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I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twit

I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power. But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic, but worse, fragments the community and creates (IMO) unacceptable privacy concerns. Self-hosting requires unnecessary hoops, loses some community functionality, and runs into the risk of "defederation", which only exacerbates the problem of servers being overly important. If you do decide to go with one of the existing servers, and hadn't been there early enough to get into one of those run by the foundation, you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar. Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.

pxoe 4y ago
lack of algorithmic feed (and the whole anti-algo slant) and lack of openly viewable likes on people's profiles are actually gonna backfire. mastodon is gonna get lonely and boring, because it's kinda hard to do content discovery, particularly the kind where you get recommendations based on people you follow or interested in, so that those recs would be in closer proximity to you, rather than just getting random posts from trending. for how much algo stuff (like topics, suggested tweets, etc.) and particularly algo feed gets talked shit about, it's vital to discovery of new posts and new people. without those things, it's easier to just run out of stuff and people to see, and end up in a place where you're caught up with things, and new people aren't entering your circle, and the activity just stops. well, it is also unlikely, because people just do stuff and mix other people in, but it's easier to end up in that static state, when you don't get suggestions in other ways. at least there are reblogs. but there's also no option to filter those out right in someone's profile. so it's gonna get real annoying if those are gonna be the only way for someone to push content from somebody else.
- vidarh 4y ago
  When you follow someone, you can mute just boosts from them if you like. Other than that, all of these things are things people can build using the API. I agree they're needed, and I think enough others do that things will get built. I certainly want to build my own algorithmic feed, because reverse chronology is already a nuisance to me.
  - pxoe 4y ago
    huh. ability to mute someone's reposts in your own timeline won't do much for purposes of browsing through that particular person's tweets though. it's not about 'how someone's tweets appear in your timeline', but 'browsing someone's tweets'. to be fair, twitter doesn't let you just filter out reblogs from someone's profile timeline either (though one could just do a search like 'from:username'), but with visible likes, this sort of 'personal curation' separates itself into 'profile tweets' and 'likes', with retweets getting used more sparingly.
    - vidarh 4y ago
      I also don't like that difference in separation w/less visible likes/favourites. Other than that I think what you're describing might well be a good feature for one of the frontends to support. Incidentally, since all of the profile info is available without auth, it's also possible to build an entirely separate profile browser that could offer that filtering for any profile. EDIT: Mastodon in fact includes a profile browser for remote profiles; it's just that when logged out it will redirect to the remote profile instead of show the "local view" of it. So if someone wants to build a profile browser like that, all the necessary code for a good starting point is there in Mastodon already. Thought it might well be easier just to do it from scratch.
sangnoir 4y ago
Any article tangentially related to Mastodon inevitably has a comment like yours voted to the top, even when it's off-topic and adds little to the conversation. I'm reminded of the immortal slashdot comment about another "inferior" disruptor: No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame > Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me. Perhaps because Twitter has metrics on how many times the Mastodon links are posted and followed, and you don't?
kornhole 4y ago
I trust an anarchist admin with my DMs more than any corporation, billionaire, intelligence agencies, and their data miners, but you do you.
kornhole 4y ago
I just setup a new instance in less than 30 minutes. There are many ways it can be done.. Hoops are optional.
rcade 4y ago
Mastodon looks workable to me. Choosing a Mastodon instance is like signing up for an email provider. Email is decentralized and seems to be doing alright. I picked an instance that was good-sized at 9,000 users with a focus I liked: indieweb.social. That gives me a Local feed of interesting indieweb-related content in addition to my Home feed of people I follow. I didn't have to trust my privacy to an anonymous activist. I know who is running the instance and support it via Patreon.
ATMLOTTOBEER 4y ago
I think mastodon will be ok. The lesson learned from comparing twitter to Reddit, hacker news, and Facebook is that creating a successful social network is a moderation problem not a technology problem. BYO moderation strategies like those in use by mastodon, Reddit, twitch and discord can scale (while those of hackernews, fb, twitter cannot).
lukeschlather 4y ago
> you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar I have some friends operating a Mastodon server, with a team of volunteer operators, and I'm pretty sure I've met all of them in person. I've only used Twitter a handful of times and don't really like the medium, but it's really not that hard to run a server. And I don't think there's any fundamental reason this doesn't scale. Every single community center runs a website, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine local, trusted Mastodon-type servers operated by all sorts of organizations. You may already be a member of an organization that has the capability and drive in your area, if you just can find the other people who want it.
- vidarh 4y ago
  There are also paid hosting services, and more are sure to come.
  - throwaway290 4y ago
    Such as Tumblr
    - ryukafalz 4y ago
      For those downvoting the above poster, this probably wasn't a sarcastic quip - Tumblr really does plan to federate with the rest of the fediverse. https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/tumblr-to-add-support-for-activitypub-the-social-protocol-powering-mastodon-and-other-apps/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/tumblr-to-add-support-for-...
      - vidarh 4y ago
        I'm guessing some might have downvoted because I mentioned paid providers. As in letting you pay them to run a Mastodon instance. While the above poster seems to have read my "and more are sure to come" as more options in general rather than more paid options. But I didn't downvote as I agree, the promise of Tumblr support is a big deal and will be a good option for a lot of people.
