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Mastodon isn’t just a replacement for Twitter
- api 4y agoIt reminds me more of a cross between Twitter and Usenet. It is not the same thing as a silo social media site.
- ergonaught 4y agoI've taken to suggesting people read https://mastodon.help/ https://mastodon.help/ before they bother. It's not perfect, either, but I like to kid myself that it helps avoid the "I DEMAND THAT THIS BE LIKE TWITTER" thing.
- cldellow 4y agoThat page looks very helpful! I giggled at them trying to explain Mastodon, though: > There is no such thing as a social network called Mastodon! Instead there are thousands of independent social networks called Mastodon Instances. ...three paragraphs later... > When we say “Mastodon” we mean the whole network of Mastodon Instances I know what they were going for, but it seems to undercut itself. :)
- jxramos 4y agoyah, there's no instance called Mastodon, Mastodon we can consider at the meta transcendent level of the universe of instances. The union of each essentially.
- numpad0 4y agoThey do that kind of gymnastics because they can't have (pawoo.net and) mstdn.jp and half of top instances[0] by post counts to be representative of the name. That will kind of push the platform into where Twitter is, just later, maybe following NovelAI. 0: https://fediverse.space/instances https://fediverse.space/instances
- anthropodie 4y agoThere's one more https://fedi.tips https://fedi.tips
- mxuribe 4y agoThis is the website that i share with folks who are new to the Fediverse.
- esperent 4y agoI checked it hopefully... But it's basically a small book, or at least the huge TOC makes it look that way. I don't think I would share that with someone unless they're really interested in mastodon. Is there a summary that can be read <5 minutes?
- CM30 4y agoDon't worry, it's not that long. Most of the sections are a couple of paragraphs at most, not an entire page's worth of content.
- blooalien 4y agoI find much the same mindset among many Windows users who try to switch themselves over to Linux. They come in expecting Linux (a Unix alike) to be exactly like a "free Windows", which it simply is not and never was but that's what they think it is for some reason. I always make it a point to explain up front that Linux is an entirely different operating system, and while there will be similarities that will be immediately obvious, Linux is not a Windows-alike, and there will be learning and adapting involved. Folks who go into such changes knowing what to expect tend to cope far better with the differences than those expecting something to be an identical clone of what they're already familiar with. I assume the same likely holds true here as well. Those who go in expecting exactly Twitter, but free and distributed / decentralized are going to be sorely disappointed, but those going into it knowing to expect differences won't be caught by surprise the first time they are confronted with something that doesn't operate exactly as they thought it would.
- ourmandave 4y agoI've seen a lot of people migrating to POST. There's a waiting list while the devs are frantically in the middle of actually writing it. https://www.thewrap.com/what-is-post-twitter-alternative-news-social-media-mastodon/ https://www.thewrap.com/what-is-post-twitter-alternative-new...
- zzzeek 4y agoI see famous journalists and celebrities talking about it, but not really any ordinary people. If "can be purchased by a crazed billionaire and taken over by nazis [1]" is now something we have to worry about, the financial model of Post does not seem to have any particular protection against that, where it took money from Andreessen Horowitz [2] just to get started - the same people who helped [3] Musk take over Twitter. [1] https://archive.ph/xYeYY https://archive.ph/xYeYY - TPM article without paywall [2] https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/post-news-twitter-alternative-a16z/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/post-news-twitter-alternat... [3] https://www.npr.org/2022/11/21/1138064606/elon-musk-twitter-investors-fans https://www.npr.org/2022/11/21/1138064606/elon-musk-twitter-...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yborg 4y agoIt's the new Clubhouse. Oh hey, that's Andreessen Horowitz, too.
- Finnucane 4y ago[dead]
- mhoad 4y agoIsn’t post the one where they tried to pretend that making fun of billionaires was on par with racism?
- hk1337 4y agoMastodon seems like a more successful version of what Diaspora was supposed to do.
- tapoxi 4y agoI think it's because Mastadon and ActivityPub, are far simpler. Diaspora was just over-engineered.
- rglullis 4y agoFunny you say that. Now that Mastodon is gaining some popularity, people are finally starting to realize how chatty the servers are, and some popular bloggers are already complaining about being DDOS'd by the mere fact they got post with a link triggered a cascade of simultaneous requests from +1900 servers. Personally, I started to look at nostr [0]. It gets rid of this idea of decentalization-by-federation and makes nodes mere relays of information. The architecture is infinitely simpler and it a lot easier to scale. I'm wondering how easy it would be to fork an Mastodon/ActivityPub client and make it work with a nostr relay, and I will probably take the christmas break to add a nostr relay to communick. [0] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
- mxuribe 4y agoBy "successful", did you mean from a technical/engineering perspective, or do you mean that one software stack (and instances that use said software) has been able to attract more newbies?
- hk1337 4y agoSuccessful in getting the technical/engineering working in a timely manner that people would want to actually use it. It seemed to flop pretty hard when the original founder(s) (at least one) committed suicide right as they were starting.
