[HN Gopher] LWN Is Now on Mastodon
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LWN Is Now on Mastodon
Author : dredmorbius
Score : 100 points
Date : 2022-05-20 20:19 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| kixiQu wrote:
| Since they say "a home for article notifications _and more_ "
| (emphasis mine), if you're looking to not miss the "and more",
| let me plug that Mastodon has its own RSS feeds built in for
| public posts:
|
| https://fosstodon.org/@LWN.rss
|
| Which is a nice feature a social network can have when it isn't
| trying to achieve user capture.
| zackees wrote:
| Also, Twitter front end nitter.net gives out rss feeds of your
| twitter timeline.
| tandav wrote:
| Mastodon have a nice low key feel, less loud than Twitter
| usrn wrote:
| Mastodon is great. I tried Twitter the other week and it feels
| so much worse, like crappy RSS for celebrity gossip instead of
| a discussion platform.
| dymk wrote:
| They have a long road ahead of them to shake off the
| association of being a haven for CSAM and alt-right holdouts.
|
| But the leaders of the project seem willing to take pretty
| drastic measures to, and it's good to see "neutral" communities
| adopt Mastodon as their platform.
| jordemort wrote:
| I run a small instance for myself, and there's a certain grim
| satisfaction in blocking entire instances full of trolls and
| pedos that can't be matched by the blocking capabilities of
| other social networks.
| rglullis wrote:
| Funny, for me it always seemed that Mastodon has always be
| associated with the left/identity-politics/SJWs/progressives
| and Pleroma was chosen by the alt-right/shitposters/incels.
| melony wrote:
| Ever wondered about the stack powering Gab?
| draxil wrote:
| "they".. Really on the fediverse it's very much on an
| instance by instance basis. really it's like saying that
| email is a haven for some group or other. Don't shoot the
| protocol!
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Protocols can encourage rogue or unsustainable behaviour.
|
| That's largely what happened with Usenet, and seems to be
| well-in-process with email.
|
| Mastodon is an implementation of the ActivityPub standard.
| I've been on the platform since 2017, five years now, and
| have watched it go through various teething and growing
| pains, including mutually-incompatible cultures (e.g.,
| Japanese Lolicon vs. World, also attempts by Gab and
| similar groups to join, largely rejected). There are
| strengths, including instance-level controls over
| moderation and peering / federation. That's scaled
| acceptably to a few thousand instances, but would likely be
| stressed were the network to grow to even a small fraction
| of the world's largest social networks. Given a one-tier
| model (users -> instances -> network), 10^10 active
| participants and balancing users to instances would require
| on the order of 10^5 users per instance, and 10^5 instances
| --- which is to say, 10^5 peering relations.
|
| Given that most present admins are managing their peering /
| blocking relationships in their heads with a very minimal
| configuration system, that scaling problem seems unlikely
| to succeed.
|
| My suspicion is that more tiers of relationships will
| appear, effective a hub-and-spoke system, of members,
| instances, and hubs, with roughly 1,000 of each on average.
| (This gives you about 1 billion total participants.)
|
| What a "hub" means, or does, and how it interacts ...
| raises interesting questions. Which are entirely
| unaddressed so far as I'm aware.
|
| (Note that in meatspace, we typically have geographic
| aggregations of people -> cities ->
| counties/states/provinces -> countries, or fourt to five
| levels of aggregation. This gives, in theory, roughly 100
| members within each category. Clearly that's _very_ rough,
| with cities often having far more people, and counties /
| states / provinces frequently having far fewer cities than
| the model would suggest. A large country might have ~100
| major cities (again, some more, some fewer), and there are,
| counting as a physicist does, about 100 countries in the
| world (195 per worldometers).)
|
| I've been largely pretty happy with Mastodon. I'm under no
| illusion that its success is guaranteed, or that it is
| inherently resistant to abuse or misuse.
| glenstein wrote:
| Yeah, I've been on it since roughly 2017 and that's not at
| all the prevailing cultural association with Mastodon in my
| experience.
|
| Numerous communities have decided to move off of Twitter
| and on to mastodon, including lgbtq folks, furries, sex
| workers, FOSS enthusiasts. My understanding is that on the
| most popular instances, there's active exclusion and de
| federating extremist content, and those things live on
| repurposed versions of the underlying Mastodon software but
| are not at all connected to the community.
| blacklight wrote:
| I've been an instance admin myself for some months, and
| except for one instance populated with profiles with
| swastikas (which I promptly blocked) I found Mastodon to be
| the most inclusive social network I've seen in a while.
|
| I'm not sure if it's only my experience, but at least half of
| the profiles I bump into have an LGBTQ flag or belong to some
| minorities (sometimes I suspect that I'm the only white
| straight guy there), and so far I haven't witnessed any
| episodes of intolerance that got way too familiar on Facebook
| and Twitter.
|
| I think that the structure of the Fediverse in general
| facilitates inclusiveness and moderation and it prompts
| people to be "nicer". If you're an intolerant jerk or a
| fascist, expect yourself to be muted/blocked. If you run a
| whole instance of intolerant jerks, expect other instance
| admins to mute/block your instance.
|
| Eventually, they'll still be able to vomit their intolerance
| or conspiracies with their buddies on their own instance, and
| maybe find a couple of like-minded instances to buddy with.
| But they'll be basically isolated from the rest of the
| Fediverse, because most of the people don't like to read that
| shit, and most of the other admins will filter out their
| content.
|
| And that's the best of the two worlds: intolerants and bigots
| have the freedom of speech that they crave so much, but very
| few are willing to listen to what they say.