smcn 4y ago
I agree with some of what you wrote, especially regarding selfhosting. I personally would like to see the ability to follow and post to local timelines, to ensure that you're able to be part of communities in a decentralised way. However. > you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar. Is this worse than trusting Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok? Those companies are actively looking to exploit you for profit. Whereas strawman kitty avatar can't do anything. Especially are there are no private messages on Mastodon.
- vidarh 4y ago
  In terms of local timeline inclusion that kind-of already muddies things, but WebFinger does provide for aliases and supports forwarding, so maybe the ability to have accounts on multiple instances but have them all forward to the same "follows"/"following" lists might work (likely not without changes, and there are many potential pitfalls there, though).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- codeflo 4y ago
  > Is this worse than trusting Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok? Yes for the first two, no for the third. US-based companies are large targets for potential lawsuits, and consequently have processes in place to prevent random employees from accessing your DMs without cause. I obviously wouldn't trust those companies completely -- we're really arguing about probabilities here -- but there's at least some measure of accountability that makes them unlikely to do something trivially stupid. > there are no private messages on Mastodon It does have a DM feature -- that they aren't private is exactly the point.
  - smcn 4y ago
    It's not about them being read, it's about them being used against me. Being scraped and weaponised to train some algorithm to exploit me. That's the issue I have.
aaa_aaa 4y ago
I dont think it feels threatened. Most migrated Mastodon users dislike Musk and they deliberately rub him the wrong way.
whitepaint 4y ago
You can export your data and move it to another server. If you're banned on Twitter, you're done. Also, complete failures like banning important stories, banning presidents, banning journalists etc. cannot happen on Mastodon the same way that it has happened countless of times on Twitter and will continue happening. Mastodon is obviously superior when it comes to the freedom of speech. Elon is afraid, because he knows. Funnily enough, he is the reason why we will get the better version of social media faster.
- drexlspivey 4y ago
  What if your server that is run by a hobbyist suddenly shuts down without any notice? If they had an accident for example or they got hacked or whatever
  - rcade 4y ago
    Most instances follow the Mastodon Covenant, whose promises include giving users three months warning before a shutdown. https://joinmastodon.org/covenant https://joinmastodon.org/covenant
  - vidarh 4y ago
    If you're concerned about that, back up regularly, or pick an instance not run by a hobbyist, or run your own, or pay one of the commercial hosters to do it for you.
    - codeflo 4y ago
      I love the moving of goalposts that's happening here. "Just pick a server", "you can always migrate" moves to "you can always migrate if you happened to have picked a server not run by a hobbyist". Which, BTW, isn't even a filter criterion on the often linked instances.social. Also, you can't back up your followers.
      - weinzierl 4y ago
        You can't back up your followers, but as long as the old instance exits, is not banned and is cooperative you can move your followers from one instance to another. Yes, that's a lot of "ifs" and doesn't help at all if the instance you are on is already defederated, which was the point that started this thread. I think Mastodon is a tiny bit better than Twitter in that, at least you have a chance to move as long as things are good. If that makes a practical difference, I don 't know...
aquova 4y ago
> I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power. But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronisticm. I don't understand what decentralized internet service you would prefer then? The ability for anyone to host their own decentralized instance is exactly what a return to the protocols of old would look like. They may not have had anime avatars, but you were just as susceptible to the whims of your IRC admin. Either you trust in the faceless centralized conglomerate or in your smaller devop. What third option is there?
- codeflo 4y ago
  Peer to peer networks, with servers being purely optional for convenience (for convenient access from mobile, for example). Nothing about the social experience -- including your identity -- being tied to the "server" you're using to access the network. Technology has advanced since the invention of IRC.
  - viraptor 4y ago
    Yet nobody really showed how to solve p2p in a way that supports: moderation, not downloading massive amount of data, account recovery, safe protocol upgrades. For example scuttlebutt exists and the initial connection involves "This “inital syncing” process can take up to an hour and use a fair amount of data.", you can't lose your keys, and unless something changed, moderation is still just wishful thinking "Presently, there is a "flag" feature, which is an extremely strong negative signal. If somebody is behaving poorly, feel free to flag them." I acknowledge that Mastodon is not perfect, but raising that as "badly designed and engineered" seems weird, when it's the most decentralised, actually working solution we've got.
ehnto 4y ago
> fragments the community I think this is a feature for most communities to be honest. Twitter is great at inter-networking, and a decent soap-box, but communities there are shallow and when your audience is "everyone on the platform" the chilling effect means only certain types of people are participating honestly and in full. There's probably some great communities that happen to be on twitter in spite of there being almost no open functionality that helps with that, but I bet they would all grow and foster better conversations if they added a discord server or something similar. Twitter is about as good as a blog comment section for long-term community building.
- codeflo 4y ago
  I agree that subcommunities are a useful feature. That only proves my point, though. The positive example you give, Discord servers, are a lot more like subreddits than they are like Mastodon servers. You can join multiple of them, the power of the moderator is local and doesn't affect your account as a whole. Discord and Reddit are of course centralized services, but in theory there's nothing preventing a decentralized system from having a similar feature.