- snapetom 4y agoDiaspora came out with a lot of bravado and hype. The founders openly targeted Facebook and its data exploitation in their messaging. It was over engineered for its time, misfired on its benefits (you can install your own instance! Still a problem with fediverse devs), and when it failed, people piled on. I only found recently it was still going and was surprised.
- dpflan 4y ago'As media scholar Victor Pickard suggests, “Hopefully Twitter’s collapse will lead to a more expansive conversation about the relationships between capitalist imperatives and the communication [and] information needs of democratic societies.” As users begin migrating to the noncommercial fediverse, they need to reconsider their expectations for social media — and bring them in line with what we expect from other arenas of social life. We need to learn how to become more like engaged democratic citizens in the life of our networks.' All right, running with this: corporate sponsored "public spaces" aren't really public (as they are capitalist entities). Let's add "Conway's Law" [1.] to this, and extrapolate that perhaps democracies currently are repeating the design of the communication structures that comprise it (of which there are myriad, but assume the largest/loudest have more sway). Let's pick one nation, the US, and question: is the US democracy constrained by the current corporate-sponsored public-spaces/communication structures (which have been old media, i.e. print, but seems now new media, i.e. all online). A 'fediversification' of the public mind seems really important here, the question is how far can/does it go (techno-first generations seems fine, but let's say baby-boomers perhaps not so much?). I'm curious what others think about this, and what resources can be shared to provide more insight into this question. [1.] Conway's Law: “Organizations, who design systems, are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
- mfer 4y ago> As users begin migrating to the noncommercial fediverse I keep wondering, who pays to run all those servers, handle users on the servers, and for the people to spend time keeping it all up to date? Will it end up with some companies running servers for people. Still, where does the money come from to cover the expenses?
- klabb3 4y ago> who pays to run all those servers Today, volunteers and goodwill. Tomorrow, likely the same actors that run free VPNs today, ie the tier-2 ad-tech/data-broker shadow industry.
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
- JustSomeNobody 4y agoThe Twitter migration to Mastodon will be short-lived, sadly. People see Post as the new shiny already. One silo to another. Sigh...
- jghn 4y agoI've noticed a marked uptick in traffic on my Twitter feed over the last week or so. A couple of weeks ago my feed was a ghost town. I haven't followed anyone new, so this traffic is coming from people who stopped posting for a bit and then returned. Some of them I know are crossposting from mastodon, but not all of them.
- numpad0 4y agoCould also be something behind the scenes failing at Twitter, I saw tons of horror stories in recent weeks that people found faded out friends on Twitter, who were in fact actively posting but somehow masked out of timeline and search.
- jghn 4y agoPerhaps, but before everyone disappeared there were plenty of "goodbye, cruel world" type posts. I think some of it is just that people saw the whole thing didn't implode and either got back to using it and/or didn't like the alternatives much. Personally have been splitting time between Twitter & Mastodon, although using Twitter more. Mastodon has a higher percentage of my high quality follows but a lot of them either dont post much there or are crossposting to Twitter anyways. And I prefer Twitter the application a heckuva lot more than Mastodon.
- czbond 4y agowhat is the incentive for anyone but the technology adopter or politically inclined to move from Twitter to Mastodon? For almost all users, Twitter is free, and has all the users? The only reason I've heard someone suggest to move from Twitter is because the new owner opened his mouth about political views.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- paul_funyun 4y agoIf you dislike social media switching to an inferior product could help you cut down on usage.
- MichaelBurge 4y agoBecause Twitter has all the users, it is the pool that politicians, marketing consultants, and scammers can most efficiently piss in. If they have to split their efforts among 10,000 independent groups, maybe the EV-chasers will go away and people will talk about things other than the latest scandal or movie.
- luckylion 4y agoWith automation, targeting micro-communities is easy enough, especially when they all speak the same protocol. At the same time, you don't have a massive anti-spam team defending the platform, but instances can probably introduce small variations (like a honey-pot url-field in a contact form that immediately cuts spam frequency by 99% for most sites).
- rglullis 4y ago- No ads - No data mining - No opaque algorithm that can not be tuned by the user. Okay, Mastodon has only one "algorithm" (aka reverse chronological order) but there is nothing stopping us from developing clients (user-agents) that filter the timeline according to what we think it's important. [0] - Who cares about "all the users"? The important thing is that the you can connect, follow and interact with a large-enough group of interesting people. Even if the whole network has "only" 8M people, my timeline on Mastodon has certainly become more interesting than the twitter one. [0] https://mastodon.communick.com/web/@raphael/109381554315719113 https://mastodon.communick.com/web/@raphael/1093815543157191...
- floren 4y agoUnfortunately Mastodon is doomed to failure because 50% of people will spell it "Mastadon" no matter how many times they see it written correctly.