|
| However, it could also be that things are like this because
| the Fediverse is still relatively small compared to the major
| social media. 3-5 million people isn't exactly small, but
| it's still three orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook.
| It's still a bit of a green field mostly populated by geeks,
| scientists, open-source enthusiasts and instances
| specifically dedicated to hobbies. Maybe we just need to make
| sure that it remains like this? Just in case, I won't share a
| sign up invite with my parents...
| hd4 wrote:
| Not sure if the siloization of thought is the correct
| direction. Do we really just want another internet
| hugbox/echochamber?
| blacklight wrote:
| It's a bit different in this case. I mean, if an admin
| wants to run their own silos (maybe a private instance
| with family/colleagues, or an instance on invite),
| they're free to do it. But most of the people who run
| their instances have their interest in those instances
| being discoverable, and most of the people who sign up
| have their interest in following and be followed by
| people on other instances. So no matter if there are many
| instances, you won't have silos if content is well
| discoverable. Having an account on a Fediverse instance
| is like having an email address: no matter if it's Gmail,
| Hotmail or your own SMTP server, you can still
| communicate with other people as long as you have their
| addresses.
|
| However, this is still a bit of theoretical talk. In
| practice, nowadays the solutions proposed for inter-
| instance discoverability (relays and user directories)
| are still immature. The former has no filtering criteria,
| it's prone to spam, and many relays come and go within
| days/weeks. The latter is still operating at very small
| scales, but it's promising.
|
| I believe that with better curated relays and user
| directories we can have the best of the two worlds:
| decentralized small instances that are easy to curate and
| moderate, but also well connected and discoverable. I'm
| considering running my own relay with instances dedicated
| to science and tech, but even the software for relays
| isn't that stable yet...
| Retr0id wrote:
| I've been using the fediverse occasionally for the last few
| years, and more actively in the last month or so (running my
| own instance). While I have _heard_ of instances with
| objectionable moderation policies (and by extension,
| objectionable content), I have yet to encounter any myself.
| datalopers wrote:
| > CSAM and alt-right holdouts
|
| You've succinctly described Twitter's 2023 roadmap
| Tao332 wrote:
| > They have a long road ahead of them to shake off the
| association of being a haven for CSAM and alt-right holdouts.
|
| Considering the first time I even heard that was _this very
| comment_ , I'd say they're doing pretty well on that front.
| Basically every nook and cranny of the Internet has had to
| shake similar associations at some point.
| DuskStar wrote:
| For a while, the biggest mastodon instances were japanese,
| (and potentially still are), and had a _different_ approach
| to lolicon.
|
| https://medium.com/@EthanZ/mastodon-is-big-in-japan-the-
| reas...
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Noted but that's very much not CSAM.
| daptaq wrote:
| I don't know, my impression from a few years ago is that a lot
| of the worst, most exhausting people from Twitter got persuaded
| to use Mastodon, ironically on the grounds that it should do
| better job at moderation. Mix this with people who are in it
| for the decentralization and those who see decentralization as
| a means to withstand censorship, and the overall feel was ...
| not the best.
| user3939382 wrote:
| I liked reddit more back in the day. I like lobste.rs more than
| HN. I'm starting to think that forums are better with less
| people.
| daptaq wrote:
| I used to think that it was not only this, but the rate at
| which a group grows. Lobste.rs used to be interesting, but it
| either grew too much or the rate exceeded some point, but it
| has been moderation issue for a while now. I don't know if a
| more complicated moderating system would help (having some kind
| of a priority invite system, limiting the number of invitations
| per month).
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Intimacy does not scale.
|
| Conversation is an intimate activity.
| zokier wrote:
| kinda would have expected them to run their own instance of sorts
| corbet wrote:
| It might come to that at some point; it would be a nice thing
| to offer to our reader community! But we'd have to maintain it
| and would have another thing to moderate and ... For now we're
| just getting our toes wet.
| ancientsofmumu wrote:
| There's a tangible benefit to being discoverable without effort
| (no friction for users); other "famous" FOSS projects are part
| of the fosstodon.org instance such as
| https://fosstodon.org/@mate - kind of makes sense to me as a
| generic user. $0.02
| blacklight wrote:
| Discoverability is a bit of an issue with the Fediverse in
| general. Those who run their own instances are initially
| quite "isolated" and hard to find, unless they advertise
| themselves on other channels.
|
| Relays are supposed to make federated content more easily
| discoverable, but right now they're still far from being what
| I expect them to be (i.e. curated lists of instances
| categorized by topic, like an OPML that aggregates multiple
| feeds/channels based on some criteria), and they're instead
| saturated and endless streams of zillions of instances with
| no filtering/aggregation criteria and plenty of spam/adult
| content. And if you run your instance they're going to fill
| up your database storage FAST. After joining to the largest
| relay I immediately got my federated timeline flooded by
| erotic anime toots in Japanese and filled up 50 MB of db
| storage in an hour.
|
| Fediverse user directories like those run by @FediFollows are
| good ideas for discovering new content, but they're still
| small (we're talking of a few hundreds profiles so far).
|
| But I also believe that it's worth the effort of running your
| own instance. Right now most of the folks are on
| mastodon.social or mastodon.online. Fosstodon itself already
| has 21k users. The purpose of the Fediverse is to be as
| decentralized as possible, because smaller communities are
| easier to moderate, aggregate and federate. If everybody ends
| up signing up to 5-6 big instances, and the long tail is left
| to pick the crumbs, we'll have again the centralization
| problem that we were trying to solve.
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(page generated 2022-05-20 23:02 UTC)