tjpnz 4y ago
I just downloaded the app for a second time and tried to create an account. I failed. I thought I'd try mastodon.social but couldn't find it on any of the lists so chose the search option. Found it but it wouldn't let me register an account. Go go site, there's a register button but rather than taking me to a signup form I just get a big wall of text about how I can't be a sexist or a transphobe. Fine, I won't. But why can't I register?
- vidarh 4y ago
  So you pre-decided to sign up for a specific instance which was closed to signups and is then surprised you can't sign up. Go to joinmastodon.org or instances.social, not directly to a specific instance.
  - tjpnz 4y ago
    >So you pre-decided to sign up for a specific instance which was closed to signups and is then surprised you can't sign up. I saw that elonjet had found a new home there so assumed I wouldn't have any trouble signing up. The "Create Account" button on mastodon.social seemed promising too.
    - LightG 4y ago
      Just take your time and get familiar. I wemt through some teething troubles but have found it to be worth it.
    - vidarh 4y ago
      The "Create Account" button does indeed let you create a Mastodon account. Just not on mastodon.social. I can't seem to reconcile your description with what happens when you press that button, though.
      - Tassels 4y ago
        The official app has a significantly shittier UX than the webui. Third party apps provide a better experience, but randos who haven't already been on mastodon for years don't know that. This is where I've found a lot of the friction lives.
darkerside 4y ago
It's interesting that now, when it would be most relevant, discussion about a social media platform running on blockchain has all but disappeared. If not now, then when?
- whitepaint 4y ago
  Because blockchains are definitely not built for that..?
- codeflo 4y ago
  Assuming you mean an actual blockchain and aren't just using it, as some people seem to do, as a catch-all term for cryptographic signatures, it's expensive overkill. Social media really doesn't need to pay the brutal computational costs to solve the Byzantine generals problem. You don't need to establish an immutable record under adversarial conditions because there's no "double spend" problem. A simple synchronization mechanism for cryptographically signed posts (to prove authorship) is enough.
323 4y ago
> But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic Jack linked to nostr which tries to solve some of these problems: https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768 https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768 > The problem with Mastodon and similar programs: - User identities are attached to domain names controlled by third-parties; - Server owners can ban you, just like Twitter; Server owners can also block other servers; - Migration between servers is an afterthought and can only be accomplished if servers cooperate. It doesn't work in an adversarial environment (all followers are lost); - There are no clear incentives to run servers, therefore they tend to be run by enthusiasts and people who want to have their name attached to a cool domain. Then, users are subject to the despotism of a single person, which is often worse than that of a big company like Twitter, and they can't migrate out; - Since servers tend to be run amateurishly, they are often abandoned after a while — which is effectively the same as banning everybody; - It doesn't make sense to have a ton of servers if updates from every server will have to be painfully pushed (and saved!) to a ton of other servers. This point is exacerbated by the fact that servers tend to exist in huge numbers, therefore more data has to be passed to more places more often; - For the specific example of video sharing, ActivityPub enthusiasts realized it would be completely impossible to transmit video from server to server the way text notes are, so they decided to keep the video hosted only from the single instance where it was posted to, which is similar to the Nostr approach. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#very-short-summary-of-how-it-works-if-you-dont-plan-to-read-anything-else https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#very-short-summary-o...
- r721 4y ago
  Previous HN discussions of Nostr: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061 (11 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360 (22 days ago)
- vidarh 4y ago
  You can easily achieve the same with ActivityPub relays and a few small tweaks - if this turns out to actually.be useful it'd be easy to provide gatewaying relays for those who care.
kybernetyk 4y ago
- fredgrott 4y ago
  unless they are German American :)
- amelius 4y ago
  Wait, I was under the impression that Germans are good at engineering.
  - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
    Wait until you hear about their railways.
- JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
  > > There's something in the German soul that makes them great at building cars. But lacking in design. See how German supercars look plain vis-a-vis the Italian ones
  - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
    Yeah, but the Italians are rubbish at buildings (source: I went to Rome and half the buildings are in ruins)
    - shepherdjerred 4y ago
      I know that this is a (very funny) joke, but when I visited Rome I was absolutely astonished that humans could build something so long ago and still stand today. Most people don't have such a visible (obvious), lasting impact on the physical world.
      - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
        Joking aside, Rome does have some amazing old architecture. The Pantheon's dome ceiling is remarkable and that's just one example.
beowulfey 4y ago
I am a little younger than the days of decentralized social media, but I caught the tail end of it. To me, Mastodon feels like an “email address” for social media. I think a lot of people are so used to centralized platforms that it seems crazy to have it be decentralized again. I suspect as Mastodon grows, there will be more servers that become popular and will likely host the bulk of people, in much the same way that gmail pulled in the bulk of email users—but it will still be possible to have other “addresses” too. The idea is starting to grow on me.
- mmastrac 4y ago
  Technology Connections put it well https://hachyderm.io/@TechConnectify@mas.to/109529844854465065 https://hachyderm.io/@TechConnectify@mas.to/1095298448544650... > "Imagine you signed up for a sort of reverse-email address where your sent emails landed on a public page that anyone who knew your address could read if they wanted to and even follow you for more."