- totemandtoken 4y agoYou know, if you move around the 'just' in this title, it changes the meaning of the title to almost every opinion I've seen about Mastodon and Twitter
- wlesieutre 4y agoJust Mastodon Isn’t a Replacement for Twitter Mastodon Just Isn’t a Replacement for Twitter Mastodon Isn’t Just a Replacement for Twitter Mastodon Isn’t a Just Replacement for Twitter Mastodon Isn’t a Replacement Just for Twitter Mastodon Isn’t a Replacement for Just Twitter Mastodon Isn’t a Replacement for Twitter Just Yep, I’ve seen most of those blogposts
- layer8 4y agoWhat would the last one mean?
- wlesieutre 4y agoIt’s why I said “most”
- whacked_new 4y agotwitterjust... might mean the part where you need to split your thoughts into spoon sized tweets... "how's the article coming along?" "hold on, I'm twitterjusting it"
- yarg 4y agoIt's progressing, almost there, not yet ready.
- theprincess 4y agoEnding a sentence with "just" is short for "just fck my sht up". https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/brendan-frasers-alimony-just-fuck-my-shit-up https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/brendan-frasers-alimony-just-... It's meant to convey a sense of defeat. So in this case the sentence would read as implying that the author wanted Mastodon to replace Twitter but that it's not able and that fact is causing her emotional pain.
- incomingpain 4y agoMastodon isn't a replacement. You can be on both platforms at once. Yes, an outrage or drama event violating trust will be what shifts people away from a platform. Why Mastodon isn't as large as twitter is a question by itself. Twitter's continued existence doesn't matter.
- dawnerd 4y agoI've been meeting a lot more really cool people on Mastodon than I have in the entire 15+ years I was on Twitter. Discussions end up much more civil, everyone has been friendly so far. It's just really chill not having an algorithm push outrage topics to bump engagements.
- Yeroc 4y agoNot to worry. There's nothing inherent in the platform that encourages to be more civil and friendly other than established cultural norms that will soon be trampled by the influx of new users if things continue on the current trajectory.
- panarky 4y agoFederation, defederation, local moderation and zero algorithmic amplification are all inherent in the platform.
- francisofascii 4y agoDon't most new communities start that way?
- dawnerd 4y agoI wouldn’t call this a new community though. A lot of people I’ve talked to have been on the platform for years now. I think it has more to do with the heavier moderation and whole hateful instances being blocked.
- pornel 4y agoI think non-commercial status is also an important factor. It doesn't need to aim for hockeystick growth or guard its data to create value for investors. It doesn't need to manipulate users for high engagement metrics to impress advertisers.
- noncoml 4y agoIsn’t Mastodon moderation similar to subreddits? I.e. the owner of the server is the one who decides what’s allowed and what not? I find it very problematic
- newaccount2021 4y ago
- timbit42 4y agoMastodon has a feature that lets you switch from one instance to another, bringing along your posts.
- noncoml 4y agoDo you get to keep your address/handle?
- retox 4y agoYour old one doesn't go away unless you delete that account. You don't automatically get to keep your old handle on the new server because it may already be taken (handles aren't unique across the entire network), but if it isn't you can keep it by normal registration.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y agoNope. Your handle consists of your alias and your home instance. ie, "@sohcahtoa82@nerds.social" If I want to move to another instance, say, jocks.social, then my handle would become @sohcahtoa82@jocks.social, and that's assuming @sohcahtoa82 wasn't already taken on jocks.social.
- noncoml 4y agoSo it doesn’t help much to just move your data if you get banned by a mod, does it?
- orangepurple 4y agoWhile we're on the topic of social media I'd like to remind everyone that Discord won't let you delete older messages without the risk of getting banned with no appeals process. So if you were considering leaving Twitter or Mastodon for Discord, DON'T. https://github.com/victornpb/undiscord/discussions/273 https://github.com/victornpb/undiscord/discussions/273
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago> So if you were considering leaving Twitter or Mastodon for Discord, DON'T. It's puzzling to me that "Discord" is even in the same sentence as Twitter or Mastodon. It serves an entirely different use case, being designed for real-time communication.
- fomine3 4y agoYounger people use Discord for everything, so worth noting.
- 10g1k 4y agoExtreme lefty Westerners: "OMG! Twitter might allow free speech?! Nooooooo!!1111" Meanwhile in China...
- peterashford 4y agoPeople on the left aren't opposed to free speech, they're opposed to hate speech. FS is about not being jailed for, or prevented from, expressing political ideas. It's not about being able to call someone the N word without repercussions. Conflating the two is asinine
- 10g1k 4y agoNo such thing in reality. It's cultist jargon intended to restrict speech and ideas to whatever the cult allows on any particular day.
- rvz 4y agoCorrect. Anything can branded as 'hate speech' these days as a way to censor or deplatform anyone that the platform or a person they don't like.
- trollerator23 4y agoFor all the three users flocking to Mastodon
- peterashford 4y agoWhere 3 = two and half million
- trollerator23 4y ago/doubt
- ohiovr 4y agoThere is no drama leakage from mastodon that I've seen which seems the point of twitter entirely.
- baxuz 4y agoMastodon is just an extra obtuse version of subreddits with less users and features. I honestly don't get the hype.