6 ms·

Mastodon Is Rewinding the Clock on Social Media – In a Good Way

137 points by CharlieDigital 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
vorticalbox 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230831161113/https://chrlschn.medium.com/mastodon-is-rewinding-the-clock-on-social-media-in-a-good-way-8998f6d9f1aa https://web.archive.org/web/20230831161113/https://chrlschn....
dragontamer 3y ago
Ish. Advertising-based media gets funding and will work. Due to the nature of funding, any ad-based media will always be bigger and more mainstream. See Youtube, TikTok, Instagram. The content creators are now glorified advertisers who can hawk their attention-economies for money. You can't beat money, not for mainstream. Those who work for money can make more money, and spend that money to make more money on top of that. That in of itself drives more content and eyeballs, and to some degree higher-quality (or at least, more attention-grabbing) media. ----------------- That's not to say that Mastodon is going to fail. We nerds don't care much about attention and care more about having a discussion space to share ideas. Yes, there's a degree of attention-economy here as well (see any 1980s-era computer magazine: the advertisements for various computer parts are obvious). So there will be a tredmill towards advertising and attention media IMO, even on something like Mastodon. (Ex: Tumblr and Threads might be ActivityPub / Mastodon compatible, what then?). Recognizing that we're a niche community who prefers to slink away from attention (and indeed: attention-grabbers disgust us rather than intrigues us), that's fine. We just need to build our own little corners of the internet that matches our discussion style and pace. But don't fall into the trap of believing that Mastodon can displace Twitter (or whatever replaces Twitter in the long term, like Threads or Tumblr or whoever). Appreciate what Mastodon has built, but also recognize its a niche appeal. ------------ For the non-Mastodon aware, I think the best example of such a discussion site is https://mastodon.gamedev.place/explore https://mastodon.gamedev.place/explore, perhaps one of the better Mastodon instances for nerds that match Hacker News's stereotypes. There's no chance that gamedev.place will ever become a mainstream instance. And that's fine and cool. Their focus on game development and programming issues makes them a pleasant community to interact with. That's the kind of community that only Mastodon can build, that will not work as well on Twitter.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  One of the positive aspects about the Mastodon and the fediverse is that, yes, there isn't going to be some mass displacement of Twitter or whatever... but it introduces the ability for all those small niche focused communities to federate and become something larger than the sum of their parts. Yes, your gamedev Mastodon isn't going to become a mainstream big thing. But it's connected into a broader pool. And that pool has the potential to change the narrative somewhat.
- tkellogg 3y ago
  Bigger ad-based social media NEEDS to be big. Their investors need to see growth, so they're always investing in new features to expand their user base or grow into new businesses. If it starts shrinking, it collapses. The fediverse can simply be. Growth isn't required for survival. Operating a mastodon instance can be quite cheap because all you have to pay for is hardware costs & power, etc. No salaries, no R&D investments. Only build features that users want, there's no hidden incentives. They're difficult to compare
DustinBrett 3y ago
"A comment on a Hacker News thread" article not starting on a good foot.
- jsbisviewtiful 3y ago
  Standard blogspam these days. Gaming sites are rampant with "according to reddit/twitter comments" articles.
  - seabrookmx 3y ago
    There's literally sites that use AI to mine reddit comments and generate blogspam: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/07/redditors-prank-ai-powered-news-mill-with-glorbo-in-world-of-warcraft/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/07/redditors-prank-ai-po... <insert "I don't want to live on this planet anymore" meme>
  - lolinder 3y ago
    I see these as two separate things. If you're trying to make money as a journalist, yeah, you need something more than "I compiled a few comments from social media", and that kind of story drives me crazy for how low-effort it is. However, if you're just writing a personal blog like this, then taking a comment that you found interesting and replying to it in a long-form blog post is participating in the wider community. It's not that much different than replying to someone else's blog post, the only difference is that the original source is short-form instead of long-form.
hattmall 3y ago
That's good to hear, finding basic information is so difficult on Facebook.
jsbisviewtiful 3y ago
Personally I did not last long on Mastodon but that's mainly from the standpoint of also never having been super interested in Twitter as a medium. His breakdown of what the average social media feed looks like rings true though. My instagram feed is obnoxious and overrun with the same 12 accounts between ads. I turn off the "recommended" posts every 30 days and will be very sad when those are not optional anymore. I wish I could commit to leaving the platform, but I'm not there yet.
- CharlieDigital 3y ago
  Check out Pixelfed: https://pixelfed.org/ https://pixelfed.org/ The Fediverse equivalent of IG.
agumonkey 3y ago
I still question the value of the idea of "social network".. in the fact that socializing is not the same as sending rapid short letters.
wyldfire 3y ago
I feel like the decentralization of things like Twitter and reddit makes me wish RSS could make a comeback. Has it? (or did it never leave?)
- sircastor 3y ago