  - beowulfey 4y ago
    Yes! I think the reason people struggle with Mastodon is they implicitly understand that picking a server is, whether they want it to be or not, a reflection of their online persona, and they don’t know how to find or gauge servers to see if they might “fit”. I think universities should immediately make official instances for students and faculty. At least in academic twitter circles having an official institutional home would probably help a ton with migration; it would feel like a natural place to be.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Mastodon feels like an “email address” for social media And it’s waiting for its AOL and Gmail.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    which is why email is a bad analogy. email adoption was fast because it was a gamechanger compared to faxes and telegraphs. ISPs offered inboxes, as did universities and offices, years before Hotmail arrived. Additionally, people got email because they wanted to communicate with friends. People get on social media mostly to escape boredom, not intentionally communicate with stranngers.
weinzierl 4y ago
I think I'm in the same demographic as you, but I don't see it as negatively. Most of the issues you mentioned don't bother me as much or could be fixed. The only thing that concerns me is the risk of defederation. Why would anyone want to run an instance if they (and their users) are at the risk of being excluded on the whim of a small and intransparent group of people? I mean so far moderation on Mastodon seems to work, but it still does not sit right with me that we basically replaced a dictatorship with the (benevolt) oligoply of the group of most popular server's owners. In the end it's all a matter of trust and it would be good if more organizantions ran their own instances so that we would have bigger plurality of large instances.
- skissane 4y ago
  > I mean so far moderation on Mastodon seems to work, but it still does not sit right with me that we basically replaced a dictatorship with the (benevolt) oligoply of the group of most popular server's owners. Elon Musk has made some dumb moderation calls, but he seems open to changing some of them in response to popular feedback and media pressure. I don’t know if the same is true of those people. If new Twitter bans whoever, odds are high everybody will hear about it, and if they shouldn’t be banned, odds are decent it will be reversed. I’m not sure the same is true for this “oligopoly” for whom few know who they are. Seems even worse than Twitter as far as transparency and accountability goes
  - mmastrac 4y ago
    Has he really though? Apparently now he's banning journalists asking him for comments on stories. It seems to be getting worse and more arbitrary on his end. https://taylorlorenz.substack.com/p/elon-musk-banned-me-from-twitter https://taylorlorenz.substack.com/p/elon-musk-banned-me-from...
    - skissane 4y ago
      Ariadna Jacobs says that Taylor Lorenz doxxed her, by asking her for her home address for “fact-checking” purposes, promising that it was not for publication, and then publishing it anyway - https://mobile.twitter.com/littlemissjacob/status/1603575149524971521 https://mobile.twitter.com/littlemissjacob/status/1603575149... Jacobs has been calling on Musk to ban Lorenz for doxxing her. Maybe he (or his staff) have listened. I’m sure Lorenz knows about this, so when she claims she “doesn’t know” why she was suspended, and implies that it was for asking Musk questions or criticising him, I think people should take that claim with a grain of salt
petesergeant 4y ago
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, but I’ve switched off my Twitter and I’m going to really try and make Mastodon work because I think all issues except the network effect are surmountable here
ajross 4y ago
> Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me. I don't want to be too glib, because your technical concerns are legitimate and well-argued. But... have you actually tried using it? It works fine! It doesn't work as well as Twitter and has rough edges, but at this point it's well past the "will it work?" stage. There are real people there posting real content and engaging in real ways. If Twitter were to disappear tomorrow, people could all just move over and... it would be fine. So it's OK to criticize, but the idea that it's somehow fatally flawed seems weird to me. It works fine.
jackmott42 4y ago
Yeah so instead of worrying about all the stuff you are worrying about, I've just been using Mastodon and its been fine. I see the toots from the people I follow, I find the people I want to follow. Its been fine.
BeefWellington 4y ago
Every one of your complaints about individual servers apply to Twitter as it is already, and some of them I see as features. For instance, not completely losing your community because Twitter or Discord or whatever parent company decides one day you don't belong there. You can move accounts to a different server if you stop liking where you're at, which is a feature nobody has elsewhere it seems. I view Mastodon as if Twitter, a Microblogging platform, and IRC had a child. Let's take the reverse tack though, and agree with your opinion that it's a clusterfuck. Twitter should be threatened by Mastodon because they're losing users to it in spite of all those "problems".
that_guy_iain 4y ago
> I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power. Personally, I think we should have this stuff regulated. We have power, mail, phones, internet, etc but most of the internet just isn't. Which seems really odd considering that for most people their Outlook/Google email is far more important to them than their postal mail but can be taken away from them because they emailed a photo to a doctor. Your revenue generating Twitter account can be suspended because you tweeted something some random person just didn't like with no real recourse. YouTube is probably the worse for kneecapping people's livilhoods over dodgy claims. Decenteralized just seems like it'll be a pain for me to find stuff. And instead of being held hostage by a big company with policies and processes and money to sue them. You're being held hostage by some random guy who may decide he doesn't like being connected to a certain network and all of sudden you've got to create a new account somewhere else.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
unloco 4y ago
Mastodon, regardless of your server, can see and connect to everyone in the federation. The servers are just for how your name appears, local and moderation rules. infosec.exchange can talk to and see content in mastodon.social
rc_kas 4y ago
I have build https://sendie.com https://sendie.com as an alternative. Twitter doesn't seem to care about me and my 100 users :D

