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I agree with the premise of the article. I’m a new Mastodon user trying to give the platform an honest shot, but I can’t understand why I would choose any parti

by sxg 3y ago

I agree with the premise of the article. I’m a new Mastodon user trying to give the platform an honest shot, but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another. Why choose anything other than the pseudo-default Mastodon.social? If I’m forced to choose another server, is that choice actually meaningful? I feel like I’m randomly picking between Hachyderm and TechHub.io and others. One advantage of federation I keep hearing is that servers can block other servers if their users become problematic. My question is this: why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane? I do see the potential advantages of federation to prevent the same fate that overcame Twitter and Reddit, but I can’t figure out how to make a user’s server choice actually meaningful. Without solving that piece of the puzzle, I don’t see any practical advantage to federated services.

7e 3y ago
Yes, all problematic users don’t congregate on the same server. Problematic users can pop up anywhere. However, a server could fail to moderate effectively and become a source of misinformation and trolling. That’s the benefit of federation: it ensures a minimum level of moderation quality. Servers that don’t moderate are blocked, which sets up the proper incentives.
- sxg 3y ago
  Sure, but as the number of users on the federated service grows, how do we not end up in the same place as email today? Does it not become good moderation policy to auto-block all new and small servers (e.g., self-hosted email servers) if you're a big server (e.g., Gmail)? If that happens, wouldn't all users migrate to the big server (e.g., Gmail) and effectively re-establish centralization and undermine federation?
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    The inverse happened recently on Lemmy. Beehaw.org, a community focused on good behavior, defederated lemmy.world and another smaller site because those sites caused a lot of unwanted content and moderator intervention. Lemmygrad.ml, a bunch of communist extremists, also gets blocked quite often, not just by principled servers like beehaw. A lot of people got mad for being blocked, but honestly I can't blame the admins for trying to reduce the amount of moderation necessary. There are thousands of people per moderator on those sites and that combined with open registration is a recipe for toxic bullshit nobody wants to deal with. Smaller instances don't get blocked, though. I doubt they will be until the low quality shitposters will figure out a way to host a server of their own, but without a central gathering place I think even then the abuse will be easily prevented. That said, Lemmy used to be set to whitelist-only by default for ages. This has been changed, but if someone wants to federate with just their servers of choice, they can just toggle a setting. Lemmy also comes with an approval form by default, which is used manually to vet users during signup. Open signup servers disable that field, obviously, but those servers are often also the ones that get blocked. I can see this evolving to a situation where only closed or manually approved servers get federated by default. Requiring manual reduces the probability that a small team of admins will get overwhelmed by a large influx of users.
  - post-it 3y ago
    Email isn't fully centralized, and the centralization seems to have plateaued. Fully hosting your own email server is difficult, but there are hundreds of non-Google/Microsoft/Apple hosts. If the Fediverse centralizes to the extent of email, I still prefer that to the current 100% siloization of all social media. Email is also old and unextendable, whereas the Fediverse has interoperable stacks built on top of it, opening the door to better moderation and web-of-trust tools that help combat spam and decrease the pressure for centralization.
- memefrog 3y ago
  What's misinformation? Things you don't think are true? Things the instance admin doesn't think are true? Things officially deemed untrue by the State? Or by the UN/WHO? Is is considered Misinformation if it was deemed Untrue in the past by State Officials but is now Official State Policy? We have always been at war with Eastasia. We have always recommended the wearing of masks. We have always seriously considered the possibility of a lab leak. Border closures are a bad, racist, problematic idea. No wait, now New Zealand is the hero of the pandemic because it closed its borders. We have always recommended border closures! Servers defederating because of viagra/nigerian prince/etc. spam is one thing. A "lefty politics" server defederating with a "righty politics" server or vice-versa because they just want an echo chamber? Sure, you do you. General-purpose defederating other general-purpose servers because of "misinformation" and "trolling", when those terms basically mean "disagreeing with the current mainstream narrative on any controversial issue"? That's absurd. The generally-accepted issue with social media was for years that it created echo chambers. Now people are trying to use mastodon to create even more powerful echo chambers.
  - eggnet 3y ago
    Signal to noise ratio. When the admin of a server thinks the ratio of another server is too low, the admin will block it. What's the definition of too low? Up to the admins of that server.
    - cubefox 3y ago
      That's the problem. It's enough when people choose themselves whom to follow.
      - eggnet 3y ago
        It's not enough if those people's posts are flooded with low quality replies.
        cubefox 3y ago
        That seems to be only a problem for a few people with a very high follower count or for viral tweets. Both are quite rare relatively speaking.
lopatin 3y ago
Maybe each subcommunnity can be it's own server? Or will that not work because a user can belong to multiple communities?
- sxg 3y ago
  That’s exactly the problem with replacing Reddit with a federated service. The opposite is true with replacing Twitter in which case it’s difficult to explain why a user has to pick any server at all.
