[HN Gopher] Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon
___________________________________________________________________
Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon
Author : srvmshr
Score : 221 points
Date : 2022-10-30 19:22 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitodon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitodon.com)
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Surely there has to be another way to do this besides logging in
| with Twitter. Heck, they could just have you post a verification
| tween on your Twitter account.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| You can't view an account's followers/following without being
| logged in. And if you try to back a service using a single bot
| account, you're going to get instantly banned b/c of suspicious
| traffic.
| sigmar wrote:
| Keybase somehow manages to do verification through a twitter
| post, surely there could be a similar method for Mastodon?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| You can see a person's latest tweets without a login. Just
| play around in incognito and you can see:
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| spaceywilly wrote:
| Maybe they can create a specific pattern people can enter in
| their Twitter bio, then build a crawler
| throwaway221017 wrote:
| augustuspolius wrote:
| This maybe a noob question - does Mastodon allow replies? The few
| profiles referenced in this thread that I visited look like
| announcement boards, with no way to comment or start a
| discussion.
|
| I am interested in electronic music and followed several links
| from fedi.directory. E.g. https://mastodon.art/@merle,
| https://mastodon.cc/@Sevish, https://sonomu.club/@luka. Is that
| normal that there are no discussions? Also one of the links led
| to https://v.basspistol.org/a/setto/video-channels, which looks
| completely different, like a personal page from the 90s, not a
| Twitter-like app.
|
| I thought Mastodon was a Twitter replacement, but was surprised
| by how uninviting and empty the entire recommended directory for
| electronic music is.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| It certainly does. From your example accounts:
| https://mastodon.art/@merle/105821287332308089
|
| I think there are just fewer people active on these platforms,
| which isn't great for interaction.
|
| As for v.basspistol.org, that's not a Mastodon instance but a
| Peertube (derived) instance. Both are part of the so-called
| Fediverse, but Mastodon (and similar) intent to replace/extend
| Twitter/Facebook whereas Peertube intends to replace/extend
| Youtube.
|
| Edit: perhaps worth mentioning is that both types of social
| media share a protocol called ActivityPub. This is how several
| social media systems (Twitter replacements, Reddit
| replacements, Youtube replacements, etc.) can all communicate
| with each other. NextCloud, for instance, also has an
| ActivityPub system integrated, which means your toots and the
| shared files/comments may end up in the same system, all with
| some manner of interoperability.
| augustuspolius wrote:
| Interesting. Wonder if it could be clearer if they were still
| showing a comment field or a reply button to non-logged in
| users. Just to surface the feature.
|
| Thanks for the info on Peertube, I heard the name before but
| didn't realize it's a federated app.
|
| Reply to the edit: thanks for the pointer! Reading about
| ActivityPub made me feel pretty excited both about the
| technology and about Mastodon.
| letier wrote:
| I never cared much about twitter. But I'd be very happy to get a
| couple of good tech profiles on Mastodon recommended. :)
| commoner wrote:
| FediFollows (@FediFollows@mastodon.online) recommends
| interesting accounts to follow on Mastodon. Many of these
| accounts are tech and FOSS-related.
|
| https://mastodon.online/@FediFollows
|
| They've also listed all of their recommendations in a
| directory:
|
| https://fedi.directory
| letier wrote:
| Thanks that seems like a great starting point!
| masukomi wrote:
| ugh. this has a killer flaw
|
| > Looking for Mastodon users progress, scanned 867 of 867 users
| you follow on Twitter. Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon who
| have previously linked their Twitter and Mastodon accounts by
| logging into Twitodon.
|
| WHO HAVE PREVIOUSLY LINKED ACCOUNTS... BY LOGGING IN TO TWITODON
|
| the odds of that having happened for any notable subset are so
| low as to make this useless.
| Brakenshire wrote:
| It would be much more useful to search using the "people you
| follow" filter.
| styfle wrote:
| Instead of creating a new service, it would be better if this
| read from https://keybase.io since those mappings already
| exist.
| [deleted]
| wrycoder wrote:
| You would want to think very carefully about giving Twitodon
| these rights to your Twitter account:
|
| _Things this App can view...
|
| People who follow you and people who you follow.
|
| All the Tweets you can view, including Tweets from protected
| accounts.
|
| Any account you can view, including protected accounts._
| pigeons wrote:
| Often mastodon servers either intentionally or naturally have a
| "theme", which is really helpful for discovering interesting
| content and users.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I was skeptical on Mastodon. But I'm actually realling enjoying
| it. It's having a surge in popularity the last few days. When I
| checked it out a couple years ago it didn't click with me. But
| now I'm liking it, and I think there's potential there.
