23 ms·

Mastodon's federation model encourages specific instances with peculiar rules

182 points by AstixAndBelix 4y ago

detaro 4y ago
I'm aware of very few instances that insist that people only post about whatever the "theme" of the instance is, so I don't think this is actually a big issue in practice.
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  Which instance would get more users and hold more power, @mastodon.com or @mylittlepony4ever.net? Which instance would you want to hold your entire online persona? @mozilla.com or @stopclimatechange.org? very few people have silly email addresses because they realize sending their CV or writing to a friend or collegue with fuckjoebiden@racism.ftw is insane. but somehow when creating their main online account on mastodon they sign up to the silliest instances and bind their own identity to these niche communities
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    > "your entire online persona" Are you limited to one instance or persona? Feels like an assumption based on twitter style advertising requirements where they don't want multiple sign ups as it maks it harder to track you.
    - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
      You're not limited, but most people just want to have at least one profile which has their name and photo where they can have a presence online linked to their real life persona. By having so few generalist instances the risk is that they grow too large and gain too much power over the fediverse.
      - constantcrying 4y ago
        >most people just want to have at least one profile which has their name and photo where they can have a presence online linked to their real life persona. I am so absurdly out of touch with "most people"...
    - jagermo 4y ago
      No, you are not. I have one persona that moved over from twitter, one for ttrpgs. I think, we need to go back to the basics with people. You are allowed to have more than one email, for example. Facebook brainwashed people into believing they can only be one thing online.
      - unshavedyak 4y ago
        Slight tangent though; but i'm starting to believe we're going back to only being a single thing online. I used to rotate accounts frequently for privacy sake. These days it's becoming shockingly easy to link accounts.. ML is only going to make it easier. I prefer many anonymous accounts.. but i think those days are moving further and further behind us.
    - amadeuspagel 4y ago
      Twitter makes it very easy to manage multiple accounts. You can be logged in with several accounts at once, and easily switch between them in the twitter UI.
      - faizmokhtar 4y ago
        I think this is possible on the Mastodon app. There's an option to login to multiple accounts but I haven't try it yet since I only have a single account.
      - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
        Not only does Mastodon's official mobile app support multiple accounts and makes it easy to switch, it shows notifications for all of the accounts.
      - zimpenfish 4y ago
        Pinafore (web FE) allows you to be logged into multiple instances with an easy switch between them. Soapbox (web FE, also Pulpit, Mangane since they are forks) handles multiple ogged in accounts on the same instance (which is handy if e.g. you've got an admin/mod role account or you've got a lot of bots on there.) Pretty sure this will be a common feature in frontends that get popular in 2023.
      - delecti 4y ago
        Isn't the same true on Mastodon? In fact, it's even easier since they're separate websites, so you can be actively logged into multiple at once. My mastodon.social and porn.social (not sure the latter actually exists) sessions remain as seamlessly separate as my hackernews and reddit logins.
        boredhedgehog 4y ago
        That's visually separate, but how easily would your identity be traceable by prying users or admins? Who would be able to see your IP and link your political/hobbyist persona to your porn account?
  - constantcrying 4y ago
    >very few people have silly email addresses because they realize sending their CV Back when I was a teenager, I was told not to create accounts under my own name. I have many silly E-mail accounts. E-mail can be a professional medium. You don't apply via Twitter DM, I hope. >bind their own identity to these niche communities Just migrate if you don't like it anymore.
    - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
      Why would your teenager years be relevant here? Nowadays companies are online and jobs are online. There are an infinite amount of reasons why you would want to link your online identity to your personal one. You're not forced to and you should still be able to make anonymous and silly accounts, but this is not the point. >You don't apply via Twitter DM, I hope. If a company has a Twitter, why wouldn't I? Many young businesses less revering of e-mail gladly use Twitter as a valid avenue for these kinds of communications. >just migrate Mastodon handles migration terribly. You can either redirect or straight up move. In both cases your old profile is still in full display and your posts don't transfer.
      - constantcrying 4y ago
        >If a company has a Twitter, why wouldn't I? Many young businesses less revering of e-mail gladly use Twitter as a valid avenue for these kinds of communications. What a world...
    - fknorangesite 4y ago
      > You don't apply via Twitter DM, I hope. I was hiring recently, and one of the ways we advertised the position was that I tweeted the job description, and I arranged with the our social media team for them to retweet it for additional visibility. Candidates responding to that tweet generally contacted me via twitter DM - why wouldn't they? It's not like I conducted interviews in that medium, but it's not really any different than the people who initiated contact via email.
    - nibbleshifter 4y ago
      I've applied for (and gotten) more than one job where the initial reach out was a DM...
  - int_19h 4y ago
    People will learn. It didn't happen overnight with email, either.
- rolenthedeep 4y ago
  One of the running jokes around mastodon right now is innocent people singing up on an instance like meow.social because they like cats. Then they realize it's specifically a furry instance. Some stick around because they like the people, others migrate to a new instance.
okaleniuk 4y ago
What you describe is, of course, possible. You can create a personal fidonet/usenet-like echo conference with nothing more than a bunch of e-mail redirection rules. But people don't want that. I checked. There is no such thing as an "intellectual need". All the needs are fundamentally emotional. Mastodon addresses the identity need, it creates the sense of a community, and, as all the social media, it grants both cheap entertainment and immediate gratitude for conformity. It is a good "social network", it's just what we call a phenomena of "social network" is essentially shit.
- akira2501 4y ago
  > the social network itslef [sic] should be as boring and generic as possible. Well, in a certain sense, he is describing one mechanism of the peculiar popularity of sites like 4chan; however, I think it just highlights how incomplete the thesis is. There's clearly much more to it than just these simple mechanics.
beertoagunfight 4y ago
Isn’t the point while point of the federated feed is that it cuts across instances?
- advisedwang 4y ago
  Users on different instances can follow each other and see each others posts, but any given account is on a specific instance and must follow that instance's rules.
  - albert180 4y ago
    Which are mostly "Don't be an asshole (No direct swearing, posting Racist Stuff etc.) or do not post illegal stuff"
constantcrying 4y ago
??? Is there a single instance which forbids you from talking about a certain topic? I really don't see the issue, even hyper specific instances let you talk about other things. Where is the actual problem? Why would it matter that your account is some specific instance?
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  I've seen plenty of instances where if you dare to be critical of Palestine they straight up ban you for being a fascist capitalist pig. You can be as polite as possible, but if one of the rules is "fascists not welcome" they can just accuse you of being a fascist and ban you regardless of your arguments. I'm sure there are plenty of other instances that behave the same way according other areas of the political spectrum. This has just been my experience when I wanted to sign up 5 years ago, when most people using this platform were left leaning and tech savvy
  - morbidious 4y ago
    If they don't want your opinions, forget it and join a like minded instance where they value your thoughts. You seem to be disappointed with the left-wing ideology, not Mastodon itself. Leftist will not tolerate anything other than what they think is right, so it's expected that they will ban everyone who doesn't share their mindset.
    - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
      I explicitely said I used this as an example because it was my personal experience, but I'm sure this happens for every single politically charged Mastodon servers regardless of political leaning. I'm not disappointed with any ideology and this had nothing to do with politics. Please don't charge my opinion with ulterior motives
      - morbidious 4y ago
        Fair
allenbrunson 4y ago
this doesn’t sound terribly likely to me, as an outcome. i am seeing a whole lot of criticisms of mastodon that, to me, sound like “social networking sites have always been bad, therefore mastodon must also be bad.” surely we can muster a little more optimism than that. i just posted my own “come to jesus” moment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34079668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34079668
- jjulius 4y ago
  >surely we can muster a little more optimism than that. Name one social media site and then explain how it was a net positive for society/outweighed all of it's toxic aspects.
  - krapp 4y ago
    >Name one social media site and then explain how it was a net positive for society/outweighed all of it's toxic aspects. That isn't something one can objectively measure.
    - jjulius 4y ago
      I have my own subjective opinions about social media, as does OP. OP suggested I inject positivity into mine, so I am curious to see what their subjective opinions are in an effort to perhaps shift my perspective.
  - marmadukester39 4y ago
    This one.
  - allenbrunson 4y ago
    i think that's asking the wrong question. i think most or all of them started off pretty good. where we went wrong is creating a system where social media sites are paid for with ads, which gives warped incentives to the owners of those sites. in that respect, federation is the answer. take the power away from anybody who could screw it all up for us.
ocq698nes3javxw 4y ago
poorest take i've seen on this page so far
dusted 4y ago
I'm so offended by the capitalization in this (potentially interesting) article that I didn't get past the first two paragraphs.
- xmcqdpt2 4y ago
  Also what's up with all the bold words all over the place? _Emphasis_ doesn't work when used *Everywhere*!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - thot_experiment 4y ago
    wild, i had to go back to the article after reading this comment to double check. my brain completely autocorrected everything and i didn't notice the formatting at all!
  - r00fus 4y ago
    This is annoying in a way that even my go-to "reader mode" doesn't fix either (unlike ads or autoplay videos etc).
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    It does, in the sense that it seems to mirror sentence-level emphasis in speech. (Even your comment sort of works - I'd drop the emphasis on "up" and "place" though.) It's definitely atypical. I think it wouldn't impact readability all that much, if not for the lack of capitalization at the start of sentences - the two abnormalities together make the text much harder to read than it should be.
    - xvector 4y ago
      Except when we read sentences, we expect to be reading sentences, not someone’s interpretation of what their voice would sound like transposed onto a sentence, using obscure formatting cues to accomplish this. Generally I find that the more people rely on emphasis and formatting, the poorer their writing skills are.
forgotpwd16 4y ago
>some could say: just create your account on a more generalist instance Close. I'ld have said host your own instance.
madrox 4y ago
