4 ms·

Mastodon is great. It's just unfortunate that the number of people is on the low side.

• INTPenis 1y ago
  >The fediverse is an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape.
  • bovermyer 1y ago
    These two statements are not mutually exclusive.
• dsr_ 1y ago
  I think the fediverse is great but: the specific desire for "more people that you already know coming to the Fediverse" is good; the general desire "more people" is not such a useful goal.
  • bigiain 1y ago
    Yeah. Everybody wants "more of the right kind of people", but there are as many interpretations of "the right kind of people" as there are people. People and interactions between them are just messy. And that's not a thing there can be any tech solutions to. For me, there are several clear step changes in groups based on size and there closeness of the relationships. A close circle of perhaps up to a dozen or two trustworthy friends is different to that same sized group of less trusted people. As the group size grows, it becomes less possible for the sort if "trusted" status of all group members to exist, and that fundamentally changes things. There's another step change when the group gets big enough that you can't personally know all the members. And another big step change when the group gets big enough that you can't even recognise all the members names (in my head, this is associated with a lot if the postulating about Dunbar's Number, however bad that research really was).
• verdverm 1y ago
  On boarding is too complicated for your average social user https://atproto.com https://atproto.com has more of the developer mindshare now
  • lutoma 1y ago
    It's also effectively centralized. Of course that makes the experience easier.
    • verdverm 1y ago
      If you cannot reach UX that normal people will use, you're building for the very few tradeoffs are acceptable to help our social fabric to take a step in a better direction and away from corporate silos and the attention economy
      • kstrauser 1y ago
        Except that usernames contain a domain name component, and the “bare” username likely isn’t globally unique, the UX is nearly the same as other microblogs. And as to that username bit, people are used to joe@gmail.com and joe@outlook.com being different people, and having to specify which one they’re trying to send an email to. Everyone who’s both email and Twitter already understands all the basic concepts.
        • verdverm 1y ago
          > And as to that username bit, people are used to joe@gmail.com and joe@outlook.com being different people, and having to specify which one they’re trying to send an email to. User handles are unique in ATProto because of the domain, just like email. Not sure what the "except" part is about. Can you clarify? In ATProto, they are not "bare" ActivityPub is the same, except they are tied to the server you join. In ATProto, they are decoupled from your data host so you can move your data and server without changing your handle. You can also change your handle without moving anything else, because handle points to a DID behind the scenes
• LastTrain 1y ago
  I wish it were better. I really want to move to it, but they’ve somehow managed to even make something as simple as liking a toot unintuitive. Boost and favorite don’t fit the bill.
  • BeetleB 1y ago
    Honest question: Why is it important to like a toot? What benefit does liking one provide?
    • abdullahkhalids 1y ago
      It indicates to the poster that someone (you) liked their post. Perhaps that encourages them to make other similar posts.
      • BeetleB 1y ago
        In which case either favorite or bookmark will do the trick, correct? Why worry whether you're clicking the "wrong" one? Boost will also do it, but it has more side effects.
        • LastTrain 1y ago
          Because I don’t want to boost or add the toot to a perma-list, I just want to give the person that posted something I like some acknowledgement.
        • abdullahkhalids 1y ago
          In real life, your friend tells you a moderately funny story that happened to him. You tell the friend, "nice story" (that's a like). Another friend tells you a super funny story. You then go and tell other friends this same funny story. (that's a boost). Different real life things, that are captured by digital tools. What I have a problem with are quote tweets, which are like talking about someone in front of them, without including them in the conversation.
      • 1y ago
• criddell 1y ago
  At some point more users would probably make everything worse. Having a low user count is probably a good thing.
• pndy 1y ago
  I see bots that import from/link to other sources, bots that are clearly someone's attempts at automation. Then "classic" ad spam bots and countless porn/drawn lewd content profiles and even instances that contain nothing else. Normal people are getting buried beneath all of this trash and if you actually want to have some conversations you need to either look up by particular tags or comment in trending posts.
  • jeromegv 1y ago
    > Normal people are getting buried beneath all of this trash This is the entire opposite of my experience on Mastodon. I get buried in trash on Twitter, any semi-popular tweet ends up with hundreds of bots and racial slurs. I see none of that on Mastodon Really curious how you ended up in a situation like that.
    • pndy 1y ago
      I tried two different instances and two different accounts, following people and really extensive post filtering and it still happen. Also no matter if content was filtered or not, three different applications on iOS and Android were crashing after trying to scroll through streams - local and federated. I guess it was because of that trash overload. It's not like I don't like mastodon, fediverse - on contrary, it's an amazing idea. I had really nice conversations there for a while - till people drop their masks.
