expect a centralized Twitter clone. If your complaint is Elon's flavor of moderation on Twitter, moving to a Mastodon server with an admin with their own fun and unique ideas about moderation isn't the tea.
- wheats 4y ago
  >moving to a Mastodon server with an admin with their own fun and unique ideas about moderation isn't the tea. Well, that's supposed to be the benefit of Mastodon, isn't it? Every platform has moderation rules and owners/admins, and every platform will have these things change periodically. Mastodon is built around the idea that you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the platform if you disagree with how it is being run. You can even be your own owner/admin of an instance if you feel strongly enough about it but still be on the same platform as other users you follow.
  - convery 4y ago
    Ye, seems like a good fit for the terminally-online Twitter users as their main complaint about Elon is him wanting to be fair in terms of moderation and not favouring their side. Even launched their Twitter clone called "Tribal" to have a "fascist free" alternative without wrongthink..
  - TrueGeek 4y ago
    > Mastodon is built around the idea that you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the platform if you disagree with how it is being run I’m not super clear on how it works. If you do this, what happens to the people who follow you? Since they had to type in your address (including instance) wouldn’t you lose all followers in this case?
    - _djo_ 4y ago
      The migration tool publishes a message to the instances of each of your followers informing them of your new handle, which in theory then gets updated seamlessly. It was pretty rough when first introduced but seems to be solid now.
poszlem 4y ago
[flagged]
- hossbeast 4y ago
  What does it tell you?
abzolv 4y ago
The Mastodon software is not horizontally scalable. So, each instance is forced to be relatively small. One instance will not be able to handle millions of users.
- sseagull 4y ago
  Neither could twitter at the beginning: https://theoutline.com/post/4147/in-twitters-early-days-only-one-celebrity-could-tweet-at-a-time https://theoutline.com/post/4147/in-twitters-early-days-only...
  - haunter 4y ago
    Yeah but Mastodon is 6 years old at this point. Is it still the beginning? 6 years old Twitter already had ~200m users in 2012
- abzolv 4y ago
  https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions/18153 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions/18153
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  If federation works as intended this should not be a problem since it should (...) not matter whether someone uses server_X.org or server_Y.net. As to whether this works in practice I have no real idea. I have self-hosted a number of Peertube instances which also support activitypub and am on-and-off experimenting with a Pixelfed instance ("Instagram goes activitypub") but since these are all small-scale experiments they neither prove nor dispell the utility of activitypub-as-a-protocol.
- abzolv 4y ago
  Having too many servers (many thousands) could be a big drawback for onboarding. Choice paralysis, and difficulty / time consumption of picking a suitable server to join.
  - petepete 4y ago
jayflux 4y ago
A lot of this overreaction reminds me of when Facebook bought WhatsApp. All the alternatives came up for a few weeks/months, but the dust settled and not that many left in the end. Maybe it’s different this time? But the cycle feels the same
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Signal is gradually gaining adoption in the circles that I am in. Few years ago? Unusable. Now, many of the people I meet are fine starting a signal chat instead of SMS.
  - klabb3 4y ago
    Yep. I have tons of people on signal today, and when I started it was just 1 or 2. About half came after the whatsapp exodus, and then it's been a steady trickle. To be clear, it's still not enough to start a group chat with random people because of course that's a problem in 2022.
  - ronnier 4y ago
    I mainly use only signal now. I feel very uncomfortable using other messaging platforms that keep the text sitting in a database that is either plain text or encrypted with keys they have. I mean private messaging apps, not things like twitter or HN.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Did whatsapp change significantly? Twitter has a "culture" in a way that whatsapp doesn't really. That's a lot more ephemeral and subject to disruption.
- raytube 4y ago
  It's where the people are. I don't use Facebook in the main, but there is a local neighborhood group that I feel I have to subscribe to. You don't always get to pick the venue.
robbiemitchell 4y ago
> The first thing you have to do when you sign up is choose a server > It doesn't hugely matter which one you are on because you will be able to follow users on all the others anyway > The server you choose becomes part of your user name > Unlike Twitter, Mastodon won't suggest followers you may be interested in OK, so this shouldn't be the first step unless the "server" is a key part of the experience or has other benefits. A company laser focused on signups, like Twitter was at one point, would aim a growth team at this and remove all unnecessary signup steps to reduce friction. Steps like... first enter email, then auto-suggest a username, then suggest some interests (i.e., people) to follow, then (and only then) allow for the editing and selection of your username. > he had over 6,000 new joiners in 24 hours and had to pause registration You don't turn off signups when things get too hot. You allow signup and then throttle the experience. Reach back out when things cool down and get people re-engaged. (This is difficult, but better than nothing.) In any case, if Mastodon is a bit like email (as another comment suggested), what will make it "just work" is an upgraded experience to make it easy to sign up. Yes, you will be "picking your server" by selecting your upgraded experience -- such as AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, etc. -- but then they will also need to monetize it or track your usage for other reasons. In fact, if it gets any traction, perhaps Google will spin up a Mastodon service as a companion to Gmail.
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  > OK, so this shouldn't be the first step unless the "server" is a key part of the experience or has other benefits. It is; the local timeline of the server you pick is often the best way to discover new people as a new user. It becomes progressively less important as you build out your network (I hardly look at it these days) but for bootstrapping as a new user it helps.
  - robbiemitchell 4y ago
    The important point here is that this puts a big decision in front of people before they get started, rather than treating this as something more like a post-signup engagement vehicle. For general adoption, every ounce of friction has to be removed from signup. Furthermore, reading the docs here[1]: > Before you sign up for a service, it is important to understand its policies and terms of use. A Mastodon website will usually have its policies listed on the /about/more page, which can be found by clicking “learn more” on the landing page while not logged in to that website. Every server can have different terms? > Mastodon allows website administrators to set one of three different signup modes :facepalm: [1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/signup/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/signup/
mnd999 4y ago
I spun up my own instance today (just for me). It’s not super hard but equally it’s not straightforward. Admittedly I could just have signed up on an existing instance but this felt like a better way to understand the platform and what it offers. I’ve been off social media for some time so I figure I’ll give it a few weeks and see how it goes.
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
Just got this in my email because I signed up in Patreon as a supporter of a Mastodon node: "So our IndieWeb server has seen a 4,333% spike in users, and every day is a new record in daily new users sign ups .... In that same time we have done one major server upgrade, and have had zero down time, and as we screen all new users before joining, so far have had zero cases of spammers or scammers from inside the instance itself. And been vigilant about blocking outside actors selling their wares or trying to push sypware, etc." Let that sink in. 4,333% user sign ups on just this one node. Mastodon as a whole added almost 300,000 users in the last week, and the rate of addition keeps climbing. Right now it's somewhere around 4000 signups an hour. Earlier in the week it was about 1000. Just under 100,000 people signed up in the last 24 hours. There's about 20,000 posts an hour, vs a much smaller amount two weeks ago. (I had to look at the numbers again and edit this post after I posted it, because they had jumped a bunch since I last looked a couple hours ago.) It's not an overreaction or hysteria. It's a lot of people voting with their feet. In large part because they were already annoyed by Twitter before Musk even took over and were already open to trying something new. It's within the last month that Kanye West was mouthing off anti-Semitic slurs, before Musk even took over. And one can expect Trump to come back and start stirring the drama pot again. And Twitter's engagement "algorithm" means people get exposed to all this ugliness and the drama around it whether they hunt for it or not. I for one could never stand it and never got hooked in that world. On Mastodon I only see the interesting people I hunt for. It's a breath of fresh air. It doesn't matter if they all stay. It doesn't have to replace Twitter. It's just something new. Twitter can remain, being what it is -- a cesspool of celebrity, narcissism, self-marketing and pithy, mean quips. It's always been that. Now it will just be worse because many of its more sophisticated users will migrate elsewhere. In the meantime I welcome fresh blood over to Mastodon. This is about the 4th? article about Mastodon to make the front page of HN in the last 24 hours? It's amusing that every time one gets posted most of the comments are naysaying, critical, and defensive, and "it will never amount to anything". Meanwhile, the growth continues...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nojito 4y ago
  Not sure why this growth is relevant. Think back to people moving off of Github to alternatives.
newaccount2021 4y ago
baxtr 4y ago
I have no clue what Twitter will be turned into by Musk. I also don’t have a very strong opinion about the entire situation or about the changes he’s implementing right now. But here is what concerns me: the speed of execution. Ofc speed matters a lot in startups. But Twitter is a not a startup anymore. Compare that to when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. He took some weeks (months?) to understand what was going on inside Apple thoroughly. Only after he understood the situation (he did product review sessions) and had developed a strategy, only then he executed it quickly. And even then, he knew that results would come eventually but not immediately. Now, ofc you could argue that the situation is different since Musk is a long-term twitter user himself and knows the platform, at least outside in. Yet, Jobs was an Apple user, too. I don’t know. We will see how this turns out. Musk has some other companies that are running quite well. Still, this might be the one which won’t because he rushed it.
- poszlem 4y ago
  We know that from the released texts, that Musk is a close friend of Jack Dorsey, so I would expect him to have necessary intel in place for months.
  - baxtr 4y ago
    We know that Steve Jobs still knew many many people inside Apple when he returned and had ongoing business relations with them. Yet, he didn’t skip the step of understanding from the people directly once he was CEO.
- mytailorisrich 4y ago
  The deal for Musk to buy Twitter was agreed in April. He has indeed taken control only this week but he had months to get a plan together, with, as far as I know, a level of access to Twitter's internals during that time.
  - abzolv 4y ago
