8 ms·

Whatever your fears for Twitter future are, Mastodon is already that

41 points by dmitriid 4y ago

RobotToaster 4y ago
A sufficient quantity of servers in dudes' basements are indistinguishable from a cloud.
wlesieutre 4y ago
It’s already stuffed full of desperate questionably appropriate advertising?
mt42or 4y ago
You are free to be the Musk's product, I will not.
OctopusLupid 4y ago
This is just some random guy's tweet?
- TrevorFSmith 4y ago
  Yup
jfkimmes 4y ago
"E-Mail is never gonna work. Servers are run by random dudes in basements." (There is a lot of discussion on paid instances on mastodon. There is also e.g https://masto.host/ https://masto.host/ for a managed solution.)
- award_ 4y ago
  This is basically my argument here as well. Fully agree.
- skozharinov 4y ago
  Good luck running your mail server in your basement :) You will be able to receive most mail that is sent to you, but sending without being sent to spam or rejected is trickier, and I don't think sending reliably is possible at all from a residential network.
  - vertis 4y ago
    Where it started VS where it ended though. You're looking at the end of the journey not the start of it. It was completely possible to run your own email server 20-25 years ago and diminished after that slowly with the advent of Hotmail/Gmail. Similarly IRC was run for the longest time by federated servers from peoples basements. It only really started to diminish at all with the advent of Slack.
    - phendrenad2 4y ago
      So I don't get it, are we celebrating the inevitable rise of a cabal of paid mastodon providers, paralleling gmail/outlook/etc.?
- yucky 4y ago
  Email isn't an echo chamber like Mastodon instances are. Also, email isn't moderated like Mastodon instances are. Apples and oranges.
zach_garwood 4y ago
I guess I see all of the straws he's grasping at there, but honestly, most of those "downsides" of Mastadon sound like good things to me. I guess that's why I killed my Twitter account years ago.
award_ 4y ago
This is a hard take on mastodon. I've moved over in the last week or two and it's been a pretty good experience. I think there will be some growth in mastodon with more and more users involved in it as well. Does a confederation of instances have it's issues? Sure. But we've already solved a lot of that with email for a long time anyway. I view mastodon/activityPub as almost an analog of email in the "social media" space. With time and use, it has every opportunity to become the mainstream used service for these types of needs imo. It 'solves' alot of problems that centralized social media systems bring, with only some of the detriments (imo).
- lambdadmitry 4y ago
  There are at least three distinct use cases that Twitter somewhat covers: a) participating in already existing, well-defined communities. Mastodon works for that, but so does Discord, Gemini, Gopher, tilda communities, IRC servers, and so on. Mastodon's peculiarities like tiny scale instances, inter-instance admin wars, non-existent search are perfectly fine for this use case. That's what it is made for, effectively. b) connecting with friends and following their interests. This is just miserable with Mastodon: you might be on different instances that mute/ban each other, you might not find each other if you don't know their instances, if instances are interest-specific you have to follow on a number of instances, if their instance admin gets fed up with it and shuts it down you need to reconnect somehow, etc. Mastodon is not an identity-first design, it's community-first, and it's a problem for this use case. c) following celebrities or creators famous in the world of atoms. Celebrities would want massive following, which requires massive scale, which is hard to achieve for something effectively run by volunteers. If it's smaller scale celebrities, they'd also want discoverability, which is hampered by the lack of search, federation bans, etc. Mastodon is widely presented as a "twitter backup/alternative". It's just misleading unless the person moving to it only wants (a). There is nothing wrong with wanting (a)! However, it means that Mastodon has very little similarity to Twitter if people want (b) or (c).
  - detaro 4y ago
    Based on my experience I feel like you massively overstate the issues with b). > you might be on different instances that mute/ban each other, only an issue if it's actually bans (mutes dont affect following), and if you don't explicitly pick a very ideological instance (either towards banning a lot or towards tolerating behavior that gets you banned a lot) that's not really a problem. I don't believe I've ever encountered a "I want to follow this person but can't", even when e.g. looking through a few hundred accounts I got from my twitter followings. > you might not find each other if you don't know their instances, To follow people you need to know their username, yes (which happens to include the instance). Is there anything where that isn't the case? I certainly wouldn't reliably find my friends on Twitter either without knowing that. > if instances are interest-specific you have to follow on a number of instances, Very few instances are that strictly interest-specific that they force people to take other interests elsewhere. And if someone does run multiple accounts and wants people to follow multiple, they link them so its just a few extra clicks once, hardly a big hurdle in the few cases where it does happen. > if their instance admin gets fed up with it and shuts it down you need to reconnect somehow True if the instance just disappears without warning, otherwise the account move feature handles this transparently.