  It's still around. I think primarily it's used in Podcasting right now, though a number of entities are trying to get rid of it (Spotify comes to mind specifically)
- CharlieDigital 3y ago
  It never left. But I see ActivityPub (what Mastodon and the Fediverse are built upon) as a spiritual extension of RSS.
  - mdaniel 3y ago
    I'm still coming up to speed, but isn't ActivityPub push and Atom/RSS pull? IOW, is there an ActivityPub endpoint where I can get (lastUpdateTime, entry[]) in order to know what I've missed since $time-1 check? And then, perhaps this is just me, but is there a way to do that unauthenticated as one can with Atom/RSS?
- kryptec 3y ago
  I still use it to get my news. Most news sites and blogs support it still. I was sad when google reader shut down, but Feedly has turned out to be a great replacement as I'm too lazy to roll my own Tiny Tiny RSS server.
mg 3y ago
I don't know if I am an outlier, but even though I love the idea of decentralized social media and dislike a lot about Twitter, my Twitter experience is better than my Mastodon experience. I use both as a log of interesting stuff I want to preserve and maybe review in the future. Both work fine for this purpose. But when I see "529 Views, 7 likes, One Reply" on Twitter, it gives me an additional sense of community: https://twitter.com/marekgibney https://twitter.com/marekgibney On Mastodon, I have never seen any reaction whatsoever: https://masto.ai/@mg https://masto.ai/@mg It might be just because my Twitter account is older. I don't know. But somehow I have the feeling it will stay this way.
- rvz 3y ago
  > I don't know if I am an outlier, but even though I love the idea of decentralized social media and dislike a lot about Twitter, my Twitter experience is better than my Mastodon experience. According to the hundreds of millions of daily active users that still use Twitter / X, You are not an outlier.
  - CharlieDigital 3y ago
    Because Mastodon's home feed doesn't have an algorithm, it really requires more concerted curation to get a good experience. As I wrote, it can be a bit "disorienting" at first until you find the right people and tags to follow (at least this was my experience).
  - timbit42 3y ago
    The correct way to use Mastodon is to follow hashtags, not people, and use lots of hashtags in your posts and comments so other people can find them. When you follow people, you get all their posts, including the ones you aren't interested in. When you follow hashtags, you get all the posts that are relevant to you and none of the posts that are irrelevant to you. If you put hashtags in your posts and comments, you will attract people with similar interests and they will engage with you. Xitter is a lonely place compared to Mastodon w/hashtags.
    - 3y ago
johnny99k 3y ago
[flagged]
keiferski 3y ago
It's surprising to me that forums haven't made a comeback. I guess because forums don't scale well and therefore VC has zero interest in funding them. Everything I dislike about modern social media was a solved issue on a well-run forum: less spam and self-promotion, a tighter community, more toleration for off-topic discussion. When I look at Mastodon, it still has the same blaring "listen to me!" format that Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. all have. On the traditional forum, the idea of making a thread purely to "share your thoughts" on the topic-du-jour was anathema. Threads were topic-based, not individual based, and the designated personal spaces (post signatures) also allowed for much more creativity – while still not being the primary focus. Or maybe I'm just being nostalgic.
- downWidOutaFite 3y ago
  Reddit owns the space that forums used to occupy. All forums in one place is more convenient for users. Unfortunately users will pick convenience over the vague centralization risks Every. Single. Time.
  - pasc1878 3y ago
    That a what usenet was
- TechSquidTV 3y ago
  Too disconnected. You are expected to remember to visit multiple forums every day. Think of every forum you are no longer a part of, one day you just forgot about it. What Discord ACTUALLY gives you, is notifications. If forums were as low-friction to join an interact with as Discord, there would be more incentive. Unfortunately centralization usually means centralizing body. Lemmy is a federated reddit alternative that in some ways is like a modern forum.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    That was definitely a factor in the demise of forums, but today it’s possible to get notifications from forums. I agree though that forums require a bit more from their users, which is perhaps why they aren’t as popular today.
abletonlive 3y ago
mastodon isn't doing much of anything because it just doesn't have the adoption. people are still using twitter
jmclnx 3y ago
I am not or was ever was a big twitter user, but friends made me sign-up a few years ago. I signed up to Mastodon after Elon bought Twitter and I find I use Mastodon far more than I ever used Twitter.
the_third_wave 3y ago
Mastodon - or rather the 'fediverse' of which Mastodon is part - 'rewinds the clock on social media' in that it makes it possible to recreate the heavily censored echo chamber which Twitter ended up being under Dorsey, Agarwal, Roth, Gadde and the rest of the old leadership group. At the same time the fediverse makes it possible for those who are censored by the former to create their own instances where they can act in any way they want ranging from erudite conversations on important matters (if only...) to shit-posting memes. The rampant censorship - shunning entire instances because they do not toe the party line in some way - which permeates the fediverse has led and will continue to lead to the formation of disparate islands of federation with hardly any connections between them. With a bit of luck there will eventually emerge a large enough contingent of federated sites which neither cave to the censorship demands from the 'progressive/left' factions nor devolve into the God & Guns parochialism often seen on the 'conservative/right' side. A place where 'conservative' and 'progressive' subjects can be discussed without the immediate labelling - 'racist!', 'nazi!', 'homophobe!' or 'commie!', 'hippie!', 'purple-haired freak!' - which is all too common on 'social' media. For this to happen people should stop being afraid of being labelled and start standing up for their own ideas instead of simply parroting whatever some influencer-type puts in their mouths.
