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> but the protocol they use to communicate (ActivityPub) I stopped reading here. Most people who aren't tech savvy (much less professionally famous engineers)

> but the protocol they use to communicate (ActivityPub) I stopped reading here. Most people who aren't tech savvy (much less professionally famous engineers) aren't going to want to learn this nonsense, much less see cased words like this that reek of geekdom. Everything about Mastodon (and the Fediverse) seems like it's catered to people who are already are (or who think they are) mentally all in on the concept. I dunno, maybe things will change given enough time, money and new users, but right now Mastodon seems like something that people just post to with very little comments and interaction.

zzzeek 4y ago
you should log in and see all the very non-tech people who have joined
- andsoitis 4y ago
  I don’t know much about Mastodon, so wondering: can I see chatter without logging in? Where do I go to see it (discovery)?
  - zzzeek 4y ago
    me neither, only been on for a few days. here's the public stream from the server I'm on server https://fosstodon.org/public https://fosstodon.org/public the "main" mastodon.social server is mostly unreachable, that would be at: https://mastodon.social/public https://mastodon.social/public
  - mroche 4y ago
    You can visit any available instance and view their public feeds. For example, I use Fosstodon, so you visit the site[0] and click on "See what's happening" to preview the local feed, or navigate to the /public page. It's up to the instance to expose the "Explore", "Local", and "Federated" feeds. Fosstodon only exposes the local one to unauthenticated users. [0] https://fosstodon.org https://fosstodon.org
    - pwinnski 4y ago
      I clicked your link and found a "Why is Fosstodon currently down?" page.
      - zzzeek 4y ago
        this is a tech website so I'm sure you can appreciate the need for urgent migrations given the sudden changes in userbase
        pwinnski 4y ago
        Absolutely. Been there, lived through that myself. I'm sure you can appreciate that every one of these issues impacts the uptake of mastodon, of course.
        zzzeek 4y ago
        fosstodon is not the server that non-technical people would be going towards in any case and it also isn't accepting new registrations right now. the main server mastodon.social, that's the big one that's getting killed also. despite all this, a lot of prominent people have joined (to be clear, left leaning journalists, attorneys and economists, but Paul Krugman did win a nobel prize)
lern_too_spel 4y ago
This sentence is just explaining how he thinks Mastodon usage will evolve, comparing it to federated email instances and the protocol they use to communicate (SMTP). Most people who use email don't know that, and most people who use Mastodon don't know its federation protocol either. Most people who read Fowler's blog or HN are able to understand the difference between what users need to know and how a system is implemented.
pcl 4y ago
Well, Martin Fowler is a tech guy who writes largely for an audience of tech people. It’s that surprising that tech jargon would find its way into his musings about a piece of tech he’s learning about. And certainly doesn’t have any bearing on Mastodon itself.
SoftTalker 4y ago
I have worked in tech for 30 years. I agree 100%. Any twitter alternative needs to be as easy and seamless as Twitter itself. The first step being a decision on where to set up an account is a non-starter for a huge number of people. Haven't we all learned the UX lesson of reducing choices?
- Barrin92 4y ago
  >The first step being a decision on where to set up an account is a non-starter for a huge number of people then the should just stay on twitter. The entire differentiator between Mastodon and Twitter is choice. It's akin to complaining about the fact that there's 50 states in the US and you have multiple elections to take part in and decide where you wanna live. It's all very complicated. Any technology that empowers people by definition makes it so they need to make their own choices. If these decentralized systems are to have any purpose it needs to stay that way. If that means you lose 90% of users, fine so be it honestly.
  - ZanyProgrammer 4y ago
    > then the should just stay on twitter. The entire differentiator between Mastodon and Twitter is choice There's that OSS elitism we all know and love so much.
    - Barrin92 4y ago
      it's literally the opposite of elitism. Demanding of people that they need to take control of the tools that they use and making tools that empower them recognizes that they are at least in principle able to do just that.What's really elitist is thinking that every piece of software needs to spoon-feed content to its users and eliminate all their choices because they're really too infantile to be bothered to make any decisions at all. Crazy world we're in where recognizing the potential for, and asking people to take control of their own actions is considered to be a symptom of elitism
- earth_walker 4y ago
  I don't find twitter to be seamless nor easy. They have reduced my choices to the point where I can't actually see what I want to see without doing a bunch of research into how to 'game' the system. Looking at my home page right now, Elon is at the top saying that "Twitter needs to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world. That’s our mission." Followed by an advert from a company I didn't subscribe to, and then a bunch of meaningless personal tweets from people I don't know and I didn't subscribe to. One news item on the whole page. I get regular email notifications updating me on the latest paranoid rants from various right wing 'rebel' groups (that I definitely didn't subscribe to), and I cannot find any way to stop them because they only show up in my emails, not in my feed. There's no way I can see to block them. That's not seamless nor easy. The email notifications I do want cut off important headlines half way through the sentence, forcing me to log into the platform just to read what might have happened. No way to configure that either. Certainly not seamless nor easy.
chipotle_coyote 4y ago
Most people who aren’t tech savvy aren’t reading Martin Fowler’s blog. It’s okay for bloggers to write for their expected audience, rather than having to think “how will what I am writing be interpreted by all possible readers, e.g., literally everyone who can access this web site.” As for Mastodon itself, yeah, it would be nice if it got better about its terminology and “marketing” to people who aren’t nerds, although one can argue this is endemic to open source culture at this point (cue unceasing arguments about Calibre’s wacky UI choices, The Gimp’s arguably offensive name, and so on). Those are trivially solvable problems, though. If Mastodon is “something that people just post to with very little comments and interaction,” I would suggest that it’s long been a network effect issue; it’s very hard to get any new system that depends on user-constructed social graphs off the ground, until or unless that graph exceeds some hard-to-define node count level for a sufficient number of users. Anecdotally, I have seen a lot more activity on Mastodon over the last week; whether enough will stick to push it over that magic number remains to be seen.
- ZanyProgrammer 4y ago
  Similarly I saw a lot of activity there in the spring when Musk made his first attempt, and it didn't last.
rakoo 4y ago
The author explains a bit of how things work, but no one ever said you need to read the full spec to use it. Just like it's better to know your car has an engine, but you don't need to know the details of how the engine works to drive your car. Sharing knowledge, and the reader can decide what level of detail they want to keep.