  - ParetoOptimal 3y ago
    You can subscribe to other servers though which let's users "have" multiple instances.
- qball 3y ago
  >Maybe each subcommunnity can be it's own server? The need to do this obviates the utility of federation completely.
notatoad 3y ago
>but I can’t figure out how to make a user’s server choice actually meaningful in theory, the instance-specific bit of it is the moderation. the one you sign up with chooses which other instances to federate with, as well as how to moderate the content on their own instance. in theory, you could sign up for an instance that only allowed the sort of politics you agree with, or that had very lax moderation, or that had very strict moderation. unfortunately, none of the fediverse seems to actually talk about this so without signing up and using an instance for a while to see what the moderation policies are like there's no way to know.
- jeromegv 3y ago
  > unfortunately, none of the fediverse seems to actually talk about this so without signing up and using an instance for a while to see what the moderation policies are like there's no way to know. Correct, but that's why you can actually migrate your account (including your followers!) from one instance another. The initial choice doesn't matter too much. Just migrate if you don't like it. That's why there isn't much discussions about it.
  - dclowd9901 3y ago
    Can you migrate to another instance if yours becomes defederated?
    - nightpool 3y ago
      "Defederated" is not something that happens to an instance, it's a choice that other instances make. There's no "globally defederated" state. If your server (Server A) is blocked by Server B, then no, you can't move to Server B. But you can still move to Server C that doesn't block you.
      - dclowd9901 3y ago
        Well so this is kind of what I was getting at. It feels similar to an email service being blocklisted, only in this case, you really _can’t_ move your content because at the end of the day, a group of federated instances will also be wary of instances without reputation, as much as those of ill repute. So no, in reality, you can’t move your content, or if you can right now it’s a foible of the system as it is today and will not continue as such.
egypturnash 3y ago
> why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane? The fediverse is not one unified whole, the fediverse is a bunch of loosely-connected communities that can very easily throw up walls at a moment's notice. Admins are actively incentivised to kick problem users off. If a server becomes known as a source of problems, then other admins will defederate from it. How you define "problems" depends on who you are, in general if an admin looks at a report for one of your users and finds you doing the exact same kind of bullshit as what your user was reported for then they will probably defed from you without a second thought. After a while your server will only be federated with other servers that are also fine with that particular kind of bullshit. If your particular kind of bullshit is "finding people who are different from you and making fun of them" then there's a high chance that the users on your server will either wander away, or turn on each other; both of these tend to lead to admins deciding it's not worth keeping the place running in my experience. Mastodon.social is way too big to realistically be handled by anything but a bigger crew of paid moderators than it has, and "we should defed from mastodon.social because it's right on the border of being a constant source of trouble" is a topic that admins constantly chew on in places like the #fediblock tag. But you can start on one of the big servers and move, too. Possibly to a small one with a lot of your friends, so that the "local" timeline is useful. Possibly one run by one of your friends, who will make largely the same "oh god look at this server full of assholes, block'd" calls that you would, and save you the trouble. Possibly one with a cool name, would you rather be sxg@mastodon.social, sxg@possums.gay, sxg@gop.party, sxg@...? (As far as I know neither Lemmy or Kbin offer account migration yet, so you're stuck on your initial one until they fix this. I'm sure it's in their roadmaps.)
- Zak 3y ago
  At least as big an issue for Lemmy and Kbin is community migration. A server that hosts a popular community shutting down is a very real risk, and simply telling users to switch doesn't scale. (No, not everything needs to scale, but it would be better if that did.)
  - egypturnash 3y ago
donio 3y ago
> ... but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another. Email is often a good analogy for questions like these: Why do you pick one email service over the other? Maybe you think the domain is cool. Maybe you heard that they are reliable or have features that others don't. Maybe your university, company or other community you belong to runs its own service. Or you decide to host your own. Or you really have no preference and you just go with the one your friend uses. We just don't have just don't have the gmail-equivalent catch-all choices yet. Maybe that will come later or maybe it won't.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Except that with e-mail there are obvious good reasons, which basically boil down to whether you've centered your digital life around the Google, Microsoft, or Apple ecosystems (or never moved away from Yahoo, etc.). These are recognizably proven brands that aren't going to disappear next year, and which integrate with your other tools in ways that clearly provide benefit. And back in the day before webmail was a thing, your ISP gave you an e-mail address so you didn't pick at all. But none of these are even remotely applicable to Mastodon instances. So I'm not sure that e-mail is actually a helpful analogy at all here.
  - donio 3y ago
    That's what I meant by "no catch-all choices yet". There is no reason Google or Apple couldn't get in the game if they choose to. Supposedly Facebook is making a go at it for whatever that's worth. I offered the email analogy because that helped me to wrap my head around it when I was starting out.
