[HN Gopher] Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon
___________________________________________________________________
Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon
Author : srvmshr
Score : 603 points
Date : 2022-10-30 19:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitodon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitodon.com)
| goodpoint wrote:
| Anything similar for Facebook?
| WesSouza wrote:
| > Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon
| remram wrote:
| Maybe you were the first one of your network, now the others
| will get to find you.
| AndroidKitKat wrote:
| Mine found the 2 people I'd already followed on Mastodon. Maybe
| one day more people will be on it, but if not, it's not that
| big of a deal.
| 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
| Thorentis wrote:
| If Mastodon takes off because of Musk ill be pretty amused. There
| is an irony to Mastdon, a more open platform than Twitter,
| becoming more popular because people thought Musk would make
| Twitter... more open.
| akho wrote:
| Mastodon has moderation facilities and is famous for instances
| having CoCs, refusing federation with instances with
| conflicting views, &c.
| EarlKing wrote:
| This. Mastodon is a federation in name only. If the protocol
| is not the policy then you really don't have a federation at
| all, rhetoric notwithstanding. I note that this is not a
| problem particular to Mastodon/The Fediverse, though, as its
| the exact problem that led to people forking their own
| networks off of FidoNet.
| akho wrote:
| You can run your own and federate with whomever. It's
| unlikely that this scenario will be common. It's more
| likely that the large instances switch to whitelisting
| eventually.
|
| Maybe self-hosting could be made more common through
| selling a (cheap) appliance with self-hosted services pre-
| installed. It is not clear how to solve the chicken-and-egg
| problem with such a setup. Also, someone will need to
| maintain the tunnels these things will need to be
| accessible. That entity can again be pressured into
| moderation.
|
| It's not at all clear if effective freedom of speech is
| attainable at scale.
| iicc wrote:
| >Maybe self-hosting could be made more common through
| selling a (cheap) appliance with self-hosted services
| pre-installed.
|
| Mastondon-as-a-service exists eg https://masto.host/.
|
| one-click-install mastodon exists too -eg
| https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/04/mastodon-now-
| available...
| reitanqild wrote:
| > You can run your own and federate with whomever.
|
| One big problem IIRC (haven't touched it for a year or
| two):
|
| I'm all in favor of being able to block users or
| instances.
|
| But many Mastodon instances have a policy of blocking
| other instances if they don't block certain other
| instances.
|
| When I realized this it was one of a number of reasons
| why I just gave it up.
|
| I'm currently hoping that nostr and element/matrix takes
| off, but in the meanwhile I agree with whoever commented
| somewhere onnthe Internet the other day that Telegram is
| a DIY social network.
| EarlKing wrote:
| > It's not at all clear if effective freedom of speech is
| attainable at scale.
|
| It runs into basically the same problem as torrenting:
| How do you punish people who try to leech? It more or
| less requires the majority of participants to apply the
| same policy consistently so that defectors are punished
| for their defection.
|
| Ultimately, the solution is more or less the same as it
| was for FidoNet: Defederate and form your own network
| with stringent requirements so that jackasses that want
| to ignore the rules when it suits them will be shown the
| door. Networks then grow to encompass precisely the
| number of people who can be trusted to keep to the policy
| and no further. Thus, you wind up with a patchwork of
| disconnected networks. I for one am fine with this sort
| of future since it worked just fine before. The only
| people who'd really not like it are those who prefer
| centralization in order to easily engage in influence
| operations... and of course their opinions don't count.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| The only people interested in Musk's disingenuous theory of
| "open" are the right wing industrial-scale disinformation
| peddlers and those enabled by them.
|
| QElon's amplification of deranged right wing conspiracy theory
| wasn't mere trolling or stupidity; it was a declaration of
| intent.
|
| Never forget he was partners with Peter Thiel, and the two of
| them together have minted a fascist-friendly grift into literal
| kleptocracy pipeline for themselves. You don't have to do more
| than peel back the sticker to learn Musk hasn't invented any of
| the companies he's associated with; and his success with them
| hinges on dishonesty and card tricks.