rufius 4y ago
People comparing Twitter and Mastodon as though they’re equivalent. They’re not - Mastodon has Twitter-like properties but the core “network” model (centralized vs federated) of the two makes them distinct beasts. That’s not people’s fault to make the comparison. Mastodon and the larger community does little to disambiguate this and make it clear. (I say this as someone that’s used both Twitter and mastodon for years. They’re just different, period.)
invalidname 4y ago
This is a bit of FUD with the exception of search (which sucks on Twitter too). * Different instances - yes some are problematic. But that's the beauty. You can move instances easily and everything redirects. * Instance run by random dude - be that dude. One of my communities is starting its own server. Pretty cool. Also relatively simple to do so the "support" aspect doesn't need much. Not an OSS fanatic. I'm still keeping my twitter but Mastodon is fine too and if Twitter is gone tomorrow, it's a decent alternative.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Come on, you have to admit that not all Twitter users are capable of "being that dude/<pronoun>". And if everyone runs their own instance, then doesn't that defeat the benefits of mastodon's instances in general?
  - invalidname 4y ago
    Sure. But it's $15 to run an instance on Linode and it's not too hard. If you can't do it you can probably find someone else who can. I don't think it defeats the purpose since separate instances is the basic idea.
    - phendrenad2 4y ago
      So every Twitter user can pay $15/month? Every Twitter user can find someone to run their instance for them (for more money?)
      - invalidname 4y ago
        That's a straw man. Very few have the problem of banning or needing that. I don't do that. But every "problematic" user can do that.
        phendrenad2 4y ago
        It's not a straw man, you just changed your point on the sly. Before we were talking about Mastodon as a viable replacement for Twitter - full stop. Now we're talking about the Alex Jones of the world.
joecot 4y ago
All of his complaints are intentional. * There is intentionally no global search. Mastodon is about conversation among people, not about searching out every single person in the entire fediverse who mentions your name or a topic you want to argue about so you can argue with them. * Mastodon instances can intentionally choose to not federate with other instances. This is why, even though people regularly bring up that there are servers full of Nazis on Mastodon, you never see them. Because everyone blocked their instances. Everyone blocks The Gab immediately for example. If someone on an instance is harassing people, the first step is to report them to their instance admin. If they don't take any action, the next step is to defederate from that instance because they don't have the level of moderation safety your instance expects. Defederating is what keeps out harassment and trolls, because the instances that don't moderate them get iced out of the Fediverse. But it is not, as described, a situation where one instance "Doesn't Like" another. Harassment ~= "Doesn't Like." There might be a few who defederate with that little reason, but not the vast majority. * Sure, the small instances are an old server in someone's basement. There are also massive instances with many servers and redundancies. You can also get a managed Mastodon instance. You could also run an instance for just you on a Raspberry Pi. Your choice whether you put it in the basement or your living room. * I'm surprised he didn't also mention a lack of quote tweets, but that's also intentional.[1] All these complaints come down to: join an instance that runs how you want it. Join one with text search or not. Join one with strong or no moderation (but with no moderation, expect it is isolated from many other instances). Join a small instance in someone's basement or a big one with a huge patreon. Or just put up your own, in your own basement, at a host, or managed. Or just don't join mastodon. Don't tell people to quit having fun because you choose not to understand it. 1. https://scott.mn/2022/10/29/twitter_features_mastodon_is_better_without/ https://scott.mn/2022/10/29/twitter_features_mastodon_is_bet...
- zach_garwood 4y ago
  > Don't tell people to quit having fun because you choose not to understand it. I mean, that's pretty much Twitter's raison detre, isn't it?
- RobotToaster 4y ago
  I do think not allowing users to override blacklists is an issue personally. When the main point of federation is supposed to be about giving power back to users, and that you are supposed to be able to follow anyone on any server. Having blacklists as default is one thing, but not allowing your users to make their own decisions is just treating them as children. And it's not just about "nazis" many instances do block instances that allow porn or simply opinions they don't like. For example the largest instance lists plenty of blocked instances just under "inappropriate content" (they list "hate speech" separately, which I assume nazis would fall under) The only way to get access to the entire fediverse right now is to host your own instance, that doesn't seem desirable.
davidgerard 4y ago
Fake title.