zzzeek 4y ago

you should log in and see all the very non-tech people who have joined

andsoitis 4y ago
I don’t know much about Mastodon, so wondering: can I see chatter without logging in? Where do I go to see it (discovery)?
- zzzeek 4y ago
  me neither, only been on for a few days. here's the public stream from the server I'm on server https://fosstodon.org/public https://fosstodon.org/public the "main" mastodon.social server is mostly unreachable, that would be at: https://mastodon.social/public https://mastodon.social/public
- mroche 4y ago
  You can visit any available instance and view their public feeds. For example, I use Fosstodon, so you visit the site[0] and click on "See what's happening" to preview the local feed, or navigate to the /public page. It's up to the instance to expose the "Explore", "Local", and "Federated" feeds. Fosstodon only exposes the local one to unauthenticated users. [0] https://fosstodon.org https://fosstodon.org
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    I clicked your link and found a "Why is Fosstodon currently down?" page.
    - zzzeek 4y ago
      this is a tech website so I'm sure you can appreciate the need for urgent migrations given the sudden changes in userbase
      - pwinnski 4y ago
        Absolutely. Been there, lived through that myself. I'm sure you can appreciate that every one of these issues impacts the uptake of mastodon, of course.
        zzzeek 4y ago
        fosstodon is not the server that non-technical people would be going towards in any case and it also isn't accepting new registrations right now. the main server mastodon.social, that's the big one that's getting killed also. despite all this, a lot of prominent people have joined (to be clear, left leaning journalists, attorneys and economists, but Paul Krugman did win a nobel prize)

lern_too_spel 4y ago

This sentence is just explaining how he thinks Mastodon usage will evolve, comparing it to federated email instances and the protocol they use to communicate (SMTP). Most people who use email don't know that, and most people who use Mastodon don't know its federation protocol either. Most people who read Fowler's blog or HN are able to understand the difference between what users need to know and how a system is implemented.

pcl 4y ago

Well, Martin Fowler is a tech guy who writes largely for an audience of tech people. It’s that surprising that tech jargon would find its way into his musings about a piece of tech he’s learning about. And certainly doesn’t have any bearing on Mastodon itself.

