7 ms·

To those who come here to say that Fediverse is too small to be in any way, shape or form viable, I'll repeat my comment from the other day [0] that the Fediver

by rapnie 4y ago

To those who come here to say that Fediverse is too small to be in any way, shape or form viable, I'll repeat my comment from the other day [0] that the Fediverse is not in a contest to existing megascale platforms: > The growth-hacking folks around here should realize that from the perspective of the Fediverse there is no such "contest". This is probably the biggest difference why Twitter is by no means an alternative to Mastodon. There's no need to grow at all costs, move fast and break things, do crazy things to get engagement levels up, no commercial incentives, valuations, VC and shareholders to satisfy. The Fediverse is a network created by people, for people, and it is noticeable in the culture.. if you stop the frantic growth-hacking and take the time to discover it. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35584385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35584385

celdon25 4y ago
I didn't find anything interesting about Mastodon. It felt like just another Twitter to me. I don't care about some random dude's cat pictures or their takes on politics or what they had for lunch. Is there something I'm missing?
- beej71 4y ago
  Don't follow #cats or #politics or #lunch. :) I care a lot about some random person's astronomy pictures. They're fun to look at. And some random person's programming content, or history or geology content... Good stuff. You can seriously curate your own feed on Mastodon.
- IanCal 4y ago
  My mastodon feed is generally people talking about stuff they find interesting. Twitter is 95% like this X is really important. 5 things you have to know: (thread) All because of trying to game/use all the engagement figures about what shows your post more. Splitting your content into two tweets with half the people clicking through after reading the first results in half the people actually getting the information but massively more engagement stats so Twitter thinks it's much more important.
  - blitzar 4y ago
    > 5 things you have to know: (thread) This seems to be a trend amongst wannabe influencers - sader than the lack of actual content is that you see the same thread copied and pasted and used by multiple accounts.
    - a_bonobo 4y ago
      I deactivated my Twitter account (set to private), from time to time I take a peek and it looks like the new algorithmically generated timeline really seems to push these garbage listicle tweet-threads.
      - blitzar 4y ago
        If your version gets pushed I might as well do copy & paste and get my impressions up too ...
- nstart 4y ago
  To be fair, if you don't use Twitter then you are already well removed from the target demographic that might find Mastodon useful. That said, there are a lot of really useful takes on Mastodon on various topics. Politics is probably the area where you will find the most number of takes. But in infosec, and game development at least, there's a lot of interesting info. The biggest issue with Mastodon or the fediverse rather is the lack of full text search and the cultural push back against it. I don't view the push back as negative. It's a sign that the community has strong opinions and that's a good thing. But the lack of search does make it hard to peek into a conversation around a topic which to me takes away from the experience of jumping into communities of interest.
  - WA 4y ago
    I agree. I find it interesting that we took search on Twitter for granted and only realize later that it is probably more important than expected. Maybe a search engine for Mastodon can fix this.
    - WJW 4y ago
      AFAIK there have been several attempts at this, but Mastodon deliberately does not support arbitrary search and some communities are extremely hostile to having their posts scraped.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        This seems like it guarantees political battles of some sort? Whether intra or inter-community.
        WJW 4y ago
        Given how many political battles there are on platforms that do have full text search, I don't think it's the lack or presence of full text search that causes such things. Rather it seems likely that political battles naturally arise on any social media platform that allows broadcasting your opinion to the whole world.
- tptacek 4y ago
  If you don't care about Twitter's service model, you don't care about Mastodon.
- DoItToMe81 4y ago
