[HN Gopher] Mastodon for Android app is officially released
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Mastodon for Android app is officially released
Author : riffic
Score : 52 points
Date : 2022-04-18 19:46 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (play.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (play.google.com)
| ushakov wrote:
| fun fact: the app was built by HN user grishka, who previously
| worked on VK and Telegram Android clients. He's got upset with
| the state of social media and turned to Mastodon/ActivityPub
| zagrebian wrote:
| How does the mobile web app compare?
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Would love to hear from people that use Mastodon on a daily
| basis. What is your experience like? How do you find interesting
| people?
|
| I'm on Twitter every day, mostly following artists, tech people,
| and political shitposters.
| nimbius wrote:
| ugh, i tried. i really tried, and i really really wanted to
| love this but eventually came to find it inherited all the
| trash neoconservative hot takes, woke culture virtue signaling
| and micro-aggression bellyaching that twitter has.
|
| its a "federated" service only insofar as large groups of
| admins openly advocate for, and agree to ban traffic from
| certain servers with speech they disagree with, so thats also
| been a sticking point with me as well.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Eh. I love Mastodon, and host a reasonably busy server. The
| official apps are just _OK_ , though. In particular, they
| deliberately leave out the critical "local" timeline showing
| posts from users on that server. That's half the point of having
| a federated network: each instance can have its own "feel "or
| "flavor". Cutting new users off from an easy way to see what
| their neighbors are talking about makes servers almost fungible.
| riffic wrote:
| there are multiple clients to choose from, and third-party
| clients (as far as I know) maintain the "local" timeline.
|
| The project made an intentional design decision here regarding
| their own official client, and personally I don't have feelings
| one way or another about that choice. It's good to hear the
| use-case towards local timeline inclusion though.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I've posted some links to variously decent iOS apps at
| https://honeypot.net/post/mastodon-apps-for-ios/ . I'd
| strongly encourage a new user to chose from one of those
| (IMHO better) apps than to use the official, limited version.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I love the idea of Mastodon but none of the people I follow on
| social media are using it. I wonder if there's some kind of web
| service that re-toots tweets from twitter so I can ditch the
| crappy Twitter web app and slowly move towards the fediverse at
| the same time. So far I've only seen publisher-oriented services,
| but I what I actually want is a combined feed of tweets and
| toots.
| ushakov wrote:
| technically it's possible to mirror tweets from Twitter
| directly, just find a Mastodon instance which supports this
| [deleted]
| bifrost wrote:
| feed2toot can do some of it, but you'd need to build something
| to automate your feed/etc.
|
| Its also probably against Twitter's TOS to tweet2toot so YMMV.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| I run a small 2 person family pleroma instance. I truly believe
| fediverse to be the best thing to happen to internet in a long
| time because just like in my case, I can have my own server with
| anyone I like. We don't need to serve 1000 people of different
| tastes, if I am content with people I am comfortable, why do I
| need to be exposed like on a public platform like twitter?
|
| Or Facebook which monetizes this same interaction for what
| benefit of mine? I am getting the same/similar interaction with
| people I care about, on my own dime.
| ssl232 wrote:
| Turns out F-Droid inclusion is pending [1]. I was surprised not
| to see it there.
|
| [1] https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/10909
| riffic wrote:
| this app is open source, code is available here:
|
| https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android
|
| this joins the previously released iOS client
| (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-ios)
|
| I have no personal affiliation with the Mastodon project, I just
| like what they're doing to liberate social networking (and there
| are other Fediverse platforms to pay attention to, too!)
| oneepic wrote:
| I get that people love the decentralization aspect of Mastodon,
| but... does it have better content than Twitter? I remember
| trying it very briefly once, and the few toots I saw were similar
| content -- some interesting info, but also a heap of
| complaining/virtual signaling.
| riffic wrote:
| I've been reading recently a lot of people are getting better
| engagement results than they would over at Twitter. One
| example:
|
| https://twitter.com/atomicpoet/status/1512202694391345188
|
| edit: Chris has been expounding on this engagement thing, this
| goes into more detail:
|
| https://blog.peerverse.space/my-pixelfed-instance-is-a-bigge...
| kstrauser wrote:
| I believe it has much better content. The easiest way to
| boostrap your friend group is to look at the local timeline and
| see who posts interesting stuff, and follow them. When they
| repost things from interesting people, follow those people.
| Lather, rinse, and repeat.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| ya that's just a description of how to use twitter tho.
| what's better here other than there being a lot smaller of a
| pool to draw from?
| kstrauser wrote:
| My personal experience has been that the most interesting
| people I now chat with on Mastodon either 1) left Twitter
| long ago, or 2) deliberately stayed away from it. For
| instance, if you're into infosec stuff, Mastodon is a
| wonderful place to be.
| mattl wrote:
| Very few people outside of open source tech and a couple
| fandoms seem to really use Mastodon.
| wirrbel wrote:
| Did they add local and federated timeline support?
| OberstKrueger wrote:
| Based on this open issue on the repo [0], it only has federated
| timeline support. The lead developer of Mastodon had this to
| say with regards to not adding it to iOS[1]:
|
| > The omission is intentional and I do not intend to add these
| types of timelines into the app. They might have made sense for
| early Mastodon in November 2016 when there were less than 20k
| people total and all from a homogenous demographic but nowadays
| the signal to noise ratio makes them a liability in almost
| every aspect.
|
| > [...]
|
| > The local and federated timelines are not going away from
| other apps or the web app, to be clear. I'm simply not adding
| them to this app, and if that bothers you, simply don't install
| the app.
|
| [0] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android/issues/8
|
| [1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-ios/issues/221
| lin83 wrote:
| That's crazy. Local timelines are the best part of mastodon
| instances.
| kstrauser wrote:
| This saddens me, and I truly believe it's because Mastodon's
| author, Eugen, also runs the largest server, mastodon.social.
| _Of course_ the local timeline there is utter chaos,
| basically like the Twitter firehose. That 's absolutely not
| the case for topical servers, like ones that specialize in
| posts about cats, or a friend group, or a particular city. I
| don't think Eugen opposes the idea out of malice, because he
| seems like a pretty good guy. I think he just has a
| particularly narrow view of what Mastodon is, as seen from
| his perspective.
| giords wrote:
| From time to time I try Mastodon again and every time I ditch it.
| I joined the main server mastodon.social and still as of today
| it's pretty much impossible for me to perform effective searches
| and find content. Maybe I'm just unable to use it, I don't know.
| easrng wrote:
| Don't bother with search. You really need to start out
| following people you already know about, then when they boost
| posts check if the people who wrote those posts are worth
| following. I started following 1 person and now I follow 102
| people.
| narrator wrote:
| Search is where a lot of these services fail badly. The search
| on most video sites besides youtube is garbage. In fact,
| Youtube is so far ahead that they recently made their search
| worse to satisfy other priorities besides competing with
| rivals.
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