| starefossen wrote:
| For me it is how one person can suddenly own an entire social
| network and dictate the rules as he likes or dislikes. Mastodon
| it self is more open, the server you choose to sign up to might
| have content policies in place.
| nathias wrote:
| If I could choulse twitter would be a protocol, but to me the
| worst case is being owned by an anonymous bureaucracy working
| exclusively to optimize the platform for add revenue, that
| changes the 'rules' on the fashions of US local politics.
| Anything else is an improvement.
| onethought wrote:
| But all the social networks are owned by a few individuals.
| Even twitter before musk bought it was owned by a select few
| (with real control), and they already dictated the rules
| based on their own likes/dislikes... that's what started this
| whole thing in the first place.
| shapefrog wrote:
| > Even twitter before musk bought it was owned by a select
| few
|
| Except it wasnt
| rjzzleep wrote:
| Wait, that's literally Zuckerberg? How was it OK when a Saudi
| Prince bought into Twitter to make sure Saudi Arabia wouldn't
| be hit by an Arab Spring[1]?
|
| I don't really like Musk, but is every conversation and topic
| these days just plain hysteria?
|
| [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2471759/arab-
| prince-bu...
| MrDresden wrote:
| Some of us have already left the Meta ecosystem years ago
| after finally waking up to that.
|
| Now it is time to do the same for Twitter.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Yeah, it is not about a whole social network being
| controlled by a single person. It is about a whole social
| network being controlled by a single person _you disagree
| with_.
| goodpoint wrote:
| That's a pretty dishonest framing.
| rchaud wrote:
| It's not controlled by a single person, it's controlled
| by those who coughed up the $44b.
|
| Musk is the only one of them who actively desires the
| spotlight.
| kramerger wrote:
| You don't have to disagree with Elon as a person or
| politically to feel that an open speech platform
| controlled by one person who is known to micromanage
| everyone around him is bad.
|
| The tweets about Pelosi should that he is absolutely open
| to using his power as a prominent figure to control the
| narrative long outside his area of expertise
| raspberry1337 wrote:
| We need to reduce harmful information. Only experts on A
| may speak about it. Experts are decided by trustable
| media outlets.
| j3th9n wrote:
| You seem a good example of a victim of propaganda.
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| I may be mistaken, but I read the comments you're
| replying to as a sarcastic one.
| j3th9n wrote:
| I hope you're right, people like this really exist.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Who determines what is a "trustable media"? Who watches
| the watchdog? Etc.
| pennaMan wrote:
| I present to you a trustable media outlet deciding on an
| expert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6Y2uQn_wvc
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Tweeting isn't controlling any narrative. If you ban one
| side and not the other, and suppress stories you don't
| like, that's more along the lines you're talking.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| You have to only care about it now.
| hoseja wrote:
| It's a private company.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember when that was an excuse people
| used for Twitter. Funny, seems like months ago. Now, it's a
| private company but the arguments are all different.
| ekianjo wrote:
| a publicly traded company. not exactly the same as its
| current status.
| gadders wrote:
| Where have you been for the last few years? That was exactly
| what was happening.
| tasuki wrote:
| > If Mastodon takes off because of Musk ill be pretty amused.
|
| Iirc, Elon Musk said social networking should not be
| centralized but distributed. Perhaps he bought Twitter just to
| shut it down so that ActivityPub would become more popular?
| psychphysic wrote:
| You've only got to look at the inconvenience of setting up a
| matrix home server and soon think "centralised it is".
|
| Mastodon is even worse.
|
| I can't see it taking off.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Synapse is not the only implementation
| psychphysic wrote:
| It's the only full featured implementation.
|
| The alternatives like dendrite are significantly more
| work.
|
| And good luck getting any federation working at all
| unless if you replace sqlite.
| infinitezest wrote:
| As someone that recently set up a Matrix server, I'm not
| sure what you're talking about.