|
| It won't "replace" Twitter. But a good crowd of people has
| collected around there, and there's quite a bit of enjoyable
| content coming through.
| augustuspolius wrote:
| Is there a non-niche general Mastodon instance that's really
| popular? That would be the easiest way for me personally to
| embrace it. I checked a few instances and it's all very niche
| and very empty.
|
| (To clarify, I don't mind niche instances, just at this stage
| there isn't enough discussion or interesting profiles to
| follow.)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| mastodon.social is by far the largest, but the recommendation
| is generally to find the one that has interests & people on
| it you find interesting to start. you'll get content from
| people on mastodon.social anyways.
| augustuspolius wrote:
| This looks great, definitely more active and offers a good
| variety of topics/profiles.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I went with indieweb.social. I think some people from
| hackernews might find a vibe they like generally there.
| bkuehl wrote:
| You can be a part of a large or small instance and your
| consumption/conversation is not limited to users on that
| instance. You can follow people from other instances as well
| as scroll through a timeline that is posts/toots from across
| the fediverse (not just your local instance)
| augustuspolius wrote:
| Got it. Does it make any difference where I register first?
| E.g. if that instance disappears overnight, will I be able
| to recover my account or not? I understand that I can
| access posts from all instances in the instance I use, but
| not sure how account handling/ownership works.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| There are migration tools to move your followers and your
| followings between nodes. But no way to move your posts.
| And so, yes, your identity partially/kind-of doesn't
| move. But mostly sort of does?
|
| At first this bugged me, but then it was pointed out that
| if you could just move your posts you could also
| potentially violate the moderation rules of the host you
| were moving to. So it makes some sense.
| augustuspolius wrote:
| Thanks. I am more worried about the identity than the
| posts. If my identity belongs to the host, then in that
| sense this is no better than a centralized Twitter. Just
| theoretically speaking (I have not been banned from
| anything ever), if a mastodon.art user is banned from
| mastodon.art - everyone who followed them will have to
| find them on another instance and subscribe again? If
| exporting data is a process that depends on the host
| instance, when they ban you - that's it, your identity is
| not recoverable.
| bkuehl wrote:
| To start, you should choose an instance that had been
| around for a while and isn't too small. Instances do
| shutdown occasionally but the admin(s) will give you
| plenty of time to migrate to a new instance. Mastodon has
| built-in tools to migrate your whole account (and
| content) to another instance if needed. I'm currently
| having to do that because a large well-established
| instance (mastodon.technology) is shutting down the end
| of the year.
| michaelwww wrote:
| I find this whole situation to be incredibly depressing,
| especially with Musk tweeting out a fact free insinuation about
| Paul Pelosi (since deleted without apology.) The proverbial shit
| is going to hit the fan on Twitter on election night Nov 8 in
| America and I don't think Musk is prepared to handle it. I'd love
| to live in a country where we could have nice things, but
| apparently America is not it.
| rybosome wrote:
| The shit hitting the fan on election night will not be limited
| to Twitter. Expect chaos in meatspace, exacerbated in part by
| Twitter.
| Zigurd wrote:
| It also isn't as if Elon was just thumbing his nose at
| naysayers. A day earlier he pledged to advertisers Twitter
| would not become a "free for all hellscape."
|
| Now that's the new tagline.
| michaelwww wrote:
| It will be easy to switch to another platform and there will
| be tools to help as this post indicates. 4chan users are
| having fun saying the N word on Twitter and Le Bron James is
| complaining about it. And this is only day 2. I certainly
| think people should be able to exercise free speech, but that
| doesn't mean I have to listen to it. I can go somewhere else
| if Twitter gets too depressing.
| leereeves wrote:
| > I certainly think people should be able to exercise free
| speech, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to it.
|
| Would that be different on Mastodon? I've never used it,
| but as a decentralized service, I assume it won't have a
| central authority banning users?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The difference is that each node has its own set of
| moderators.
|
| So jerks will get moderated there. And when they do that,
| they'll probably jump servers. And so get cordoned off
| into wherever federated node that they isolate themselves
| into.
|
| Note that each server decides which other servers it will
| federate and share content with.
|
| So eventually nodes that collect jerks will just get cut
| from most of the rest of the federation.
|
| It's certainly vulnerable to abuse. But it also leaves
| more room for community response.
|
| And it also doesn't have a recommendation "algorithm".
| You see the content you explicitly subscribe to. In
| chronological order. So dark patterns that arise out of
| feeding people rage tweets and engagement hacking and
| amplifying "controversial" crap for engagement... doesn't
| happen. So the platform isn't going to give an outsized
| "recommended" audience for crap just because it has high
| "likes" -- that's not how the platform works.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| > So eventually nodes that collect jerks will just get
| cut from most of the rest of the federation.