  You aren't missing anything. It's not a forum, it's just people from mainstream social media who have sought to leave mainstream social media for various reasons. There are some interesting tech people on some instances, but it's generally not worth wading through the hundreds of people attracted to the idea of a more hugbox Twitter.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  I've found twitter/mastadon useful to follow updates from specific open source developers whose work I know and am interested in.
  - yutijke 4y ago
    How do you find the time to go through it all? A lot of open source developers also post about other topics like their cats, dogs and favorite types of bread. Which is fine. It's their profile. With twitter I could filter out these with carefully crafted search queries on separately maintained lists since I only have so much time in my day to devote to Tech, I cannot do this on Mastodon since no one is diligent about hashtags and it is an explicit policy to cripple search. I've most stopped following open source developers since then.
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      > How do you find the time to go through it all? I'm not consistent with it. I just check it occasionally. For people I'm particularly interested in (and who don't post that often!), I'll go to their profile and scroll down that separately to if there's anything I've missed. For others, if I didn't see it then that's ok. > A lot of open source developers also post about other topics like their cats, dogs and favorite types of bread. I just don't follow (or later unfollow) anyone who does this.
- _khhm 4y ago
  [dead]
gsatic 4y ago
Dont worry about the "growth" hackers. Attention is finite. They cant hack that. How many books get added to a library, or how many ppl get shoved into the library, has no effect on how many books one person can actually read and digest at a time.
HopenHeyHi 4y ago
And yet the vanity metric is right in the title. Most of what we hear of the Fediverse is rants about twitter and a few of the same subcultures over and over again. There used to be a site long ago, lost to the mists of time, called Big Boards, tracking the biggest forums: https://web.archive.org/web/20130223011947/http://rankings.big-boards.com/?filter=phpBB,all https://web.archive.org/web/20130223011947/http://rankings.b... 10 years ago it was a thing called Gaia online with Chibi anime thingies and 2 billion messages. The more things change..
- fogzen 4y ago
  Gaia Online! What a blast of nostalgia. I miss my chibi avatar…
  - HopenHeyHi 4y ago
    Son, I still think about my green Neopets T-Rex.
    - Operyl 4y ago
      That website is somehow still kicking, years later. It’s a shell of its former self, though, having been sold a few times now.
  - bovermyer 4y ago
    I created my Gaia Online account in 2003. Sadly, I can't regain access to it, as it was deactivated. Last time I tried, I needed to create a new account in order to create a support request, and things got weird. That was a decade ago, I think.
- nstart 4y ago
  > Most of what we hear of the Fediverse is rants about twitter and a few of the same subcultures over and over again. I feel like this isn't true anymore. There's definitely a lot of chatter about Twitter of course and even more so now that there's regular Twitter related drama happening. But I have 7 federated instances on speed dial that range from general purpose, to infosec, to art, and to game development. They all talk about a lot of stuff, not just the things related purely to the server theme. I checked all of their local timelines just now and found only one post talking about Twitter and it was just a link to a news item where Elon talks about government access to Twitter. Notably absent were any growth hack posts. Everything was just stream of consciousness stuff.
rvz 4y ago
Seems like tons of Mastodon advocates are the ones always pitching it as an alternative to Twitter. Every time that happens, I'll just get the numbers out since you brought up the total number or registered users which is irrelevant to active users: Twitter: 220M+ DAU over 17 years. Mastodon: ~50,000 DAU (1.4M MAU) over 7 years. What matters in social networks is scale and it still means more users and there is already evidence that Mastodon not only was and is still struggling to scale, but eventually needed to re-centralize to handle their scalability issues, ie. using Cloudflare. Most of the instances there, are hosted by enthusiasts and hobbyists which intermittently struggle with more users. If an instance is too small, it will easily be at risk of getting attacked and overloaded with users, with the instance falling over and having to close signups. If its too large, they become more centralized and to incentivise federation they have to close signups. Either way, centralization is inevitable. It's already bad enough for normal users to 'choose an instance' if their can't register on a closed one or if a rouge admin bans you or an entire instance over something silly. Thus, It is quite clear to me, that for normal users who are not techies or geeks, Mastodon is not a viable alternative or even remotely to replace Twitter or even a recommendation.