| psychphysic wrote:
| Which server?
|
| Synapse needs dual core with 8GB ram. You don't call that
| inconvenient?
|
| Even then you might have timeouts joining some rooms.
|
| Most will not meet that spec and won't be able to join
| popular rooms.
|
| God help you should you not replace the standard sqlite
| dB.
| rpgbr wrote:
| "More open" as owned by a billionaire extremist that promised
| to destroy moderation efforts that weren't even good to begin
| with. People in the US have a weird notion of what "open"
| means.
| wraptile wrote:
| I think "More open Twitter" is a red herring. The bigger issue
| seems to be that people simply dislike and distrust Musk.
| kukx wrote:
| I would rephrase it to "political propaganda machine dislikes
| and distrusts Musk". It is telling that Tesla was not invited
| to the EV summit or that or was removed from S&P 500 ESG.
| atoav wrote:
| Depends which political propaganda machine you are talking
| about: the one that is outraged at their speakers husband
| being hit by a hammer or the one flately making stuff up to
| justify that attack.
|
| P.S. I am not an US citizen so I couldn't care less, but
| when "my" party over here would defend a guy who breaks
| into someone's home and hit an old man with an hammer
| because of -- you name it -- political propaganda _I_ would
| pause for a moment and revaluate whether I am still who I
| think I was.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| > because of -- you name it -- political propaganda I
| would pause for a moment and revaluate whether I am still
| who I think I was.
|
| We don't know why Pelosi's husband was attacked. The guy
| who attacked him appears to be left wing (nudist
| activist, pro lgbt, he made hemp jewelry, and was a
| member of the green party). Pelosi appears to have said
| the attacker was his friend on the police call.
|
| We just don't know enough to say it is political.
| kukx wrote:
| Why do you feel a need to defend political propaganda?
| Did you not just try to show that it is instrumental? If
| anything I guess you agree that there is this top down
| attack on Musk. Well, he became so influential that shady
| political interests are in play.
| atoav wrote:
| I am not defending political propaganda, I am observing
| the area where it transitions into action with worry and
| thus critizising it.
|
| Living in an area of the world where you are given more
| than two political choices might make you think a little
| differently on a lot of stuff. For example you don't have
| to take sides like in a team sport and cheer on "your"
| team independent of it's actions. What I am saying here
| is that the US is an absolute mid-pit in terms of
| propaganda and this includes Republicans and Democrats
| alike. Yet by my standards (the standards of someone
| whose grandfather was an _actual_ Nazi) one of those
| propaganda machines is more dangerous than the other.
| carschno wrote:
| How do you imagine a "top down attack" on the richest man
| on earth?
| kukx wrote:
| If you are the richest man on earth and are attacked by
| political elites how would you defend yourself? Mind that
| they control, to some extent, media and institutions.
| There are things beyond money.
| incahoots wrote:
| Gonna have to agree with this. Musk may be rich but rich
| doesn't necessarily mean you have the same access to
| certain networks as other oligarchs.
|
| If anything we should sit back and let them eat their
| own. I mean they've been doing it to us for so long that
| it's a bit refreshing to see them attack each other.
| api wrote:
| Not top down, but maybe side to side.
|
| Tesla has really helped push EVs over the adoption hump
| and into the mainstream. Quite a lot of incredibly
| wealthy people and governments (petro-states) would love
| to see Tesla (and Musk personally) fail. Upending the
| global energy order is a big deal and will make you
| serious enemies.
|
| SpaceX has also almost single handedly taken the entire
| launch industry. Nowhere near as big as the oil and
| internal combustion engine industries but it's very
| wrapped up with large powerful states like Russia.
| Roscosmos is basically dead now.
|
| The idea that Musk is pro-Russian is kind of dubious for
| many reasons, and Russia certainly has zero reason to be
| pro-Musk. He's destroyed their space industry, threatens
| the fossil fuel basis of their economy, and helped
| Ukraine.