|
| Why do you assume the "jerks" wouldn't decide to federate
| among themselves. What's stopping them from creating a
| Splinternet (Splinterdon?) where they're free to say what
| they want?
|
| > So the platform isn't going to give an outsized
| "recommended" audience for crap just because it has high
| "likes" -- that's not how the platform works.
|
| You can't get rid of recommendations. Someone can easily
| build an easy to use page-ranked search engine for
| Mastodon servers, even if unofficial, and the engagement
| race will reinvent itself.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Nothing would stop them. That's already happened --
| that's effectively what Truth Social is, for example.
|
| And it wouldn't matter. Because the majority would be
| elsewhere. Or not. The point is that there's no
| centralized authority making this decision. And if I
| didn't like how the node I was on handled the moderation,
| and who it chose to federate with, I'd be free to move my
| account elsewhere.
|
| I personally would just choose to hang out on whatever
| Mastodon node that had cut itself off the the Musk/Trump-
| ish node.
| leereeves wrote:
| That seems likely to result in a split. Not a few
| isolated servers with jerks, but one big federation with
| free speech types like Elon Musk, and a different
| federation with heavy moderation.
|
| But returning to a chronological feed would be nice.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's already heavily federated so it wouldn't be a binary
| split like you describe.
|
| Like, it wouldn't be "one federation with Musk types" vs
| "another with heavy moderation" but actually already a
| whole bunch of nodes with different types of moderation
| choosing to isolate away the Musk node. Or not. It would
| be up to each node.
|
| Note that "Gab" and "Truth Social" are both built on
| Mastodon. But they're isolated from the rest of the
| federated nodes.
| leereeves wrote:
| How does "it would be up to each node" work?
|
| Suppose there are three servers (A, B, C), and A is
| federated with both, but B isn't federated with C, and
| there's conversation between people on A and B.
|
| Do people on C only see the A side of the conversation?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I am not fully clear on how _threads_ are handled, but,
| yes, in principle visibility of users and posts is based
| on who they choose to federate with. So C would not see
| any content that originated out of B. Which AFAIK
| includes replies, etc.
|
| I'm a Mastodon newb and not an expert, I'm sure someone
| else more informed could give a better explanation of the
| subtleties.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| This more or less has already happened, though there are
| more than two "groups" depending on how you define such
| things. Broadly speaking, there are free speech instances
| which allow edgelord teens to come in and N-word their
| hearts out (as well as do more mundane things like
| question the mainstream narrative on elections, the
| pandemic, and, yes, this Pelosi story) so long as they
| don't do anything actually illegal, and there are more
| regulated instances where "hate speech" is explicitly
| forbidden. As the instances in the latter group don't
| like the practices of the former group, the former
| insulates from the latter by defederating those
| instances, meaning that insances in both the former and
| the latter can generally only federate with each other.
| (Then there are the pro-MAP/CP/lolicon instances, which
| are generally defederated by both of the previous groups
| and also can largely only federate with each other.)
|
| Whether you think this is a good thing is up to you, but
| it does seem that both groups of people on either side of
| the Great Divide get what they want from the system, so I
| don't really see the harm in it.
| fazfq wrote:
| >The proverbial shit is going to hit the fan on Twitter on
| election night Nov 8 in America and I don't think Musk is
| prepared to handle it.
|
| What exactly is he supposed to do? I don't see how Nov 8 is
| megacorp's business.
| wrycoder wrote:
| How about closing Twitter for three days, starting two days
| before the election. Twiliday for the staff!
| mjmsmith wrote:
| I'd be reassured just knowing that he won't use his megacorp
| megaphone to amplify obvious misinformation about the results
| of the election, but given the last 24 hours, even that
| appears to be too much to hope for.
| fazfq wrote:
| Well you can just not follow him - I don't.
| michaelwww wrote:
| > What exactly is he supposed to do?
|
| When Twitter is flooded with threats of violence and calls to
| form mobs will he just do nothing? Is that what you are
| suggesting? He can take the site dark if he wants and he may
| have to.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Isn't it the job of the police/FBI to do something in that
| situation? Why are we expecting corporations to be a
| private police force, judge, jury, and executioner?
| dd36 wrote:
| Not policing content would destroy Twitter.
| michaelwww wrote:
| If you owned Twitter and the site was suddenly flooded
| with calls to attack election officials and raid election
| offices what would you do? You'd probably meet with your
| lawyers and find out what kind of liability you had, then
| you'd field calls from advertisers saying they are all
| leaving unless you stop it. You'd also field calls from
| all your friends telling you that you need to stop it.