konart 3y ago
Hopefully nostr will get more of attention too.
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  For some reason even as someone hungry for some distributed socializing, I haven't been compelled to try nostr at all. Who hangs out there?
  - konart 3y ago
    Well... people? Quite a few of them crypto enthusiasts and sometimes timeline can look like you've come across some crypto scam page, lol. This scares some people. What I like about Nostr is its simplicity comparedy to ActivityPub. The protocol is basically a set of NIPs[1] (Nostr Implementation Possibilities). Each of them describes what features relays and clients may or have to implement. Out of 99 (currently) NIPs only one (NIP 01) is mandatory and around twelwe are stable\final (the other ones are drafs for now). So to create a basic nosrt relay or clien you have to implement a bare minimum of functionality. The way it works: Each user has a public and a private key. Public one is to be shared with other people and can be published online. The Private one is your identity you use to "log in" via nostr client of you choice. As soon as you log in with your private key a client will fetch your notes (and notes of other people you follow if any) from relay(s), assuming you were communicating with these relays before (which will be the case unless you are using more than one client with completely different sets of relays they are talking to). In Nostr a client (a web app, mobile app, cli tool etc) simple publishes notes to N relays and gets\receives notes from them. Quite similar to RSS, except you have more than one RSS agregator and feed is being actively pushed to the said agredgator by "publisher". Also if you are using a client that implemented NIP-72 (like https://satellite.earth/ https://satellite.earth/) you basically get a simple reddit alternative [1]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips
    - jazzyjackson 3y ago
      Thanks for the reply, that all makes sense. I remember now logging onto it once and seeing a very barebones feed. Not much discovery or anything to play with. I wish it well. I'm trying urbit now which I'm impressed with so far, quite a few applications written on top of it already, people with good taste in music sharing stuff at least. To each 'is own!
beanjuiceII 3y ago
went on mastadon a few times, seems clunky and no one is on it
- CharlieDigital 3y ago
  > no one is on it For most folks, it probably makes more sense to change the interaction model. Instead of following handles on Mastodon, it makes a lot more sense to follow tags first and then discover and follow interesting handles that post those tags. Most of us are conditioned now for a "creator" focused social interaction model. Mastodon and the Fediverse -- my sense -- is a "topic" focused social interaction model and also what makes it better.
  - kryptec 3y ago
    I think people not following and using hashtags is the most common mistake people new to Mastodon make.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Basically a [dupe] This is a blog about a comment on a thread from earlier today, in which all the conversation is basically over there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37334737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37334737
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
egypturnash 3y ago
I have seen the future And it is a Wordpress site with an ActivityPub plugin For a turn of the wheel Every Internet site a small node, hosted by friends or family, sharing your thoughts with the world, with far fewer middlemen (for good and for ill) Until the corporations get enough of their claws into the AP attention stream to co-opt it and become it’s main host and cut it off from its roots to feast on greater portions of everyone’s attention and money And once again we are watching places like Facebook and Google and Twitter and Amazon devour the Internet And once that, too has passed There shall be a new protocol for the people to talk upon And whatever it is, however it works, ultimately it will be a plugin For Wordpress.
bazmattaz 3y ago
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again my unpopular opinion is that Mastadon will never become mainstream outside of tech literate communities - it’s just too complicated to wrap your head around if you’re used to centralised social media sites. There is a certain learning curve and unfortunately I can’t see it taking off for the average non-technical person who just likes to doom scroll in front of the TV
- timbit42 3y ago
  The secret to Mastodon is to use hashtags. Put them in your posts and comments and follow hashtags. This will immediately immerse you in conversations you are interested in and will elicit lots of comments on your posts. If you don't use hashtags, the only way people will see your posts is if they are following you, but when you first sign up, no one is following you. I follow dozens of hashtags and only three people because there are few people that I want to see everything they post. Following people increases the noise in your feed.
  - matthewfelgate 3y ago
    "If you're explaining you're losing."
    - timbit42 3y ago
      If you're not explaining, you're using weak, useless software.
      - matthewfelgate 3y ago
        Did that sound good in your head? Because it makes no sense as a comment.
throwaway12501 3y ago
[flagged]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