| shapefrog wrote:
| Yet the other _political propaganda machine_ love and
| trusts Musk
| ethanbond wrote:
| Some people don't like elevating leaders who openly flout
| and degrade our culture's expectations of how leaders
| behave. Some of those are silly, of course, but some of
| them are not. For example, a leader _should_ be knocked
| down a few notches if they're calling rescue workers
| pedophiles for no reason. They _should_ be knocked down a
| few more for impregnating their employees. They _should_ be
| knocked down for throwing childish insults at their
| business associates.
|
| Nothing to do with politics and everything to do with not
| wanting to live in a world where all of these things become
| the norm.
| hn2017 wrote:
| How Musk has tumbled so quickly will go down in history
| books. Now he's spouting conspiracy theories.
| incahoots wrote:
| Grifting pays big money and gains you attention.
| docmars wrote:
| I feel the same about Hillary. She shared a conspiracy
| theory this last week that Paul Pelosi's attacker was a
| right-wing extremist.
|
| It was found later that the alleged "blog" David created
| wasn't created long ago and was taken down pretty swiftly
| after the attack, showing that this was created as a prop
| for a political stunt before midterms.
|
| The residence for the attacker, David, was found to be a
| hippie commune with a gay pride marijuana flag in their
| front yard. Does anyone really think this guy was a far
| righty? Give me a break.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| All of my conservative friends live in Berkeley, attend
| nudist weddings, and live in Communes. Don't yours?
| rat87 wrote:
| The attacker is a far right extremist. That's fact. He
| might have once been fairly left wing but has been on the
| far right for a while.
|
| https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2022/10/29/
| fea...
|
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/What-we-know-
| about...
|
| > He published multiple blogs laced with statements about
| the QAnon mass delusion, whose adherents believe former
| President Donald Trump stands against an alliance of
| Satan-worshipping Democratic pedophiles. The blog also
| included bigoted commentary directed at people of color,
| women, Jewish people, Muslims, members of the LGBTQ
| community and immigrants.
| ethanbond wrote:
| For readers, AFAICT the evidence that his blogs were
| created immediately before and deleted immediately after
| the attack is that the Wayback Machine hadn't indexed
| them prior to being linked to by major media outlets.
| treeman79 wrote:
| No. People don't want Conservatives to have a voice.
| pron wrote:
| I've always been curious about that. Does Twitter forbid
| discussing lowering taxes? Maybe demanding harsher
| immigration policies? Higher prison sentences? Bans on
| abortion? Shutting down the department of education?
| Reinstating a monarchy? Who is more conservative than The
| Federalist? Quillette posts "race science" articles, and
| even the Claremont Institute, which is so reactionary that
| it balks at the term "conservative," posts articles on
| Twitter calling for ending democracy. Margarita Simonyan, a
| chief spokesperson for an ultraconservative authoritarian
| regime that is _currently_ engaged in one of the deadliest
| wars in modern history against a budding democracy, has an
| account with over half a million followers. You want pre-
| Hellenic conceptions of the world? You got it! So
| seriously, what specific conservative content does Twitter
| disallow?
| ekianjo wrote:
| > that is currently engaged in one of the most deadly
| wars in history
|
| ? you dont have to use hyperbole to make a point.
| pron wrote:
| I wasn't (although I'll qualify with "modern history"): h
| ttps://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/23/ukraine-
| wa...
| ekianjo wrote:
| If? Since when do we qualify a war as deadly based on
| linear projections in the future?
| pron wrote:
| No projections needed. By intensity it's in the top 25%
| deadliest _already_.
| rat87 wrote:
| It's very hard to estimate casulties in Russia's war on
| Ukraine but I think it's possible for it already to be
| over 200k soldiers and civilians, definitely over 100k
| since over 30k civilians died in Mariupol (likely many
| more some say 100k in Marioupol alone). We probably won't
| get good numbers till after the war
| agensaequivocum wrote:
| Multiple people have been locked out for saying that a
| man cannot get pregnant. Saying that cutting the healthy
| breasts of a young girl is child abuse, or saying that
| giving a child puberty blockers is also child abuse. Stop
| being so obtuse
| pron wrote:
| I don't know the particular circumstances of those
| sanctions, but _all_ of these opinions have been widely
| disseminated on Twitter. Exactly none of them have been
| suppressed, as a quick Twitter search would immediately
| reveal.