| Then you'd go for a walk and contemplate how you feel
| about people using your site to facilitate armed
| rebellion. Then you'd figure out how much money you were
| willing to lose over doing it your way. The most sensible
| thing to do at the point is pull the plug for a few weeks
| for "technical issues related to the purchase' and go
| home and get a good nights sleep.
| etchalon wrote:
| Because they could.
|
| When you see someone getting robbed on the street, you
| can chose to do nothing.
|
| But a lot of people would think you're morally deficient
| for doing nothing.
|
| And a lot of people would do something in that situation.
| [deleted]
| mephos wrote:
| Interesting tool. This reminds me of the initial steps in the
| vampire attack idea.
|
| https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2022/04/16/vampi...
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > Enter your Mastodon host's web address:
|
| What?
| GeckoEidechse wrote:
| On the topic of Twiter, Mastodon, and the Fediverse, why do
| federated FOSS alternatives to popular platforms not offer a
| read-only version of said platform as one of its instances to
| augment its lack of content?
|
| In the example of Twitter, Nitter already exists as an
| alternative front-end. Now what if there's a Mastodon instance
| that uses Nitter to wrap official Twitter content and serve it as
| if it where the twitter.com mastodon instance? Again it would
| need to be a read-only version as Twitter is not Mastodon but it
| would help fill the content gap for sure.
|
| Now Mastodon might not have a content issue but PeerTube for
| example very well has and in that case masquerading YouTube as a
| PeerTube instance would become very interesting.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| There is a lot of Twitter content out there. Too much for a
| single instance to proxy. I believe there are projects to
| mirror specific Twitter accounts to a (personal) Mastodon
| server so you can switch apps without needing two apps. I'm not
| sure what the implication would be for privacy/data usage
| regulations if you open those messages to the public, though;
| blindly reposting everything may actually violate data privacy
| laws (yes, even if that information is publicly available).
|
| Engagement with the audience also is a significant factor for
| making social media enjoyable. A read-only mirror of Twitter
| would be very boring, because you can respond/tag/whatever you
| want for all eternity, but the Twitter authors would never
| notice.
|
| Such a system would work for people primarily using Mastodon
| that cross-post to Twitter; you could add Twitter replies to
| the Mastodon replies and get a mixed content stream (that
| Twitter users might miss half of when discussions respond to
| as-of-yet unproxied messages).
| srvmshr wrote:
| A nifty tool that I came across to find Twitter peers registered
| with Mastodon federated servers. Requires authentication though
| Timja wrote:
| Twitter is the only platform I know where you can search for
| people who share your interests and then connect with them. The
| whole #buildinpublic community is just insanely great. Everybody
| is building something. Everybody is having similar issues to talk
| about. You can make so many great connections and help each other
| out.
|
| But I feel that with Twitter becoming a private company owned by
| a single controversial person, Twitter lost a lot of its appeal.
|
| It could be very unfortunate (if Twitter just goes down the drain
| without a replacement) or it could be the start of something new,
| if a new way to interact comes up.
|
| If the community moves to another form of communication, I hope
| it will be something decentralized that can not be taken away
| from us again.
|
| That is the reason why I am not enthusiastic about Mastodon.
| Mastodon is not decentralized. Unless you run your own instance,
| you do not own your social graph.
| depingus wrote:
| I don't twitter or mastodon. But isn't "people who share your
| interests and then connect with them" exactly what the
| different mastodon instances are for? You're kinda supposed to
| find a server that aligns with your interest.
| futuretaint wrote:
| twitter has a social dynamic where opposing interests feed
| off of each other so you need in-group + out-group. there are
| psychosocial elements which mastodon does not have as it's
| more reddit like IMHO. edit: for clarity
| prmoustache wrote:
| I don't know I started reusing twitter 2 months ago after years
| of not really using it.
|
| My main gripe is it looks like it locked me up in a bubble full
| of accounts with similar interests and ideas. I don't really
| feel challenged and I am almost totally excluded from other
| subjects that could theorically interest me.
| viraptor wrote:
| > That is the reason why I am not enthusiastic about Mastodon.
| Mastodon is not decentralized. Unless you run your own
| instance, you do not own your social graph.
|
| That's needed for practical reasons though. Actually
| decentralised alternatives like for example Scuttlebutt have
| this common issue: "This "inital syncing" process can take up
| to an hour and use a fair amount of data."
| (https://scuttlebutt.nz/get-started/) You don't get popularity
| with non-tech people that way.