    Kara Swisher said some advertisers had told her, after a meeting with Musk last week in NY, that either he came to the meeting totally unprepared or he actually had no plan. He could not articulate a sensible plan to them.
running101 4y ago
It’s a fad, they’ll be back
chatterhead 4y ago
If you didn't close your Github account when Microsoft bought it for $7B then you likely aren't going to close your Twitter cause Elon.
- cm2187 4y ago
  or left to Canada when Trump was elected
marvin 4y ago
Twitter will do at least as well under Musk as it did under the previous leadership, in terms of user satisfaction, reach and retention. But it will have moderation policies that are noticeably different from those of the competition. My prediction made while everyone is freaking out.
easytiger 4y ago
You don't get the dopamine hit talking to yourself. So it won't work. Critical mass required.
gonehome 4y ago
Mastodon and federated systems like it will not succeed beyond a tiny niche, will not replace twitter, and don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve. They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these issues. Twitter has been a terribly mismanaged company for a long time and there's general consensus on this. Jack knew this, but was powerless to actually make the changes necessary to fix it. Elon may not succeed, but I hope he does and what he's doing is a necessary prerequisite. People dismiss his obvious success elsewhere in other insanely hard domains, they can largely be ignored. I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it. The press pretending otherwise because they hate Elon and see tech companies as a threat are just embarrassing themselves. To solve this problem for real is a lot harder, but I'm optimistic it's not impossible. https://zalberico.com/essay/2022/09/28/tlon-urbit-computing-freedom.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2022/09/28/tlon-urbit-computing-...
- eftychis 4y ago
  Why do you think/know Jack was powerless to fix things?
  - gonehome 4y ago
    He had only a tiny amount of company ownership, didn't have total voting power, the board (which barely even used Twitter) made it impossible for him to make the changes he'd want to make and just generally seemed obstructionist/bad. Jack has talked a lot about how making Twitter a company (instead of a protocol) was a mistake, he's talked about Web5 which lands on a lot of the same ideas as Urbit, but trying to tack it on top of the existing stack. He supported Elon taking power and being able to actually make the necessary changes and recently tweeted support of the layoffs too. Pre IPO Twitter was doing interesting things with API access and being more protocol like, but they killed all of that stuffed ads on it and went public. Ben Thompson talks a lot about how they're a terrible ad product and I think he's generally right. Subscriptions are a more interesting model. If you read the texts between Jack and Elon that came out during the recent legal fights over the sale you can see these things for yourself. That's somewhat of a rambling answer, but a lot of this stuff is publicly verifiable.
locallost 4y ago
Mastodon is enjoying a bit of the network effect right now. More and more people are posting that they're trying it out without leaving Twitter - and this in turn drives others to try it too. Whether it will be enough for them to stick around I don't know. But they got the ball rolling a little bit.
bawolff 4y ago
Conspiracy theory: musk is a mastodon plant. It makes about as much sense as anything else that is happening.
seydor 4y ago
Even if mastodon takes off, it will be like any other protocol on the internet: A centralized free service will appear , like Gmail did, which most people will be there . Twitter will probably convert its service to activityPub then. Slightly better than what we have today, but it wont be immune. Also, does anyone remember the backlashes every time facebook made a major change to their website? Yeah , all those users went to friendster for sure ... Social networks have network lock-in. The more mad your users are, the more they talk about it, on the service, which ironically is good for the service.
- JW_00000 4y ago
  I didn't believe your point about Gmail, expecting many companies to still host their own mail servers or use other services, so I went looking for some data. Found [1], which says that Gmail has 34% market share and Microsoft Exchange 33%. GoDaddy is third with 15% and all others are < 2.5%. Contrary to my expectations, this does confirm that Google and Microsoft are quite close to a duopoly; I'd expected there to be many more providers still. Still, if Twitter would use ActivityPub I'd consider that a huge improvement. I can send a mail from my @outlook.com to your @gmail.com account, and I can send a text message from my Verizon phone number to your AT&T one; while apps like Twitter, Whatsapp, Messenger are all closed off. If Twitter would adopt an open protocol, IMO that would be a huge improvement, preventing lock-in, allowing users to choose between different UIs, having instances with slightly different features competing. (Also, regarding your last point, remember when Digg did a major redesign? Change can happen ;-) ) [1] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--23 https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--23
- saurik 4y ago
  While it sucks that Gmail dominates e-mail, it is still important and useful that they don't control all of it and that essentially everyone continues to interoperate with the protocol enough that I can still run my own server even if most people don't. You don't have to have a fully distributed protocol with no large players to gain powerful benefits from decentralization.
- lucideer 4y ago
  GMail dominating email is mainly bad because their level of influence allows them to do things like cripple IMAP (their broken support heavily influences how clients must implement IMAP - usually wrongly on purpose) & push other major hurdles for clients like their "trusted apps" auth ux. However, all things considered, Gmail is still in a way better state than any popular social media service. I can talk to someone on gmail without having a google account. They can talk to me. I can migrate my data on and off it with relative ease. That's not possible with any major social network (gdpr has made the data out situation better but it's still inconsistent and high effort). So even if mastodon gets popular enough to become dominated by a large corp instance, the protocol still represents a massive improvement over the current twitter status quo.
xianshou 4y ago
This may be the only time this phrase has ever been warranted, but...crypto solves this? I mean, you want decentralization but Mastodon is decentralized at the whim of whoever happens to own your server. So, what if you had a bunch of fungible providers all incentivized to etc etc...
- mmplxx 4y ago
  Nobody really knows, but we can safely say that a distributed ledger has to be part of the solution.
john2x 4y ago
Off-topic, but is there a similar federated alternative to Reddit? e.g. each subreddit can be its own server.
- cropcirclbureau 4y ago
  There's Lemmy[0] which is a reddit clone though it's multiple "subreddits" per server is how it's implemented. It's rather small currently and the existing crowd's mainly software developers and hardcore leftists. [0]: https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cropcirclbureau 4y ago
  Ah,I forgot the Littr[0] which fits your bill even better. Discussed on HN[1] a few months ago. [0]: https://littr.me/ https://littr.me/ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31785966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31785966
Eumenes 4y ago
From my experience, the only people use Mastodon are super integrated into the web/open source communities. There's also a strange mix of anime, furry, and weird gamer people.
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
So, getting a little meta and just a little frustrated: I am amazed at the continued downward trend of the quality of the commentary on this site in regards to news relating to hacker culture, when topics like this come up. A pointy haired narcissist with a track record of taking credit for other people's work takes over a tech company and fires half of its employees based on a metric of the number of lines of code they wrote. Cartman style Ha-Ha "they probably deserve it what do those people do all day anyways" Microsoft-owned Copilot violating the spirit and possilby the legal letter of the GPL? "Don't care, it writes my boiler plate code for me. I hope all lawsuits against it lose" A federated open source ad-less social network starts to get some popularity? "It will never amount to anything. Pointless over-reaction." Has hacker culture truly changed this much since I came up into in the 90s? Or has the demographic just shifted here that much? I was around running a UUCP node, Citadel BBSes, logging into MUDs and MOOs and IRC back in the late 80s and early 90s, when the Internet went through several of its early growth explosions, lived through the fall of '94 when AOL users first flooded the web, saw the fallout from that, etc. and then saw this culture and the open source and free software movement grow throughout the 90s and into the milennium. People who comment like this are unrecognizable to me as part of that same movement. When you comment on an article about the growth of a federated open source network built by hackers... with disparaging snark -- what exactly are you contributing to hacker culture?
- baby 4y ago
  HN is not just about the cypherphunk culture, actually it's far from that IMO. It's much more about the startup and product culture. It was started by a VC after all. Personally, I'm happy to read realistic and pragmatic comments here. Mastodon is not going to kill twitter. The headline is frustratingly clickbaity. What's nice is that it will get a nice bump of users thanks to this article, and the project will be stress tested.
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    Mastodon may very well kill Twitter. What make you think that a company with descent financial backing can't scale a Mastodon instance to Twitter-size levels?
teeray 4y ago
Twitter users jumping to Mastadon is just the sequel to Facebook users jumping to Diaspora.
esskay 4y ago
If anyone seriously thinks Mastodon is going to become a replacement for Twitter they're deluded. The whole convoluted nature of it will put off average users. Nobody gives a crap that its decentralised yet they insist on shoving it down everyones throat as they jump through hoops trying to work out how to follow someone.
- lucideer 4y ago
  That's the same for every new tech. Sometimes enough people invest their focus in overcoming the hurdle to push the needle to a point where network effect "forces" the rest (if they want to stay in whatever loop motivates their social media participation). Can't say mastodon will do this but if you asked me last week I would've agreed with you, yet what I'm seeing this week is unprecedented.
gaoshan 4y ago
Like most everyone else on here I think there is no way Mastodon could possibly take over for Twitter (or anything else). It will never appeal to anyone outside of certain tech circles or very specific niche areas. What I am curious about is Dorsey's new project, Bluesky. Does that have potential to bring a wholesale change to social media? Will it fix ownership of data issues while also leading to easy to use, popular and appealing platforms? It feels promising (based on the marketing and buzz amongst tech circles) but it is still early days.
drdec 4y ago
Can anyone recommend a mastodon server for technically-minded folks?
hongtona 4y ago
Guthur 4y ago
This makes no sense and I call BS by a media that is plainly controlled by the state. Why would anyone who actually used Twitter, an obviously curated social media, want to move to a more free platform because Elon bought Twitter and wanted to ostensibly make it more open. There is an obvious attempt to destroy Twitter, for whatever reason, with big advertisers pulling out and the government mouth piece, the BBC, is now encouraging users to leave.
preordained 4y ago
I love how people act like Twitter was good before...
TheCleric 4y ago
It's the year of the l̵i̵n̵u̵x̵ ̵d̵e̵s̵k̵t̵o̵p̵ Mastodon instance.
mjmsmith 4y ago
Which parts of what he's doing are the necessary prerequisites?