      • BeetleB 1y ago
        Curious: Are you looking at the local/federated timeline, or just the people you follow? I strongly urge you to stick to the latter. I get nothing like what you describe, but I ensure the local/federated timeline stays out of my feed.
        • cthulha 1y ago
          I also just read the timeline of followed accounts, and even a list of 'must-reads' for the high-value people, but I'm also aware that this isn't the way other people liked to use Twitter/Mastodon. Maybe that's why this discussion is so split between "I read my follows and love it" || "I read the open feeds and hate the stream of trash" Not sure what can be done when there's such an adversarial environment for open social media - everything you need for a federated environment can be misused by bad actors or neglected by naive well-intentioned ones :/
• prmoustache 1y ago
  I view it as a good thing.
• BeetleB 1y ago
  > It's just unfortunate that the number of people is on the low side. You mean like HN?
• protocolture 1y ago
  If i logged into my account, its probably just some german hackers, some weird people, and a bot that posts the current big ben chimes in an amusing way. I love it. Empty is good.
• jillesvangurp 1y ago
  Mastodon is alright; it could be much better. And I find that disappointing. Mastodon is where some of my techie friends live (the less sociable types generally, which is ironic IMHO). Bluesky seems to have a much broader appeal. They both aspire to federation. So why not federate them together? I'm sure there are technical challenges but those aren't the reason this is not happening. The Mastodon community actively pushes back against federating with other networks, discoverability features (having content indexed for search), or sane security mechanisms (like signing your content). This is IMHO what is holding back Mastodon. It could be better but people push back against improving it and therefore it stays a bit niche and meh. It's basically open source twitter but minus all the loud mouths using that to self promote, spam, troll, attack each other, etc. Twitter was really nice too before the masses showed up. Bluesky basically adds content signing, discoverability, and a few other things a to the mix. It's similarly free from all the nasty things on Twitter. It's less federated than it could be (it was designed as a federated protocol but effectively is centralized) because big company reflexes seem to be taking over there. That's an interesting dynamic. But there's enough open source stuff there that a mastodon bridge would be feasible. And IMHO stronger crypto would be good for Mastodon. I don't see the logic of defaulting to publishing content unsigned. How is that a thing in 2025?
• Tepix 11mo ago
  Yes, it's disappointing frankly to see how many smart people still are on X. Then again it's disappointing to see how many people with fuck you money don't say "fuck you".
• berkes 11mo ago
  I think one is the result of the other. It is a nice place because there are few people there. Or, more cynical, reversed: I am convinced Mastodon will be a horrible platform if it grows to a size of e.g. twitter, reddit, and far, far worse if it grows to sizes of insta, tiktok, facebook etc. The reason I am convinced the low number of people makes the place overall nice is that its a niche, like HN is a niche. That its not an interesting target for phishers, spammers, scammers or attackers: the ROI is too low. And that the low number of people keeps influencers and other commercial entities, like brands or news-agencies away: not much to make money off.
  • krapp 11mo ago
    >Or, more cynical, reversed: I am convinced Mastodon will be a horrible platform if it grows to a size of e.g. twitter, reddit, and far, far worse if it grows to sizes of insta, tiktok, facebook etc. The thing is Mastodon isn't a platform like twitter, reddit, etc, it's a decentralized network of platforms. A few instances might become popular (like mastodon.social) and become a default for newcomers but there will always be smaller instances doing their own thing.
    • berkes 11mo ago
      But these instances are part of the platform. Or, a better term, part of the system. So "doing their own thing" is very limited. Do "too much of it" and you'll be fediblocked. Too little of your own thing and you're essentially getting what the large instances dictate. Sure, your instance can e.g. block meta instances because it dislikes Facebook. But that doesn't isolate you from meta content completely - or even at all - it depends. If your instance wants that, it'll have to also block all instances that don't block meta. Basically defederating almost entirely. And this doesn't even consider the numerous malicious practices that one can do, but aren't interesting currently due to the limited reach of this fediverse. Like scooping up expired domains of previous instances and using that to spam. Or like impersonating famous people and scamming users that way. Or like taking over accounts and spamming or scamming that way. Or even taking over entire instances by hacking the server or social engineering access. Etc. etc. The fediverse has nothing technical that protects it against the real and expensive threats that "common social media platforms" face on a daily basis. Federation doesn't suddenly make any of these attacks more difficult. If anything, it makes it easier, because the instances themselves are ran by volunteers who in many cases will not have security budgets to protect against such attacks. The only thing that the fediverse has going for it, in this regard, is that the blast radius is smaller. The attack easier, the result contained. But it's not unthinkable that malware, fake news, or other malicious content can easily be spread this way.