|
| With mastodon, the profiles can be migrated. So effectively you
| can start with some main hub, move to a more interesting
| instance if you want to in the future, and move to your own
| instance if that is what you want.
| saurik wrote:
| It isn't like it was a non-profit before run by a board trying
| to make Twitter awesome for users or some form of cooperative
| that was owned democratically by its community... it was a
| "public" company that, by construction, could only blindly
| optimize for profit of its shareholders--and, even worse:
| almost always relatively short-term profits, which is why you
| see a lot of these companies right now trying to squeeze a few
| extra dollars out of everyone instead of just holding out for a
| year on cash reserves, as otherwise people will (rightfully)
| sell their stock and wait to re-purchase it if things ever look
| up again--at the almost explicit expense of its users (who
| frankly should have bailed as soon as the company went public,
| as that's the moment you knew the company no longer was even
| allowed to care about their interests).
| twblalock wrote:
| Wait and see what happens.
|
| The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have not
| changed. It is a free service that needs to convert user
| engagement into advertising dollars. Unless Twitter moves to a
| paid model, that will always be true no matter who owns it. And
| if Twitter fails, any potential replacement will need to deal
| with the same incentives and solve the same problems Twitter
| did.
| Timja wrote:
| A replacement could be just a protocol.
|
| If you signed your message with "This is a reply to msg
| 33398198 by Timja. Signed: twblalock", then nobody could take
| this converstion away from us again. I could copy it and put
| it on any server. Owned by myself or run by some service
| provider. And it would always be clear to everybody that this
| conversation really took place between the two of us.
| twblalock wrote:
| Yeah but who would use a system like that outside of a
| small hardcore contingent of techies?
| Timja wrote:
| The interface could be just like Twitter or Hacker News.
|
| In fact, users could use any service they like.
|
| It would not matter what client you use to reply to me.
| Your reply would appear on Hacker News, because HN would
| follow the protocol and accept properly signed comments
| relayed to it.
| dd36 wrote:
| It already exists: newsgroups.
| augustuspolius wrote:
| The messages would still need to be stored somewhere,
| right? Is SMTP a decentralized protocol in this sense?
| You can send a message from any client... however most
| people still use centralized solutions, not their own
| mail servers.
|
| In your example HN would still need to retrieve and store
| billions of messages, handle user authentication,
| discovery, aggregation, additional data handling (e.g.
| you want to attach a video, or go live). They will need
| to monetize _something_. So we are back to square one,
| just with a much more inconvenient client setup process
| (like we do right now setting up pop3/smtp/imap).
| anigbrowl wrote:
| When are Mastodon stans going to figure out that the reason
| people like Twitter is that it's (nominally) flat and you can
| interact with anyone unless they've blocked you for some reason?
| It's easy to build silos, which is what most instances are.
| Mastodon just reinvented single sign-on.
|
| It's not a terrible thing to build, but whenever you make a
| product that's just imitating someone else (Twitter has 'tweets'
| but Mastodon has 'toots' because the logo is an elephant!) then
| it needs to be way better, not just a slight improvement. Longer
| messages are a good thing on Mastodon, though Facebook already
| does that. But what else does it offer that offsets the confusion
| of finding target instances, or conversely not being easily
| findable by people you don't want to converse with?
|
| 99.9% of users do not care about federation as a principle, it's
| just another level of technical gabble that they don't wish to be
| distracted by. Virtually every decentralized service struggles
| with this issue. Decentralization is primarily of interest to
| nerds, and for online services that requires you to be a bit of a
| computer _and_ a bit of a politics nerd, shrinking your already
| small target pool.
|
| Twitter's original win was that it was staggeringly simple, just
| asking new users to post about 'what they're doing right now' and
| offering simple controls to reply, repeat, or express approval.
| They realized that people felt more connected to a scrolling
| ticker of headline-style status updates than a newspaper.
| jdeibele wrote:
| I actively dislike the federation that Mastodon is using. If
| they would let me use somebody@gnail.com or
| somebody@hotmail.com, fine. Or somebody@mastodon.master-name-
| server. Instead, you have somebody@mastodon.technology.
|
| Guess what? mastodon.technology is closing down. Any
| connections using that address are going to be lost.
|
| It's really too bad that the idea of where you connect became
| conflated with what your name is.
|
| PS: thanks to the person who was running mastodon.technology
| and found that it was too much to do with what else was going
| on in their life.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| > (Twitter has 'tweets' but Mastodon has 'toots' because the
| logo is an elephant!)
|
| It's a mastodon, not an elephant!!