cropcirclbureau 4y ago
The most challenging thing I faced when I first joined some niche Mastodon server was what to make of the three feeds available to me: - the mostly quiet local feed (even though it niche suit me well) - the inaccessible firehose that is the "federated" feed - and the completely empty personal feed Where do you go from there? But after a few days, after I started recognizing some of the locals and having talked with them, after following some interesting accounts and some people I knew from Twitter, I got rather comfortable with the slow and small pace of Mastodon. Twitter's now very good at finding you a spot in it's network quick (especially since tech twitter's pretty active) but I remember signing up way back on my old account when I had to spend time curating it before it was any kind of enjoyable. The post-algorithm, organic vision of the Mastodon will also be very familiar to people familiar to the cozyweb (Discord, Telegram...etc). And I think the cozyweb's exactly what people should keep in mind when joining Mastodon. You'll not get to _at_ your country's leader and your favorite retail chain, you'll discuss the news with people in your network and not with whoever has the most attention grabbing takes but hopefully, you'll have more meaningful interactions and build a more lasting relationships. It feels more like Facebook/Facebook groups of old except your locale isn't whoever you went to highschool to origin, if you're not familiar with cozyweb. It's definitely not Twitter and I personally think there'll always be place for something like it but maybe journalists and the kind of conversations they're supposed to help facilitate shouldn't be had on micro-blogs.
- lucideer 4y ago
  If your local feed is too quiet, slowly microdosing the firehose to curate your personal feed is probably the best approach. The other is to manually browse other small instances of interest to do that same curation: a bit more involved (& not possible with some private ones) but worthwhile. Once you've built a small amount of variety you should be able to check out people's boosts & maybe the follower lists on their profiles if you feel you need to further expand.
WalterBright 4y ago
There's always the NNTP newsgroups. We use them in the D community as the basis for our discussion groups. We're very happy with them. A modern interface has been put over them: https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/ but still, it's NNTP and any NNTP newsreader can access them.
rglover 4y ago
What's most exciting and optimistic to me about all this hullabaloo is that people are organically starting to make a move back to a more-decentralized web (decentralized in the original, 90s internet sense). What's cool is it's happening 100% organically and independent of technology. I love the idea of different "corners" of the internet becoming more of a thing again. We need more diversity of thought, not less, and this move (however small) makes it more likely, not less.
coffeeblack 4y ago
Surprising that mastodon has only half a million users?! Way below what I expected after so many years. I am looking forward to new Twitter. So many cool changes coming: Vine coming back. Maybe even Periscope coming back. Birdwatch getting more love. And over all more diversity and openness. Pretty sweet.
- keithnz 4y ago
  think they missed a zero, more like 6 million... https://bolha.us/@gutocarvalho/109298885964017612 https://bolha.us/@gutocarvalho/109298885964017612
rhollos 4y ago
If you're considering Mastodon, you might want to instead use Pleroma (https://pleroma.social/ https://pleroma.social/) which provides access to Mastodon instances but is less demanding of computing resources, and easier to create your own instance (if you choose to go that route) as it has fewer dependencies.
bArray 4y ago
BBC title correction according to their own article: "Some Twitter users jump to Mastodon - but what is it?". It's certainly not even remotely close to all. > The social network says it now has over 655,000 users - with over 230,000 having joined in the last week. Not all of them will be active. I think I even have an account I have not used in many years. The actual user base is likely smaller, and in a few weeks much less. There will be some attempts to link Mastodon and Twitter, but Twitter is incentivized to prevent decentralization of their platform. Mastodon is obviously federated, but they also have quite a collective ideology they use to enforce policies. For example, rightfully or wrongfully, they blocked the largest Mastodon node Gab Social [1]. It wasn't even a majority vote, it was just those who maintain servers and develop apps that were able to do this - so a handful of people. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)#Forks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)#Forks
- keithnz 4y ago
  missing a 0 on the number of users.... also this bot tracks users on mastodon https://bolha.us/@gutocarvalho/109298885964017612 https://bolha.us/@gutocarvalho/109298885964017612
  - bArray 4y ago
    I quoted the article, take it up with the BBC. At the time of checking your bot link: 6,047,035 accounts +4,669 in the last hour +96,241 in the last day +295,175 in the last week This just tracks the number of users being created and not the number of active users?
- toofy 4y ago
  there are six million users now, not six hundred thousand.
  - bArray 4y ago
    I quoted the article.
zmmmmm 4y ago
Seems to me the biggest challenge for Mastodon is that the most high profile Twitter users explicitly want the centralisation it provides. They are going there literally to get on a sandbox and propagate their messages to as many millions of followers as they can. They will not understand the theoretical possibility of federation - they will see anything that introduces any kind of barrier or complexity in the way of them reaching their audience as an antifeature. I think Mastodon, or whatever else tries to follow it, needs to bury the federation aspect as a technical detail and design from the ground up something that emphasises a unified system. It's not that easy when probably a large fraction of the people building it are introverted engineers who have difficulty even comprehending how someone can want to interact with hundreds let alone thousands or millions of other people. But as long as the fundamental concept of the system is in contention with what the core user base wants, it's hard to think how it will be very successful, at least at replacing a service like Twitter. EDIT: speling
- rolenthedeep 4y ago
  Mastodon isn't trying to replace Twitter.
  - zmmmmm 4y ago
    yes .... good point - which makes it all the more unlikely to succeed in meeting people's expectations.
- lucideer 4y ago
  I don't want to be too confrontational / personal but your comment contains hubris at levels I've rarely seen & it's something I think may be worth reflecting on. The worst offender: > probably a large fraction of the people building it are introverted engineers who have difficulty even comprehending how someone can want to interact At least this starts with "probably", admitting some level of uncertainty, but the overall tone shows a derision & contempt for a group of people you've almost certainly (ironically) never interacted with. I guarantee the developers behind Mastodon understand how people want to interact much better than you do; they're highly intelligent & have actively engaged on the problems around human interaction for years. This is not a system that's been created in a vacuum. > the most high profile Twitter users explicitly want > They are going there literally to get > They will not understand > they will see You've made a lot of very confident statements here about what these high profile people want and will do: I'm not seeing a lot of data to back that up. Regardless, even if there are a subset of people who do want that: what makes them high profile? Mostly it's the platform they're on. If they don't gain a high profile on Mastodon, it's not Mastodon's loss, it's theirs. All Mastodon needs to do is serve the needs of a critical quorum in aggregate, not the needs of a specific supposedly-influential few users. All-in-all, the main reason people favour centralisation is habit. In reality, even on e.g. Facebook you see communities developing within its "groups" feature, as a parallel to what Mastodon is fundamentally designed around.
jimmytidey 4y ago
I think there's a fair amount of 'status quo' bias here. Mastodon isn't going to be a massively federated system that recreates every nuance of the Twitter UX. It could still be a worthwhile alternative to Twitter. It would be nice if there were thousands of Mastodon servers, but perhaps a handful is ok. Mastodon has a slightly confusing user experience, but so was early Twitter - maybe that's ok too. Whatever the downsides to Mastodon are they should be weighed against the benefits of moving away from Twitter, which are enormous. Irrespective of whether the Town Square metaphor fits exactly, Twitter hosts a massive amount of influential political discussion. Demonstrating that many users will stop using a venue for political speech if a billionaire gains unfettered control of it is an incredibly important precedent to set. Mastodon doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be a bit better than Twitter. I think it probably clears that bar easily.
deleted 4y ago
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tommek4077 4y ago
They just don't.
cbeach 4y ago
[dead]
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
Today's SMBC is a riot. Quite apropos: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/internet-5 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/internet-5
eternalban 4y ago
"jump" ratio = 230,000 / 400,000,000,000 = 0.0575% of users. The English are masters of understatement, which is why BBC did not say "users leap" and used the word jump instead .. Shouldn't BBC wait just a bit, like a month, before breathlessly telling us how users are jumping to another network? Do you think stories like this may influence people to leap or jump to Mastedon? And would you characterize this piece by BBC as "making news" or "reporting news"?
- poszlem 4y ago
  Isn't that the whole point of that article? When the exact same thing happened to a different political option (people moving to Parler, or Gab) the whole coverage was about making the move as unpalatable as possible. It is 100% making news at the moment, and it is quite obvious that mainstream journalists are a bit uneasy about no longer being the protected cast on Twitter.
  - eternalban 4y ago
    I don't see the Musk regime as a different political option. The case you refer to was clearly a partisan affair. This is a systemic response by BBC. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/twitter-executive-also-part-time-officer-uk-army-psychological-warfare-unit https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/twitter-executive-also-pa... Did this 'chap' get the ax by Elon? Asking for a friend ..
rvieira 4y ago
Regardless of hype, or whether this is a watershed moment for Mastodon or not, I'm pleased to see a mainstream media article signed off with "You can follow me on Mastodon (... or Twitter)". I know that signature is a bit tongue in cheek, but I love seeing this growth of a (then) unknown OSS project to potential household name.
FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
I don't understand how people can -- -- on the one hand, be outraged that Elon bought Twitter, and be upset that he's doing layoffs -- -- and on the other, enjoy schadenfreudistic pleasure that Elon has just been forced to pay $40B for an obvious pile of garbage -- -- all because they love to hate the loud rich guy. I mean, I do understand, but the two thoughts don't seem logically compatible. Either Twitter is shit, layoffs were overdue, and he's a bagholder; or it's a valuable thing with necessary staff that he's acquired; I don't see how it can be both. It seems like the anger is misplaced. Who pocketed the $40B? If the whole thing was bullshit all along, and somebody just checkmated Elon into bribing him $40B to end the grift and hang the Potemkin employees out to dry -- who was that person who took the money? Who cashed out, betraying the lower employees? Who did Elon buy Twitter from?