This is not a bug. It's a feature. You see this today in subreddits, twitch channels, and discord servers, and the community is better for it. Places with community moderation have higher levels of engagement. I'm one of those people that preferred Twitter before it became overrun with politics. Not that I'm not political, but it's not what I wanted to go to Twitter for. There was no control over it since people tweeted about whatever was on their mind, which was sometimes interesting tech things, and the rest of the time was social issues. I migrated to topic-based sites as a result.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  How does conversations work between people on different instances when it comes to moderation? Is an entire conversation taking place on the instance the top post is on?
  - ezfe 4y ago
    The conversation happens across the instances. User reports first go to the instance of the reporter, but can also be anonymously forwarded on to the instance of the reported post as well. If a user is bothering someone on your instance, then either your instance or that users instance could take action. If your instance bans them, they won't be banned anywhere else. If their instance bans them, they will be fully suspended.
- Justsignedup 4y ago
  I think the argument he makes at the end is that "we should have a centralized account model" and then let exactly what you say shine. It'll be like a twitter reddit. Problem: If you sign up for say LEGO reddit, but want to post a geo-political thing, then suddenly YOU CANNOT because you need a new account. Reddit is about the subreddit's popularity Twitter is about personal popularity
  - madrox 4y ago
    I don't think that's a fediverse problem. Nothing is stopping a server from implementing OpenID or some other centralized identity solution. However, these things don't happen for a reason.
Finnucane 4y ago
I think this completely wrong. The fact that anybody can create an instance for any purpose they want is a good thing. The rest of the fediverse can choose the degree they wish to interact with that instance. But the possibilities of what can exist on the fediverse is not constrained at all.
imgabe 4y ago
> imagine if the only online profile where you could express yourself was through your old "Ancient Greek Literature Forum" account. that would be quite limiting, wouldn't it? I remember the days of small forums dedicated to niche topics. They usually had an “off-topic” board where members could socialize and talk about whatever. It was not limiting at all.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Not seeing a problem here either. It's free to create an account on however many instances and it lends itself to per-topic pseudonyms which is probably better than one identity everywhere anyway unless you're explicitly trying to build a self-brand. Even in the case of a single identity everywhere, it gives your followers a way to control which types of posts they see from you. Maybe they don't care about my explorations in UI design and programming and just want to see what pastries I've been cooking lately, in which case they can follow my account on a cooking-oriented Mastodon instance. That's actually one of my minor gripes with Twitter; it had no way to filter for topic which meant that even though I followed people I had an interest in my timeline still had a lot of stuff in it I didn't care about.
- seydor 4y ago
  it was separate , though and you could ignore it. I purposely remove people who mix their politics in their science from twitter, and it works, but i am left with a small number of people. Separate rooms is good.
neogodless 4y ago
I get the gist of this sentiment. It took me a while to migrate from the generic mainstream instance (mastodon.social) to a more specific one (hachyderm.io) because a lot of instances were regional (e.g. some country in the EU) or too narrowly defined (e.g. tabletop games). But the about page of hachyderm.io included a lot of broader interests that let me feel like joining that instance wouldn't give off the impression of a particularly deep but narrow interest (that isn't accurate). But who you are within Mastodon is not limited by the instance you created your account on! Especially since follows and posts are federated. A gentle reminder that your follows, Home feed, hashtags and the Federated timeline are not (overly) limited or filtered by the instance your account lives on. Only the Local timeline is 100% a view specific to that instance.
Barrin92 4y ago
>I am of the opinion that, to give the users the most freedom to let their personality shine, the social network itslef should be as boring and generic as possible. This sounds like the Thatcherism of social networks. "There's no such thing as a community, only individual posters". The sort of desolate environment that you get as a result of this is exactly what people are increasingly shunning. It's why people move to private chat groups, subreddits, niche twitter subcultures with memes that nobody even understands from the outside (intentionally so). This very site is strongly opinionated as well. The logical endpoint of generic platforms is the Youtube comment section. If a social network is supposed to be social it has to be about something. There needs to be something that ties the people in it together. Any video game speedrunning community, music subculture, whatever have you is more interesting than generic sites. Even if you have to move between groups sometimes, that cost is well worth it. The real world doesn't work like this either. Does anyone ever go to the "generic people meetup, where we do generic things"? Everyone is part of social networks, plural.
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  So you extrapolated a single quote from the post when the rest of the article describes exactly how to have highly personalized communities without the burden of binding your personal profile to them?
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    no, the article itself at the end actually agrees that the proposed solution of many small, generalist instances is a pipedream: "I personally don't think this will ever be possible, it can only serve as some nice little fantasy to keep me dreaming for better online spaces." This can never work because generic instances have absolutely nothing that prevents them from growing. After all if a space has no strong, unique characteristics, there's nothing that stops anyone from coming in. This is the ultimate fate of every unopinionated internet community, it "Eternal September"'s itself. The physical decentralization of Mastodon instances and the resulting tendency towards having unique instances with strict rules is the only thing stopping those instances from growing into a giant blob.
jwildeboer 4y ago
Millions of users seem to be OK with the decentralised approach :)
- Gigachad 4y ago
  For now until their accounts die off because the scattered collection of servers start to shut down.
  - unshavedyak 4y ago
    Hasn't bothered me with email. Though, regardless, i'm not sure what the fuss is about. Is Mastodon perfect? Of course not. I just don't want to be on Twitter. What do you suggest?
seydor 4y ago
Can we please go back to forums? The author is right, social media is about "me me me", users accumulating points in r/funny and then using it as social proof in r/geopolitics. Topical bubbles are the best, especially because they present only one aspect of each user. Since people don't use their real-life network in twitter/mastodon, i even thing that model is not social.
jrm4 4y ago
No, it doesn't really encourage closed off instances. I've been using for a while and, especially during recent times,my gut says the author's just wrong here; not my experience and also not likely to happen -- even if that's what some people think they want. My belief is that the collective "want" for something like Twitter, plus the superior model for doing so, will drive Mastodon to be effectively the new Twitter. Roughly, I think the human desire to "be up on everything" aka the desire for a "town square" will override this "divided up little spaces" thing. Two things make me optimistic about that. The first is the personal experience of watching a strong push for "Content Warnings" and the subsequent mostly-dismantling of that idea (owing to the fact that it became apparent that the sort of thing some people wanted to be warned against was also the very thing you should be paying attention to, mostly in the realm of racism). But the second and bigger feels like the killer here, if companies are smart enough to figure it out. On Mastodon, companies and corporations can be their OWN primary source of truth. No Eli Lilly Situation. They're starting to catch on.
pwinnski 4y ago
This is the dumbest assessment of the fediverse I've seen in a month full of dumb assessments of the fediverse. For all the talk of peculiar rules, I haven't seen any servers with peculiar rules. There seems to be a general understanding that a server may be set up to focus on tabletop gamers, or STEM nerds, or journalists, that doesn't mean they can't also talk about politics, or movies, or whatever they want. But ultimately, even if the fever dream hypothetical dystopia were real, people are free to set up their own dedicated servers just for themselves. That is, in fact, a point in favor of the federation model. There are a number of dedicated mastodon hosts already[0] for those who don't want to roll their own from scratch, and more will probably come online with time. Just a really, really dumb assessment. 0. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/#so-you-want-to-run-your-own-mastodon-server https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/#so-you-want...
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  I proposed a solution to both have more relaxed rules for personal profiles and have dedicated and highly regulated places for discussion. Seems like you just want to call things dumb
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    I don't have a history of calling things dumb, but you wrote this: > admins create these highly specific instances with peculiar rules, and people who want to create a profile there have to submit themselves to a highly limited set of conversations and content they can publish. what if I feel strongly about some geopolitical topic yet those kind of conversations are banned on my "LEGOholics" instance? You then proposed two things that don't make sense to solve a problem that doesn't exist. I called it like I see it.
    - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
      I first started dabbling with Mastodon 5 years ago. In my country there only were 6 instances at the time. 3 were made up by anarcho-communists, 1 was dedicated to music, 1 was dedicated to video games and only 1 self-touted as a "generalist" instance. Of course I made my first profile on the generalist one, but I quicky discover I couldn't post on the timeline of the music or videogames one. I could only reply to already existing discussions, which was fine but gave me a big sense of passivity. This is a real problem for which I now propose a solution. If you think it's fine that the only people who can post in a specific community are the ones who have an account there (= giving all your data to the server admins) then maybe you have a completely different view of what should be possible on Mastodon.
imwillofficial 4y ago
Their house, their rules. I can respect that.
timerol 4y ago
There's an entire paragraph about why generalist instances are bad, but no reflection about how each of those faults exists in a worse way in any centralized social network.
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  - generalist instances aren't bad, there's just too few of them - if the whole point of the article is to illustrate how Mastodon might end up being centralized-light that's a tacit admission that it would not be a good thing
mathlover2 4y ago
One issue with this article is that there is nothing preventing a person from having multiple accounts on different servers. I have three I still use because I was uncertain which community to join in 2019. There are many apps for Fediverse that allow one to use multiple accounts on different instances and flip between them as easily as flipping between Discord servers or alt accounts is in the Discord app. I also agree with madrox's comment that having specific instances with peculiar rules according to taste is a feature, not a bug. Heck, I agree with everyone calling out this article here, because it's just a bad take.
shortformblog 4y ago
This feels like a mid-November take that feels extremely out of date in mid-December. That’s the problem right now. Things are moving so fast that quick reads don’t hold up to scrutiny after seeing how things actually play out.
Ruq 4y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but no one is stopping you from making multiple accounts on various instances to overcome this built-in "limitation"... Also just run your own instance?