pxoe 4y ago

lack of algorithmic feed (and the whole anti-algo slant) and lack of openly viewable likes on people's profiles are actually gonna backfire. mastodon is gonna get lonely and boring, because it's kinda hard to do content discovery, particularly the kind where you get recommendations based on people you follow or interested in, so that those recs would be in closer proximity to you, rather than just getting random posts from trending. for how much algo stuff (like topics, suggested tweets, etc.) and particularly algo feed gets talked shit about, it's vital to discovery of new posts and new people. without those things, it's easier to just run out of stuff and people to see, and end up in a place where you're caught up with things, and new people aren't entering your circle, and the activity just stops. well, it is also unlikely, because people just do stuff and mix other people in, but it's easier to end up in that static state, when you don't get suggestions in other ways. at least there are reblogs. but there's also no option to filter those out right in someone's profile. so it's gonna get real annoying if those are gonna be the only way for someone to push content from somebody else.

vidarh 4y ago
When you follow someone, you can mute just boosts from them if you like. Other than that, all of these things are things people can build using the API. I agree they're needed, and I think enough others do that things will get built. I certainly want to build my own algorithmic feed, because reverse chronology is already a nuisance to me.
- pxoe 4y ago
  huh. ability to mute someone's reposts in your own timeline won't do much for purposes of browsing through that particular person's tweets though. it's not about 'how someone's tweets appear in your timeline', but 'browsing someone's tweets'. to be fair, twitter doesn't let you just filter out reblogs from someone's profile timeline either (though one could just do a search like 'from:username'), but with visible likes, this sort of 'personal curation' separates itself into 'profile tweets' and 'likes', with retweets getting used more sparingly.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    I also don't like that difference in separation w/less visible likes/favourites. Other than that I think what you're describing might well be a good feature for one of the frontends to support. Incidentally, since all of the profile info is available without auth, it's also possible to build an entirely separate profile browser that could offer that filtering for any profile. EDIT: Mastodon in fact includes a profile browser for remote profiles; it's just that when logged out it will redirect to the remote profile instead of show the "local view" of it. So if someone wants to build a profile browser like that, all the necessary code for a good starting point is there in Mastodon already. Thought it might well be easier just to do it from scratch.

sangnoir 4y ago

Any article tangentially related to Mastodon inevitably has a comment like yours voted to the top, even when it's off-topic and adds little to the conversation. I'm reminded of the immortal slashdot comment about another "inferior" disruptor: No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame > Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me. Perhaps because Twitter has metrics on how many times the Mastodon links are posted and followed, and you don't?

kornhole 4y ago

I trust an anarchist admin with my DMs more than any corporation, billionaire, intelligence agencies, and their data miners, but you do you.

kornhole 4y ago

I just setup a new instance in less than 30 minutes. There are many ways it can be done.. Hoops are optional.

rcade 4y ago

Mastodon looks workable to me. Choosing a Mastodon instance is like signing up for an email provider. Email is decentralized and seems to be doing alright. I picked an instance that was good-sized at 9,000 users with a focus I liked: indieweb.social. That gives me a Local feed of interesting indieweb-related content in addition to my Home feed of people I follow. I didn't have to trust my privacy to an anonymous activist. I know who is running the instance and support it via Patreon.

ATMLOTTOBEER 4y ago

I think mastodon will be ok. The lesson learned from comparing twitter to Reddit, hacker news, and Facebook is that creating a successful social network is a moderation problem not a technology problem. BYO moderation strategies like those in use by mastodon, Reddit, twitch and discord can scale (while those of hackernews, fb, twitter cannot).

lukeschlather 4y ago

> you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar I have some friends operating a Mastodon server, with a team of volunteer operators, and I'm pretty sure I've met all of them in person. I've only used Twitter a handful of times and don't really like the medium, but it's really not that hard to run a server. And I don't think there's any fundamental reason this doesn't scale. Every single community center runs a website, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine local, trusted Mastodon-type servers operated by all sorts of organizations. You may already be a member of an organization that has the capability and drive in your area, if you just can find the other people who want it.

vidarh 4y ago
There are also paid hosting services, and more are sure to come.
- throwaway290 4y ago
  Such as Tumblr
  - ryukafalz 4y ago
    For those downvoting the above poster, this probably wasn't a sarcastic quip - Tumblr really does plan to federate with the rest of the fediverse. https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/tumblr-to-add-support-for-activitypub-the-social-protocol-powering-mastodon-and-other-apps/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/tumblr-to-add-support-for-...
    - vidarh 4y ago
      I'm guessing some might have downvoted because I mentioned paid providers. As in letting you pay them to run a Mastodon instance. While the above poster seems to have read my "and more are sure to come" as more options in general rather than more paid options. But I didn't downvote as I agree, the promise of Tumblr support is a big deal and will be a good option for a lot of people.

