6 ms·

Note that Mastodon is third in the list. I consider that a success. 1. They ignore you. 2. They laugh at you. 3. They fight you. <<<--- we are here. 4. You win

by m4lvin 4y ago

Note that Mastodon is third in the list. I consider that a success. 1. They ignore you. 2. They laugh at you. 3. They fight you. <<<--- we are here. 4. You win.

jerrygenser 4y ago
I love this quote. I also wish Elizabeth Holmes didn't ruin it for me.
afandian 4y ago
I mean, what a great way to find out about alternatives. I'd never heard of "Post" and "Nostr".
- zetazzed 4y ago
  Post (https://post.news https://post.news) is probably the closest to a well funded Twitter clone that I’ve seen. Very similar UX. Supposed to have more emphasis on publishers but that’s not very apparent yet in my feed there. Right now I use sigmoid.social for tech stuff and Post for mainstream chatter.
  - synu 4y ago
    I’m excited to check it out, signed up for the waiting list today.
    - jrmg 4y ago
      Please don’t just move to another centralized platform. Mastodon is right there, and working.
      - synu 4y ago
        I have a Mastodon, for what it’s worth, but never really figured out how to find a community that resonates with me. It’s quite possible I’m using it wrong in some way.
        jrmg 4y ago
        I’m never sure what people mean when they say things like this. I found community in Twitter by following people I knew, a small number of organizations, websites and celebrities, then occasionally following people I learned about through retweets or replies. How did you do it on Twitter? Did you use the search functionality? What did you do with it? The idea of doing that just seems overwhelming to me. I mean all this genuinely - this is not intended as a snark post! I am sure your way of using Twitter is just as valid as mine, and maybe it’ll give me some ideas for things I could do differently.
        synu 4y ago
        I wasn’t able to find anyone I know, and the incoming discovery feeds were people I didn’t know anything about talking about stuff I wasn’t interested in. Overall it was just really quiet and felt empty. Maybe this means I joined the wrong server, not sure. Eventually it seems someone deleted the server I was on, I am not sure if I can do anything about that or not. When I first joined Twitter it seemed like more people I knew where there, so that initial bootstrapping was a lot easier.
        jrmg 4y ago
        It sounds like another server would’ve served you better - but I get what you’re saying, it’s not only that, it’s the nature of Mastodon (or, ActivityPub, I guess). Servers basically only know about their own users, and people they follow. I joined Twitter in the fairly early days, and my network grew from tech folks I’d met in real life out (‘Are you on Twitter? What’s your handle?’ was a common refrain at meetups and conferences). Later, non-tech friends, news organizations and celebrities joined. It was easy to organically grow my feed without search or algorithmic recommendations, and I never came to really use either. If you were to try Mastodon again, my recommendation would be to initially join either a large server (mastodon.social, mas.to etc.) or one that targets an interest you have (tech?). On the targeted one, the local feed might be interesting. On the larger one, the federated feed will be pretty complete and searchable for hashtags. Wherever you join, as you follow people it’ll become more rounded out and you’ll start to see boosts from people you follow that might reveal others to follow - from all sorts of servers. It’ll feel more like early Twitter before the algorithmic feed. I have to admit, server choice paralyzed me for a long time! I finally joined a local geographic one - sfba.social - and it’s pretty good. Being the SF Bay Area the local feed can have a good mix of local and tech stuff (and a lot of random uninteresting ephemera, I will admit…) and it’s big enough that the federated feed is pretty full too (perhaps too full!). But server choice doesn’t _really_ matter - it’s easy to move and I haven’t seen any criticism of folks moving.
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        That's true. The only proper way that I can see to join Mastodon is to have your own personal instance. And maybe that's how social media should be, but then the difference between that and a webserver with an RSS feed is getting quite small.
        jrmg 4y ago
        The user experience is quite different though? And I think there’s value in decentralization even without the granularity of a server-per-person. Sure, some Mastodon servers might go down, or some admins might do unwise things, but damage should be limited. the entire network - I hope - would not fail. Of course, I’ve lived through the death of Usenet, so perhaps I should not be so optimistic :-/ Edit: not to mention the arguable centralization of email, blogging, and perhaps soon podcasting :-(
      - holler 4y ago
        > Please don’t just move to another centralized platform. Do you believe that all centralized platforms are inherently evil?
        rsynnott 4y ago
        Well, they’re particularly vulnerable to the current twitter failure mode.
        holler 4y ago
        Sure, but there are other centralized services not implementing such policies, and I don't think Twitter would exist today in current form if not for being centralized & well funded. I guess there are just tradeoffs in either choice.
        jrmg 4y ago
        Definitely not! It just seems a bit ‘risky’ to use another centralized Twitter-like when Mastodon seems to be working. I’d rather we gave it a try than another centralized service.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