|
| I understand that the feeling that
| conservative/reactionary ideas are suppressed has been an
| important myth in conservative circles for at least a
| century (to varying degrees), and that opinion itself is
| one of those conservative notions so prevalent on
| Twitter, but as a statement of fact, it is very easily
| disproved.
| rat87 wrote:
| So they're claiming things, that are part of being a
| supportive parent and are not abuse, are abusive. And
| possibly encouraging harrasment of supporting parents and
| doctors?
|
| Also I'm pretty sure vast majority of those getting top
| surgery are 18 or older.
| sneed-oil wrote:
| Twitter suppressed the NY Post's story on Hunter Biden's
| laptop right before the 2020 presidential election.
| Calling a surgeon who performed sex reassignment surgery
| a criminal is what got Jordan Peterson suspended until
| he'll remove that tweet. Trump was banned despite never
| telling anybody to go inside the Capitol building and
| even posting a video telling his supporters to go home.
| Milo Yiannopoulos was banned for making fun of an
| actress. Alex Jones was banned for posting a video where
| he insulted a CNN journalist. Nick Fuentes was banned for
| repeated violations but Twitter has never made clear what
| the relevant tweets were. These were just off the top of
| my head. I also remember tweets calling for mass
| reeducation of white people or the eradication of
| whiteness being allowed.
| rat87 wrote:
| Trump encouraged a violent coup attempt. Twitter didn't
| want to be culpable in any further attempts to violently
| overthrow a democratic government
|
| Nick Fuentes is a white nationalist.
| https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-
| files/indi...
| pron wrote:
| All of these ideas/notions/opinions/stories were _very
| widely_ disseminated on Twitter to an audience of
| millions (BTW, the legality of Trump 's behaviour,
| including what exactly he urged his followers to do, is
| under ongoing investigation). The suppression of the
| Post's story on Hunter Biden might have been an
| overreaction, that story itself was all over Twitter
| (that's how I heard about it). It's possible some tweets
| "calling for mass reeducation of white people or the
| eradication of whiteness" were not removed, but neither
| were tweets with vile racism/misogyny/antisemitism that
| constantly flood the platform.
|
| I assume a claim could be made (although it would be hard
| to support) that, on average, more conservatives are
| suspended than progressives for similar behaviour but
| that still amounts to _zero_ conservative ideas
| suppressed. On the other hand, there 's also a bias in
| violent acts between conservatives and progressives. If
| there's any conservative _content_ banned or suppressed,
| I 've yet to see a single example.
| sneed-oil wrote:
| > If there's any conservative _content_ banned or
| suppressed, no one has yet to find even a single example.
|
| A pretty common conservative opinion is that there are
| only two genders, but Twitter doesn't allow misgendering
| pron wrote:
| That doesn't limit in any way the expression of the
| belief that there are only two genders. Feel free to run
| a Twitter search and confirm that for yourself (I just
| did). I have to say I am genuinely curious to find a
| conservative belief that I wouldn't find thousands of
| (unironic/uncritical) hits for in a matter of seconds.
| mojzu wrote:
| I'm not a big Twitter user but am often bombarded with
| right wing content on other sites like Reddit and Youtube
| no matter how often I try to tell the site/train the
| algorithm that it's not content I'm interested in seeing
| whatsoever, the idea that conservatives are being
| silenced when I (a left wing Brit) am constantly seeing
| their content is frankly ridiculous
| stiltzkin wrote:
| That depends the subs you are subscribed, I usually get
| bombarded with left content and big subs are astroturfed
| by leftist.
