4 ms·

> there are good reasons to use them What is one of them?

tptacek 4y ago
The medium is better for expressing thoughts (you can write a decent-sized blog post in a single Mastodon post). It has most of the effective bits of Twitter, and many of the effective bits of the peak, RSS-soaked blogosphere. If the tooling gets better, I can see it being better than the golden age of Google Reader. It also makes sense that you can stand up your own Mastodon, in the same sense as you could stand up WordPress back in the day. Most people won't, but the fact that you can, and that the ability to do so is baked into protocol, keeps development interesting. It also makes it more interesting for third party clients, which Twitter has spent the last decade trying to eradicate. So that's a second (and probably third) reason. Perhaps ironically, these are also reasons that I think the norms of the "fediverse" aren't going to matter in the long term. I think the software approach is important, and the notion of a single "decentralized social network" is not.
- jancsika 4y ago
  I thought you were giving reasons for "ordinary software users" to go out and use Mastodon in its current form. I was hoping that perhaps their shitshow onboarding UX got updated to accommodate the influx of users over the past few weeks. Nope-- they just changed the "Create Account" link to "Apply for Account" in their hall of instances. :( But regarding Mastodon as a potential alternative to the the current centralized social networks-- fair enough. I even saw recently that Ted Unangst even made a stripped-down Mastodon server in Go which I'd like to check out when I get a chance.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    Yes: there are reasons ordinary users might prefer Mastodon to Twitter; as I said: * You can write full posts in Mastodon * You can own your own data, run your own service, or select from a variety of hosted options * The ecosystem encourages good third-party clients and tooling The tooling isn't there, but then, I don't think anybody expected the events of the last few months, so I'm inclined to give it a quarter or two. As a casual user, there are ways in which Mastodon is superior to Twitter already, and most of my problems are with the clients; Tapbots can't keep up with the beta demand for Ivory, and there's 2-3 other promising clients, so I'm optimistic. I wrote Mastodon off for years, but: it's pretty good? I miss the blogosphere, and Mastodon is a step back towards it.
    - OctopusLupid 4y ago
      To add on to this, remember that there is a Fediverse plugin for Wordpress as well.
      - drusepth 4y ago
        And lots of other popular sites, like Tumblr, are adding Fediverse support as well.
      - longitudinal93 4y ago
        And Drupal
    - dmix 4y ago
      What about the inherent bubble-y nature of Mastodon? Do you see it as beneficial to have a series of large groups of balkanized servers optionally interconnected rather than a general public network everyone contributes to. I hate the label of "public square", because Twitter should already be opt-in in terms of which content you see based on who you follow, even though it's one big network (ignoring the @jack era AI-feeds which fought this idea). A key difference in Twitter vs Mastodon UX is that users would have to make different accounts for each "Balkan country" server they join. If one server blacklists or is blacklisted they won't be able to participate in others. And this has implications well beyond US polarized politics once it reaches global scale.
      - tptacek 4y ago
        I perceive this to be the biggest critique people have of Mastodon and I simply don't care about it at all; it just passes directly over my head. My guess is that it's a consequence of people mostly "belonging" to community servers, with defined (and evolving) community norms. Blog hosts didn't have those, and I don't think Mastodon/ActivityPub servers will for long either. It's going to get easier to run your own server, and there are going to be hosting providers that do that work for you; ultimately, "Mastodon instances" (or some pin-compatible equivalent) are going to be commodities, like Blogger blogs. I'm on a server (infosec.exchange) that I like just fine for now, but I'd expect to be publishing on my own server within a month or so. At that point, what's the "bubble"? It seems like exactly the same situation as RSS, except I'm not depending on Google to keep Reader going. I'm not bullish on "the fediverse" as a federation of communities with some global norms (like religiously posting alt tags on images) and lots of local norms (like never posting AI art, or things like that). But having actually used it now, I think the underlying technology is a lot smarter than I gave it credit for, and I think it stands a decent chance of being important.
- indigochill 4y ago
  > and the notion of a single "decentralized social network" is not. I've been running my own Pleroma instance for a month or so and I'm firmly of the opinion that a single network is actually a Bad Idea. The fact that ActivityPub is federated means that it's also prone to abuse from other nodes similar to email spam, which is just about as simple to execute in the fediverse right now as rolling a new domain name. Small-time casual admins like myself won't be able to keep up with a global abuse firehose which hasn't really happened yet to my knowledge but will sooner or later. The solution in my mind (and what I've already done) is to use a node whitelist instead of relying on blacklisting, which means smaller networks based foremost on interpersonal trust. Which means a constellation of much smaller but also stronger social networks that reflect actual communities as opposed to just the internet at large. This is super easy to do with ActivityPub servers and my prediction is this is the way forward although I expect people will also try to write clever abuse filters and fall into that perpetual cat-and-mouse game since that's what happened with email.