    > probably the closest to a well funded Twitter clone Probably, but who needs a clone of what we had and didn't work out? Lets make the next thing better than the last. If it's a clone, then it's another big money-backed "engagement maximisation" play. (2) Post seems to be dodgy around micropayments (1) 1) https://post.news/terms_conditions https://post.news/terms_conditions https://home.social/@raccoon/109526574444237572 https://home.social/@raccoon/109526574444237572 2) https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/post-news-twitter-alternative-a16z/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/post-news-twitter-alternat...
  - joegahona 4y ago
    I got off the waitlist on Post a few weeks ago and am really disappointed. It’s a giant anti-Musk diatribe no matter who I follow. It’s the worst parts of Twitter, just more concentrated. If that’s their target market, then so be it, but I tried something new to get away from that angst, not wallow in it. Post’s features are also clunky, but that’s understandable with a new product.
  - ttepasse 4y ago
    > well funded Twitter clone In a way that are the failure modes of Twitter itself. Centralized, funded by VCs, susceptible to the whims of the millionaire owners. Wasn’t Post the clone where, according to their TOS, you couldn’t "discriminate by net worth"?
    - SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
      That's the one. https://mastodon.social/@taylorlorenz/109422846935825930 https://mastodon.social/@taylorlorenz/109422846935825930 But they might have changed that "no criticising the rich" policy now. Since it's such a bad look.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - astrange 4y ago
      That’s a good policy. You should discriminate by net assets instead. Someone with a zero net worth because they have millions in assets and millions in debt is probably actually rich - otherwise how’d they get the loans? Same for a new dentist who’s negative due to student debt but is about to have more than enough income to handle it.
- evan_ 4y ago
  That they included Nostr was interesting to me because it’s far smaller than the others but Jack Dorsey has been promoting it recently.
- shubhamkrm 4y ago
  The irony is Jack has invested in and actively promotes nostr.
  - RustyRussell 4y ago
    "donated to" not "invested in". It's just a plain FOSS project.
- legutierr 4y ago
  Nostr is perhaps the most interesting of the list. Fully decentralized; messages are cryptographically signed; users are identified by their private keys; following is done on the client side, with no stateful server-side component; messages broadcast via stateless relays. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr Overall design seems very simple. It feels a bit like email, in the sense that you could probably put together a barebones implementation like sendmail and still be fully functional.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Very interesting, thank you. To what degree is it decentralized?
    - legutierr 4y ago
      Per my understanding: most important functionality is implemented in the client; clients can connect to any relay server, and any number of relay servers; messages can be relayed by any number of relay servers; and anyone can spool up a new relay server at any time.
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        Ok. I will definitely have a look. My decision so far was to go and run a one-person Mastodon instance but this sounds intriguing.
        leesalminen 4y ago
        I was able to get nostr-rs-relay[0] running in <5 minutes on fly.io. Got all my client apps and those of ~5 friends writing to and posting from it. Hasn't crashed yet. [0] https://github.com/scsibug/nostr-rs-relay https://github.com/scsibug/nostr-rs-relay
        jacquesm 4y ago
Vaslo 4y ago
No one outside of tech nerds or PR departments is going to get seriously into Mastodon. My wife and her lib/moderate friends checked it out and went right back to Twitter. Too confusing, one husband was banned from one instance and caused issues getting onto others, hard to understand why.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Mastodon has moved well beyond where I thought it would in spite of having some pretty glaring shortcomings. If they fix those it will explode. A 'Mastondoninabox' distribution would be a very nice starting point.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pohl 4y ago
  I know from personal experience that this is exactly wrong. Most of the left-leaning blue-checks that I followed on Twitter became mastodon users starting about a week after he carried the literal sink in through the door. It accelerated during subsequent events. While I still laughed when Paul Ford recently characterized Mastodon as "socialists who solder", the truth is that far more ordinary folk than I thought possible made it past the senseless UX hurdles that Mastodon makes new users jump over right away. I was amazed. This new policy against sharing Mastodon links makes me think their numbers are showing an exodus of users toward it.
JasserInicide 4y ago
Mastodon is the last thing people need to be moving toward. It's an even more isolated bubble than people already experience
cuteboy19 4y ago
Quoting Elizabeth Holmes?
- frankgrimesjr 4y ago
  In case you weren't aware, she was quoting Gandhi. Which I'm assuming the parent commenter was doing too.
  - m4lvin 4y ago
    The internet also says that even Gahndi did not exactly say this ;)

by m4lvin 4y ago

Note that Mastodon is third in the list. I consider that a success. 1. They ignore you. 2. They laugh at you. 3. They fight you. <<<--- we are here. 4. You win.