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Oh noes I invalidated my whole argument ToT
| twblalock wrote:
| Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized platform
| over a federated platform?
|
| The centralized platform made it very easy to find people. Now
| people who are moving to a federated platform miss the value of
| centralization, so they are writing a tool that will leverage
| that value and import it into the federated platform.
|
| Maybe if Mastodon was a centralized Twitter-style platform it
| would be more usable, and more popular.
| anotherrandom wrote:
| Honestly the fact that more tools are needed to make Mastodon
| usable shows that federation technology is "not there yet." I
| hope we are able to improve stuff to the point where it is
| usable.
|
| Something I'm keeping an eye on is the @ protocol that is being
| designed specifically for the creation of federated social
| media applications -- it allows for portable identity and your
| social graph is portable, these things are not tethered to an
| instance of something. Hopefully that will be an upgrade so
| there will be less "jury-rigging" like this required to make
| federated applications usable
| prmoustache wrote:
| If anything, they just shows they were late to the party.
| notatoad wrote:
| even if this were true, which i'm not sure it is, it isn't a
| reason to make the whole platform centralized.
|
| you could argue that there's benefit to centralized friend-
| finder tools, but there's no reason that has to be tied to a
| centralized platform. a decentralized and open-access platform
| allows for choice and competition amongst friend-finder tools
| kemenaran wrote:
| To find someone on Mastodon, I would either enter their
| nickname in the search bar (no need for the domain, it will
| search on all instances) - or simply click on their profile on
| a post I like. Just like a centralized network. This tool just
| exists to do this automatically and in bulk.
|
| It seems to me that finding someone on a federation is as easy
| as on centralized systems. Do you have a use case in mind where
| centralization makes it easier to find someone?
| masukomi wrote:
| it will not search "all instances".
|
| It will search a subset of instances.
|
| How do we know this to be true?
|
| a) there is no central listing of all mastodon instances, or
| even all public ones.
|
| b) it would take FREAKING AGES TO COME BACK because there are
| so damn many, you can only make so many parallel requests at
| a time, and you have to process the results from all of them.
| numpad0 wrote:
| [fill in here with an insightful texts on distinction between
| identity and content distribution being centralized] - I don't
| want to sort out which one of
| {prefix}username{suffix}{duplicate identifier}.{domain}.tld is
| the person I had been talking with just 5 minutes ago, nor he
| would appreciate such a situation, but I do not care who serves
| the content for me so long it's valid within contexts i.e. if
| it comes from amazonaws.com or onmicrosoft.com.
|
| Imagine you could find me as @numpad0 anywhere, and you can
| validate shadydomain.shadywebsite.tld/uuid.htm with my pubkey
| to hold me accountable for weird things I'd say, and that
| /uuid.htm URL may be ephemeral, or could be more permanent for
| more respectable posts at non-shady venues, and either ways I
| wouldn't have to be perfect wrt handling of privkey, yet
| somehow usernames matches someone anywhere would be verifyably
| that someone. That would be ideal.
|
| But I believe social media operators recognize the exploitable
| value in conflating both; this has to be why no one use cross-
| OAuth between social medias and web apps anymore, and rather
| focuses on own ID systems and federated signups. Consistent set
| of identities is a value, media is a means to monopolize on it.
| echelon wrote:
| > Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized
| platform over a federated platform?
|
| Not at all. These types of centralized platforms won because
| they raised capital to grow fast and meet market needs before
| anything else. Email is still king, but if it were to be
| designed today, it would have been designed as some proprietary
| centralized system.
|
| Distributed systems are hard.
|
| In any case, I don't think federation goes far enough to save
| us from the problems we're seeing. I want a peer-to-peer social
| feed / social news app that doesn't depend on federation or
| servers at all.
|
| Takedowns (DeCSS), takeovers (Twitter, FreeNode), shutdowns
| (Google+, Orkut, Digg, mastodon.technology), censorship
| (everywhere; should be an individual choice), maintainer-
| imposed spying (Apple CSAM), and maintainer-imposed changes or
| limits (Digg, modern Reddit, Twitter API) seem an order of
| magnitude harder to pull off if we have full control at the
| protocol and node level.
|
| Federation would be nice for anonymity and aggregation of
| interest graph metadata, but at the core we should just have a
| swarm of content to sample and consume. It's fine if the
| content is naturally ephemeral as a consequence. We can use a
| constellation of opt-in 3rd party distributed (federated)
| services to provide durability, ranking, recommendation,
| filtering, etc. where desired.
|
| Bittorrent, but for Twitter/Reddit/HN.
| [deleted]
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Or an opt-in for submitting a piece of private information like
| a phone, an email, a public key, etc. so you can prove who you
| are to your friends.