smcn 4y ago

I agree with some of what you wrote, especially regarding selfhosting. I personally would like to see the ability to follow and post to local timelines, to ensure that you're able to be part of communities in a decentralised way. However. > you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar. Is this worse than trusting Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok? Those companies are actively looking to exploit you for profit. Whereas strawman kitty avatar can't do anything. Especially are there are no private messages on Mastodon.

vidarh 4y ago
In terms of local timeline inclusion that kind-of already muddies things, but WebFinger does provide for aliases and supports forwarding, so maybe the ability to have accounts on multiple instances but have them all forward to the same "follows"/"following" lists might work (likely not without changes, and there are many potential pitfalls there, though).
deleted 4y ago
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codeflo 4y ago
> Is this worse than trusting Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok? Yes for the first two, no for the third. US-based companies are large targets for potential lawsuits, and consequently have processes in place to prevent random employees from accessing your DMs without cause. I obviously wouldn't trust those companies completely -- we're really arguing about probabilities here -- but there's at least some measure of accountability that makes them unlikely to do something trivially stupid. > there are no private messages on Mastodon It does have a DM feature -- that they aren't private is exactly the point.
- smcn 4y ago
  It's not about them being read, it's about them being used against me. Being scraped and weaponised to train some algorithm to exploit me. That's the issue I have.

aaa_aaa 4y ago

I dont think it feels threatened. Most migrated Mastodon users dislike Musk and they deliberately rub him the wrong way.

whitepaint 4y ago

You can export your data and move it to another server. If you're banned on Twitter, you're done. Also, complete failures like banning important stories, banning presidents, banning journalists etc. cannot happen on Mastodon the same way that it has happened countless of times on Twitter and will continue happening. Mastodon is obviously superior when it comes to the freedom of speech. Elon is afraid, because he knows. Funnily enough, he is the reason why we will get the better version of social media faster.

drexlspivey 4y ago
What if your server that is run by a hobbyist suddenly shuts down without any notice? If they had an accident for example or they got hacked or whatever
- rcade 4y ago
  Most instances follow the Mastodon Covenant, whose promises include giving users three months warning before a shutdown. https://joinmastodon.org/covenant https://joinmastodon.org/covenant
- vidarh 4y ago
  If you're concerned about that, back up regularly, or pick an instance not run by a hobbyist, or run your own, or pay one of the commercial hosters to do it for you.
  - codeflo 4y ago
    I love the moving of goalposts that's happening here. "Just pick a server", "you can always migrate" moves to "you can always migrate if you happened to have picked a server not run by a hobbyist". Which, BTW, isn't even a filter criterion on the often linked instances.social. Also, you can't back up your followers.
    - weinzierl 4y ago
      You can't back up your followers, but as long as the old instance exits, is not banned and is cooperative you can move your followers from one instance to another. Yes, that's a lot of "ifs" and doesn't help at all if the instance you are on is already defederated, which was the point that started this thread. I think Mastodon is a tiny bit better than Twitter in that, at least you have a chance to move as long as things are good. If that makes a practical difference, I don 't know...

aquova 4y ago

codeflo 4y ago
Peer to peer networks, with servers being purely optional for convenience (for convenient access from mobile, for example). Nothing about the social experience -- including your identity -- being tied to the "server" you're using to access the network. Technology has advanced since the invention of IRC.
- viraptor 4y ago
  Yet nobody really showed how to solve p2p in a way that supports: moderation, not downloading massive amount of data, account recovery, safe protocol upgrades. For example scuttlebutt exists and the initial connection involves "This “inital syncing” process can take up to an hour and use a fair amount of data.", you can't lose your keys, and unless something changed, moderation is still just wishful thinking "Presently, there is a "flag" feature, which is an extremely strong negative signal. If somebody is behaving poorly, feel free to flag them." I acknowledge that Mastodon is not perfect, but raising that as "badly designed and engineered" seems weird, when it's the most decentralised, actually working solution we've got.

ehnto 4y ago

> fragments the community I think this is a feature for most communities to be honest. Twitter is great at inter-networking, and a decent soap-box, but communities there are shallow and when your audience is "everyone on the platform" the chilling effect means only certain types of people are participating honestly and in full. There's probably some great communities that happen to be on twitter in spite of there being almost no open functionality that helps with that, but I bet they would all grow and foster better conversations if they added a discord server or something similar. Twitter is about as good as a blog comment section for long-term community building.

codeflo 4y ago
I agree that subcommunities are a useful feature. That only proves my point, though. The positive example you give, Discord servers, are a lot more like subreddits than they are like Mastodon servers. You can join multiple of them, the power of the moderator is local and doesn't affect your account as a whole. Discord and Reddit are of course centralized services, but in theory there's nothing preventing a decentralized system from having a similar feature.

tjpnz 4y ago

I just downloaded the app for a second time and tried to create an account. I failed. I thought I'd try mastodon.social but couldn't find it on any of the lists so chose the search option. Found it but it wouldn't let me register an account. Go go site, there's a register button but rather than taking me to a signup form I just get a big wall of text about how I can't be a sexist or a transphobe. Fine, I won't. But why can't I register?