jerrygenser 4y ago

I love this quote. I also wish Elizabeth Holmes didn't ruin it for me.

afandian 4y ago

I mean, what a great way to find out about alternatives. I'd never heard of "Post" and "Nostr".

zetazzed 4y ago
Post (https://post.news https://post.news) is probably the closest to a well funded Twitter clone that I’ve seen. Very similar UX. Supposed to have more emphasis on publishers but that’s not very apparent yet in my feed there. Right now I use sigmoid.social for tech stuff and Post for mainstream chatter.
- synu 4y ago
  I’m excited to check it out, signed up for the waiting list today.
  - jrmg 4y ago
    Please don’t just move to another centralized platform. Mastodon is right there, and working.
    - synu 4y ago
      I have a Mastodon, for what it’s worth, but never really figured out how to find a community that resonates with me. It’s quite possible I’m using it wrong in some way.
      - jrmg 4y ago
        I’m never sure what people mean when they say things like this. I found community in Twitter by following people I knew, a small number of organizations, websites and celebrities, then occasionally following people I learned about through retweets or replies. How did you do it on Twitter? Did you use the search functionality? What did you do with it? The idea of doing that just seems overwhelming to me. I mean all this genuinely - this is not intended as a snark post! I am sure your way of using Twitter is just as valid as mine, and maybe it’ll give me some ideas for things I could do differently.
        synu 4y ago
        I wasn’t able to find anyone I know, and the incoming discovery feeds were people I didn’t know anything about talking about stuff I wasn’t interested in. Overall it was just really quiet and felt empty. Maybe this means I joined the wrong server, not sure. Eventually it seems someone deleted the server I was on, I am not sure if I can do anything about that or not. When I first joined Twitter it seemed like more people I knew where there, so that initial bootstrapping was a lot easier.
        jrmg 4y ago
        It sounds like another server would’ve served you better - but I get what you’re saying, it’s not only that, it’s the nature of Mastodon (or, ActivityPub, I guess). Servers basically only know about their own users, and people they follow. I joined Twitter in the fairly early days, and my network grew from tech folks I’d met in real life out (‘Are you on Twitter? What’s your handle?’ was a common refrain at meetups and conferences). Later, non-tech friends, news organizations and celebrities joined. It was easy to organically grow my feed without search or algorithmic recommendations, and I never came to really use either. If you were to try Mastodon again, my recommendation would be to initially join either a large server (mastodon.social, mas.to etc.) or one that targets an interest you have (tech?). On the targeted one, the local feed might be interesting. On the larger one, the federated feed will be pretty complete and searchable for hashtags. Wherever you join, as you follow people it’ll become more rounded out and you’ll start to see boosts from people you follow that might reveal others to follow - from all sorts of servers. It’ll feel more like early Twitter before the algorithmic feed. I have to admit, server choice paralyzed me for a long time! I finally joined a local geographic one - sfba.social - and it’s pretty good. Being the SF Bay Area the local feed can have a good mix of local and tech stuff (and a lot of random uninteresting ephemera, I will admit…) and it’s big enough that the federated feed is pretty full too (perhaps too full!). But server choice doesn’t _really_ matter - it’s easy to move and I haven’t seen any criticism of folks moving.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      That's true. The only proper way that I can see to join Mastodon is to have your own personal instance. And maybe that's how social media should be, but then the difference between that and a webserver with an RSS feed is getting quite small.
      - jrmg 4y ago
        The user experience is quite different though? And I think there’s value in decentralization even without the granularity of a server-per-person. Sure, some Mastodon servers might go down, or some admins might do unwise things, but damage should be limited. the entire network - I hope - would not fail. Of course, I’ve lived through the death of Usenet, so perhaps I should not be so optimistic :-/ Edit: not to mention the arguable centralization of email, blogging, and perhaps soon podcasting :-(
    - holler 4y ago
      > Please don’t just move to another centralized platform. Do you believe that all centralized platforms are inherently evil?
      - rsynnott 4y ago
        Well, they’re particularly vulnerable to the current twitter failure mode.
        holler 4y ago
        Sure, but there are other centralized services not implementing such policies, and I don't think Twitter would exist today in current form if not for being centralized & well funded. I guess there are just tradeoffs in either choice.
      - jrmg 4y ago
        Definitely not! It just seems a bit ‘risky’ to use another centralized Twitter-like when Mastodon seems to be working. I’d rather we gave it a try than another centralized service.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  > probably the closest to a well funded Twitter clone Probably, but who needs a clone of what we had and didn't work out? Lets make the next thing better than the last. If it's a clone, then it's another big money-backed "engagement maximisation" play. (2) Post seems to be dodgy around micropayments (1) 1) https://post.news/terms_conditions https://post.news/terms_conditions https://home.social/@raccoon/109526574444237572 https://home.social/@raccoon/109526574444237572 2) https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/post-news-twitter-alternative-a16z/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/post-news-twitter-alternat...
- joegahona 4y ago
  I got off the waitlist on Post a few weeks ago and am really disappointed. It’s a giant anti-Musk diatribe no matter who I follow. It’s the worst parts of Twitter, just more concentrated. If that’s their target market, then so be it, but I tried something new to get away from that angst, not wallow in it. Post’s features are also clunky, but that’s understandable with a new product.
- ttepasse 4y ago
  > well funded Twitter clone In a way that are the failure modes of Twitter itself. Centralized, funded by VCs, susceptible to the whims of the millionaire owners. Wasn’t Post the clone where, according to their TOS, you couldn’t "discriminate by net worth"?
  - SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
    That's the one. https://mastodon.social/@taylorlorenz/109422846935825930 https://mastodon.social/@taylorlorenz/109422846935825930 But they might have changed that "no criticising the rich" policy now. Since it's such a bad look.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - astrange 4y ago
    That’s a good policy. You should discriminate by net assets instead. Someone with a zero net worth because they have millions in assets and millions in debt is probably actually rich - otherwise how’d they get the loans? Same for a new dentist who’s negative due to student debt but is about to have more than enough income to handle it.
evan_ 4y ago
That they included Nostr was interesting to me because it’s far smaller than the others but Jack Dorsey has been promoting it recently.
shubhamkrm 4y ago
The irony is Jack has invested in and actively promotes nostr.
- RustyRussell 4y ago
  "donated to" not "invested in". It's just a plain FOSS project.
legutierr 4y ago
Nostr is perhaps the most interesting of the list. Fully decentralized; messages are cryptographically signed; users are identified by their private keys; following is done on the client side, with no stateful server-side component; messages broadcast via stateless relays. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr Overall design seems very simple. It feels a bit like email, in the sense that you could probably put together a barebones implementation like sendmail and still be fully functional.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Very interesting, thank you. To what degree is it decentralized?
  - legutierr 4y ago
    Per my understanding: most important functionality is implemented in the client; clients can connect to any relay server, and any number of relay servers; messages can be relayed by any number of relay servers; and anyone can spool up a new relay server at any time.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Ok. I will definitely have a look. My decision so far was to go and run a one-person Mastodon instance but this sounds intriguing.
      - leesalminen 4y ago
        I was able to get nostr-rs-relay[0] running in <5 minutes on fly.io. Got all my client apps and those of ~5 friends writing to and posting from it. Hasn't crashed yet. [0] https://github.com/scsibug/nostr-rs-relay https://github.com/scsibug/nostr-rs-relay
        jacquesm 4y ago