327 points by app4soft 4y ago

radium3d 4y ago

Vaslo 4y ago
Only in the tech world will this be popular. The system is not friendly for people want a simple experience.

stevens37 4y ago

No. I went back to twitter. The direction is promising.

fazfq 4y ago

PointA2B 4y ago
Sources familiar with the matter confirm it.
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jrnichols 4y ago

I think a lot of instances are about to experience their own version of the Eternal September.

nemo44x 4y ago
I agree. It’s going to be the worst thing that happened to some of the communities there. Scam and Spam in particular have fresh greenfield with little to stop them. That is if the entire thing doesn’t fall over.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The smart instances have closed the doors hard (or invite-only) to try to mitigate the destruction. The waves will pass, but some servers will have suffered fatal damage from it.
- jrnichols 4y ago
  the fediverse has also been a safe haven for some otherwise marginalized communities too, and I am concerned that a flood of other users that are not familiar with the culture could overwhelm things and change the vibe significantly. Also worried about what happens when advertisers & corporate money finds its way to the fediverse. Where users go, advertisers always follow, sadly. We'll see how long this new surge lasts. I have 2 accounts on different instances and watched a 3rd that I used a lot vanish along with the instance itself when it became flooded with very illegal content.
  - Kye 4y ago
    I'm not sure I would call it a safe haven. The same infighting that plagues marginalized communities on Twitter is there on Mastodon. I've had to block entire instances of people I otherwise agree with because they spent all their time making callouts, many quite questionable.

jmann99999 4y ago

If this BBC story doesn't indicate that there is an overreaction to new Twitter management, I don't know what will. It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An intelligent employee brought up that an average business person would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it. Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough reach.