_cenw 4y ago
This is looking really hard for a problem that isn't there. Has the author actually used Mastodon? I wonder what server they ended up on to have this impression. And I find the claim that people don't want to run generalist instances... interesting. I ran a few of these and while they all had a theme and a few cultural baselines (which is okay, other instances have other standards), none of them really restricted what you post about.
- pornel 4y ago
  > I wonder what server they ended up on to have this impression Probably http://dolphin.town http://dolphin.town — you're only allowed to use the letter E.
  - _whiteCaps_ 4y ago
    I would join gadsby.town - it would block that symbol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)
    - PebblesRox 4y ago
      You can in fact join https://oulipo.social/public/local https://oulipo.social/public/local for that!
    - delecti 4y ago
      Thank you! I knew this novel existed, but the name's similarity to "The Great Gatsby" meant that I could never remember what it was called.
  - dm319 4y ago
    Ah good point, the article makes far more sense now.
- jackson1442 4y ago
  yeah i just use mas.to and it pretty much just feels like twitter without the algorithm. I post what I want and people who follow me or tags I use see my posts
jarjoura 4y ago
I also agree with the OP. My personal take on the experience so far: Joining a server feels like I'm hanging out in someone else's backyard. There's this feeling that at any point I could be asked to leave if I overstay my welcome. The server I'm attached to is run by someone who seems very friendly and so far I'm enjoying the community they're trying to build. However, I am struggling to wrap my head around this weird intersection of public broadcast over a semi-public (someone's backyard) space. Unlike Reddit or Discord where I can partake in multiple forums through my single account, my entire public persona on Mastodon is tied to the server I'm on. It really limits what I want to share as I don't feel as free to talk openly about any topic.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  IMO Mastodon will settle like email has. A handful of mega servers and a smaller group of people who run their own for their use only. Owners of medium sized servers will tire of the maintenance and moderation.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    I’m hopeful for this. Email has managed to survive this consolidation without the big providers somehow capturing the technology and squeezing it. I still feel like I could change my email provider at any point. There’s even some options for keeping your address. I like the idea of leveraging some profit-motivated actors to make the experience smooth, but the open and federated nature helps ensure they don’t “own” the entire network.
    - mannerheim 4y ago
      Moderation is less of an issue with email, though. Very few people have been banned by their email provider, but how many users have gotten moderated on Facebook and Twitter?
      - kixiQu 4y ago
        > Very few people have been banned by their email provider I mean, the contents of my spam folder did originate with someone.
masukomi 4y ago
Email is not a good messaging platform. Every server has its own rules and expectations. Completely different terms of service on each one. Communities of like minded people are bad. We shouldn't encourage people to gather with like minded folks. "the ideal solution would be to distribute all these users between many small and generic instances with no silly domain names or draconic rule sets" Self expression, humor, and fun are bad! I shouldn't be forced to adhere to your community guidelines! Only boring domains should be allowed! Only rules I like should be allowed! o....m....f....g.... </sarcasm>
- spankalee 4y ago
  Email providers do not generally prescribe what you can email about.
  - masukomi 4y ago
    this implies you haven't actually read the terms of service. How much you want to be there's info in there about not sending threats and using their service to abuse people. just because you agree with the prescription doesn't mean it isn't a prescription.
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      That's just them following laws though. (Yes, I know, different countries have different laws, which is an important, but separate, conversation.)
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  writing </sarcasm> doesn't change the fact that this is an astound misrepresentation of everythig said in the post. it's not even close to the point
  - masukomi 4y ago
    which part did i misrepresent? Yes, i was hyperbolic. but i don't think i misrepresented anything. they said: "admins create these highly specific instances with peculiar rules, and people who want to create a profile there have to submit themselves to a highly limited set of conversations and content they can publish." I said "Email is not a good messaging platform. Every server has its own rules and expectations. Completely different terms of service on each one." i simply replaced the concept of social network with the dominant alternate federated messaging protocal that has the same properties. (every email server has terms of service that dictate rules and expectation of usage) I didn't address the "highly limited set of conversations and content" part because it's a complete misapprehension of how those server rules work. While i'm sure there's 1 or 2 exceptions to this servers do not dictate what you can talk about beyond "no hate speech" kind of dictation. A Star Trek server, for example doesn't mean people are ONLY allowed to talk about Star Trek. It just means it's a server for folks who like Star Trek. they said: "what if I feel strongly about some geopolitical topic yet those kind of conversations are banned on my "LEGOholics" instance?" I responded "Communities of like minded people are bad. We shouldn't encourage people to gather with like minded folks. All groups of like-minded people have rules about what is and is not acceptable speech amongst them. To suggest otherwise is ignorance in the extreme. He's specifically advocating for NOT having instances like that. He's advocating against a core aspect of groups of like minded people if you don't have common (spoken or unspoken) rules around acceptable topics the group will NOT continue to exist. It's WHY we stick with a group. To advocate against something is to make a valuation of it being "bad". He's advocating against groups of people with rules about acceptable conversation topics. Therefore they are saying that communities of like minded people with the rules that cause them to come into existence and stay in existence are (to them) "bad". this isn't a misrepresentation. It's actually thinking about the logical implications of their words. they said "the ideal solution would be to distribute all these users between many small and generic instances with no silly domain names or draconic rule sets" Their commentary about "silly domain names" in context is obviously derogatory. Silly domain names ARE self expression and humor and fun. He is advocating against them, thus he's saying they are bad. Yes, i was hyperbolic, but it's not actually a misrepresentation. Suggesting that the rules of most servers are "draconic" is itself either hyperbole or massive misunderstanding of those rules. It seems hyperbolic, and thus he is suggesting that being forced to adhere to other people's rules is undesirable. I said "I shouldn't be forced to adhere to your community guidelines!" again. not misrepresenting anything. Hypebolic yes, but also accurate. Saying "Only rules I like should be allowed!" is just repeating the same idea another way. It's, again, not a misrepresentation. They never say they're unwilling to follow rules. Only that rules of small servers are "draconic" and there is the _strong_ implication that they don't want to be forced to adhere to them. So. with that in mind. What _exactly_ do you think i've actually misrepresented? What interpretation of their statements did i get wrong?
hendersoon 4y ago
Just spitballing here, but one solution is mandatory tagging, where you must pick at least one tag before posting. Additionally other users and mods on your Mastodon instance can vote to add tags as they see fit, and the mods may at their discretion discipline people who tag deceptively. The protocol itself could be amended to include a set of very high-level tags. Say for example, politics, sports, TV, movies, gaming, celebrities, fashion, personal, and NSFW. Don't have one of those? Your post won't be federated. Then if you're on a Mastodon instance dedicated to (for example) Porsche cars, you would have custom tags available by default for models, engines, make years, and so on to enrich the metadata. Mastodon already lets users subscribe to hashtags so much of the baseline functionality already exists, other than the control aspect.
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  >The protocol itself could be amended to include a set of very high-level tags. Say for example, politics, sports, TV, movies, gaming, celebrities, fashion, personal, and NSFW. Or rather tags have groups under an hierarchy to which groups someone post. Something like comp.os.linux or comp.lang.python. Oh, wait...
  - hendersoon 4y ago
    The benefit of tagging over categorization is you can have multiples coupled together. So if you're posting about a Lego set for the new Wonder Woman 1993 flick, you could tag #LEGO, #SUPERHERO, and #MOVIE rather than posting under rec.toys.lego.
    - forgotpwd16 4y ago
      Usenet allowed cross-posting resulting in a unique thread across multiple groups.
      - hendersoon 4y ago
        True, but that seems less elegant and Twitter users are already comfortable with tags.
joshlemer 4y ago
Maybe what we need is a decoupling of user-hosting instances and post-hosting instances. Probably the biggest issue I have with twitter is that I have multiple interests/communities I'm involved with. If I post a lot about topic A, get some followers who know me through A, that's great! But then I want to talk about B with the community who knows me through topic B and I feel the need to self-censor as to not spam the topic A followers. I've always felt I would like to be able to tweet only to the TopicA people or only to the TopicB people. But I don't really care that my user data is stored on the same instance as the people in TopicA or TopicB. So maybe a better model for federation would be that you can host your user on an instance, and then also when you post, you are deciding which instance to post on. At the same time, being on a generalist server (mastodon.social) I really couldn't possibly care less about looking at the trending posts on my server as that is just a general slice of mastodon users and I am not in any specific community with them. I want to subscribe to specific niche/thematic mastodon instances for my feed.
- post-it 4y ago
  Google Plus handled that really well with Circles.
ryukoposting 4y ago
First of all, a forum is a social network. A primitive one, sure, with origins before "social network" had really entered our lexicon, but a social network nonetheless. The ability of people in a federated social network to create arbitrary, independent instances with rules tailored for particular discussion topics is a feature, not a bug. If you don't like that... well, don't go on topic-specific Mastodon servers I guess. Are you advocating for Mastodon to have SSO? If so, I can get on board with that. Are you advocating for a cap on the number of members of a particular instance? Mastodon can already do that - all you have to do is not approve new accounts. Of course, the inherent problem with that is that activity in member-capped servers will gradually die out, and now you need way more admins... your idea, not mine.
bawolff 4y ago
Given that i read HN because of its focus and perculiur rules, the thesis of this post is a pretty hard sell to me.
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  Depends on whether you consider fora and social media be the same thing and, even if not, whether they have to function in a similar way. Author notes that a social network has "to give the users the most freedom to let their personality shine" and the thesis is Mastodon is not a good social network due to its model resulting in focused instances.
iza 4y ago
I prefer the approach taken by nostr[1] and Scuttlebutt[2], where identity is a public key not tied to any particular server. However Mastodon is gaining a lot more traction and seems to be good enough in practice. 1. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr 2. https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/