- phoe-krk 4y ago
  >If an instance is too small, it will easily be at risk of getting attacked and overloaded with users, with the instance falling over and having to close signups. Co-admin of https://functional.cafe https://functional.cafe here. Mastodon lists us as having 213 active users currently, so I guess this counts as a small instance. Haven't seen our instance fall over for more than a day or two except for hitting hardware limits, mostly hard disk space. Also, I have no idea why you perceive closing sign-ups as a sign of failure. Closing sign-ups or going invite-only protects the current users and state of the instance (and, indirectly, the rest of the Fediverse) both from the dangers of attacks from new users and from explosive growth. Is it some sort of measure of success, to be able to always invite new people even at the expense of already existing ones?
- boudin 4y ago
  What's this thing with the absolute wish to centralise everything? The Internet is decentralisation, it's birth is interconnecting networks, having one massive network being just not scaleable. The web is a decentralise content system, allowing anybody to add content easily is the reason it scaled. Same goes for the domain name system. Companies like Twitter HAVE to decentralise their system in some ways to make it scale, because centralisation does not scale (using CDNs, caches, replication, etc...). Centralisation do makes seems much simpler to build, but it's not a strength, it's a big weakness and create single points of failure.
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
Maybe open source can project such a thing as "deathzone" around social networks once funding for growth hacking rounds out. Once matrix is up to discord levels of features, and the horrors facebook will be willing to todo for one last sip of growth get revealed, things might turn sour fast. All it takes is the social carawanne lead animals leaving the beaten track and the whole network will unravel following them.
safety1st 4y ago
This is right. The Fediverse and Mastodon aren't products. As the most widespread implementation of ActivityPub (and AGPL'ed to boot), Mastodon, like WordPress and the Linux kernel before it, is more like a force of nature. It's something that more and more people will adopt over time because it's free and "good enough" for some use cases. A fraction of those who adopt it will contribute to it and it will improve. The longer this virtuous cycle continues the harder it is to stop. Over several decades it will commoditize a chunk of a technology layer that's currently proprietary (basically, the social graph). Maybe a huge chunk of it. Again just like Linux and WordPress - there will be lots of of critics and naysaying from people who don't understand the economics of the software industry (or in some cases simply don't want to). They will be wrong, again. They will moan about it for many years after it has become successful. History repeats.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Cultivate ecosystems, not products. Ecosystems persist, products are at the whim of…everything. EDIT: @madeofpalk Better comment than mine, great links.
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    Protocols, Not Platforms https://www.techdirt.com/2019/08/28/protocols-not-platforms-technological-approach-to-free-speech/ https://www.techdirt.com/2019/08/28/protocols-not-platforms-... https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
    - numtel 4y ago
      For even more, see the reading list for the ongoing Summer of Protocols: https://efdn.notion.site/0314a1800b774258a8e6197487c479bc?v=15fb6b39a490413cbba3b7f78ad67c2b https://efdn.notion.site/0314a1800b774258a8e6197487c479bc?v=...
- riffic 4y ago
  the AP ecosystem is a genie that can't be placed back inside the bottle, it can not be bought by a single malicious actor (or nation-state), and it was built openly by folks associated by the W3C as a standard specification for anyone to freely implement. looking forward for media and the public sector (emergency comms etc) to get on board.
shadowgovt 4y ago
Quite correct. I'd argue it's not even the right framework to consider the question. Individual Mastodon nodes might be interested in maximizing their userbase. But talking about "Growth goals for Mastodon" is like trying to talk about "Growth goals for the Internet."