colordrops 4y ago
Not having enough reach is a chicken and egg problem. Mastodon-like protocols could have the ubiquity and ease of use of the similarly decentralized email protocol with wide enough adoption.
LeoPanthera 4y ago
It is not for you, or a fair news organization, to decide what is an "overreaction".
Eji1700 4y ago
Having it brought to my attention, and as someone who never got into twitter, I figured I'd give it a shot and see if it fit my desires better. So far it mostly just doesn't work, so that's neat.
- sigmar 4y ago
  What specifically do you mean by "mostly just doesn't work"?
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Pretty much all instances are having massive issues keeping up with the new traffic.
    - gpm 4y ago
      I've had pretty much no issues, but the (10k user) instance I've been on has been closed to new user registration except by invite (from any existing user) the whole time this twitter thing has been happening. Generally I'd assume that any big open instance is going to have scaling pains right now, but not all instances.

deleted 4y ago

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raytube 4y ago

Is this a good explainer? There is a barrier to most tech. I remember joining a server and not going much further a few years back. Seen lots of people saying this is me I think on Mastodon.

nemo44x 4y ago

The “Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus” is in overdrive this weekend, now providing manuals on how to sign up for a different social network that none of them heard of last week because of Current Thing. We’re going to hear exaggerated stories about how no one uses Twitter anymore and everyone who is anyone is on Mastodon. The articles will be tweeted, of course.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago
Wake me up when people start publishing RSS feeds again and I'll accept the claims of federated platform.
- gpm 4y ago
  Mastodon publishes RSS feeds, take a username and server and make a url that looks like this: https://octodon.social/users/fasterthanlime.rss https://octodon.social/users/fasterthanlime.rss
  - bombcar 4y ago
    You can import https://twitter.com/elonmusk https://twitter.com/elonmusk directly into an RSS reader if you want, still.
- etchalon 4y ago
  A lot of places never stopped publishing RSS feeds. It's just not a lot of people read them anymore.

audessuscest 4y ago

For most people it means trusting unknown people with their data and trusting them to not delete your account or turn off the instance eventually, which doesn't make it really better than twitter. Ideally everyone should run its own instance but it won't be the case.

rem7 4y ago
How’s that different from trusting Twitter? You can export your data everyday and back it up if you want. Move to another server and restore.
- audessuscest 4y ago
  > How’s that different from trusting Twitter? that's not, exactly my point

primeradical 4y ago

Pretty clear a good portion of the Twitter users moving to Mastodon don't understand that it's a federated application, and expect a centralized Twitter clone. If your complaint is Elon's flavor of moderation on Twitter, moving to a Mastodon server with an admin with their own fun and unique ideas about moderation isn't the tea.

wheats 4y ago
>moving to a Mastodon server with an admin with their own fun and unique ideas about moderation isn't the tea. Well, that's supposed to be the benefit of Mastodon, isn't it? Every platform has moderation rules and owners/admins, and every platform will have these things change periodically. Mastodon is built around the idea that you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the platform if you disagree with how it is being run. You can even be your own owner/admin of an instance if you feel strongly enough about it but still be on the same platform as other users you follow.
- convery 4y ago
  Ye, seems like a good fit for the terminally-online Twitter users as their main complaint about Elon is him wanting to be fair in terms of moderation and not favouring their side. Even launched their Twitter clone called "Tribal" to have a "fascist free" alternative without wrongthink..
- TrueGeek 4y ago
  > Mastodon is built around the idea that you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the platform if you disagree with how it is being run I’m not super clear on how it works. If you do this, what happens to the people who follow you? Since they had to type in your address (including instance) wouldn’t you lose all followers in this case?
  - _djo_ 4y ago
    The migration tool publishes a message to the instances of each of your followers informing them of your new handle, which in theory then gets updated seamlessly. It was pretty rough when first introduced but seems to be solid now.

poszlem 4y ago

[flagged]

hossbeast 4y ago
What does it tell you?

abzolv 4y ago

The Mastodon software is not horizontally scalable. So, each instance is forced to be relatively small. One instance will not be able to handle millions of users.

sseagull 4y ago
Neither could twitter at the beginning: https://theoutline.com/post/4147/in-twitters-early-days-only-one-celebrity-could-tweet-at-a-time https://theoutline.com/post/4147/in-twitters-early-days-only...
- haunter 4y ago
  Yeah but Mastodon is 6 years old at this point. Is it still the beginning? 6 years old Twitter already had ~200m users in 2012
abzolv 4y ago
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions/18153 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions/18153
the_third_wave 4y ago
If federation works as intended this should not be a problem since it should (...) not matter whether someone uses server_X.org or server_Y.net. As to whether this works in practice I have no real idea. I have self-hosted a number of Peertube instances which also support activitypub and am on-and-off experimenting with a Pixelfed instance ("Instagram goes activitypub") but since these are all small-scale experiments they neither prove nor dispell the utility of activitypub-as-a-protocol.
abzolv 4y ago
Having too many servers (many thousands) could be a big drawback for onboarding. Choice paralysis, and difficulty / time consumption of picking a suitable server to join.
- petepete 4y ago

jayflux 4y ago

A lot of this overreaction reminds me of when Facebook bought WhatsApp. All the alternatives came up for a few weeks/months, but the dust settled and not that many left in the end. Maybe it’s different this time? But the cycle feels the same

whimsicalism 4y ago
Signal is gradually gaining adoption in the circles that I am in. Few years ago? Unusable. Now, many of the people I meet are fine starting a signal chat instead of SMS.
- klabb3 4y ago
  Yep. I have tons of people on signal today, and when I started it was just 1 or 2. About half came after the whatsapp exodus, and then it's been a steady trickle. To be clear, it's still not enough to start a group chat with random people because of course that's a problem in 2022.
- ronnier 4y ago
  I mainly use only signal now. I feel very uncomfortable using other messaging platforms that keep the text sitting in a database that is either plain text or encrypted with keys they have. I mean private messaging apps, not things like twitter or HN.
pjc50 4y ago
Did whatsapp change significantly? Twitter has a "culture" in a way that whatsapp doesn't really. That's a lot more ephemeral and subject to disruption.
raytube 4y ago
It's where the people are. I don't use Facebook in the main, but there is a local neighborhood group that I feel I have to subscribe to. You don't always get to pick the venue.

robbiemitchell 4y ago

> The first thing you have to do when you sign up is choose a server > It doesn't hugely matter which one you are on because you will be able to follow users on all the others anyway > The server you choose becomes part of your user name > Unlike Twitter, Mastodon won't suggest followers you may be interested in OK, so this shouldn't be the first step unless the "server" is a key part of the experience or has other benefits. A company laser focused on signups, like Twitter was at one point, would aim a growth team at this and remove all unnecessary signup steps to reduce friction. Steps like... first enter email, then auto-suggest a username, then suggest some interests (i.e., people) to follow, then (and only then) allow for the editing and selection of your username. > he had over 6,000 new joiners in 24 hours and had to pause registration You don't turn off signups when things get too hot. You allow signup and then throttle the experience. Reach back out when things cool down and get people re-engaged. (This is difficult, but better than nothing.) In any case, if Mastodon is a bit like email (as another comment suggested), what will make it "just work" is an upgraded experience to make it easy to sign up. Yes, you will be "picking your server" by selecting your upgraded experience -- such as AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, etc. -- but then they will also need to monetize it or track your usage for other reasons. In fact, if it gets any traction, perhaps Google will spin up a Mastodon service as a companion to Gmail.

ryukafalz 4y ago
> OK, so this shouldn't be the first step unless the "server" is a key part of the experience or has other benefits. It is; the local timeline of the server you pick is often the best way to discover new people as a new user. It becomes progressively less important as you build out your network (I hardly look at it these days) but for bootstrapping as a new user it helps.
- robbiemitchell 4y ago
  The important point here is that this puts a big decision in front of people before they get started, rather than treating this as something more like a post-signup engagement vehicle. For general adoption, every ounce of friction has to be removed from signup. Furthermore, reading the docs here[1]: > Before you sign up for a service, it is important to understand its policies and terms of use. A Mastodon website will usually have its policies listed on the /about/more page, which can be found by clicking “learn more” on the landing page while not logged in to that website. Every server can have different terms? > Mastodon allows website administrators to set one of three different signup modes :facepalm: [1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/signup/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/signup/

mnd999 4y ago

I spun up my own instance today (just for me). It’s not super hard but equally it’s not straightforward. Admittedly I could just have signed up on an existing instance but this felt like a better way to understand the platform and what it offers. I’ve been off social media for some time so I figure I’ll give it a few weeks and see how it goes.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