  - nightpool 3y ago
    Maybe not from the outside. But after a few months of actively using the platform with a curious mindset, I'd wager you'd have a much stronger idea of how instances differ. That's the main service I see the "pseudo-default" mastodon.social providing in the current world—as a "jumping off" point that people can use prior to migrating to more specific instances with more customizations or better communities.
class4behavior 3y ago
The same way people manage to decide whether to buy buns at the bakery on the right rather than the one on the left or donate to the NGO1 rather than NGO2 doing exactly the same, you ought to manage to judge which instance is a better fit or if it even matters in your case. >why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane? Well, exactly. And who's doing all the blocking and filtering? What are the rules? And which community is better at reporting and keeping the instance the way you like it? What about your interests? If you join a busy generic instance, of course, you will become disinterested in your local timeline.
- sxg 3y ago
  Perhaps Mastodon is just too immature at this stage for the servers to really differentiate themselves from each other. However, as the number of users and posts on Mastodon grows, will any server actually be capable of adequate moderation? Twitter has ~6,000 tweets per second—it's hard to imagine any Mastodon server today being able to handle even a fraction of that content.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    It would be interesting to know how many moderators Twitter has. They do have ad income, so they can afford to employ full time staff. Then again, Reddit does well with volunteer moderators.
- croutonwagon 3y ago
  I have also noticed that in some cases....user blocks are being replicated to an instance I run. I have this huge and ever growing list of banned users on my single user instance in lemmy. ANd I have no idea who is banning and why...I doesnt seem to affect me...but its odd
  - vGPU 3y ago
    Which is exactly what worries me. I don’t want other people deciding who I can read and who I can’t. I don’t want other people deciding what voices should be heard. This just seems like the creation of another echo chamber.
jojobas 3y ago
>I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another Who runs the server? On what kind of funding, and how long can it last? Are you served intrusive ads? Are your a customer or a product for the people running this instance? How hard is it to run an instance yourself, and what happens if you suddenly post a video that attracts 10M views? So many questions, I know, that's too hard, gimme something easy.
- sxg 3y ago
  At the time I signed up for Mastodon and a server, I didn't consider and wasn't presented with any of these questions/answers or other points of differentiation among servers. I guess that's part of the issue: when an ordinary user signs up for Mastodon, they're unaware of what they should even consider when picking a server. As an ordinary Mastodon user myself, I just wanted to get on the platform and start using it.
  - jojobas 3y ago
    Well signing up for anything important (or anything at all really) you should consider all of that, federated or not (especially if not). Yes, it's a problem that the majority of people "just want to start using it" and wouldn't consider any of the above when exposing, I assume, their lives to strangers.
    - sxg 3y ago
      Sure, on paper we should all carefully consider every decision we make. However, in practice I’m confident the vast majority of Mastodon and Twitter users (including myself) don’t consider using either service particularly important or deserving of more than a couple minutes of thought. From Mastodon, I aim to follow some interesting users to find interesting articles, learn new things, get a sense of “what’s happening” in the circles I follow, and broadly be entertained for a few minutes at a time. I absolutely don’t consider it a critical component of my life and can’t justify spending much thought on it.
ekanes 3y ago
I think many servers/instances post what they're all about and how they're different, and that should help. We're seeing all kinds of sites springing up to help navigate this, and I think in time it'll be sorted out.
kornhole 3y ago
Mass federation is the best solution to resist mass surveillance and censorship. I never have a problem picking an instance because I just create my own instance whenever I want to use different SW. In a few minutes I can usually spin one up. and I have a few running on my SBC sitting here on my desk. I rarely ever block anyone as unfollowing is good enough.
Stephen304 3y ago
Problematic users do tend to congregate on certain servers because they keep getting banned from better moderated ones. Eventually they find the ones that won't ban them, and now well moderated instances have an easy target to block them wholesale. That's how you end up with instances like explodingheads.
- jojobas 3y ago
  The only caveat is that what's well moderated and what's not depends on who you ask.
  - burnished 3y ago
    That isnt a caveat so much as a fearure
    - jojobas 3y ago
      Imagine being unable to email someone because he holds an opinion that was the only one possible some 15 years ago, and think again.
      - pixl97 3y ago
        I mean if that opinion was they can send commercial messages to unsolicited users I don't have to imagine at all. I've been on the internet long enough to remember the days before spam filters.
      - HWR_14 3y ago
        For pretty much any value of "an opinion that was the only one possible some 15 years ago", you are wrong. Other ideas were around at the time.
        cubefox 3y ago
        It's more that at the time you could disagree on some things where now only one view is acceptable. The Overton window has narrowed substantially on certain subjects.
foogazi 3y ago
> why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Because they have been banned from other servers ?
Glyptodon 3y ago