https://web.archive.org/web/20230831161113/https://chrlschn.medium.com/mastodon-is-rewinding-the-clock-on-social-media-in-a-good-way-8998f6d9f1aa https://web.archive.org/web/20230831161113/https://chrlschn....

dragontamer 3y ago

Ish. Advertising-based media gets funding and will work. Due to the nature of funding, any ad-based media will always be bigger and more mainstream. See Youtube, TikTok, Instagram. The content creators are now glorified advertisers who can hawk their attention-economies for money. You can't beat money, not for mainstream. Those who work for money can make more money, and spend that money to make more money on top of that. That in of itself drives more content and eyeballs, and to some degree higher-quality (or at least, more attention-grabbing) media. ----------------- That's not to say that Mastodon is going to fail. We nerds don't care much about attention and care more about having a discussion space to share ideas. Yes, there's a degree of attention-economy here as well (see any 1980s-era computer magazine: the advertisements for various computer parts are obvious). So there will be a tredmill towards advertising and attention media IMO, even on something like Mastodon. (Ex: Tumblr and Threads might be ActivityPub / Mastodon compatible, what then?). Recognizing that we're a niche community who prefers to slink away from attention (and indeed: attention-grabbers disgust us rather than intrigues us), that's fine. We just need to build our own little corners of the internet that matches our discussion style and pace. But don't fall into the trap of believing that Mastodon can displace Twitter (or whatever replaces Twitter in the long term, like Threads or Tumblr or whoever). Appreciate what Mastodon has built, but also recognize its a niche appeal. ------------ For the non-Mastodon aware, I think the best example of such a discussion site is https://mastodon.gamedev.place/explore https://mastodon.gamedev.place/explore, perhaps one of the better Mastodon instances for nerds that match Hacker News's stereotypes. There's no chance that gamedev.place will ever become a mainstream instance. And that's fine and cool. Their focus on game development and programming issues makes them a pleasant community to interact with. That's the kind of community that only Mastodon can build, that will not work as well on Twitter.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
One of the positive aspects about the Mastodon and the fediverse is that, yes, there isn't going to be some mass displacement of Twitter or whatever... but it introduces the ability for all those small niche focused communities to federate and become something larger than the sum of their parts. Yes, your gamedev Mastodon isn't going to become a mainstream big thing. But it's connected into a broader pool. And that pool has the potential to change the narrative somewhat.
tkellogg 3y ago
Bigger ad-based social media NEEDS to be big. Their investors need to see growth, so they're always investing in new features to expand their user base or grow into new businesses. If it starts shrinking, it collapses. The fediverse can simply be. Growth isn't required for survival. Operating a mastodon instance can be quite cheap because all you have to pay for is hardware costs & power, etc. No salaries, no R&D investments. Only build features that users want, there's no hidden incentives. They're difficult to compare