Just got this in my email because I signed up in Patreon as a supporter of a Mastodon node: "So our IndieWeb server has seen a 4,333% spike in users, and every day is a new record in daily new users sign ups .... In that same time we have done one major server upgrade, and have had zero down time, and as we screen all new users before joining, so far have had zero cases of spammers or scammers from inside the instance itself. And been vigilant about blocking outside actors selling their wares or trying to push sypware, etc." Let that sink in. 4,333% user sign ups on just this one node. Mastodon as a whole added almost 300,000 users in the last week, and the rate of addition keeps climbing. Right now it's somewhere around 4000 signups an hour. Earlier in the week it was about 1000. Just under 100,000 people signed up in the last 24 hours. There's about 20,000 posts an hour, vs a much smaller amount two weeks ago. (I had to look at the numbers again and edit this post after I posted it, because they had jumped a bunch since I last looked a couple hours ago.) It's not an overreaction or hysteria. It's a lot of people voting with their feet. In large part because they were already annoyed by Twitter before Musk even took over and were already open to trying something new. It's within the last month that Kanye West was mouthing off anti-Semitic slurs, before Musk even took over. And one can expect Trump to come back and start stirring the drama pot again. And Twitter's engagement "algorithm" means people get exposed to all this ugliness and the drama around it whether they hunt for it or not. I for one could never stand it and never got hooked in that world. On Mastodon I only see the interesting people I hunt for. It's a breath of fresh air. It doesn't matter if they all stay. It doesn't have to replace Twitter. It's just something new. Twitter can remain, being what it is -- a cesspool of celebrity, narcissism, self-marketing and pithy, mean quips. It's always been that. Now it will just be worse because many of its more sophisticated users will migrate elsewhere. In the meantime I welcome fresh blood over to Mastodon. This is about the 4th? article about Mastodon to make the front page of HN in the last 24 hours? It's amusing that every time one gets posted most of the comments are naysaying, critical, and defensive, and "it will never amount to anything". Meanwhile, the growth continues...

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nojito 4y ago
Not sure why this growth is relevant. Think back to people moving off of Github to alternatives.

newaccount2021 4y ago

baxtr 4y ago

I have no clue what Twitter will be turned into by Musk. I also don’t have a very strong opinion about the entire situation or about the changes he’s implementing right now. But here is what concerns me: the speed of execution. Ofc speed matters a lot in startups. But Twitter is a not a startup anymore. Compare that to when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. He took some weeks (months?) to understand what was going on inside Apple thoroughly. Only after he understood the situation (he did product review sessions) and had developed a strategy, only then he executed it quickly. And even then, he knew that results would come eventually but not immediately. Now, ofc you could argue that the situation is different since Musk is a long-term twitter user himself and knows the platform, at least outside in. Yet, Jobs was an Apple user, too. I don’t know. We will see how this turns out. Musk has some other companies that are running quite well. Still, this might be the one which won’t because he rushed it.

poszlem 4y ago
We know that from the released texts, that Musk is a close friend of Jack Dorsey, so I would expect him to have necessary intel in place for months.
- baxtr 4y ago
  We know that Steve Jobs still knew many many people inside Apple when he returned and had ongoing business relations with them. Yet, he didn’t skip the step of understanding from the people directly once he was CEO.
mytailorisrich 4y ago
The deal for Musk to buy Twitter was agreed in April. He has indeed taken control only this week but he had months to get a plan together, with, as far as I know, a level of access to Twitter's internals during that time.
- abzolv 4y ago
  Kara Swisher said some advertisers had told her, after a meeting with Musk last week in NY, that either he came to the meeting totally unprepared or he actually had no plan. He could not articulate a sensible plan to them.

running101 4y ago

It’s a fad, they’ll be back

chatterhead 4y ago

If you didn't close your Github account when Microsoft bought it for $7B then you likely aren't going to close your Twitter cause Elon.

cm2187 4y ago
or left to Canada when Trump was elected

marvin 4y ago

Twitter will do at least as well under Musk as it did under the previous leadership, in terms of user satisfaction, reach and retention. But it will have moderation policies that are noticeably different from those of the competition. My prediction made while everyone is freaking out.

easytiger 4y ago

You don't get the dopamine hit talking to yourself. So it won't work. Critical mass required.

gonehome 4y ago

Mastodon and federated systems like it will not succeed beyond a tiny niche, will not replace twitter, and don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve. They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these issues. Twitter has been a terribly mismanaged company for a long time and there's general consensus on this. Jack knew this, but was powerless to actually make the changes necessary to fix it. Elon may not succeed, but I hope he does and what he's doing is a necessary prerequisite. People dismiss his obvious success elsewhere in other insanely hard domains, they can largely be ignored. I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it. The press pretending otherwise because they hate Elon and see tech companies as a threat are just embarrassing themselves. To solve this problem for real is a lot harder, but I'm optimistic it's not impossible. https://zalberico.com/essay/2022/09/28/tlon-urbit-computing-freedom.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2022/09/28/tlon-urbit-computing-...

eftychis 4y ago
Why do you think/know Jack was powerless to fix things?
- gonehome 4y ago
  He had only a tiny amount of company ownership, didn't have total voting power, the board (which barely even used Twitter) made it impossible for him to make the changes he'd want to make and just generally seemed obstructionist/bad. Jack has talked a lot about how making Twitter a company (instead of a protocol) was a mistake, he's talked about Web5 which lands on a lot of the same ideas as Urbit, but trying to tack it on top of the existing stack. He supported Elon taking power and being able to actually make the necessary changes and recently tweeted support of the layoffs too. Pre IPO Twitter was doing interesting things with API access and being more protocol like, but they killed all of that stuffed ads on it and went public. Ben Thompson talks a lot about how they're a terrible ad product and I think he's generally right. Subscriptions are a more interesting model. If you read the texts between Jack and Elon that came out during the recent legal fights over the sale you can see these things for yourself. That's somewhat of a rambling answer, but a lot of this stuff is publicly verifiable.

locallost 4y ago

Mastodon is enjoying a bit of the network effect right now. More and more people are posting that they're trying it out without leaving Twitter - and this in turn drives others to try it too. Whether it will be enough for them to stick around I don't know. But they got the ball rolling a little bit.

bawolff 4y ago

Conspiracy theory: musk is a mastodon plant. It makes about as much sense as anything else that is happening.

seydor 4y ago

Even if mastodon takes off, it will be like any other protocol on the internet: A centralized free service will appear , like Gmail did, which most people will be there . Twitter will probably convert its service to activityPub then. Slightly better than what we have today, but it wont be immune. Also, does anyone remember the backlashes every time facebook made a major change to their website? Yeah , all those users went to friendster for sure ... Social networks have network lock-in. The more mad your users are, the more they talk about it, on the service, which ironically is good for the service.