I think if the intent and structure of federation curves towards every household having its own server or something analogous the federated universe seems more sensible. But that does seem like a difficult curve until we have a universe where there's something like app-store level ease around self hosting your household services on something equivalent to a fancy home router is the norm. And that universe seems far off and actively not what the powers that be desire.
- davidpaulyoung 3y ago
  We're offering this at Federated Computer: https://federated.computer https://federated.computer. Nextcloud, Jitsi, Matrix/Element, all domain level services, all private.
geppetto 3y ago
Easy, I just choose the instance with the bigger community in my own native language then added people from other instances.
TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
What you see on Mastodon is (a) stuff posted by other people on your server, and (b) stuff posted by people on other servers whom people on your server are following. So your choice of server has a strong affect on your feed. And hosting your own instance means that you really need to start following loads of people if you want to keep an eye on what's going on. I suppose I can see this as a good thing, or at least vaguely see why other people might see it as a good thing, but I mostly find it annoying. (It also means that there isn't an overall Mastodon zeitgeist, the way there may have been with Twitter.) Another, even more annoying side-effect, is that conversations may have bits silently missing, if they're posted by someone not on your instance. I have been reading a thread of seven posts, posted by five different people, and then looked at that same thread from another server and found that it was actually sixteen posts, posted by eight different people, several of which had not federated to my server. I have been irritated by two different people asking me the same questions, leading to two separate threads hanging off my initial comment, covering exactly the same subject, until I looked at the conversations from their servers and realised that they were invisible to each other. I would never use Mastodon for anything serious: the chance of irritating people, missing context, and talking at cross purposes are far too high.
hosh 3y ago
I think the idea is to find a local server where you know the admin and the other local users that have similar community values.
danijelb 3y ago
Current federation looks like that, a bunch of small independent communities focused on a single topic like tech or photography or whatever, but it doesn't have to be like that. If federation catches on then the most likely the pick will be between 5-10 huge general instances run by corporations. In such world, Twitter and Facebook could add support for ActivityPub, Google and Microsoft could build their own, different ISPs and media companies could run their instances, and so on. Then the benefit of choice becomes more clear - who do you trust the most to provide you an account. Basically, it would be like the situation with email where most people use a 3-4 biggest services, but the ecosystem is open to new competitors. The current state of federated social networks is very experimental. If it catches on with big corporations 90% of people will use that, and these small communities can still survive but would be more or less irrelevant.
kossTKR 3y ago
Yeah, tried the same with Lemmy. A list of half done of dead communities, all of them with zero explanation of why and how. Then i read about the codebase and people were struggling with SQL so performance is bad - i mean what? is that really the state things, where's the talent working on this? I'm honestly surprised that both the design, performance and docs of these alternatives are this bad in 2023. If this has to work you need an extremely simple and well designed landing page with a super simple explanation of how this works, the creation of a user should work on more or less all instances, and you should be able to easily meta search for the communities you want and get an easy overview quickly.
Libcat99 3y ago
Consider the phone network for a moment. The phone network is a federated service. You can call an ATT customer from Verizon. You can also call them from Joe's Discount Boxes and VoIP sales. Now, if you start making spammy calls, ATT might block you as a customer (after warning you first). Same for Verizon. But Joe's Discount Boxes and VoIP sales doesn't, because box sales are down and these VoIP margins are so, so juicy. Spammy customers flock to Joe, because he allows it. Joe keeps letting customers on, without doing due diligence, without caring if they're legit (beyond a valid looking credit card), and eventually gets blocked by FCC order. (See https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-23-389A1.pdf https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-23-389A1.pdf, for an example). Now, federation doesn't have an FCC, the various server admins will be filling that role themselves, but there is a reason scummy people will use scummy servers. Side note: This kind of FCC enforcement is fairly new to the industry, so if you're wondering why you get spam called all the time still, there is some hope this'll change.
artichokeheart 3y ago
“ why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? ” There’s a simple answer to why server blocking is a feature of mastodon. It was built to handle a real world problem. I.e there was early on a server that was a “free speech absolutist” server that server mods wanted to block at a server level.
kazinator 3y ago
> Why choose anything other than the pseudo-default Mastodon.social? - Because might not be accepting new users. - Because some other server has a local timeline that is interesting, perhaps catering to certain interests. - Geographic: it may be closer to you. - Language restrictions. You want to toot in certain languages, but some instances are English (or whatever) only. - Some instances run hacked software with useful features. > why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Because they behave in a way that gets them banned in other servers.