The medium is better for expressing thoughts (you can write a decent-sized blog post in a single Mastodon post). It has most of the effective bits of Twitter, and many of the effective bits of the peak, RSS-soaked blogosphere. If the tooling gets better, I can see it being better than the golden age of Google Reader. It also makes sense that you can stand up your own Mastodon, in the same sense as you could stand up WordPress back in the day. Most people won't, but the fact that you can, and that the ability to do so is baked into protocol, keeps development interesting. It also makes it more interesting for third party clients, which Twitter has spent the last decade trying to eradicate. So that's a second (and probably third) reason. Perhaps ironically, these are also reasons that I think the norms of the "fediverse" aren't going to matter in the long term. I think the software approach is important, and the notion of a single "decentralized social network" is not.

jancsika 4y ago
I thought you were giving reasons for "ordinary software users" to go out and use Mastodon in its current form. I was hoping that perhaps their shitshow onboarding UX got updated to accommodate the influx of users over the past few weeks. Nope-- they just changed the "Create Account" link to "Apply for Account" in their hall of instances. :( But regarding Mastodon as a potential alternative to the the current centralized social networks-- fair enough. I even saw recently that Ted Unangst even made a stripped-down Mastodon server in Go which I'd like to check out when I get a chance.
- tptacek 4y ago
  Yes: there are reasons ordinary users might prefer Mastodon to Twitter; as I said: * You can write full posts in Mastodon * You can own your own data, run your own service, or select from a variety of hosted options * The ecosystem encourages good third-party clients and tooling The tooling isn't there, but then, I don't think anybody expected the events of the last few months, so I'm inclined to give it a quarter or two. As a casual user, there are ways in which Mastodon is superior to Twitter already, and most of my problems are with the clients; Tapbots can't keep up with the beta demand for Ivory, and there's 2-3 other promising clients, so I'm optimistic. I wrote Mastodon off for years, but: it's pretty good? I miss the blogosphere, and Mastodon is a step back towards it.
  - OctopusLupid 4y ago
    To add on to this, remember that there is a Fediverse plugin for Wordpress as well.
    - drusepth 4y ago
      And lots of other popular sites, like Tumblr, are adding Fediverse support as well.
    - longitudinal93 4y ago
      And Drupal
  - dmix 4y ago
    What about the inherent bubble-y nature of Mastodon? Do you see it as beneficial to have a series of large groups of balkanized servers optionally interconnected rather than a general public network everyone contributes to. I hate the label of "public square", because Twitter should already be opt-in in terms of which content you see based on who you follow, even though it's one big network (ignoring the @jack era AI-feeds which fought this idea). A key difference in Twitter vs Mastodon UX is that users would have to make different accounts for each "Balkan country" server they join. If one server blacklists or is blacklisted they won't be able to participate in others. And this has implications well beyond US polarized politics once it reaches global scale.
    - tptacek 4y ago
      I perceive this to be the biggest critique people have of Mastodon and I simply don't care about it at all; it just passes directly over my head. My guess is that it's a consequence of people mostly "belonging" to community servers, with defined (and evolving) community norms. Blog hosts didn't have those, and I don't think Mastodon/ActivityPub servers will for long either. It's going to get easier to run your own server, and there are going to be hosting providers that do that work for you; ultimately, "Mastodon instances" (or some pin-compatible equivalent) are going to be commodities, like Blogger blogs. I'm on a server (infosec.exchange) that I like just fine for now, but I'd expect to be publishing on my own server within a month or so. At that point, what's the "bubble"? It seems like exactly the same situation as RSS, except I'm not depending on Google to keep Reader going. I'm not bullish on "the fediverse" as a federation of communities with some global norms (like religiously posting alt tags on images) and lots of local norms (like never posting AI art, or things like that). But having actually used it now, I think the underlying technology is a lot smarter than I gave it credit for, and I think it stands a decent chance of being important.
indigochill 4y ago
> and the notion of a single "decentralized social network" is not. I've been running my own Pleroma instance for a month or so and I'm firmly of the opinion that a single network is actually a Bad Idea. The fact that ActivityPub is federated means that it's also prone to abuse from other nodes similar to email spam, which is just about as simple to execute in the fediverse right now as rolling a new domain name. Small-time casual admins like myself won't be able to keep up with a global abuse firehose which hasn't really happened yet to my knowledge but will sooner or later. The solution in my mind (and what I've already done) is to use a node whitelist instead of relying on blacklisting, which means smaller networks based foremost on interpersonal trust. Which means a constellation of much smaller but also stronger social networks that reflect actual communities as opposed to just the internet at large. This is super easy to do with ActivityPub servers and my prediction is this is the way forward although I expect people will also try to write clever abuse filters and fall into that perpetual cat-and-mouse game since that's what happened with email.