41 points by dmitriid 4y ago

RobotToaster 4y ago

A sufficient quantity of servers in dudes' basements are indistinguishable from a cloud.

wlesieutre 4y ago

It’s already stuffed full of desperate questionably appropriate advertising?

mt42or 4y ago

You are free to be the Musk's product, I will not.

OctopusLupid 4y ago

This is just some random guy's tweet?

TrevorFSmith 4y ago
Yup

jfkimmes 4y ago

"E-Mail is never gonna work. Servers are run by random dudes in basements." (There is a lot of discussion on paid instances on mastodon. There is also e.g https://masto.host/ https://masto.host/ for a managed solution.)

award_ 4y ago
This is basically my argument here as well. Fully agree.
skozharinov 4y ago
Good luck running your mail server in your basement :) You will be able to receive most mail that is sent to you, but sending without being sent to spam or rejected is trickier, and I don't think sending reliably is possible at all from a residential network.
- vertis 4y ago
  Where it started VS where it ended though. You're looking at the end of the journey not the start of it. It was completely possible to run your own email server 20-25 years ago and diminished after that slowly with the advent of Hotmail/Gmail. Similarly IRC was run for the longest time by federated servers from peoples basements. It only really started to diminish at all with the advent of Slack.
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    So I don't get it, are we celebrating the inevitable rise of a cabal of paid mastodon providers, paralleling gmail/outlook/etc.?
yucky 4y ago
Email isn't an echo chamber like Mastodon instances are. Also, email isn't moderated like Mastodon instances are. Apples and oranges.

zach_garwood 4y ago

I guess I see all of the straws he's grasping at there, but honestly, most of those "downsides" of Mastadon sound like good things to me. I guess that's why I killed my Twitter account years ago.

award_ 4y ago

This is a hard take on mastodon. I've moved over in the last week or two and it's been a pretty good experience. I think there will be some growth in mastodon with more and more users involved in it as well. Does a confederation of instances have it's issues? Sure. But we've already solved a lot of that with email for a long time anyway. I view mastodon/activityPub as almost an analog of email in the "social media" space. With time and use, it has every opportunity to become the mainstream used service for these types of needs imo. It 'solves' alot of problems that centralized social media systems bring, with only some of the detriments (imo).

lambdadmitry 4y ago
There are at least three distinct use cases that Twitter somewhat covers: a) participating in already existing, well-defined communities. Mastodon works for that, but so does Discord, Gemini, Gopher, tilda communities, IRC servers, and so on. Mastodon's peculiarities like tiny scale instances, inter-instance admin wars, non-existent search are perfectly fine for this use case. That's what it is made for, effectively. b) connecting with friends and following their interests. This is just miserable with Mastodon: you might be on different instances that mute/ban each other, you might not find each other if you don't know their instances, if instances are interest-specific you have to follow on a number of instances, if their instance admin gets fed up with it and shuts it down you need to reconnect somehow, etc. Mastodon is not an identity-first design, it's community-first, and it's a problem for this use case. c) following celebrities or creators famous in the world of atoms. Celebrities would want massive following, which requires massive scale, which is hard to achieve for something effectively run by volunteers. If it's smaller scale celebrities, they'd also want discoverability, which is hampered by the lack of search, federation bans, etc. Mastodon is widely presented as a "twitter backup/alternative". It's just misleading unless the person moving to it only wants (a). There is nothing wrong with wanting (a)! However, it means that Mastodon has very little similarity to Twitter if people want (b) or (c).
- detaro 4y ago
  Based on my experience I feel like you massively overstate the issues with b). > you might be on different instances that mute/ban each other, only an issue if it's actually bans (mutes dont affect following), and if you don't explicitly pick a very ideological instance (either towards banning a lot or towards tolerating behavior that gets you banned a lot) that's not really a problem. I don't believe I've ever encountered a "I want to follow this person but can't", even when e.g. looking through a few hundred accounts I got from my twitter followings. > you might not find each other if you don't know their instances, To follow people you need to know their username, yes (which happens to include the instance). Is there anything where that isn't the case? I certainly wouldn't reliably find my friends on Twitter either without knowing that. > if instances are interest-specific you have to follow on a number of instances, Very few instances are that strictly interest-specific that they force people to take other interests elsewhere. And if someone does run multiple accounts and wants people to follow multiple, they link them so its just a few extra clicks once, hardly a big hurdle in the few cases where it does happen. > if their instance admin gets fed up with it and shuts it down you need to reconnect somehow True if the instance just disappears without warning, otherwise the account move feature handles this transparently.