Octokiddie 4y ago
The author makes two good points: 1. Nobody wants to maintain a generalist instance, partly because it's harder to apply generalist moderation policies and partly because it attracts so many more users. 2. Running your own instance does solve (1), but Mastodon was not designed as a P2P network and likely can't function that way.
- Duralias 4y ago
  Running your own instance works, as long as everyone else isn't. I run my own and while my local feed is dead (even though I am not the only one on it), "home" and "federated" are fairly lively after following a few people.
- toofy 4y ago
  > Nobody wants to maintain a generalist instance… i’m not sure what ya mean, the largest instance is generalist. almost all of the most populated instances are also generalist: mastodon.social mastodon.cloud mastodon.online mstdn.social mas.to mastodon.world and on and on. there is no shortage of smaller generalist servers either. i may be misunderstanding your larger point tho?
EarlKing 4y ago
This is precisely how things worked back in the days of FidoNet, and it was one of the big arguments that was never fully resolved, as you had one group of sysops who felt that if you wanted to be a FidoNet sysop you should be obligated to carry whatever topics are on the network backbone, and another group of sysops who felt "my computer, my rules". Fundamentally it was a disagreement over what being part of a federated service meant. Such disagreements eventually led sysops to leave the network and start their own. I have little doubt that is going to happen with the Fediverse as well since some nodes seem hellbent on making sure it happens.
thejohnconway 4y ago
As someone that runs an interest-based instance, this take is just does not ring true. Sure, if you want to join my server you probably should have an interest in palaeontology or zoology, but I have no problem at all if people want to talk about whatever they want to talk about§. This seems to be true of most such instances. Hacker News seems to have an interest in finding things wrong with Mastodon. There are things wrong with Mastodon of course, but they pale in comparison to the problems of centralised internet that had nearly devoured the entire world. I'd like to see more talk about how to build and improve or solve actual problems rather than these usually pretty off-base complainy takes. §Within the rules of decency, of course.
- andreyk 4y ago
  Agreed - I run an AI-focused instance, but our FAQ explicitly states it's fine to post about non AI stuff. It's more about making a community that shares the interest rather than forcing all conversations to focus on that one interest.
  - dmix 4y ago
    From my experience Mastodon is more obsessed with creating bubbles than Reddit hypermodding. So it's great your FAQ says that and your topic is non-controversial and niche. But when applied en masse it's just a mass collection of extremely segmented bubbles. Nothing wrong with that. Niche forums are perfectly fine. But lets not pretend that's a social network anything like Twitter, or FB, or Reddit circa 2012. Popular Mastodon servers ban hundreds of servers where users may have signed up but not known the extensive rules list of each other sub server (in addition to the [n] amount of moderated content).
    - toofy 4y ago
      > But when applied en masse it's just a mass collection of extremely segmented bubbles. We don’t exist in mastodon bubbles. we go out with friends. we visit families houses. we visit friends families. we visit dozens of other web sites. we interact with countless numbers of people every single day. we go to work. we go to school. this “you’re going to live in a bubble!” panic is wild.
rsynnott 4y ago
This feels like... an issue that the author has just imagined, to be honest. Sure, many instances have some sort of theme, but by no means all (the majority of users, I'd think, are on one of the generic ones), and in most cases there's no rule enforcing keeping to the theme.
acjohnson55 4y ago
A problem right now is the conflation between instance and community. The instance is really a technical concept, which allows for the federated hosting model. It hosts your Fediverse identity and while you can migrate, it's not seamless. Most people don't want to belong to just one community, so while an instance gives you a default community, it should not be the only mechanism of community. I don't think there's a widely distributed community concept, but hopefully, one will evolve. Something akin to the feature set of Facebook groups. This is very solvable, and I'm guessing that if Mastodon continues to gain in popularity, we'll see something emerge.
napsy 4y ago
Couldn't mastodon just provide an option to logging in via OpenID? Then you would have a single authentication for multiple mastodon instances with different topics.
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  logging in via OpenID Would that not bring us back to a centralized service that can decide a person is toxic and is globally banned?
3np 4y ago
I'm surprised to not yet see mentions of DIDs in the article or comments. IMO ideally users should be able to control and move parts of their identity/persona/account independent of the server they are on. I think it's possible to come up with a great solution, but there's a lot of unexplored territory.
INTPenis 4y ago
I'm split on this. On one hand I want to run an instance with freedom, and I want users to resolve conflicts amongst themselves, and using the mute button if push come to shove. But on the other hand, if I allow that, other servers will de-federate from me. So these last few months I've been put into a lot of hard moderating situations. Where for example an entire instance reports a user on my instance, saying it's spreading hate speech, or transphobia, but it's not. The user just happened to use an aggressive tone in a thread with a famous person, for example, or just piss off the wrong admin. And now I have to make a decision on how to handle this user, who didn't break any of my server rules. And I even ran into a straight up racist on my instance, but didn't suspend their account because while they were clearly a supporter of the right-wing party, that same right-wing party has a majority vote. So why should I suspend them for voicing their political affiliation? Again, not breaking any rules, not breaking any laws, just voicing opinions in line with the current right-wing majority party. I just don't believe in sweeping people under the rug. In that case, of the right-wing person, they ended up getting muted by other instances, fortunately not de-federated. But it feels like I'm always balancing on a knife's edge between free speech and a de-federated instance. Basically, I feel myself becoming a "language-police", and that's not what I want.
- 3np 4y ago
  Small instance here. One user (me) hade a few mostly technical posts about a bitcoin lightning network client they were developing on, and reposted some content along similar lines. From the perspective of software, among contributors and operators. We're now defederated by at least a few instances for "crypto grifters" or similar. We won't be bothered to investigate and follow up to see if/how it's propagated until one of our users raise an issue about it. Much of the active fediverse have had quite particular culture with very narrow corridors around some things, of all varieties. Some of these groups (in lack of better word) demonize each other. Those who take up running open general instances for years with no financial incentive are sometimes also of a particular kind within that. Some are also intentionally insular ("safe spaces" come to mind) and will mute or defederate anyone identified as not part of their in-group. I've also seen instances blanket-blocking anything Pleroma, because "all the bad people come from Pleroma". I've even seen it called evil software because it affords more customization of filtering, rewriting, and federation. If the fediverse does get traction over time and the demography widens, I think we'll have much fracturing, possibly pushing protocol changes and incompatible forks. For now: Haters gonna hate, what can you do about it
b3nji 4y ago
And this is how its supposed to be. Small communities working, or not working together. I've been using Mastodon for years, part of a community of no more than 10,000 people (we have a cap for reasons I'm not going to get into) and it's fine. I also got my own instance, like I have my own email. Mastodon isn't Twitter or Facebook, it's not designed to be that way.
albert180 4y ago
Why do so many people who haven't used or understood Mastodon have the urge to share their moronic assessment of it?
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  I used and understood Mastodon much more than you. Suck it
college_physics 4y ago
people (still) largely miss the dramatic ways in which "mastodon" is reshaping social networking - at least in principle * its not a single platform but a constellation of federating servers based on different stacks and technologies. the specific mastodon implementation of activitypub is neither built-in nor required to participate in the fediverse. enabling different technologists/stacks to compete in a common arena will have an accelerating effect in how social networking evolves * its not closed source: people/communities having other ideas about "the best social network" are free to fork, implement and experiment with said ideas. this augments the previous point and will further enable exploring the space of possibilities * its not a single instance: within the confines of a specific design / implementation one can still tweak both hard configurations and soft rules to achieve specific community aims * maybe most importantly: it enables potentially alternative business models beyond the winner-takes-all surveillance capitalism model that has come to destroy social networking (and much else as well). think of public funds, non-profit, more commercial interest-based instances etc granted, its all still largely in the realm of potentialities and one could imagine all sorts of patches that will be required as weaknesses reveal through adoption and use, but many negative reactions at this point seem just intellectual laziness (or something worse). in a sense it is a benign coincidence that the most mature expression of the emerging fediverse has been mastodon (and the mastodon.social instance), which is a twitter lookalike. combined with the convulsions of the bird site this creates the perfect conditions for people to get exposed to alternate realities and breaking the TINA spell. This is particularly true for all sorts of institutions, luminaries etc active on twitter that have provided the platform with a legitimacy it does not really deserve
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Start your own server and you can do what you want.
opan 4y ago
You can have multiple accounts on different instances and you can find general instances. I don't know why so many people flock to very specific ones.
t0bia_s 4y ago
There is no perfect solution for social network. It will never replace real conversations. Anything that could be written comfortable behind the screen tends to be soon or later extreme and toxic. Real conversations are less extreme on both sides, because factor of danger from others is more real. Also anything that has man in middle that decide what is bad or good to post or anything that can be voted also change organic flow of conversation and make it unnatural and eventually selfcensored. This concludes me to abandon social networks completely. HN is only exception for now.
rolenthedeep 4y ago
I think the key point being missed here is that mastodon isn't one website segregated into communities. It's a bunch of small websites each with their own community. Instead of one garbage Twitter replacement, we have thousands of individual Twitter-like websites each aimed at a particular community. There's one for any subset of interests you care to look for. The magic of mastodon is that these websites can interact with each other. If you live on the LGBT programmer instance, you can follow and talk to people on the clam science facts server, or artists on the art server. Then you also get to see all the accounts anyone on your server follows, and you discover new accounts and servers that way. If you find a new server you like better, you can just pack up and move in a few clicks. The model is closer to subreddits than it is to Twitter. Mastodon is a fundamentally different thing, and people keep having panic attacks because they want to frame it as Twitter and it doesn't fit. It's different, and you need to adjust your perspective. Once you appreciate mastodon for what it is, it's a pretty neat platform.