|
| Who am I kidding, these people are looking for an audience, not
| their friends.
| tootie wrote:
| I've said before the answer is just Better Twitter. One with
| clear moderation rules that aren't reactionary or flexible
| based on popularity. Non-profit Twitter would be ideal. Keep ad
| revenue just ahead of operating costs. Publish all the
| financials. Open source the code.
| detaro wrote:
| Not really, no. Imagine the reversed situation: Everyone is on
| Mastodon, and now this cool new thing called "Twitter" comes
| along and some people are switching to it. "find everyones
| Twitter account and follow it" would still be a useful thing to
| have, over manually checking for every single person you follow
| if they have an account, if they maybe have an account with a
| different username, ... and following those you find.
| Abimelex wrote:
| For only username based have a look at Fedifinder:
| https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
| contravariant wrote:
| In that scenario is Mastodon not centralized?
| detaro wrote:
| No, that scenario is assuming a federated Mastodon (and
| other Fediverse software) as today.
| georgyo wrote:
| No, it's still federated. But my account of alice@foo.com
| follows bob@bar.com
|
| Bob registers his new Twitter handle so I, Alice, can find
| it on the central service of Twitter.
|
| A mapping of users to users can be across any service,
| including centralized to centralized (ie Twitter to
| Facebook) or decentalized to decentralized (IE Diaspora to
| Mastadon). It is just saying this string registered
| somewhere else as that string.
| colesantiago wrote:
| But we all know this hypothetical isn't the case.
| Centralisation is more convenient in almost ALL cases, even
| in email (nobody except people on HN host their own email)
| shafyy wrote:
| Decentralization doesn't mean hosting your own instance.
| It's about open protocols. There are hundreds or thousands
| of email providers that you can use and still send an email
| to a Gmail user without hosting your own instance.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Yet gmail is the biggest and email isn't a social
| network, choice is the problem.
|
| People cannot find their friends on Mastodon because:
|
| + They can't search all instances across Mastodon.
|
| + There is almost little to no one on Mastodon to talk
| to.
|
| So they just go back to a centralised service like
| Twitter and they definitely not use email as a social
| network.
| nerdponx wrote:
| It proves the value of centralized search and discovery,
| but it says nothing about centralized hosting in
| moderation. There is probably quite a bit of value in a
| system where decentralized instances can volunteer to
| submit their own discovery database to a central search
| platform, and where individual users could opt in to being
| part of that database.
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| This is commonplace for decentralized protocols. Torrents
| are probably the most obvious example.
| etchalon wrote:
| Email remains decentralized.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Doesn't matter when we are talking about Mastodon.
|
| People don't use email as social network or instant form
| of social communication.
| p1necone wrote:
| Email is decentralized. It's mature enough that there's a
| bunch of trusted providers out there and you can use it
| without caring about the technical details, it's basically
| a perfect example of a successful mature decentralized
| service.
| colesantiago wrote:
| many people don't care that it is decentralised, hence
| gmail, an open protocol is irrelevant. In mastodon's case
| decentralisation is a hindrance since they want
| centralisation back.
|
| email isn't a social network and lots people outside of
| HN don't self host them as such.
| kortilla wrote:
| I think you're quite confused about email users. Very few
| of the companies I worked for outside of startups used
| google for email hosting.
|
| Business email is very dependent on the fact that it's an
| open protocol.
| p1necone wrote:
| Likewise, gmail would be totally useless if it was
| _actually_ centralized and you couldn 't email non gmail
| users.
| wrycoder wrote:
| But they can't necessarily email you, given Google's
| procedures regarding "spam", i.e. anything from a small
| email server.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| This is true. My last company used fastmail, but one guy
| insisted on using Gmail. Sometimes fastmail didn't arrive
| at Gmail. We (tech team) said, this is a problem with
| gmail. C-suite said this is a problem with fastmail.
|
| And so the word comes down, we have to move to Gmail.
| It's believable decision making, but that's how it works.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Companies like hosting their own email. Users don't
| because because they don't have an IT department whose
| job it is to filter spam etc.
| Zak wrote:
| People do, however use multiple email providers, sometimes
| small ones like the small business they work for or their
| local/regional ISP. If federated social sharing becomes
| popular, the story will likely be similar: a few big
| providers have most of the users, but a limited ability to
| dictate how the system works.
| ttepasse wrote:
| That hypothetical was the case: back in 2007/2008 people of
| the blogosphere slowly stopped blogging and started
| tweeting. And if you had a good but suddenly more empty
| feedreader you'd then had to follow the great migration and
| re-find those people on Twitter.