vidarh 4y ago
So you pre-decided to sign up for a specific instance which was closed to signups and is then surprised you can't sign up. Go to joinmastodon.org or instances.social, not directly to a specific instance.
- tjpnz 4y ago
  >So you pre-decided to sign up for a specific instance which was closed to signups and is then surprised you can't sign up. I saw that elonjet had found a new home there so assumed I wouldn't have any trouble signing up. The "Create Account" button on mastodon.social seemed promising too.
  - LightG 4y ago
    Just take your time and get familiar. I wemt through some teething troubles but have found it to be worth it.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    The "Create Account" button does indeed let you create a Mastodon account. Just not on mastodon.social. I can't seem to reconcile your description with what happens when you press that button, though.
    - Tassels 4y ago
      The official app has a significantly shittier UX than the webui. Third party apps provide a better experience, but randos who haven't already been on mastodon for years don't know that. This is where I've found a lot of the friction lives.

darkerside 4y ago

It's interesting that now, when it would be most relevant, discussion about a social media platform running on blockchain has all but disappeared. If not now, then when?

whitepaint 4y ago
Because blockchains are definitely not built for that..?
codeflo 4y ago
Assuming you mean an actual blockchain and aren't just using it, as some people seem to do, as a catch-all term for cryptographic signatures, it's expensive overkill. Social media really doesn't need to pay the brutal computational costs to solve the Byzantine generals problem. You don't need to establish an immutable record under adversarial conditions because there's no "double spend" problem. A simple synchronization mechanism for cryptographically signed posts (to prove authorship) is enough.

323 4y ago

> But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic Jack linked to nostr which tries to solve some of these problems: https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768 https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768 > The problem with Mastodon and similar programs: - User identities are attached to domain names controlled by third-parties; - Server owners can ban you, just like Twitter; Server owners can also block other servers; - Migration between servers is an afterthought and can only be accomplished if servers cooperate. It doesn't work in an adversarial environment (all followers are lost); - There are no clear incentives to run servers, therefore they tend to be run by enthusiasts and people who want to have their name attached to a cool domain. Then, users are subject to the despotism of a single person, which is often worse than that of a big company like Twitter, and they can't migrate out; - Since servers tend to be run amateurishly, they are often abandoned after a while — which is effectively the same as banning everybody; - It doesn't make sense to have a ton of servers if updates from every server will have to be painfully pushed (and saved!) to a ton of other servers. This point is exacerbated by the fact that servers tend to exist in huge numbers, therefore more data has to be passed to more places more often; - For the specific example of video sharing, ActivityPub enthusiasts realized it would be completely impossible to transmit video from server to server the way text notes are, so they decided to keep the video hosted only from the single instance where it was posted to, which is similar to the Nostr approach. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#very-short-summary-of-how-it-works-if-you-dont-plan-to-read-anything-else https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#very-short-summary-o...

r721 4y ago
Previous HN discussions of Nostr: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061 (11 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360 (22 days ago)
vidarh 4y ago
You can easily achieve the same with ActivityPub relays and a few small tweaks - if this turns out to actually.be useful it'd be easy to provide gatewaying relays for those who care.

kybernetyk 4y ago

fredgrott 4y ago
unless they are German American :)
amelius 4y ago
Wait, I was under the impression that Germans are good at engineering.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  Wait until you hear about their railways.
JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
> > There's something in the German soul that makes them great at building cars. But lacking in design. See how German supercars look plain vis-a-vis the Italian ones
- ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
  Yeah, but the Italians are rubbish at buildings (source: I went to Rome and half the buildings are in ruins)
  - shepherdjerred 4y ago
    I know that this is a (very funny) joke, but when I visited Rome I was absolutely astonished that humans could build something so long ago and still stand today. Most people don't have such a visible (obvious), lasting impact on the physical world.
    - ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
      Joking aside, Rome does have some amazing old architecture. The Pantheon's dome ceiling is remarkable and that's just one example.

beowulfey 4y ago

I am a little younger than the days of decentralized social media, but I caught the tail end of it. To me, Mastodon feels like an “email address” for social media. I think a lot of people are so used to centralized platforms that it seems crazy to have it be decentralized again. I suspect as Mastodon grows, there will be more servers that become popular and will likely host the bulk of people, in much the same way that gmail pulled in the bulk of email users—but it will still be possible to have other “addresses” too. The idea is starting to grow on me.

mmastrac 4y ago
Technology Connections put it well https://hachyderm.io/@TechConnectify@mas.to/109529844854465065 https://hachyderm.io/@TechConnectify@mas.to/1095298448544650... > "Imagine you signed up for a sort of reverse-email address where your sent emails landed on a public page that anyone who knew your address could read if they wanted to and even follow you for more."
- beowulfey 4y ago
  Yes! I think the reason people struggle with Mastodon is they implicitly understand that picking a server is, whether they want it to be or not, a reflection of their online persona, and they don’t know how to find or gauge servers to see if they might “fit”. I think universities should immediately make official instances for students and faculty. At least in academic twitter circles having an official institutional home would probably help a ton with migration; it would feel like a natural place to be.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> Mastodon feels like an “email address” for social media And it’s waiting for its AOL and Gmail.
- rchaud 4y ago
  which is why email is a bad analogy. email adoption was fast because it was a gamechanger compared to faxes and telegraphs. ISPs offered inboxes, as did universities and offices, years before Hotmail arrived. Additionally, people got email because they wanted to communicate with friends. People get on social media mostly to escape boredom, not intentionally communicate with stranngers.