182 points by AstixAndBelix 4y ago

I'm aware of very few instances that insist that people only post about whatever the "theme" of the instance is, so I don't think this is actually a big issue in practice.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago
Which instance would get more users and hold more power, @mastodon.com or @mylittlepony4ever.net? Which instance would you want to hold your entire online persona? @mozilla.com or @stopclimatechange.org? very few people have silly email addresses because they realize sending their CV or writing to a friend or collegue with fuckjoebiden@racism.ftw is insane. but somehow when creating their main online account on mastodon they sign up to the silliest instances and bind their own identity to these niche communities
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  > "your entire online persona" Are you limited to one instance or persona? Feels like an assumption based on twitter style advertising requirements where they don't want multiple sign ups as it maks it harder to track you.
  - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
    You're not limited, but most people just want to have at least one profile which has their name and photo where they can have a presence online linked to their real life persona. By having so few generalist instances the risk is that they grow too large and gain too much power over the fediverse.
    - constantcrying 4y ago
      >most people just want to have at least one profile which has their name and photo where they can have a presence online linked to their real life persona. I am so absurdly out of touch with "most people"...
  - jagermo 4y ago
    No, you are not. I have one persona that moved over from twitter, one for ttrpgs. I think, we need to go back to the basics with people. You are allowed to have more than one email, for example. Facebook brainwashed people into believing they can only be one thing online.
    - unshavedyak 4y ago
      Slight tangent though; but i'm starting to believe we're going back to only being a single thing online. I used to rotate accounts frequently for privacy sake. These days it's becoming shockingly easy to link accounts.. ML is only going to make it easier. I prefer many anonymous accounts.. but i think those days are moving further and further behind us.
  - amadeuspagel 4y ago
    Twitter makes it very easy to manage multiple accounts. You can be logged in with several accounts at once, and easily switch between them in the twitter UI.
    - faizmokhtar 4y ago
      I think this is possible on the Mastodon app. There's an option to login to multiple accounts but I haven't try it yet since I only have a single account.
    - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
      Not only does Mastodon's official mobile app support multiple accounts and makes it easy to switch, it shows notifications for all of the accounts.
    - zimpenfish 4y ago
      Pinafore (web FE) allows you to be logged into multiple instances with an easy switch between them. Soapbox (web FE, also Pulpit, Mangane since they are forks) handles multiple ogged in accounts on the same instance (which is handy if e.g. you've got an admin/mod role account or you've got a lot of bots on there.) Pretty sure this will be a common feature in frontends that get popular in 2023.
    - delecti 4y ago
      Isn't the same true on Mastodon? In fact, it's even easier since they're separate websites, so you can be actively logged into multiple at once. My mastodon.social and porn.social (not sure the latter actually exists) sessions remain as seamlessly separate as my hackernews and reddit logins.
      - boredhedgehog 4y ago
        That's visually separate, but how easily would your identity be traceable by prying users or admins? Who would be able to see your IP and link your political/hobbyist persona to your porn account?
- constantcrying 4y ago
  >very few people have silly email addresses because they realize sending their CV Back when I was a teenager, I was told not to create accounts under my own name. I have many silly E-mail accounts. E-mail can be a professional medium. You don't apply via Twitter DM, I hope. >bind their own identity to these niche communities Just migrate if you don't like it anymore.
  - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
    Why would your teenager years be relevant here? Nowadays companies are online and jobs are online. There are an infinite amount of reasons why you would want to link your online identity to your personal one. You're not forced to and you should still be able to make anonymous and silly accounts, but this is not the point. >You don't apply via Twitter DM, I hope. If a company has a Twitter, why wouldn't I? Many young businesses less revering of e-mail gladly use Twitter as a valid avenue for these kinds of communications. >just migrate Mastodon handles migration terribly. You can either redirect or straight up move. In both cases your old profile is still in full display and your posts don't transfer.
    - constantcrying 4y ago
      >If a company has a Twitter, why wouldn't I? Many young businesses less revering of e-mail gladly use Twitter as a valid avenue for these kinds of communications. What a world...
  - fknorangesite 4y ago
    > You don't apply via Twitter DM, I hope. I was hiring recently, and one of the ways we advertised the position was that I tweeted the job description, and I arranged with the our social media team for them to retweet it for additional visibility. Candidates responding to that tweet generally contacted me via twitter DM - why wouldn't they? It's not like I conducted interviews in that medium, but it's not really any different than the people who initiated contact via email.
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    I've applied for (and gotten) more than one job where the initial reach out was a DM...
- int_19h 4y ago
  People will learn. It didn't happen overnight with email, either.
rolenthedeep 4y ago
One of the running jokes around mastodon right now is innocent people singing up on an instance like meow.social because they like cats. Then they realize it's specifically a furry instance. Some stick around because they like the people, others migrate to a new instance.

okaleniuk 4y ago

What you describe is, of course, possible. You can create a personal fidonet/usenet-like echo conference with nothing more than a bunch of e-mail redirection rules. But people don't want that. I checked. There is no such thing as an "intellectual need". All the needs are fundamentally emotional. Mastodon addresses the identity need, it creates the sense of a community, and, as all the social media, it grants both cheap entertainment and immediate gratitude for conformity. It is a good "social network", it's just what we call a phenomena of "social network" is essentially shit.

akira2501 4y ago
> the social network itslef [sic] should be as boring and generic as possible. Well, in a certain sense, he is describing one mechanism of the peculiar popularity of sites like 4chan; however, I think it just highlights how incomplete the thesis is. There's clearly much more to it than just these simple mechanics.

beertoagunfight 4y ago

Isn’t the point while point of the federated feed is that it cuts across instances?

advisedwang 4y ago
Users on different instances can follow each other and see each others posts, but any given account is on a specific instance and must follow that instance's rules.
- albert180 4y ago
  Which are mostly "Don't be an asshole (No direct swearing, posting Racist Stuff etc.) or do not post illegal stuff"

constantcrying 4y ago

??? Is there a single instance which forbids you from talking about a certain topic? I really don't see the issue, even hyper specific instances let you talk about other things. Where is the actual problem? Why would it matter that your account is some specific instance?

AstixAndBelix 4y ago
I've seen plenty of instances where if you dare to be critical of Palestine they straight up ban you for being a fascist capitalist pig. You can be as polite as possible, but if one of the rules is "fascists not welcome" they can just accuse you of being a fascist and ban you regardless of your arguments. I'm sure there are plenty of other instances that behave the same way according other areas of the political spectrum. This has just been my experience when I wanted to sign up 5 years ago, when most people using this platform were left leaning and tech savvy
- morbidious 4y ago
  If they don't want your opinions, forget it and join a like minded instance where they value your thoughts. You seem to be disappointed with the left-wing ideology, not Mastodon itself. Leftist will not tolerate anything other than what they think is right, so it's expected that they will ban everyone who doesn't share their mindset.
  - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
    I explicitely said I used this as an example because it was my personal experience, but I'm sure this happens for every single politically charged Mastodon servers regardless of political leaning. I'm not disappointed with any ideology and this had nothing to do with politics. Please don't charge my opinion with ulterior motives
    - morbidious 4y ago
      Fair

allenbrunson 4y ago

this doesn’t sound terribly likely to me, as an outcome. i am seeing a whole lot of criticisms of mastodon that, to me, sound like “social networking sites have always been bad, therefore mastodon must also be bad.” surely we can muster a little more optimism than that. i just posted my own “come to jesus” moment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34079668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34079668

jjulius 4y ago
>surely we can muster a little more optimism than that. Name one social media site and then explain how it was a net positive for society/outweighed all of it's toxic aspects.
- krapp 4y ago
  >Name one social media site and then explain how it was a net positive for society/outweighed all of it's toxic aspects. That isn't something one can objectively measure.
  - jjulius 4y ago
    I have my own subjective opinions about social media, as does OP. OP suggested I inject positivity into mine, so I am curious to see what their subjective opinions are in an effort to perhaps shift my perspective.
- marmadukester39 4y ago
  This one.
- allenbrunson 4y ago
  i think that's asking the wrong question. i think most or all of them started off pretty good. where we went wrong is creating a system where social media sites are paid for with ads, which gives warped incentives to the owners of those sites. in that respect, federation is the answer. take the power away from anybody who could screw it all up for us.

ocq698nes3javxw 4y ago

poorest take i've seen on this page so far

dusted 4y ago

I'm so offended by the capitalization in this (potentially interesting) article that I didn't get past the first two paragraphs.

xmcqdpt2 4y ago
Also what's up with all the bold words all over the place? _Emphasis_ doesn't work when used *Everywhere*!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- thot_experiment 4y ago
  wild, i had to go back to the article after reading this comment to double check. my brain completely autocorrected everything and i didn't notice the formatting at all!
- r00fus 4y ago
  This is annoying in a way that even my go-to "reader mode" doesn't fix either (unlike ads or autoplay videos etc).
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  It does, in the sense that it seems to mirror sentence-level emphasis in speech. (Even your comment sort of works - I'd drop the emphasis on "up" and "place" though.) It's definitely atypical. I think it wouldn't impact readability all that much, if not for the lack of capitalization at the start of sentences - the two abnormalities together make the text much harder to read than it should be.
  - xvector 4y ago
    Except when we read sentences, we expect to be reading sentences, not someone’s interpretation of what their voice would sound like transposed onto a sentence, using obscure formatting cues to accomplish this. Generally I find that the more people rely on emphasis and formatting, the poorer their writing skills are.

forgotpwd16 4y ago

>some could say: just create your account on a more generalist instance Close. I'ld have said host your own instance.

madrox 4y ago

This is not a bug. It's a feature. You see this today in subreddits, twitch channels, and discord servers, and the community is better for it. Places with community moderation have higher levels of engagement. I'm one of those people that preferred Twitter before it became overrun with politics. Not that I'm not political, but it's not what I wanted to go to Twitter for. There was no control over it since people tweeted about whatever was on their mind, which was sometimes interesting tech things, and the rest of the time was social issues. I migrated to topic-based sites as a result.

alkonaut 4y ago
How does conversations work between people on different instances when it comes to moderation? Is an entire conversation taking place on the instance the top post is on?
- ezfe 4y ago
  The conversation happens across the instances. User reports first go to the instance of the reporter, but can also be anonymously forwarded on to the instance of the reported post as well. If a user is bothering someone on your instance, then either your instance or that users instance could take action. If your instance bans them, they won't be banned anywhere else. If their instance bans them, they will be fully suspended.
Justsignedup 4y ago
I think the argument he makes at the end is that "we should have a centralized account model" and then let exactly what you say shine. It'll be like a twitter reddit. Problem: If you sign up for say LEGO reddit, but want to post a geo-political thing, then suddenly YOU CANNOT because you need a new account. Reddit is about the subreddit's popularity Twitter is about personal popularity
- madrox 4y ago
  I don't think that's a fediverse problem. Nothing is stopping a server from implementing OpenID or some other centralized identity solution. However, these things don't happen for a reason.