JW_00000 4y ago
I didn't believe your point about Gmail, expecting many companies to still host their own mail servers or use other services, so I went looking for some data. Found [1], which says that Gmail has 34% market share and Microsoft Exchange 33%. GoDaddy is third with 15% and all others are < 2.5%. Contrary to my expectations, this does confirm that Google and Microsoft are quite close to a duopoly; I'd expected there to be many more providers still. Still, if Twitter would use ActivityPub I'd consider that a huge improvement. I can send a mail from my @outlook.com to your @gmail.com account, and I can send a text message from my Verizon phone number to your AT&T one; while apps like Twitter, Whatsapp, Messenger are all closed off. If Twitter would adopt an open protocol, IMO that would be a huge improvement, preventing lock-in, allowing users to choose between different UIs, having instances with slightly different features competing. (Also, regarding your last point, remember when Digg did a major redesign? Change can happen ;-) ) [1] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--23 https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--23
saurik 4y ago
While it sucks that Gmail dominates e-mail, it is still important and useful that they don't control all of it and that essentially everyone continues to interoperate with the protocol enough that I can still run my own server even if most people don't. You don't have to have a fully distributed protocol with no large players to gain powerful benefits from decentralization.
lucideer 4y ago
GMail dominating email is mainly bad because their level of influence allows them to do things like cripple IMAP (their broken support heavily influences how clients must implement IMAP - usually wrongly on purpose) & push other major hurdles for clients like their "trusted apps" auth ux. However, all things considered, Gmail is still in a way better state than any popular social media service. I can talk to someone on gmail without having a google account. They can talk to me. I can migrate my data on and off it with relative ease. That's not possible with any major social network (gdpr has made the data out situation better but it's still inconsistent and high effort). So even if mastodon gets popular enough to become dominated by a large corp instance, the protocol still represents a massive improvement over the current twitter status quo.

xianshou 4y ago

This may be the only time this phrase has ever been warranted, but...crypto solves this? I mean, you want decentralization but Mastodon is decentralized at the whim of whoever happens to own your server. So, what if you had a bunch of fungible providers all incentivized to etc etc...

mmplxx 4y ago
Nobody really knows, but we can safely say that a distributed ledger has to be part of the solution.

john2x 4y ago

Off-topic, but is there a similar federated alternative to Reddit? e.g. each subreddit can be its own server.

cropcirclbureau 4y ago
There's Lemmy[0] which is a reddit clone though it's multiple "subreddits" per server is how it's implemented. It's rather small currently and the existing crowd's mainly software developers and hardcore leftists. [0]: https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cropcirclbureau 4y ago
Ah,I forgot the Littr[0] which fits your bill even better. Discussed on HN[1] a few months ago. [0]: https://littr.me/ https://littr.me/ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31785966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31785966

Eumenes 4y ago

From my experience, the only people use Mastodon are super integrated into the web/open source communities. There's also a strange mix of anime, furry, and weird gamer people.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

So, getting a little meta and just a little frustrated: I am amazed at the continued downward trend of the quality of the commentary on this site in regards to news relating to hacker culture, when topics like this come up. A pointy haired narcissist with a track record of taking credit for other people's work takes over a tech company and fires half of its employees based on a metric of the number of lines of code they wrote. Cartman style Ha-Ha "they probably deserve it what do those people do all day anyways" Microsoft-owned Copilot violating the spirit and possilby the legal letter of the GPL? "Don't care, it writes my boiler plate code for me. I hope all lawsuits against it lose" A federated open source ad-less social network starts to get some popularity? "It will never amount to anything. Pointless over-reaction." Has hacker culture truly changed this much since I came up into in the 90s? Or has the demographic just shifted here that much? I was around running a UUCP node, Citadel BBSes, logging into MUDs and MOOs and IRC back in the late 80s and early 90s, when the Internet went through several of its early growth explosions, lived through the fall of '94 when AOL users first flooded the web, saw the fallout from that, etc. and then saw this culture and the open source and free software movement grow throughout the 90s and into the milennium. People who comment like this are unrecognizable to me as part of that same movement. When you comment on an article about the growth of a federated open source network built by hackers... with disparaging snark -- what exactly are you contributing to hacker culture?

baby 4y ago
HN is not just about the cypherphunk culture, actually it's far from that IMO. It's much more about the startup and product culture. It was started by a VC after all. Personally, I'm happy to read realistic and pragmatic comments here. Mastodon is not going to kill twitter. The headline is frustratingly clickbaity. What's nice is that it will get a nice bump of users thanks to this article, and the project will be stress tested.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Mastodon may very well kill Twitter. What make you think that a company with descent financial backing can't scale a Mastodon instance to Twitter-size levels?

teeray 4y ago

Twitter users jumping to Mastadon is just the sequel to Facebook users jumping to Diaspora.

esskay 4y ago

If anyone seriously thinks Mastodon is going to become a replacement for Twitter they're deluded. The whole convoluted nature of it will put off average users. Nobody gives a crap that its decentralised yet they insist on shoving it down everyones throat as they jump through hoops trying to work out how to follow someone.

lucideer 4y ago
That's the same for every new tech. Sometimes enough people invest their focus in overcoming the hurdle to push the needle to a point where network effect "forces" the rest (if they want to stay in whatever loop motivates their social media participation). Can't say mastodon will do this but if you asked me last week I would've agreed with you, yet what I'm seeing this week is unprecedented.

gaoshan 4y ago

Like most everyone else on here I think there is no way Mastodon could possibly take over for Twitter (or anything else). It will never appeal to anyone outside of certain tech circles or very specific niche areas. What I am curious about is Dorsey's new project, Bluesky. Does that have potential to bring a wholesale change to social media? Will it fix ownership of data issues while also leading to easy to use, popular and appealing platforms? It feels promising (based on the marketing and buzz amongst tech circles) but it is still early days.

drdec 4y ago

Can anyone recommend a mastodon server for technically-minded folks?

hongtona 4y ago

Guthur 4y ago

This makes no sense and I call BS by a media that is plainly controlled by the state. Why would anyone who actually used Twitter, an obviously curated social media, want to move to a more free platform because Elon bought Twitter and wanted to ostensibly make it more open. There is an obvious attempt to destroy Twitter, for whatever reason, with big advertisers pulling out and the government mouth piece, the BBC, is now encouraging users to leave.

preordained 4y ago

I love how people act like Twitter was good before...

TheCleric 4y ago

It's the year of the l̵i̵n̵u̵x̵ ̵d̵e̵s̵k̵t̵o̵p̵ Mastodon instance.

mjmsmith 4y ago

Which parts of what he's doing are the necessary prerequisites?

cropcirclbureau 4y ago

The most challenging thing I faced when I first joined some niche Mastodon server was what to make of the three feeds available to me: - the mostly quiet local feed (even though it niche suit me well) - the inaccessible firehose that is the "federated" feed - and the completely empty personal feed Where do you go from there? But after a few days, after I started recognizing some of the locals and having talked with them, after following some interesting accounts and some people I knew from Twitter, I got rather comfortable with the slow and small pace of Mastodon. Twitter's now very good at finding you a spot in it's network quick (especially since tech twitter's pretty active) but I remember signing up way back on my old account when I had to spend time curating it before it was any kind of enjoyable. The post-algorithm, organic vision of the Mastodon will also be very familiar to people familiar to the cozyweb (Discord, Telegram...etc). And I think the cozyweb's exactly what people should keep in mind when joining Mastodon. You'll not get to _at_ your country's leader and your favorite retail chain, you'll discuss the news with people in your network and not with whoever has the most attention grabbing takes but hopefully, you'll have more meaningful interactions and build a more lasting relationships. It feels more like Facebook/Facebook groups of old except your locale isn't whoever you went to highschool to origin, if you're not familiar with cozyweb. It's definitely not Twitter and I personally think there'll always be place for something like it but maybe journalists and the kind of conversations they're supposed to help facilitate shouldn't be had on micro-blogs.

lucideer 4y ago
If your local feed is too quiet, slowly microdosing the firehose to curate your personal feed is probably the best approach. The other is to manually browse other small instances of interest to do that same curation: a bit more involved (& not possible with some private ones) but worthwhile. Once you've built a small amount of variety you should be able to check out people's boosts & maybe the follower lists on their profiles if you feel you need to further expand.