by sxg 3y ago

7e 3y ago

Yes, all problematic users don’t congregate on the same server. Problematic users can pop up anywhere. However, a server could fail to moderate effectively and become a source of misinformation and trolling. That’s the benefit of federation: it ensures a minimum level of moderation quality. Servers that don’t moderate are blocked, which sets up the proper incentives.

sxg 3y ago
Sure, but as the number of users on the federated service grows, how do we not end up in the same place as email today? Does it not become good moderation policy to auto-block all new and small servers (e.g., self-hosted email servers) if you're a big server (e.g., Gmail)? If that happens, wouldn't all users migrate to the big server (e.g., Gmail) and effectively re-establish centralization and undermine federation?
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  The inverse happened recently on Lemmy. Beehaw.org, a community focused on good behavior, defederated lemmy.world and another smaller site because those sites caused a lot of unwanted content and moderator intervention. Lemmygrad.ml, a bunch of communist extremists, also gets blocked quite often, not just by principled servers like beehaw. A lot of people got mad for being blocked, but honestly I can't blame the admins for trying to reduce the amount of moderation necessary. There are thousands of people per moderator on those sites and that combined with open registration is a recipe for toxic bullshit nobody wants to deal with. Smaller instances don't get blocked, though. I doubt they will be until the low quality shitposters will figure out a way to host a server of their own, but without a central gathering place I think even then the abuse will be easily prevented. That said, Lemmy used to be set to whitelist-only by default for ages. This has been changed, but if someone wants to federate with just their servers of choice, they can just toggle a setting. Lemmy also comes with an approval form by default, which is used manually to vet users during signup. Open signup servers disable that field, obviously, but those servers are often also the ones that get blocked. I can see this evolving to a situation where only closed or manually approved servers get federated by default. Requiring manual reduces the probability that a small team of admins will get overwhelmed by a large influx of users.
- post-it 3y ago
  Email isn't fully centralized, and the centralization seems to have plateaued. Fully hosting your own email server is difficult, but there are hundreds of non-Google/Microsoft/Apple hosts. If the Fediverse centralizes to the extent of email, I still prefer that to the current 100% siloization of all social media. Email is also old and unextendable, whereas the Fediverse has interoperable stacks built on top of it, opening the door to better moderation and web-of-trust tools that help combat spam and decrease the pressure for centralization.
memefrog 3y ago
What's misinformation? Things you don't think are true? Things the instance admin doesn't think are true? Things officially deemed untrue by the State? Or by the UN/WHO? Is is considered Misinformation if it was deemed Untrue in the past by State Officials but is now Official State Policy? We have always been at war with Eastasia. We have always recommended the wearing of masks. We have always seriously considered the possibility of a lab leak. Border closures are a bad, racist, problematic idea. No wait, now New Zealand is the hero of the pandemic because it closed its borders. We have always recommended border closures! Servers defederating because of viagra/nigerian prince/etc. spam is one thing. A "lefty politics" server defederating with a "righty politics" server or vice-versa because they just want an echo chamber? Sure, you do you. General-purpose defederating other general-purpose servers because of "misinformation" and "trolling", when those terms basically mean "disagreeing with the current mainstream narrative on any controversial issue"? That's absurd. The generally-accepted issue with social media was for years that it created echo chambers. Now people are trying to use mastodon to create even more powerful echo chambers.
- eggnet 3y ago
  Signal to noise ratio. When the admin of a server thinks the ratio of another server is too low, the admin will block it. What's the definition of too low? Up to the admins of that server.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    That's the problem. It's enough when people choose themselves whom to follow.
    - eggnet 3y ago
      It's not enough if those people's posts are flooded with low quality replies.
      - cubefox 3y ago
        That seems to be only a problem for a few people with a very high follower count or for viral tweets. Both are quite rare relatively speaking.

lopatin 3y ago

Maybe each subcommunnity can be it's own server? Or will that not work because a user can belong to multiple communities?

sxg 3y ago
That’s exactly the problem with replacing Reddit with a federated service. The opposite is true with replacing Twitter in which case it’s difficult to explain why a user has to pick any server at all.
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago
  You can subscribe to other servers though which let's users "have" multiple instances.
qball 3y ago
>Maybe each subcommunnity can be it's own server? The need to do this obviates the utility of federation completely.