by rapnie 4y ago

celdon25 4y ago

I didn't find anything interesting about Mastodon. It felt like just another Twitter to me. I don't care about some random dude's cat pictures or their takes on politics or what they had for lunch. Is there something I'm missing?

beej71 4y ago
Don't follow #cats or #politics or #lunch. :) I care a lot about some random person's astronomy pictures. They're fun to look at. And some random person's programming content, or history or geology content... Good stuff. You can seriously curate your own feed on Mastodon.
IanCal 4y ago
My mastodon feed is generally people talking about stuff they find interesting. Twitter is 95% like this X is really important. 5 things you have to know: (thread) All because of trying to game/use all the engagement figures about what shows your post more. Splitting your content into two tweets with half the people clicking through after reading the first results in half the people actually getting the information but massively more engagement stats so Twitter thinks it's much more important.
- blitzar 4y ago
  > 5 things you have to know: (thread) This seems to be a trend amongst wannabe influencers - sader than the lack of actual content is that you see the same thread copied and pasted and used by multiple accounts.
  - a_bonobo 4y ago
    I deactivated my Twitter account (set to private), from time to time I take a peek and it looks like the new algorithmically generated timeline really seems to push these garbage listicle tweet-threads.
    - blitzar 4y ago
      If your version gets pushed I might as well do copy & paste and get my impressions up too ...
nstart 4y ago
To be fair, if you don't use Twitter then you are already well removed from the target demographic that might find Mastodon useful. That said, there are a lot of really useful takes on Mastodon on various topics. Politics is probably the area where you will find the most number of takes. But in infosec, and game development at least, there's a lot of interesting info. The biggest issue with Mastodon or the fediverse rather is the lack of full text search and the cultural push back against it. I don't view the push back as negative. It's a sign that the community has strong opinions and that's a good thing. But the lack of search does make it hard to peek into a conversation around a topic which to me takes away from the experience of jumping into communities of interest.
- WA 4y ago
  I agree. I find it interesting that we took search on Twitter for granted and only realize later that it is probably more important than expected. Maybe a search engine for Mastodon can fix this.
  - WJW 4y ago
    AFAIK there have been several attempts at this, but Mastodon deliberately does not support arbitrary search and some communities are extremely hostile to having their posts scraped.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      This seems like it guarantees political battles of some sort? Whether intra or inter-community.
      - WJW 4y ago
        Given how many political battles there are on platforms that do have full text search, I don't think it's the lack or presence of full text search that causes such things. Rather it seems likely that political battles naturally arise on any social media platform that allows broadcasting your opinion to the whole world.
tptacek 4y ago
If you don't care about Twitter's service model, you don't care about Mastodon.
DoItToMe81 4y ago
You aren't missing anything. It's not a forum, it's just people from mainstream social media who have sought to leave mainstream social media for various reasons. There are some interesting tech people on some instances, but it's generally not worth wading through the hundreds of people attracted to the idea of a more hugbox Twitter.
nicoburns 4y ago
I've found twitter/mastadon useful to follow updates from specific open source developers whose work I know and am interested in.
- yutijke 4y ago
  How do you find the time to go through it all? A lot of open source developers also post about other topics like their cats, dogs and favorite types of bread. Which is fine. It's their profile. With twitter I could filter out these with carefully crafted search queries on separately maintained lists since I only have so much time in my day to devote to Tech, I cannot do this on Mastodon since no one is diligent about hashtags and it is an explicit policy to cripple search. I've most stopped following open source developers since then.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    > How do you find the time to go through it all? I'm not consistent with it. I just check it occasionally. For people I'm particularly interested in (and who don't post that often!), I'll go to their profile and scroll down that separately to if there's anything I've missed. For others, if I didn't see it then that's ok. > A lot of open source developers also post about other topics like their cats, dogs and favorite types of bread. I just don't follow (or later unfollow) anyone who does this.
_khhm 4y ago
[dead]

gsatic 4y ago

Dont worry about the "growth" hackers. Attention is finite. They cant hack that. How many books get added to a library, or how many ppl get shoved into the library, has no effect on how many books one person can actually read and digest at a time.

HopenHeyHi 4y ago

And yet the vanity metric is right in the title. Most of what we hear of the Fediverse is rants about twitter and a few of the same subcultures over and over again. There used to be a site long ago, lost to the mists of time, called Big Boards, tracking the biggest forums: https://web.archive.org/web/20130223011947/http://rankings.big-boards.com/?filter=phpBB,all https://web.archive.org/web/20130223011947/http://rankings.b... 10 years ago it was a thing called Gaia online with Chibi anime thingies and 2 billion messages. The more things change..

fogzen 4y ago
Gaia Online! What a blast of nostalgia. I miss my chibi avatar…
- HopenHeyHi 4y ago
  Son, I still think about my green Neopets T-Rex.
  - Operyl 4y ago
    That website is somehow still kicking, years later. It’s a shell of its former self, though, having been sold a few times now.
- bovermyer 4y ago
  I created my Gaia Online account in 2003. Sadly, I can't regain access to it, as it was deactivated. Last time I tried, I needed to create a new account in order to create a support request, and things got weird. That was a decade ago, I think.
nstart 4y ago
> Most of what we hear of the Fediverse is rants about twitter and a few of the same subcultures over and over again. I feel like this isn't true anymore. There's definitely a lot of chatter about Twitter of course and even more so now that there's regular Twitter related drama happening. But I have 7 federated instances on speed dial that range from general purpose, to infosec, to art, and to game development. They all talk about a lot of stuff, not just the things related purely to the server theme. I checked all of their local timelines just now and found only one post talking about Twitter and it was just a link to a news item where Elon talks about government access to Twitter. Notably absent were any growth hack posts. Everything was just stream of consciousness stuff.