WalterBright 4y ago

There's always the NNTP newsgroups. We use them in the D community as the basis for our discussion groups. We're very happy with them. A modern interface has been put over them: https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/ but still, it's NNTP and any NNTP newsreader can access them.

rglover 4y ago

What's most exciting and optimistic to me about all this hullabaloo is that people are organically starting to make a move back to a more-decentralized web (decentralized in the original, 90s internet sense). What's cool is it's happening 100% organically and independent of technology. I love the idea of different "corners" of the internet becoming more of a thing again. We need more diversity of thought, not less, and this move (however small) makes it more likely, not less.

coffeeblack 4y ago

Surprising that mastodon has only half a million users?! Way below what I expected after so many years. I am looking forward to new Twitter. So many cool changes coming: Vine coming back. Maybe even Periscope coming back. Birdwatch getting more love. And over all more diversity and openness. Pretty sweet.

keithnz 4y ago
think they missed a zero, more like 6 million... https://bolha.us/@gutocarvalho/109298885964017612 https://bolha.us/@gutocarvalho/109298885964017612

rhollos 4y ago

If you're considering Mastodon, you might want to instead use Pleroma (https://pleroma.social/ https://pleroma.social/) which provides access to Mastodon instances but is less demanding of computing resources, and easier to create your own instance (if you choose to go that route) as it has fewer dependencies.

bArray 4y ago

BBC title correction according to their own article: "Some Twitter users jump to Mastodon - but what is it?". It's certainly not even remotely close to all. > The social network says it now has over 655,000 users - with over 230,000 having joined in the last week. Not all of them will be active. I think I even have an account I have not used in many years. The actual user base is likely smaller, and in a few weeks much less. There will be some attempts to link Mastodon and Twitter, but Twitter is incentivized to prevent decentralization of their platform. Mastodon is obviously federated, but they also have quite a collective ideology they use to enforce policies. For example, rightfully or wrongfully, they blocked the largest Mastodon node Gab Social [1]. It wasn't even a majority vote, it was just those who maintain servers and develop apps that were able to do this - so a handful of people. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)#Forks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)#Forks

keithnz 4y ago
missing a 0 on the number of users.... also this bot tracks users on mastodon https://bolha.us/@gutocarvalho/109298885964017612 https://bolha.us/@gutocarvalho/109298885964017612
- bArray 4y ago
  I quoted the article, take it up with the BBC. At the time of checking your bot link: 6,047,035 accounts +4,669 in the last hour +96,241 in the last day +295,175 in the last week This just tracks the number of users being created and not the number of active users?
toofy 4y ago
there are six million users now, not six hundred thousand.
- bArray 4y ago
  I quoted the article.

zmmmmm 4y ago

Seems to me the biggest challenge for Mastodon is that the most high profile Twitter users explicitly want the centralisation it provides. They are going there literally to get on a sandbox and propagate their messages to as many millions of followers as they can. They will not understand the theoretical possibility of federation - they will see anything that introduces any kind of barrier or complexity in the way of them reaching their audience as an antifeature. I think Mastodon, or whatever else tries to follow it, needs to bury the federation aspect as a technical detail and design from the ground up something that emphasises a unified system. It's not that easy when probably a large fraction of the people building it are introverted engineers who have difficulty even comprehending how someone can want to interact with hundreds let alone thousands or millions of other people. But as long as the fundamental concept of the system is in contention with what the core user base wants, it's hard to think how it will be very successful, at least at replacing a service like Twitter. EDIT: speling

rolenthedeep 4y ago
Mastodon isn't trying to replace Twitter.
- zmmmmm 4y ago
  yes .... good point - which makes it all the more unlikely to succeed in meeting people's expectations.
lucideer 4y ago
I don't want to be too confrontational / personal but your comment contains hubris at levels I've rarely seen & it's something I think may be worth reflecting on. The worst offender: > probably a large fraction of the people building it are introverted engineers who have difficulty even comprehending how someone can want to interact At least this starts with "probably", admitting some level of uncertainty, but the overall tone shows a derision & contempt for a group of people you've almost certainly (ironically) never interacted with. I guarantee the developers behind Mastodon understand how people want to interact much better than you do; they're highly intelligent & have actively engaged on the problems around human interaction for years. This is not a system that's been created in a vacuum. > the most high profile Twitter users explicitly want > They are going there literally to get > They will not understand > they will see You've made a lot of very confident statements here about what these high profile people want and will do: I'm not seeing a lot of data to back that up. Regardless, even if there are a subset of people who do want that: what makes them high profile? Mostly it's the platform they're on. If they don't gain a high profile on Mastodon, it's not Mastodon's loss, it's theirs. All Mastodon needs to do is serve the needs of a critical quorum in aggregate, not the needs of a specific supposedly-influential few users. All-in-all, the main reason people favour centralisation is habit. In reality, even on e.g. Facebook you see communities developing within its "groups" feature, as a parallel to what Mastodon is fundamentally designed around.

jimmytidey 4y ago

I think there's a fair amount of 'status quo' bias here. Mastodon isn't going to be a massively federated system that recreates every nuance of the Twitter UX. It could still be a worthwhile alternative to Twitter. It would be nice if there were thousands of Mastodon servers, but perhaps a handful is ok. Mastodon has a slightly confusing user experience, but so was early Twitter - maybe that's ok too. Whatever the downsides to Mastodon are they should be weighed against the benefits of moving away from Twitter, which are enormous. Irrespective of whether the Town Square metaphor fits exactly, Twitter hosts a massive amount of influential political discussion. Demonstrating that many users will stop using a venue for political speech if a billionaire gains unfettered control of it is an incredibly important precedent to set. Mastodon doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be a bit better than Twitter. I think it probably clears that bar easily.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tommek4077 4y ago

They just don't.

cbeach 4y ago

[dead]

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

Today's SMBC is a riot. Quite apropos: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/internet-5 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/internet-5

eternalban 4y ago

"jump" ratio = 230,000 / 400,000,000,000 = 0.0575% of users. The English are masters of understatement, which is why BBC did not say "users leap" and used the word jump instead .. Shouldn't BBC wait just a bit, like a month, before breathlessly telling us how users are jumping to another network? Do you think stories like this may influence people to leap or jump to Mastedon? And would you characterize this piece by BBC as "making news" or "reporting news"?

poszlem 4y ago
Isn't that the whole point of that article? When the exact same thing happened to a different political option (people moving to Parler, or Gab) the whole coverage was about making the move as unpalatable as possible. It is 100% making news at the moment, and it is quite obvious that mainstream journalists are a bit uneasy about no longer being the protected cast on Twitter.
- eternalban 4y ago
  I don't see the Musk regime as a different political option. The case you refer to was clearly a partisan affair. This is a systemic response by BBC. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/twitter-executive-also-part-time-officer-uk-army-psychological-warfare-unit https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/twitter-executive-also-pa... Did this 'chap' get the ax by Elon? Asking for a friend ..

rvieira 4y ago

Regardless of hype, or whether this is a watershed moment for Mastodon or not, I'm pleased to see a mainstream media article signed off with "You can follow me on Mastodon (... or Twitter)". I know that signature is a bit tongue in cheek, but I love seeing this growth of a (then) unknown OSS project to potential household name.

FooBarBizBazz 4y ago

I don't understand how people can -- -- on the one hand, be outraged that Elon bought Twitter, and be upset that he's doing layoffs -- -- and on the other, enjoy schadenfreudistic pleasure that Elon has just been forced to pay $40B for an obvious pile of garbage -- -- all because they love to hate the loud rich guy. I mean, I do understand, but the two thoughts don't seem logically compatible. Either Twitter is shit, layoffs were overdue, and he's a bagholder; or it's a valuable thing with necessary staff that he's acquired; I don't see how it can be both. It seems like the anger is misplaced. Who pocketed the $40B? If the whole thing was bullshit all along, and somebody just checkmated Elon into bribing him $40B to end the grift and hang the Potemkin employees out to dry -- who was that person who took the money? Who cashed out, betraying the lower employees? Who did Elon buy Twitter from?