Finnucane 4y ago

I think this completely wrong. The fact that anybody can create an instance for any purpose they want is a good thing. The rest of the fediverse can choose the degree they wish to interact with that instance. But the possibilities of what can exist on the fediverse is not constrained at all.

imgabe 4y ago

> imagine if the only online profile where you could express yourself was through your old "Ancient Greek Literature Forum" account. that would be quite limiting, wouldn't it? I remember the days of small forums dedicated to niche topics. They usually had an “off-topic” board where members could socialize and talk about whatever. It was not limiting at all.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
Not seeing a problem here either. It's free to create an account on however many instances and it lends itself to per-topic pseudonyms which is probably better than one identity everywhere anyway unless you're explicitly trying to build a self-brand. Even in the case of a single identity everywhere, it gives your followers a way to control which types of posts they see from you. Maybe they don't care about my explorations in UI design and programming and just want to see what pastries I've been cooking lately, in which case they can follow my account on a cooking-oriented Mastodon instance. That's actually one of my minor gripes with Twitter; it had no way to filter for topic which meant that even though I followed people I had an interest in my timeline still had a lot of stuff in it I didn't care about.
seydor 4y ago
it was separate , though and you could ignore it. I purposely remove people who mix their politics in their science from twitter, and it works, but i am left with a small number of people. Separate rooms is good.

neogodless 4y ago

I get the gist of this sentiment. It took me a while to migrate from the generic mainstream instance (mastodon.social) to a more specific one (hachyderm.io) because a lot of instances were regional (e.g. some country in the EU) or too narrowly defined (e.g. tabletop games). But the about page of hachyderm.io included a lot of broader interests that let me feel like joining that instance wouldn't give off the impression of a particularly deep but narrow interest (that isn't accurate). But who you are within Mastodon is not limited by the instance you created your account on! Especially since follows and posts are federated. A gentle reminder that your follows, Home feed, hashtags and the Federated timeline are not (overly) limited or filtered by the instance your account lives on. Only the Local timeline is 100% a view specific to that instance.

Barrin92 4y ago

>I am of the opinion that, to give the users the most freedom to let their personality shine, the social network itslef should be as boring and generic as possible. This sounds like the Thatcherism of social networks. "There's no such thing as a community, only individual posters". The sort of desolate environment that you get as a result of this is exactly what people are increasingly shunning. It's why people move to private chat groups, subreddits, niche twitter subcultures with memes that nobody even understands from the outside (intentionally so). This very site is strongly opinionated as well. The logical endpoint of generic platforms is the Youtube comment section. If a social network is supposed to be social it has to be about something. There needs to be something that ties the people in it together. Any video game speedrunning community, music subculture, whatever have you is more interesting than generic sites. Even if you have to move between groups sometimes, that cost is well worth it. The real world doesn't work like this either. Does anyone ever go to the "generic people meetup, where we do generic things"? Everyone is part of social networks, plural.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago
So you extrapolated a single quote from the post when the rest of the article describes exactly how to have highly personalized communities without the burden of binding your personal profile to them?
- Barrin92 4y ago
  no, the article itself at the end actually agrees that the proposed solution of many small, generalist instances is a pipedream: "I personally don't think this will ever be possible, it can only serve as some nice little fantasy to keep me dreaming for better online spaces." This can never work because generic instances have absolutely nothing that prevents them from growing. After all if a space has no strong, unique characteristics, there's nothing that stops anyone from coming in. This is the ultimate fate of every unopinionated internet community, it "Eternal September"'s itself. The physical decentralization of Mastodon instances and the resulting tendency towards having unique instances with strict rules is the only thing stopping those instances from growing into a giant blob.

jwildeboer 4y ago

Millions of users seem to be OK with the decentralised approach :)

Gigachad 4y ago
For now until their accounts die off because the scattered collection of servers start to shut down.
- unshavedyak 4y ago
  Hasn't bothered me with email. Though, regardless, i'm not sure what the fuss is about. Is Mastodon perfect? Of course not. I just don't want to be on Twitter. What do you suggest?

seydor 4y ago

Can we please go back to forums? The author is right, social media is about "me me me", users accumulating points in r/funny and then using it as social proof in r/geopolitics. Topical bubbles are the best, especially because they present only one aspect of each user. Since people don't use their real-life network in twitter/mastodon, i even thing that model is not social.

jrm4 4y ago

No, it doesn't really encourage closed off instances. I've been using for a while and, especially during recent times,my gut says the author's just wrong here; not my experience and also not likely to happen -- even if that's what some people think they want. My belief is that the collective "want" for something like Twitter, plus the superior model for doing so, will drive Mastodon to be effectively the new Twitter. Roughly, I think the human desire to "be up on everything" aka the desire for a "town square" will override this "divided up little spaces" thing. Two things make me optimistic about that. The first is the personal experience of watching a strong push for "Content Warnings" and the subsequent mostly-dismantling of that idea (owing to the fact that it became apparent that the sort of thing some people wanted to be warned against was also the very thing you should be paying attention to, mostly in the realm of racism). But the second and bigger feels like the killer here, if companies are smart enough to figure it out. On Mastodon, companies and corporations can be their OWN primary source of truth. No Eli Lilly Situation. They're starting to catch on.

pwinnski 4y ago

This is the dumbest assessment of the fediverse I've seen in a month full of dumb assessments of the fediverse. For all the talk of peculiar rules, I haven't seen any servers with peculiar rules. There seems to be a general understanding that a server may be set up to focus on tabletop gamers, or STEM nerds, or journalists, that doesn't mean they can't also talk about politics, or movies, or whatever they want. But ultimately, even if the fever dream hypothetical dystopia were real, people are free to set up their own dedicated servers just for themselves. That is, in fact, a point in favor of the federation model. There are a number of dedicated mastodon hosts already[0] for those who don't want to roll their own from scratch, and more will probably come online with time. Just a really, really dumb assessment. 0. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/#so-you-want-to-run-your-own-mastodon-server https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/#so-you-want...

AstixAndBelix 4y ago
I proposed a solution to both have more relaxed rules for personal profiles and have dedicated and highly regulated places for discussion. Seems like you just want to call things dumb
- pwinnski 4y ago
  I don't have a history of calling things dumb, but you wrote this: > admins create these highly specific instances with peculiar rules, and people who want to create a profile there have to submit themselves to a highly limited set of conversations and content they can publish. what if I feel strongly about some geopolitical topic yet those kind of conversations are banned on my "LEGOholics" instance? You then proposed two things that don't make sense to solve a problem that doesn't exist. I called it like I see it.
  - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
    I first started dabbling with Mastodon 5 years ago. In my country there only were 6 instances at the time. 3 were made up by anarcho-communists, 1 was dedicated to music, 1 was dedicated to video games and only 1 self-touted as a "generalist" instance. Of course I made my first profile on the generalist one, but I quicky discover I couldn't post on the timeline of the music or videogames one. I could only reply to already existing discussions, which was fine but gave me a big sense of passivity. This is a real problem for which I now propose a solution. If you think it's fine that the only people who can post in a specific community are the ones who have an account there (= giving all your data to the server admins) then maybe you have a completely different view of what should be possible on Mastodon.

imwillofficial 4y ago

Their house, their rules. I can respect that.

timerol 4y ago

There's an entire paragraph about why generalist instances are bad, but no reflection about how each of those faults exists in a worse way in any centralized social network.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago
- generalist instances aren't bad, there's just too few of them - if the whole point of the article is to illustrate how Mastodon might end up being centralized-light that's a tacit admission that it would not be a good thing

mathlover2 4y ago

One issue with this article is that there is nothing preventing a person from having multiple accounts on different servers. I have three I still use because I was uncertain which community to join in 2019. There are many apps for Fediverse that allow one to use multiple accounts on different instances and flip between them as easily as flipping between Discord servers or alt accounts is in the Discord app. I also agree with madrox's comment that having specific instances with peculiar rules according to taste is a feature, not a bug. Heck, I agree with everyone calling out this article here, because it's just a bad take.

shortformblog 4y ago

This feels like a mid-November take that feels extremely out of date in mid-December. That’s the problem right now. Things are moving so fast that quick reads don’t hold up to scrutiny after seeing how things actually play out.

Ruq 4y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but no one is stopping you from making multiple accounts on various instances to overcome this built-in "limitation"... Also just run your own instance?