notatoad 3y ago

>but I can’t figure out how to make a user’s server choice actually meaningful in theory, the instance-specific bit of it is the moderation. the one you sign up with chooses which other instances to federate with, as well as how to moderate the content on their own instance. in theory, you could sign up for an instance that only allowed the sort of politics you agree with, or that had very lax moderation, or that had very strict moderation. unfortunately, none of the fediverse seems to actually talk about this so without signing up and using an instance for a while to see what the moderation policies are like there's no way to know.

jeromegv 3y ago
> unfortunately, none of the fediverse seems to actually talk about this so without signing up and using an instance for a while to see what the moderation policies are like there's no way to know. Correct, but that's why you can actually migrate your account (including your followers!) from one instance another. The initial choice doesn't matter too much. Just migrate if you don't like it. That's why there isn't much discussions about it.
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  Can you migrate to another instance if yours becomes defederated?
  - nightpool 3y ago
    "Defederated" is not something that happens to an instance, it's a choice that other instances make. There's no "globally defederated" state. If your server (Server A) is blocked by Server B, then no, you can't move to Server B. But you can still move to Server C that doesn't block you.
    - dclowd9901 3y ago
      Well so this is kind of what I was getting at. It feels similar to an email service being blocklisted, only in this case, you really _can’t_ move your content because at the end of the day, a group of federated instances will also be wary of instances without reputation, as much as those of ill repute. So no, in reality, you can’t move your content, or if you can right now it’s a foible of the system as it is today and will not continue as such.

egypturnash 3y ago

> why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane? The fediverse is not one unified whole, the fediverse is a bunch of loosely-connected communities that can very easily throw up walls at a moment's notice. Admins are actively incentivised to kick problem users off. If a server becomes known as a source of problems, then other admins will defederate from it. How you define "problems" depends on who you are, in general if an admin looks at a report for one of your users and finds you doing the exact same kind of bullshit as what your user was reported for then they will probably defed from you without a second thought. After a while your server will only be federated with other servers that are also fine with that particular kind of bullshit. If your particular kind of bullshit is "finding people who are different from you and making fun of them" then there's a high chance that the users on your server will either wander away, or turn on each other; both of these tend to lead to admins deciding it's not worth keeping the place running in my experience. Mastodon.social is way too big to realistically be handled by anything but a bigger crew of paid moderators than it has, and "we should defed from mastodon.social because it's right on the border of being a constant source of trouble" is a topic that admins constantly chew on in places like the #fediblock tag. But you can start on one of the big servers and move, too. Possibly to a small one with a lot of your friends, so that the "local" timeline is useful. Possibly one run by one of your friends, who will make largely the same "oh god look at this server full of assholes, block'd" calls that you would, and save you the trouble. Possibly one with a cool name, would you rather be sxg@mastodon.social, sxg@possums.gay, sxg@gop.party, sxg@...? (As far as I know neither Lemmy or Kbin offer account migration yet, so you're stuck on your initial one until they fix this. I'm sure it's in their roadmaps.)

Zak 3y ago
At least as big an issue for Lemmy and Kbin is community migration. A server that hosts a popular community shutting down is a very real risk, and simply telling users to switch doesn't scale. (No, not everything needs to scale, but it would be better if that did.)
- egypturnash 3y ago

donio 3y ago

> ... but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another. Email is often a good analogy for questions like these: Why do you pick one email service over the other? Maybe you think the domain is cool. Maybe you heard that they are reliable or have features that others don't. Maybe your university, company or other community you belong to runs its own service. Or you decide to host your own. Or you really have no preference and you just go with the one your friend uses. We just don't have just don't have the gmail-equivalent catch-all choices yet. Maybe that will come later or maybe it won't.

crazygringo 3y ago
Except that with e-mail there are obvious good reasons, which basically boil down to whether you've centered your digital life around the Google, Microsoft, or Apple ecosystems (or never moved away from Yahoo, etc.). These are recognizably proven brands that aren't going to disappear next year, and which integrate with your other tools in ways that clearly provide benefit. And back in the day before webmail was a thing, your ISP gave you an e-mail address so you didn't pick at all. But none of these are even remotely applicable to Mastodon instances. So I'm not sure that e-mail is actually a helpful analogy at all here.
- donio 3y ago
  That's what I meant by "no catch-all choices yet". There is no reason Google or Apple couldn't get in the game if they choose to. Supposedly Facebook is making a go at it for whatever that's worth. I offered the email analogy because that helped me to wrap my head around it when I was starting out.
- nightpool 3y ago
  Maybe not from the outside. But after a few months of actively using the platform with a curious mindset, I'd wager you'd have a much stronger idea of how instances differ. That's the main service I see the "pseudo-default" mastodon.social providing in the current world—as a "jumping off" point that people can use prior to migrating to more specific instances with more customizations or better communities.