Vaslo 4y ago

No one outside of tech nerds or PR departments is going to get seriously into Mastodon. My wife and her lib/moderate friends checked it out and went right back to Twitter. Too confusing, one husband was banned from one instance and caused issues getting onto others, hard to understand why.

jacquesm 4y ago
Mastodon has moved well beyond where I thought it would in spite of having some pretty glaring shortcomings. If they fix those it will explode. A 'Mastondoninabox' distribution would be a very nice starting point.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pohl 4y ago
I know from personal experience that this is exactly wrong. Most of the left-leaning blue-checks that I followed on Twitter became mastodon users starting about a week after he carried the literal sink in through the door. It accelerated during subsequent events. While I still laughed when Paul Ford recently characterized Mastodon as "socialists who solder", the truth is that far more ordinary folk than I thought possible made it past the senseless UX hurdles that Mastodon makes new users jump over right away. I was amazed. This new policy against sharing Mastodon links makes me think their numbers are showing an exodus of users toward it.

JasserInicide 4y ago

Mastodon is the last thing people need to be moving toward. It's an even more isolated bubble than people already experience

cuteboy19 4y ago

Quoting Elizabeth Holmes?

frankgrimesjr 4y ago
In case you weren't aware, she was quoting Gandhi. Which I'm assuming the parent commenter was doing too.
- m4lvin 4y ago
  The internet also says that even Gahndi did not exactly say this ;)