DustinBrett 3y ago

"A comment on a Hacker News thread" article not starting on a good foot.

jsbisviewtiful 3y ago
Standard blogspam these days. Gaming sites are rampant with "according to reddit/twitter comments" articles.
- seabrookmx 3y ago
  There's literally sites that use AI to mine reddit comments and generate blogspam: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/07/redditors-prank-ai-powered-news-mill-with-glorbo-in-world-of-warcraft/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/07/redditors-prank-ai-po... <insert "I don't want to live on this planet anymore" meme>
- lolinder 3y ago
  I see these as two separate things. If you're trying to make money as a journalist, yeah, you need something more than "I compiled a few comments from social media", and that kind of story drives me crazy for how low-effort it is. However, if you're just writing a personal blog like this, then taking a comment that you found interesting and replying to it in a long-form blog post is participating in the wider community. It's not that much different than replying to someone else's blog post, the only difference is that the original source is short-form instead of long-form.

hattmall 3y ago

That's good to hear, finding basic information is so difficult on Facebook.

jsbisviewtiful 3y ago

Personally I did not last long on Mastodon but that's mainly from the standpoint of also never having been super interested in Twitter as a medium. His breakdown of what the average social media feed looks like rings true though. My instagram feed is obnoxious and overrun with the same 12 accounts between ads. I turn off the "recommended" posts every 30 days and will be very sad when those are not optional anymore. I wish I could commit to leaving the platform, but I'm not there yet.

CharlieDigital 3y ago
Check out Pixelfed: https://pixelfed.org/ https://pixelfed.org/ The Fediverse equivalent of IG.

agumonkey 3y ago

I still question the value of the idea of "social network".. in the fact that socializing is not the same as sending rapid short letters.

wyldfire 3y ago

I feel like the decentralization of things like Twitter and reddit makes me wish RSS could make a comeback. Has it? (or did it never leave?)

sircastor 3y ago
It's still around. I think primarily it's used in Podcasting right now, though a number of entities are trying to get rid of it (Spotify comes to mind specifically)
CharlieDigital 3y ago
It never left. But I see ActivityPub (what Mastodon and the Fediverse are built upon) as a spiritual extension of RSS.
- mdaniel 3y ago
  I'm still coming up to speed, but isn't ActivityPub push and Atom/RSS pull? IOW, is there an ActivityPub endpoint where I can get (lastUpdateTime, entry[]) in order to know what I've missed since $time-1 check? And then, perhaps this is just me, but is there a way to do that unauthenticated as one can with Atom/RSS?
kryptec 3y ago
I still use it to get my news. Most news sites and blogs support it still. I was sad when google reader shut down, but Feedly has turned out to be a great replacement as I'm too lazy to roll my own Tiny Tiny RSS server.

mg 3y ago

I don't know if I am an outlier, but even though I love the idea of decentralized social media and dislike a lot about Twitter, my Twitter experience is better than my Mastodon experience. I use both as a log of interesting stuff I want to preserve and maybe review in the future. Both work fine for this purpose. But when I see "529 Views, 7 likes, One Reply" on Twitter, it gives me an additional sense of community: https://twitter.com/marekgibney https://twitter.com/marekgibney On Mastodon, I have never seen any reaction whatsoever: https://masto.ai/@mg https://masto.ai/@mg It might be just because my Twitter account is older. I don't know. But somehow I have the feeling it will stay this way.