rufius 4y ago

People comparing Twitter and Mastodon as though they’re equivalent. They’re not - Mastodon has Twitter-like properties but the core “network” model (centralized vs federated) of the two makes them distinct beasts. That’s not people’s fault to make the comparison. Mastodon and the larger community does little to disambiguate this and make it clear. (I say this as someone that’s used both Twitter and mastodon for years. They’re just different, period.)

invalidname 4y ago

This is a bit of FUD with the exception of search (which sucks on Twitter too). * Different instances - yes some are problematic. But that's the beauty. You can move instances easily and everything redirects. * Instance run by random dude - be that dude. One of my communities is starting its own server. Pretty cool. Also relatively simple to do so the "support" aspect doesn't need much. Not an OSS fanatic. I'm still keeping my twitter but Mastodon is fine too and if Twitter is gone tomorrow, it's a decent alternative.

phendrenad2 4y ago
Come on, you have to admit that not all Twitter users are capable of "being that dude/<pronoun>". And if everyone runs their own instance, then doesn't that defeat the benefits of mastodon's instances in general?
- invalidname 4y ago
  Sure. But it's $15 to run an instance on Linode and it's not too hard. If you can't do it you can probably find someone else who can. I don't think it defeats the purpose since separate instances is the basic idea.
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    So every Twitter user can pay $15/month? Every Twitter user can find someone to run their instance for them (for more money?)
    - invalidname 4y ago
      That's a straw man. Very few have the problem of banning or needing that. I don't do that. But every "problematic" user can do that.
      - phendrenad2 4y ago
        It's not a straw man, you just changed your point on the sly. Before we were talking about Mastodon as a viable replacement for Twitter - full stop. Now we're talking about the Alex Jones of the world.

joecot 4y ago

All of his complaints are intentional. * There is intentionally no global search. Mastodon is about conversation among people, not about searching out every single person in the entire fediverse who mentions your name or a topic you want to argue about so you can argue with them. * Mastodon instances can intentionally choose to not federate with other instances. This is why, even though people regularly bring up that there are servers full of Nazis on Mastodon, you never see them. Because everyone blocked their instances. Everyone blocks The Gab immediately for example. If someone on an instance is harassing people, the first step is to report them to their instance admin. If they don't take any action, the next step is to defederate from that instance because they don't have the level of moderation safety your instance expects. Defederating is what keeps out harassment and trolls, because the instances that don't moderate them get iced out of the Fediverse. But it is not, as described, a situation where one instance "Doesn't Like" another. Harassment ~= "Doesn't Like." There might be a few who defederate with that little reason, but not the vast majority. * Sure, the small instances are an old server in someone's basement. There are also massive instances with many servers and redundancies. You can also get a managed Mastodon instance. You could also run an instance for just you on a Raspberry Pi. Your choice whether you put it in the basement or your living room. * I'm surprised he didn't also mention a lack of quote tweets, but that's also intentional.[1] All these complaints come down to: join an instance that runs how you want it. Join one with text search or not. Join one with strong or no moderation (but with no moderation, expect it is isolated from many other instances). Join a small instance in someone's basement or a big one with a huge patreon. Or just put up your own, in your own basement, at a host, or managed. Or just don't join mastodon. Don't tell people to quit having fun because you choose not to understand it. 1. https://scott.mn/2022/10/29/twitter_features_mastodon_is_better_without/ https://scott.mn/2022/10/29/twitter_features_mastodon_is_bet...

zach_garwood 4y ago
> Don't tell people to quit having fun because you choose not to understand it. I mean, that's pretty much Twitter's raison detre, isn't it?
RobotToaster 4y ago
I do think not allowing users to override blacklists is an issue personally. When the main point of federation is supposed to be about giving power back to users, and that you are supposed to be able to follow anyone on any server. Having blacklists as default is one thing, but not allowing your users to make their own decisions is just treating them as children. And it's not just about "nazis" many instances do block instances that allow porn or simply opinions they don't like. For example the largest instance lists plenty of blocked instances just under "inappropriate content" (they list "hate speech" separately, which I assume nazis would fall under) The only way to get access to the entire fediverse right now is to host your own instance, that doesn't seem desirable.

davidgerard 4y ago

Fake title.