SoftTalker 4y ago

I have worked in tech for 30 years. I agree 100%. Any twitter alternative needs to be as easy and seamless as Twitter itself. The first step being a decision on where to set up an account is a non-starter for a huge number of people. Haven't we all learned the UX lesson of reducing choices?

Barrin92 4y ago
>The first step being a decision on where to set up an account is a non-starter for a huge number of people then the should just stay on twitter. The entire differentiator between Mastodon and Twitter is choice. It's akin to complaining about the fact that there's 50 states in the US and you have multiple elections to take part in and decide where you wanna live. It's all very complicated. Any technology that empowers people by definition makes it so they need to make their own choices. If these decentralized systems are to have any purpose it needs to stay that way. If that means you lose 90% of users, fine so be it honestly.
- ZanyProgrammer 4y ago
  > then the should just stay on twitter. The entire differentiator between Mastodon and Twitter is choice There's that OSS elitism we all know and love so much.
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    it's literally the opposite of elitism. Demanding of people that they need to take control of the tools that they use and making tools that empower them recognizes that they are at least in principle able to do just that.What's really elitist is thinking that every piece of software needs to spoon-feed content to its users and eliminate all their choices because they're really too infantile to be bothered to make any decisions at all. Crazy world we're in where recognizing the potential for, and asking people to take control of their own actions is considered to be a symptom of elitism
earth_walker 4y ago
I don't find twitter to be seamless nor easy. They have reduced my choices to the point where I can't actually see what I want to see without doing a bunch of research into how to 'game' the system. Looking at my home page right now, Elon is at the top saying that "Twitter needs to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world. That’s our mission." Followed by an advert from a company I didn't subscribe to, and then a bunch of meaningless personal tweets from people I don't know and I didn't subscribe to. One news item on the whole page. I get regular email notifications updating me on the latest paranoid rants from various right wing 'rebel' groups (that I definitely didn't subscribe to), and I cannot find any way to stop them because they only show up in my emails, not in my feed. There's no way I can see to block them. That's not seamless nor easy. The email notifications I do want cut off important headlines half way through the sentence, forcing me to log into the platform just to read what might have happened. No way to configure that either. Certainly not seamless nor easy.

chipotle_coyote 4y ago

Most people who aren’t tech savvy aren’t reading Martin Fowler’s blog. It’s okay for bloggers to write for their expected audience, rather than having to think “how will what I am writing be interpreted by all possible readers, e.g., literally everyone who can access this web site.” As for Mastodon itself, yeah, it would be nice if it got better about its terminology and “marketing” to people who aren’t nerds, although one can argue this is endemic to open source culture at this point (cue unceasing arguments about Calibre’s wacky UI choices, The Gimp’s arguably offensive name, and so on). Those are trivially solvable problems, though. If Mastodon is “something that people just post to with very little comments and interaction,” I would suggest that it’s long been a network effect issue; it’s very hard to get any new system that depends on user-constructed social graphs off the ground, until or unless that graph exceeds some hard-to-define node count level for a sufficient number of users. Anecdotally, I have seen a lot more activity on Mastodon over the last week; whether enough will stick to push it over that magic number remains to be seen.

ZanyProgrammer 4y ago
Similarly I saw a lot of activity there in the spring when Musk made his first attempt, and it didn't last.

rakoo 4y ago

The author explains a bit of how things work, but no one ever said you need to read the full spec to use it. Just like it's better to know your car has an engine, but you don't need to know the details of how the engine works to drive your car. Sharing knowledge, and the reader can decide what level of detail they want to keep.