class4behavior 3y ago

The same way people manage to decide whether to buy buns at the bakery on the right rather than the one on the left or donate to the NGO1 rather than NGO2 doing exactly the same, you ought to manage to judge which instance is a better fit or if it even matters in your case. >why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane? Well, exactly. And who's doing all the blocking and filtering? What are the rules? And which community is better at reporting and keeping the instance the way you like it? What about your interests? If you join a busy generic instance, of course, you will become disinterested in your local timeline.

sxg 3y ago
Perhaps Mastodon is just too immature at this stage for the servers to really differentiate themselves from each other. However, as the number of users and posts on Mastodon grows, will any server actually be capable of adequate moderation? Twitter has ~6,000 tweets per second—it's hard to imagine any Mastodon server today being able to handle even a fraction of that content.
- cubefox 3y ago
  It would be interesting to know how many moderators Twitter has. They do have ad income, so they can afford to employ full time staff. Then again, Reddit does well with volunteer moderators.
croutonwagon 3y ago
I have also noticed that in some cases....user blocks are being replicated to an instance I run. I have this huge and ever growing list of banned users on my single user instance in lemmy. ANd I have no idea who is banning and why...I doesnt seem to affect me...but its odd
- vGPU 3y ago
  Which is exactly what worries me. I don’t want other people deciding who I can read and who I can’t. I don’t want other people deciding what voices should be heard. This just seems like the creation of another echo chamber.

jojobas 3y ago

>I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another Who runs the server? On what kind of funding, and how long can it last? Are you served intrusive ads? Are your a customer or a product for the people running this instance? How hard is it to run an instance yourself, and what happens if you suddenly post a video that attracts 10M views? So many questions, I know, that's too hard, gimme something easy.

sxg 3y ago
At the time I signed up for Mastodon and a server, I didn't consider and wasn't presented with any of these questions/answers or other points of differentiation among servers. I guess that's part of the issue: when an ordinary user signs up for Mastodon, they're unaware of what they should even consider when picking a server. As an ordinary Mastodon user myself, I just wanted to get on the platform and start using it.
- jojobas 3y ago
  Well signing up for anything important (or anything at all really) you should consider all of that, federated or not (especially if not). Yes, it's a problem that the majority of people "just want to start using it" and wouldn't consider any of the above when exposing, I assume, their lives to strangers.
  - sxg 3y ago
    Sure, on paper we should all carefully consider every decision we make. However, in practice I’m confident the vast majority of Mastodon and Twitter users (including myself) don’t consider using either service particularly important or deserving of more than a couple minutes of thought. From Mastodon, I aim to follow some interesting users to find interesting articles, learn new things, get a sense of “what’s happening” in the circles I follow, and broadly be entertained for a few minutes at a time. I absolutely don’t consider it a critical component of my life and can’t justify spending much thought on it.

ekanes 3y ago

I think many servers/instances post what they're all about and how they're different, and that should help. We're seeing all kinds of sites springing up to help navigate this, and I think in time it'll be sorted out.

kornhole 3y ago

Mass federation is the best solution to resist mass surveillance and censorship. I never have a problem picking an instance because I just create my own instance whenever I want to use different SW. In a few minutes I can usually spin one up. and I have a few running on my SBC sitting here on my desk. I rarely ever block anyone as unfollowing is good enough.

Stephen304 3y ago

Problematic users do tend to congregate on certain servers because they keep getting banned from better moderated ones. Eventually they find the ones that won't ban them, and now well moderated instances have an easy target to block them wholesale. That's how you end up with instances like explodingheads.

jojobas 3y ago
The only caveat is that what's well moderated and what's not depends on who you ask.
- burnished 3y ago
  That isnt a caveat so much as a fearure
  - jojobas 3y ago
    Imagine being unable to email someone because he holds an opinion that was the only one possible some 15 years ago, and think again.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      I mean if that opinion was they can send commercial messages to unsolicited users I don't have to imagine at all. I've been on the internet long enough to remember the days before spam filters.
    - HWR_14 3y ago
      For pretty much any value of "an opinion that was the only one possible some 15 years ago", you are wrong. Other ideas were around at the time.
      - cubefox 3y ago
        It's more that at the time you could disagree on some things where now only one view is acceptable. The Overton window has narrowed substantially on certain subjects.

foogazi 3y ago

> why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Because they have been banned from other servers ?