rvz 3y ago
> I don't know if I am an outlier, but even though I love the idea of decentralized social media and dislike a lot about Twitter, my Twitter experience is better than my Mastodon experience. According to the hundreds of millions of daily active users that still use Twitter / X, You are not an outlier.
- CharlieDigital 3y ago
  Because Mastodon's home feed doesn't have an algorithm, it really requires more concerted curation to get a good experience. As I wrote, it can be a bit "disorienting" at first until you find the right people and tags to follow (at least this was my experience).
- timbit42 3y ago
  The correct way to use Mastodon is to follow hashtags, not people, and use lots of hashtags in your posts and comments so other people can find them. When you follow people, you get all their posts, including the ones you aren't interested in. When you follow hashtags, you get all the posts that are relevant to you and none of the posts that are irrelevant to you. If you put hashtags in your posts and comments, you will attract people with similar interests and they will engage with you. Xitter is a lonely place compared to Mastodon w/hashtags.
  - 3y ago

johnny99k 3y ago

[flagged]

keiferski 3y ago

It's surprising to me that forums haven't made a comeback. I guess because forums don't scale well and therefore VC has zero interest in funding them. Everything I dislike about modern social media was a solved issue on a well-run forum: less spam and self-promotion, a tighter community, more toleration for off-topic discussion. When I look at Mastodon, it still has the same blaring "listen to me!" format that Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. all have. On the traditional forum, the idea of making a thread purely to "share your thoughts" on the topic-du-jour was anathema. Threads were topic-based, not individual based, and the designated personal spaces (post signatures) also allowed for much more creativity – while still not being the primary focus. Or maybe I'm just being nostalgic.

downWidOutaFite 3y ago
Reddit owns the space that forums used to occupy. All forums in one place is more convenient for users. Unfortunately users will pick convenience over the vague centralization risks Every. Single. Time.
- pasc1878 3y ago
  That a what usenet was
TechSquidTV 3y ago
Too disconnected. You are expected to remember to visit multiple forums every day. Think of every forum you are no longer a part of, one day you just forgot about it. What Discord ACTUALLY gives you, is notifications. If forums were as low-friction to join an interact with as Discord, there would be more incentive. Unfortunately centralization usually means centralizing body. Lemmy is a federated reddit alternative that in some ways is like a modern forum.
- keiferski 3y ago
  That was definitely a factor in the demise of forums, but today it’s possible to get notifications from forums. I agree though that forums require a bit more from their users, which is perhaps why they aren’t as popular today.

abletonlive 3y ago

mastodon isn't doing much of anything because it just doesn't have the adoption. people are still using twitter

jmclnx 3y ago

I am not or was ever was a big twitter user, but friends made me sign-up a few years ago. I signed up to Mastodon after Elon bought Twitter and I find I use Mastodon far more than I ever used Twitter.

the_third_wave 3y ago

Mastodon - or rather the 'fediverse' of which Mastodon is part - 'rewinds the clock on social media' in that it makes it possible to recreate the heavily censored echo chamber which Twitter ended up being under Dorsey, Agarwal, Roth, Gadde and the rest of the old leadership group. At the same time the fediverse makes it possible for those who are censored by the former to create their own instances where they can act in any way they want ranging from erudite conversations on important matters (if only...) to shit-posting memes. The rampant censorship - shunning entire instances because they do not toe the party line in some way - which permeates the fediverse has led and will continue to lead to the formation of disparate islands of federation with hardly any connections between them. With a bit of luck there will eventually emerge a large enough contingent of federated sites which neither cave to the censorship demands from the 'progressive/left' factions nor devolve into the God & Guns parochialism often seen on the 'conservative/right' side. A place where 'conservative' and 'progressive' subjects can be discussed without the immediate labelling - 'racist!', 'nazi!', 'homophobe!' or 'commie!', 'hippie!', 'purple-haired freak!' - which is all too common on 'social' media. For this to happen people should stop being afraid of being labelled and start standing up for their own ideas instead of simply parroting whatever some influencer-type puts in their mouths.

konart 3y ago

Hopefully nostr will get more of attention too.