weinzierl 4y ago

I think I'm in the same demographic as you, but I don't see it as negatively. Most of the issues you mentioned don't bother me as much or could be fixed. The only thing that concerns me is the risk of defederation. Why would anyone want to run an instance if they (and their users) are at the risk of being excluded on the whim of a small and intransparent group of people? I mean so far moderation on Mastodon seems to work, but it still does not sit right with me that we basically replaced a dictatorship with the (benevolt) oligoply of the group of most popular server's owners. In the end it's all a matter of trust and it would be good if more organizantions ran their own instances so that we would have bigger plurality of large instances.

skissane 4y ago
> I mean so far moderation on Mastodon seems to work, but it still does not sit right with me that we basically replaced a dictatorship with the (benevolt) oligoply of the group of most popular server's owners. Elon Musk has made some dumb moderation calls, but he seems open to changing some of them in response to popular feedback and media pressure. I don’t know if the same is true of those people. If new Twitter bans whoever, odds are high everybody will hear about it, and if they shouldn’t be banned, odds are decent it will be reversed. I’m not sure the same is true for this “oligopoly” for whom few know who they are. Seems even worse than Twitter as far as transparency and accountability goes
- mmastrac 4y ago
  Has he really though? Apparently now he's banning journalists asking him for comments on stories. It seems to be getting worse and more arbitrary on his end. https://taylorlorenz.substack.com/p/elon-musk-banned-me-from-twitter https://taylorlorenz.substack.com/p/elon-musk-banned-me-from...
  - skissane 4y ago
    Ariadna Jacobs says that Taylor Lorenz doxxed her, by asking her for her home address for “fact-checking” purposes, promising that it was not for publication, and then publishing it anyway - https://mobile.twitter.com/littlemissjacob/status/1603575149524971521 https://mobile.twitter.com/littlemissjacob/status/1603575149... Jacobs has been calling on Musk to ban Lorenz for doxxing her. Maybe he (or his staff) have listened. I’m sure Lorenz knows about this, so when she claims she “doesn’t know” why she was suspended, and implies that it was for asking Musk questions or criticising him, I think people should take that claim with a grain of salt

petesergeant 4y ago

I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, but I’ve switched off my Twitter and I’m going to really try and make Mastodon work because I think all issues except the network effect are surmountable here

ajross 4y ago

> Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me. I don't want to be too glib, because your technical concerns are legitimate and well-argued. But... have you actually tried using it? It works fine! It doesn't work as well as Twitter and has rough edges, but at this point it's well past the "will it work?" stage. There are real people there posting real content and engaging in real ways. If Twitter were to disappear tomorrow, people could all just move over and... it would be fine. So it's OK to criticize, but the idea that it's somehow fatally flawed seems weird to me. It works fine.

jackmott42 4y ago

Yeah so instead of worrying about all the stuff you are worrying about, I've just been using Mastodon and its been fine. I see the toots from the people I follow, I find the people I want to follow. Its been fine.

BeefWellington 4y ago

Every one of your complaints about individual servers apply to Twitter as it is already, and some of them I see as features. For instance, not completely losing your community because Twitter or Discord or whatever parent company decides one day you don't belong there. You can move accounts to a different server if you stop liking where you're at, which is a feature nobody has elsewhere it seems. I view Mastodon as if Twitter, a Microblogging platform, and IRC had a child. Let's take the reverse tack though, and agree with your opinion that it's a clusterfuck. Twitter should be threatened by Mastodon because they're losing users to it in spite of all those "problems".

that_guy_iain 4y ago

> I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power. Personally, I think we should have this stuff regulated. We have power, mail, phones, internet, etc but most of the internet just isn't. Which seems really odd considering that for most people their Outlook/Google email is far more important to them than their postal mail but can be taken away from them because they emailed a photo to a doctor. Your revenue generating Twitter account can be suspended because you tweeted something some random person just didn't like with no real recourse. YouTube is probably the worse for kneecapping people's livilhoods over dodgy claims. Decenteralized just seems like it'll be a pain for me to find stuff. And instead of being held hostage by a big company with policies and processes and money to sue them. You're being held hostage by some random guy who may decide he doesn't like being connected to a certain network and all of sudden you've got to create a new account somewhere else.

deleted 4y ago
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unloco 4y ago

Mastodon, regardless of your server, can see and connect to everyone in the federation. The servers are just for how your name appears, local and moderation rules. infosec.exchange can talk to and see content in mastodon.social

rc_kas 4y ago

I have build https://sendie.com https://sendie.com as an alternative. Twitter doesn't seem to care about me and my 100 users :D