Glyptodon 3y ago

I think if the intent and structure of federation curves towards every household having its own server or something analogous the federated universe seems more sensible. But that does seem like a difficult curve until we have a universe where there's something like app-store level ease around self hosting your household services on something equivalent to a fancy home router is the norm. And that universe seems far off and actively not what the powers that be desire.

davidpaulyoung 3y ago
We're offering this at Federated Computer: https://federated.computer https://federated.computer. Nextcloud, Jitsi, Matrix/Element, all domain level services, all private.

geppetto 3y ago

Easy, I just choose the instance with the bigger community in my own native language then added people from other instances.

TRiG_Ireland 3y ago

What you see on Mastodon is (a) stuff posted by other people on your server, and (b) stuff posted by people on other servers whom people on your server are following. So your choice of server has a strong affect on your feed. And hosting your own instance means that you really need to start following loads of people if you want to keep an eye on what's going on. I suppose I can see this as a good thing, or at least vaguely see why other people might see it as a good thing, but I mostly find it annoying. (It also means that there isn't an overall Mastodon zeitgeist, the way there may have been with Twitter.) Another, even more annoying side-effect, is that conversations may have bits silently missing, if they're posted by someone not on your instance. I have been reading a thread of seven posts, posted by five different people, and then looked at that same thread from another server and found that it was actually sixteen posts, posted by eight different people, several of which had not federated to my server. I have been irritated by two different people asking me the same questions, leading to two separate threads hanging off my initial comment, covering exactly the same subject, until I looked at the conversations from their servers and realised that they were invisible to each other. I would never use Mastodon for anything serious: the chance of irritating people, missing context, and talking at cross purposes are far too high.

hosh 3y ago

I think the idea is to find a local server where you know the admin and the other local users that have similar community values.

danijelb 3y ago

Current federation looks like that, a bunch of small independent communities focused on a single topic like tech or photography or whatever, but it doesn't have to be like that. If federation catches on then the most likely the pick will be between 5-10 huge general instances run by corporations. In such world, Twitter and Facebook could add support for ActivityPub, Google and Microsoft could build their own, different ISPs and media companies could run their instances, and so on. Then the benefit of choice becomes more clear - who do you trust the most to provide you an account. Basically, it would be like the situation with email where most people use a 3-4 biggest services, but the ecosystem is open to new competitors. The current state of federated social networks is very experimental. If it catches on with big corporations 90% of people will use that, and these small communities can still survive but would be more or less irrelevant.

kossTKR 3y ago

Yeah, tried the same with Lemmy. A list of half done of dead communities, all of them with zero explanation of why and how. Then i read about the codebase and people were struggling with SQL so performance is bad - i mean what? is that really the state things, where's the talent working on this? I'm honestly surprised that both the design, performance and docs of these alternatives are this bad in 2023. If this has to work you need an extremely simple and well designed landing page with a super simple explanation of how this works, the creation of a user should work on more or less all instances, and you should be able to easily meta search for the communities you want and get an easy overview quickly.

Libcat99 3y ago

Consider the phone network for a moment. The phone network is a federated service. You can call an ATT customer from Verizon. You can also call them from Joe's Discount Boxes and VoIP sales. Now, if you start making spammy calls, ATT might block you as a customer (after warning you first). Same for Verizon. But Joe's Discount Boxes and VoIP sales doesn't, because box sales are down and these VoIP margins are so, so juicy. Spammy customers flock to Joe, because he allows it. Joe keeps letting customers on, without doing due diligence, without caring if they're legit (beyond a valid looking credit card), and eventually gets blocked by FCC order. (See https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-23-389A1.pdf https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-23-389A1.pdf, for an example). Now, federation doesn't have an FCC, the various server admins will be filling that role themselves, but there is a reason scummy people will use scummy servers. Side note: This kind of FCC enforcement is fairly new to the industry, so if you're wondering why you get spam called all the time still, there is some hope this'll change.

artichokeheart 3y ago

“ why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? ” There’s a simple answer to why server blocking is a feature of mastodon. It was built to handle a real world problem. I.e there was early on a server that was a “free speech absolutist” server that server mods wanted to block at a server level.

kazinator 3y ago

> Why choose anything other than the pseudo-default Mastodon.social? - Because might not be accepting new users. - Because some other server has a local timeline that is interesting, perhaps catering to certain interests. - Geographic: it may be closer to you. - Language restrictions. You want to toot in certain languages, but some instances are English (or whatever) only. - Some instances run hacked software with useful features. > why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Because they behave in a way that gets them banned in other servers.