jazzyjackson 3y ago
For some reason even as someone hungry for some distributed socializing, I haven't been compelled to try nostr at all. Who hangs out there?
- konart 3y ago
  Well... people? Quite a few of them crypto enthusiasts and sometimes timeline can look like you've come across some crypto scam page, lol. This scares some people. What I like about Nostr is its simplicity comparedy to ActivityPub. The protocol is basically a set of NIPs[1] (Nostr Implementation Possibilities). Each of them describes what features relays and clients may or have to implement. Out of 99 (currently) NIPs only one (NIP 01) is mandatory and around twelwe are stable\final (the other ones are drafs for now). So to create a basic nosrt relay or clien you have to implement a bare minimum of functionality. The way it works: Each user has a public and a private key. Public one is to be shared with other people and can be published online. The Private one is your identity you use to "log in" via nostr client of you choice. As soon as you log in with your private key a client will fetch your notes (and notes of other people you follow if any) from relay(s), assuming you were communicating with these relays before (which will be the case unless you are using more than one client with completely different sets of relays they are talking to). In Nostr a client (a web app, mobile app, cli tool etc) simple publishes notes to N relays and gets\receives notes from them. Quite similar to RSS, except you have more than one RSS agregator and feed is being actively pushed to the said agredgator by "publisher". Also if you are using a client that implemented NIP-72 (like https://satellite.earth/ https://satellite.earth/) you basically get a simple reddit alternative [1]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips
  - jazzyjackson 3y ago
    Thanks for the reply, that all makes sense. I remember now logging onto it once and seeing a very barebones feed. Not much discovery or anything to play with. I wish it well. I'm trying urbit now which I'm impressed with so far, quite a few applications written on top of it already, people with good taste in music sharing stuff at least. To each 'is own!

beanjuiceII 3y ago

went on mastadon a few times, seems clunky and no one is on it

CharlieDigital 3y ago
> no one is on it For most folks, it probably makes more sense to change the interaction model. Instead of following handles on Mastodon, it makes a lot more sense to follow tags first and then discover and follow interesting handles that post those tags. Most of us are conditioned now for a "creator" focused social interaction model. Mastodon and the Fediverse -- my sense -- is a "topic" focused social interaction model and also what makes it better.
- kryptec 3y ago
  I think people not following and using hashtags is the most common mistake people new to Mastodon make.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Basically a [dupe] This is a blog about a comment on a thread from earlier today, in which all the conversation is basically over there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37334737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37334737

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

egypturnash 3y ago

I have seen the future And it is a Wordpress site with an ActivityPub plugin For a turn of the wheel Every Internet site a small node, hosted by friends or family, sharing your thoughts with the world, with far fewer middlemen (for good and for ill) Until the corporations get enough of their claws into the AP attention stream to co-opt it and become it’s main host and cut it off from its roots to feast on greater portions of everyone’s attention and money And once again we are watching places like Facebook and Google and Twitter and Amazon devour the Internet And once that, too has passed There shall be a new protocol for the people to talk upon And whatever it is, however it works, ultimately it will be a plugin For Wordpress.

bazmattaz 3y ago

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again my unpopular opinion is that Mastadon will never become mainstream outside of tech literate communities - it’s just too complicated to wrap your head around if you’re used to centralised social media sites. There is a certain learning curve and unfortunately I can’t see it taking off for the average non-technical person who just likes to doom scroll in front of the TV

timbit42 3y ago
The secret to Mastodon is to use hashtags. Put them in your posts and comments and follow hashtags. This will immediately immerse you in conversations you are interested in and will elicit lots of comments on your posts. If you don't use hashtags, the only way people will see your posts is if they are following you, but when you first sign up, no one is following you. I follow dozens of hashtags and only three people because there are few people that I want to see everything they post. Following people increases the noise in your feed.
- matthewfelgate 3y ago
  "If you're explaining you're losing."
  - timbit42 3y ago
    If you're not explaining, you're using weak, useless software.
    - matthewfelgate 3y ago
      Did that sound good in your head? Because it makes no sense as a comment.

throwaway12501 3y ago

[flagged]