| colesantiago wrote:
| this means that centralisation works better?
| Kye wrote:
| It did for a time, but people realized the major flaw
| starting in the 2010s when Twitter started becoming the
| mess it is today: once you're in, you're in, no matter
| how bad the platform gets. You could take your OPML and
| leave if you didn't like your feed reader. There's no
| equivalent way to migrate your follows on Twitter. There
| _was_ until they turned off RSS feeds. Now you 'd need a
| feed reader that specifically handles the moving target
| of Twitter's API or web interface, and that always costs
| extra.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Once imported, what would be the benefit of the centralized
| system? This just sounds like overcoming the barrier that the
| centralized system put up.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Or maybe if a distributed platform embraces some additional
| centralization (it already does some), it becomes more like the
| decentralized platform everybody wants, and keeps the best
| aspects of the federated approach for those who mainly want
| those...
|
| It's not so important to force any dichotomous perspectives on
| the whole here, as the situation has a lot of nuance to it in
| the details.
| [deleted]
| martythemaniak wrote:
| You know, I think Reddit is actually the best positioned Twitter
| alternative. You can use your real name, or anonymous account.
| You go there to follow particular subreddits, but there no reason
| why I shouldn't also be able to follow people and see their non-
| topic (ie, not part of any subreddit) microblogs interweaved with
| posts from subreddits. They deal with spam and trolls reasonably
| well.
|
| They have all the pieces, they just have to put them together
| tastefully.
| augustuspolius wrote:
| Feels like Reddit is closer to Mastodon than to Twitter. Each
| Mastodon server is like a subreddit with its own rules,
| moderation, user base, etc.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Obligatory reminder that Mastodon is a user interface for a
| defederated network commonly called the Fediverse, and that
| referring to the Fediverse as "Mastodon" is like referring to the
| web as Chrome.
|
| Spitting into the wind at this point, I know, but it still
| bothers me.
| linuxhansl wrote:
| Heresy: Why do we need a replacement for Twitter?
|
| There was a world and a life before Twitter, and there is one
| without Twitter as well.
|
| I deleted my Twitter account about a year ago and have not missed
| anything. People and topics I am interested in I can updated on
| by many different means.
| howinteresting wrote:
| Networking.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I don't think Mastodon is meant to be a replacement for
| Twitter, or will ever be that. It would be a mistake to treat
| it that way.
|
| It's more like this place than Twitter, in a way.
|
| Or, it's kind of similar to how Usenet was in the early 90s.
|
| It's a simple linear feed of who've subscribed to, or what the
| people you've subscribed to have "boosted". So you find the
| interest groups you're into and join a node that matches that,
| then find the people you like on various nodes, and follow
| them. There's no recommendations really. There's hashtags, but
| few ways to "discover" them and they don't seem to get heavily
| used right now.
|
| It's maybe like Twitter when it first launched. Certainly not
| what it became (which I never personally participated in).
|
| It certainly doesn't have the level of "action" or "engagement"
| you'd find on Twitter. And that's probably a good thing.
| yosito wrote:
| Someone should build an app like this that is integrated with all
| the social networks. Give it a sexy UI, and a catchy feature or
| two to keep people checking in. Eventually, it could serve as a
| federated contacts hub that links people between networks. A
| vital piece of infrastructure to support mandated
| interoperability.
| klyrs wrote:
| We had Trillian back in the day, but then the messaging
| services locked down their protocols. I don't expect such an
| app would survive the cat&mouse with major players for long.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I'm not sure about your standard social media, but for direct
| messaging, several Matrix-based companies have popped up that
| allow for service interoperability.
|
| The European Union is also working on breaking open the
| messenger space, forcing tech companies to either leave the
| EU or work on an interoperable standard. I believe an IEEE
| working group is already developing a protocol to serve this
| purpose, even with encryption available if I recall
| correctly.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Unfortunately, I'm sure this is probably against the ToS of
| every social media service, even those that might still provide
| a client API. :( Otherwise someone would have done this. OTOH,
| I think there are services that companies use to manage and
| post to all their social media accounts.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Gonna repost my standard question on Mastodon articles: cool, how
| do I get into it?
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Another new tool in this vein is Fedifinder. It works by scanning
| Twitter bios of accounts you follow for strings that look like
| Mastodon addresses: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
|
| 5 years ago there was a neat tool called Mastodon Bridge that did
| what Twitodon says it does but much better, I think because it
| didn't require everyone opt in. It stopped working because of
| some change Twitter made to their API terms of use.
| https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-bridge
|
| There's also Moa Party, but it's so complicated I have never used
| it. https://moa.party/
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