_cenw 4y ago

This is looking really hard for a problem that isn't there. Has the author actually used Mastodon? I wonder what server they ended up on to have this impression. And I find the claim that people don't want to run generalist instances... interesting. I ran a few of these and while they all had a theme and a few cultural baselines (which is okay, other instances have other standards), none of them really restricted what you post about.

pornel 4y ago
> I wonder what server they ended up on to have this impression Probably http://dolphin.town http://dolphin.town — you're only allowed to use the letter E.
- _whiteCaps_ 4y ago
  I would join gadsby.town - it would block that symbol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)
  - PebblesRox 4y ago
    You can in fact join https://oulipo.social/public/local https://oulipo.social/public/local for that!
  - delecti 4y ago
    Thank you! I knew this novel existed, but the name's similarity to "The Great Gatsby" meant that I could never remember what it was called.
- dm319 4y ago
  Ah good point, the article makes far more sense now.
jackson1442 4y ago
yeah i just use mas.to and it pretty much just feels like twitter without the algorithm. I post what I want and people who follow me or tags I use see my posts

jarjoura 4y ago

I also agree with the OP. My personal take on the experience so far: Joining a server feels like I'm hanging out in someone else's backyard. There's this feeling that at any point I could be asked to leave if I overstay my welcome. The server I'm attached to is run by someone who seems very friendly and so far I'm enjoying the community they're trying to build. However, I am struggling to wrap my head around this weird intersection of public broadcast over a semi-public (someone's backyard) space. Unlike Reddit or Discord where I can partake in multiple forums through my single account, my entire public persona on Mastodon is tied to the server I'm on. It really limits what I want to share as I don't feel as free to talk openly about any topic.

Gigachad 4y ago
IMO Mastodon will settle like email has. A handful of mega servers and a smaller group of people who run their own for their use only. Owners of medium sized servers will tire of the maintenance and moderation.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  I’m hopeful for this. Email has managed to survive this consolidation without the big providers somehow capturing the technology and squeezing it. I still feel like I could change my email provider at any point. There’s even some options for keeping your address. I like the idea of leveraging some profit-motivated actors to make the experience smooth, but the open and federated nature helps ensure they don’t “own” the entire network.
  - mannerheim 4y ago
    Moderation is less of an issue with email, though. Very few people have been banned by their email provider, but how many users have gotten moderated on Facebook and Twitter?
    - kixiQu 4y ago
      > Very few people have been banned by their email provider I mean, the contents of my spam folder did originate with someone.

masukomi 4y ago

Email is not a good messaging platform. Every server has its own rules and expectations. Completely different terms of service on each one. Communities of like minded people are bad. We shouldn't encourage people to gather with like minded folks. "the ideal solution would be to distribute all these users between many small and generic instances with no silly domain names or draconic rule sets" Self expression, humor, and fun are bad! I shouldn't be forced to adhere to your community guidelines! Only boring domains should be allowed! Only rules I like should be allowed! o....m....f....g.... </sarcasm>

spankalee 4y ago
Email providers do not generally prescribe what you can email about.
- masukomi 4y ago
  this implies you haven't actually read the terms of service. How much you want to be there's info in there about not sending threats and using their service to abuse people. just because you agree with the prescription doesn't mean it isn't a prescription.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    That's just them following laws though. (Yes, I know, different countries have different laws, which is an important, but separate, conversation.)
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
writing </sarcasm> doesn't change the fact that this is an astound misrepresentation of everythig said in the post. it's not even close to the point
- masukomi 4y ago
  which part did i misrepresent? Yes, i was hyperbolic. but i don't think i misrepresented anything. they said: "admins create these highly specific instances with peculiar rules, and people who want to create a profile there have to submit themselves to a highly limited set of conversations and content they can publish." I said "Email is not a good messaging platform. Every server has its own rules and expectations. Completely different terms of service on each one." i simply replaced the concept of social network with the dominant alternate federated messaging protocal that has the same properties. (every email server has terms of service that dictate rules and expectation of usage) I didn't address the "highly limited set of conversations and content" part because it's a complete misapprehension of how those server rules work. While i'm sure there's 1 or 2 exceptions to this servers do not dictate what you can talk about beyond "no hate speech" kind of dictation. A Star Trek server, for example doesn't mean people are ONLY allowed to talk about Star Trek. It just means it's a server for folks who like Star Trek. they said: "what if I feel strongly about some geopolitical topic yet those kind of conversations are banned on my "LEGOholics" instance?" I responded "Communities of like minded people are bad. We shouldn't encourage people to gather with like minded folks. All groups of like-minded people have rules about what is and is not acceptable speech amongst them. To suggest otherwise is ignorance in the extreme. He's specifically advocating for NOT having instances like that. He's advocating against a core aspect of groups of like minded people if you don't have common (spoken or unspoken) rules around acceptable topics the group will NOT continue to exist. It's WHY we stick with a group. To advocate against something is to make a valuation of it being "bad". He's advocating against groups of people with rules about acceptable conversation topics. Therefore they are saying that communities of like minded people with the rules that cause them to come into existence and stay in existence are (to them) "bad". this isn't a misrepresentation. It's actually thinking about the logical implications of their words. they said "the ideal solution would be to distribute all these users between many small and generic instances with no silly domain names or draconic rule sets" Their commentary about "silly domain names" in context is obviously derogatory. Silly domain names ARE self expression and humor and fun. He is advocating against them, thus he's saying they are bad. Yes, i was hyperbolic, but it's not actually a misrepresentation. Suggesting that the rules of most servers are "draconic" is itself either hyperbole or massive misunderstanding of those rules. It seems hyperbolic, and thus he is suggesting that being forced to adhere to other people's rules is undesirable. I said "I shouldn't be forced to adhere to your community guidelines!" again. not misrepresenting anything. Hypebolic yes, but also accurate. Saying "Only rules I like should be allowed!" is just repeating the same idea another way. It's, again, not a misrepresentation. They never say they're unwilling to follow rules. Only that rules of small servers are "draconic" and there is the _strong_ implication that they don't want to be forced to adhere to them. So. with that in mind. What _exactly_ do you think i've actually misrepresented? What interpretation of their statements did i get wrong?

hendersoon 4y ago

Just spitballing here, but one solution is mandatory tagging, where you must pick at least one tag before posting. Additionally other users and mods on your Mastodon instance can vote to add tags as they see fit, and the mods may at their discretion discipline people who tag deceptively. The protocol itself could be amended to include a set of very high-level tags. Say for example, politics, sports, TV, movies, gaming, celebrities, fashion, personal, and NSFW. Don't have one of those? Your post won't be federated. Then if you're on a Mastodon instance dedicated to (for example) Porsche cars, you would have custom tags available by default for models, engines, make years, and so on to enrich the metadata. Mastodon already lets users subscribe to hashtags so much of the baseline functionality already exists, other than the control aspect.

forgotpwd16 4y ago
>The protocol itself could be amended to include a set of very high-level tags. Say for example, politics, sports, TV, movies, gaming, celebrities, fashion, personal, and NSFW. Or rather tags have groups under an hierarchy to which groups someone post. Something like comp.os.linux or comp.lang.python. Oh, wait...
- hendersoon 4y ago
  The benefit of tagging over categorization is you can have multiples coupled together. So if you're posting about a Lego set for the new Wonder Woman 1993 flick, you could tag #LEGO, #SUPERHERO, and #MOVIE rather than posting under rec.toys.lego.
  - forgotpwd16 4y ago
    Usenet allowed cross-posting resulting in a unique thread across multiple groups.
    - hendersoon 4y ago
      True, but that seems less elegant and Twitter users are already comfortable with tags.

joshlemer 4y ago

Maybe what we need is a decoupling of user-hosting instances and post-hosting instances. Probably the biggest issue I have with twitter is that I have multiple interests/communities I'm involved with. If I post a lot about topic A, get some followers who know me through A, that's great! But then I want to talk about B with the community who knows me through topic B and I feel the need to self-censor as to not spam the topic A followers. I've always felt I would like to be able to tweet only to the TopicA people or only to the TopicB people. But I don't really care that my user data is stored on the same instance as the people in TopicA or TopicB. So maybe a better model for federation would be that you can host your user on an instance, and then also when you post, you are deciding which instance to post on. At the same time, being on a generalist server (mastodon.social) I really couldn't possibly care less about looking at the trending posts on my server as that is just a general slice of mastodon users and I am not in any specific community with them. I want to subscribe to specific niche/thematic mastodon instances for my feed.

post-it 4y ago
Google Plus handled that really well with Circles.

ryukoposting 4y ago

First of all, a forum is a social network. A primitive one, sure, with origins before "social network" had really entered our lexicon, but a social network nonetheless. The ability of people in a federated social network to create arbitrary, independent instances with rules tailored for particular discussion topics is a feature, not a bug. If you don't like that... well, don't go on topic-specific Mastodon servers I guess. Are you advocating for Mastodon to have SSO? If so, I can get on board with that. Are you advocating for a cap on the number of members of a particular instance? Mastodon can already do that - all you have to do is not approve new accounts. Of course, the inherent problem with that is that activity in member-capped servers will gradually die out, and now you need way more admins... your idea, not mine.

bawolff 4y ago

Given that i read HN because of its focus and perculiur rules, the thesis of this post is a pretty hard sell to me.

forgotpwd16 4y ago
Depends on whether you consider fora and social media be the same thing and, even if not, whether they have to function in a similar way. Author notes that a social network has "to give the users the most freedom to let their personality shine" and the thesis is Mastodon is not a good social network due to its model resulting in focused instances.

iza 4y ago

I prefer the approach taken by nostr[1] and Scuttlebutt[2], where identity is a public key not tied to any particular server. However Mastodon is gaining a lot more traction and seems to be good enough in practice. 1. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr 2. https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/

Octokiddie 4y ago

The author makes two good points: 1. Nobody wants to maintain a generalist instance, partly because it's harder to apply generalist moderation policies and partly because it attracts so many more users. 2. Running your own instance does solve (1), but Mastodon was not designed as a P2P network and likely can't function that way.