rvz 4y ago

Seems like tons of Mastodon advocates are the ones always pitching it as an alternative to Twitter. Every time that happens, I'll just get the numbers out since you brought up the total number or registered users which is irrelevant to active users: Twitter: 220M+ DAU over 17 years. Mastodon: ~50,000 DAU (1.4M MAU) over 7 years. What matters in social networks is scale and it still means more users and there is already evidence that Mastodon not only was and is still struggling to scale, but eventually needed to re-centralize to handle their scalability issues, ie. using Cloudflare. Most of the instances there, are hosted by enthusiasts and hobbyists which intermittently struggle with more users. If an instance is too small, it will easily be at risk of getting attacked and overloaded with users, with the instance falling over and having to close signups. If its too large, they become more centralized and to incentivise federation they have to close signups. Either way, centralization is inevitable. It's already bad enough for normal users to 'choose an instance' if their can't register on a closed one or if a rouge admin bans you or an entire instance over something silly. Thus, It is quite clear to me, that for normal users who are not techies or geeks, Mastodon is not a viable alternative or even remotely to replace Twitter or even a recommendation.

phoe-krk 4y ago
>If an instance is too small, it will easily be at risk of getting attacked and overloaded with users, with the instance falling over and having to close signups. Co-admin of https://functional.cafe https://functional.cafe here. Mastodon lists us as having 213 active users currently, so I guess this counts as a small instance. Haven't seen our instance fall over for more than a day or two except for hitting hardware limits, mostly hard disk space. Also, I have no idea why you perceive closing sign-ups as a sign of failure. Closing sign-ups or going invite-only protects the current users and state of the instance (and, indirectly, the rest of the Fediverse) both from the dangers of attacks from new users and from explosive growth. Is it some sort of measure of success, to be able to always invite new people even at the expense of already existing ones?
boudin 4y ago
What's this thing with the absolute wish to centralise everything? The Internet is decentralisation, it's birth is interconnecting networks, having one massive network being just not scaleable. The web is a decentralise content system, allowing anybody to add content easily is the reason it scaled. Same goes for the domain name system. Companies like Twitter HAVE to decentralise their system in some ways to make it scale, because centralisation does not scale (using CDNs, caches, replication, etc...). Centralisation do makes seems much simpler to build, but it's not a strength, it's a big weakness and create single points of failure.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

Maybe open source can project such a thing as "deathzone" around social networks once funding for growth hacking rounds out. Once matrix is up to discord levels of features, and the horrors facebook will be willing to todo for one last sip of growth get revealed, things might turn sour fast. All it takes is the social carawanne lead animals leaving the beaten track and the whole network will unravel following them.

safety1st 4y ago

This is right. The Fediverse and Mastodon aren't products. As the most widespread implementation of ActivityPub (and AGPL'ed to boot), Mastodon, like WordPress and the Linux kernel before it, is more like a force of nature. It's something that more and more people will adopt over time because it's free and "good enough" for some use cases. A fraction of those who adopt it will contribute to it and it will improve. The longer this virtuous cycle continues the harder it is to stop. Over several decades it will commoditize a chunk of a technology layer that's currently proprietary (basically, the social graph). Maybe a huge chunk of it. Again just like Linux and WordPress - there will be lots of of critics and naysaying from people who don't understand the economics of the software industry (or in some cases simply don't want to). They will be wrong, again. They will moan about it for many years after it has become successful. History repeats.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
Cultivate ecosystems, not products. Ecosystems persist, products are at the whim of…everything. EDIT: @madeofpalk Better comment than mine, great links.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  Protocols, Not Platforms https://www.techdirt.com/2019/08/28/protocols-not-platforms-technological-approach-to-free-speech/ https://www.techdirt.com/2019/08/28/protocols-not-platforms-... https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
  - numtel 4y ago
    For even more, see the reading list for the ongoing Summer of Protocols: https://efdn.notion.site/0314a1800b774258a8e6197487c479bc?v=15fb6b39a490413cbba3b7f78ad67c2b https://efdn.notion.site/0314a1800b774258a8e6197487c479bc?v=...
riffic 4y ago
the AP ecosystem is a genie that can't be placed back inside the bottle, it can not be bought by a single malicious actor (or nation-state), and it was built openly by folks associated by the W3C as a standard specification for anyone to freely implement. looking forward for media and the public sector (emergency comms etc) to get on board.

shadowgovt 4y ago

Quite correct. I'd argue it's not even the right framework to consider the question. Individual Mastodon nodes might be interested in maximizing their userbase. But talking about "Growth goals for Mastodon" is like trying to talk about "Growth goals for the Internet."