Duralias 4y ago
Running your own instance works, as long as everyone else isn't. I run my own and while my local feed is dead (even though I am not the only one on it), "home" and "federated" are fairly lively after following a few people.
toofy 4y ago
> Nobody wants to maintain a generalist instance… i’m not sure what ya mean, the largest instance is generalist. almost all of the most populated instances are also generalist: mastodon.social mastodon.cloud mastodon.online mstdn.social mas.to mastodon.world and on and on. there is no shortage of smaller generalist servers either. i may be misunderstanding your larger point tho?

EarlKing 4y ago

This is precisely how things worked back in the days of FidoNet, and it was one of the big arguments that was never fully resolved, as you had one group of sysops who felt that if you wanted to be a FidoNet sysop you should be obligated to carry whatever topics are on the network backbone, and another group of sysops who felt "my computer, my rules". Fundamentally it was a disagreement over what being part of a federated service meant. Such disagreements eventually led sysops to leave the network and start their own. I have little doubt that is going to happen with the Fediverse as well since some nodes seem hellbent on making sure it happens.

thejohnconway 4y ago

As someone that runs an interest-based instance, this take is just does not ring true. Sure, if you want to join my server you probably should have an interest in palaeontology or zoology, but I have no problem at all if people want to talk about whatever they want to talk about§. This seems to be true of most such instances. Hacker News seems to have an interest in finding things wrong with Mastodon. There are things wrong with Mastodon of course, but they pale in comparison to the problems of centralised internet that had nearly devoured the entire world. I'd like to see more talk about how to build and improve or solve actual problems rather than these usually pretty off-base complainy takes. §Within the rules of decency, of course.

andreyk 4y ago
Agreed - I run an AI-focused instance, but our FAQ explicitly states it's fine to post about non AI stuff. It's more about making a community that shares the interest rather than forcing all conversations to focus on that one interest.
- dmix 4y ago
  From my experience Mastodon is more obsessed with creating bubbles than Reddit hypermodding. So it's great your FAQ says that and your topic is non-controversial and niche. But when applied en masse it's just a mass collection of extremely segmented bubbles. Nothing wrong with that. Niche forums are perfectly fine. But lets not pretend that's a social network anything like Twitter, or FB, or Reddit circa 2012. Popular Mastodon servers ban hundreds of servers where users may have signed up but not known the extensive rules list of each other sub server (in addition to the [n] amount of moderated content).
  - toofy 4y ago
    > But when applied en masse it's just a mass collection of extremely segmented bubbles. We don’t exist in mastodon bubbles. we go out with friends. we visit families houses. we visit friends families. we visit dozens of other web sites. we interact with countless numbers of people every single day. we go to work. we go to school. this “you’re going to live in a bubble!” panic is wild.

rsynnott 4y ago

This feels like... an issue that the author has just imagined, to be honest. Sure, many instances have some sort of theme, but by no means all (the majority of users, I'd think, are on one of the generic ones), and in most cases there's no rule enforcing keeping to the theme.

acjohnson55 4y ago

A problem right now is the conflation between instance and community. The instance is really a technical concept, which allows for the federated hosting model. It hosts your Fediverse identity and while you can migrate, it's not seamless. Most people don't want to belong to just one community, so while an instance gives you a default community, it should not be the only mechanism of community. I don't think there's a widely distributed community concept, but hopefully, one will evolve. Something akin to the feature set of Facebook groups. This is very solvable, and I'm guessing that if Mastodon continues to gain in popularity, we'll see something emerge.

napsy 4y ago

Couldn't mastodon just provide an option to logging in via OpenID? Then you would have a single authentication for multiple mastodon instances with different topics.

LinuxBender 4y ago
logging in via OpenID Would that not bring us back to a centralized service that can decide a person is toxic and is globally banned?

3np 4y ago

I'm surprised to not yet see mentions of DIDs in the article or comments. IMO ideally users should be able to control and move parts of their identity/persona/account independent of the server they are on. I think it's possible to come up with a great solution, but there's a lot of unexplored territory.

INTPenis 4y ago

I'm split on this. On one hand I want to run an instance with freedom, and I want users to resolve conflicts amongst themselves, and using the mute button if push come to shove. But on the other hand, if I allow that, other servers will de-federate from me. So these last few months I've been put into a lot of hard moderating situations. Where for example an entire instance reports a user on my instance, saying it's spreading hate speech, or transphobia, but it's not. The user just happened to use an aggressive tone in a thread with a famous person, for example, or just piss off the wrong admin. And now I have to make a decision on how to handle this user, who didn't break any of my server rules. And I even ran into a straight up racist on my instance, but didn't suspend their account because while they were clearly a supporter of the right-wing party, that same right-wing party has a majority vote. So why should I suspend them for voicing their political affiliation? Again, not breaking any rules, not breaking any laws, just voicing opinions in line with the current right-wing majority party. I just don't believe in sweeping people under the rug. In that case, of the right-wing person, they ended up getting muted by other instances, fortunately not de-federated. But it feels like I'm always balancing on a knife's edge between free speech and a de-federated instance. Basically, I feel myself becoming a "language-police", and that's not what I want.

3np 4y ago
Small instance here. One user (me) hade a few mostly technical posts about a bitcoin lightning network client they were developing on, and reposted some content along similar lines. From the perspective of software, among contributors and operators. We're now defederated by at least a few instances for "crypto grifters" or similar. We won't be bothered to investigate and follow up to see if/how it's propagated until one of our users raise an issue about it. Much of the active fediverse have had quite particular culture with very narrow corridors around some things, of all varieties. Some of these groups (in lack of better word) demonize each other. Those who take up running open general instances for years with no financial incentive are sometimes also of a particular kind within that. Some are also intentionally insular ("safe spaces" come to mind) and will mute or defederate anyone identified as not part of their in-group. I've also seen instances blanket-blocking anything Pleroma, because "all the bad people come from Pleroma". I've even seen it called evil software because it affords more customization of filtering, rewriting, and federation. If the fediverse does get traction over time and the demography widens, I think we'll have much fracturing, possibly pushing protocol changes and incompatible forks. For now: Haters gonna hate, what can you do about it

b3nji 4y ago

And this is how its supposed to be. Small communities working, or not working together. I've been using Mastodon for years, part of a community of no more than 10,000 people (we have a cap for reasons I'm not going to get into) and it's fine. I also got my own instance, like I have my own email. Mastodon isn't Twitter or Facebook, it's not designed to be that way.

albert180 4y ago

Why do so many people who haven't used or understood Mastodon have the urge to share their moronic assessment of it?

AstixAndBelix 4y ago
I used and understood Mastodon much more than you. Suck it

college_physics 4y ago

people (still) largely miss the dramatic ways in which "mastodon" is reshaping social networking - at least in principle * its not a single platform but a constellation of federating servers based on different stacks and technologies. the specific mastodon implementation of activitypub is neither built-in nor required to participate in the fediverse. enabling different technologists/stacks to compete in a common arena will have an accelerating effect in how social networking evolves * its not closed source: people/communities having other ideas about "the best social network" are free to fork, implement and experiment with said ideas. this augments the previous point and will further enable exploring the space of possibilities * its not a single instance: within the confines of a specific design / implementation one can still tweak both hard configurations and soft rules to achieve specific community aims * maybe most importantly: it enables potentially alternative business models beyond the winner-takes-all surveillance capitalism model that has come to destroy social networking (and much else as well). think of public funds, non-profit, more commercial interest-based instances etc granted, its all still largely in the realm of potentialities and one could imagine all sorts of patches that will be required as weaknesses reveal through adoption and use, but many negative reactions at this point seem just intellectual laziness (or something worse). in a sense it is a benign coincidence that the most mature expression of the emerging fediverse has been mastodon (and the mastodon.social instance), which is a twitter lookalike. combined with the convulsions of the bird site this creates the perfect conditions for people to get exposed to alternate realities and breaking the TINA spell. This is particularly true for all sorts of institutions, luminaries etc active on twitter that have provided the platform with a legitimacy it does not really deserve

mensetmanusman 4y ago

Start your own server and you can do what you want.

opan 4y ago

You can have multiple accounts on different instances and you can find general instances. I don't know why so many people flock to very specific ones.

t0bia_s 4y ago

There is no perfect solution for social network. It will never replace real conversations. Anything that could be written comfortable behind the screen tends to be soon or later extreme and toxic. Real conversations are less extreme on both sides, because factor of danger from others is more real. Also anything that has man in middle that decide what is bad or good to post or anything that can be voted also change organic flow of conversation and make it unnatural and eventually selfcensored. This concludes me to abandon social networks completely. HN is only exception for now.

rolenthedeep 4y ago

I think the key point being missed here is that mastodon isn't one website segregated into communities. It's a bunch of small websites each with their own community. Instead of one garbage Twitter replacement, we have thousands of individual Twitter-like websites each aimed at a particular community. There's one for any subset of interests you care to look for. The magic of mastodon is that these websites can interact with each other. If you live on the LGBT programmer instance, you can follow and talk to people on the clam science facts server, or artists on the art server. Then you also get to see all the accounts anyone on your server follows, and you discover new accounts and servers that way. If you find a new server you like better, you can just pack up and move in a few clicks. The model is closer to subreddits than it is to Twitter. Mastodon is a fundamentally different thing, and people keep having panic attacks because they want to frame it as Twitter and it doesn't fit. It's different, and you need to adjust your perspective. Once you appreciate mastodon for what it is, it's a pretty neat platform.