| reitanqild wrote:
| I think it is an algorithm thing:
|
| As a member of NAFO I get bombarded by Pro-Russian views
| every single time I refresh my timeline it seems, and I
| never like any of it or follow any of those genocidal
| maniacs or their cheerleaders :-/
| jimjimjim wrote:
| normal conservatives? yes please. weirdo fruit-loop
| frothing conservatives? no thanks.
| otikik wrote:
| They have a voice. What they don't have any more is the
| privilege to use it without any consequences.
| docmars wrote:
| I wish the Left experienced the same, then. Large,
| influential accounts calling for white genocide and
| education camps publicly with no consequences or media
| backlash is a travesty.
| rat87 wrote:
| Lots of people on the left face moderation. Often even
| unfair moderation. They just don't whine about it as
| much.
| theblazehen wrote:
| Got any examples of accounts?
| docmars wrote:
| Unfortunately I don't really bookmark tweets so I can
| share them 1-2 years later with folks who won't bother to
| search for them, themselves.
|
| Sorry, you'll have to take my word for it, and you'll
| need to have enough interest and curiosity to care. I
| don't mean to assume you don't, and I want to think
| you're genuinely interested in knowing, but at the risk
| of sounding rude, people who usually ask for evidence or
| examples didn't spend any time looking on their own, and
| seek only to condemn, deny, or denounce the OP's claims
| at any cost -- or worse, when evidence is shared, twist
| it into something it's not and make excuses for it.
|
| A quick search got me reprehensible posts generalizing
| White people, or highlights patently racist behavior
| towards Whites by people (and news media) that are still
| allowed to exist quite freely on Twitter, like so:
|
| 1. https://twitter.com/realDailyWire/status/1325702297402
| 306561 (AOC calling for White re-education en masse, is
| patently racist)
|
| 2.
| https://twitter.com/SkyCricket/status/1280809870766284800
|
| 3.
| https://twitter.com/joanwalsh/status/1584926736583913472
|
| 4.
| https://twitter.com/swordsjew/status/1255273666302095368
|
| 5. https://web.archive.org/web/20190111211254/https://twi
| tter.c... (this thread was not deleted, the account that
| posted it has made their profile private -- however this
| thread was allowed to exist for years).
|
| 6. https://twitter.com/WilliamCheeks10/status/10693653458
| 220892... (small account, still stands as a reply off a
| Guardian news post)
|
| 7. https://web.archive.org/web/20210108061020/https://twi
| tter.c... (smaller account, but still allowed to stand)
|
| 8. https://twitter.com/Brother_Jacob1/status/128084335718
| 345113... (smaller account, but still allowed to stand)
|
| Generally the most likely response at this point is
| "You're cherrypicking" (and thus invalidates my entire
| claim), right?
|
| Disclaimer: my snark isn't directed at you by the way. I
| just find it fun to presume the outcomes of a -- 1) share
| 2) evidence pls 3) shares evidence 4) ??? -- interaction.
| otikik wrote:
| The fact that you are not witnessing the consequences a
| lot of people on the left are subjected to is part of the
| problem. Social media works better when it is able to
| isolate people into their own bubble, and to see the
| other as the source of all that is bad in the world. I
| wish you good luck, getting out of there is difficult.
|
| Here's a video about how it was to feel cancellation of a
| leftist (from people also on the left!). It's long but
| you might find it entertaining.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8
| incahoots wrote:
| Chowderhead, Tim Pool, Shapiro, Owens, FoxNews, & and to
| some extent Rogan. Last I checked all of them have a heavy
| amount of followers and their accounts have not been banned
| from Twitter or FB?
|
| Can you give examples where this takes place?
| agensaequivocum wrote:
| Donald Trump
|
| Project Veritas
|
| James Lindsay
|
| Babylon Bee (locked out for not deleting a tweet.)
|
| Jordan Peterson (locked out for not deleting a tweet.)
|
| Marjorie Taylor Greene's personal account
|
| Steve Bannon
|
| among others
| awestroke wrote:
| I think that's a vocal minority. The majority doesn't care,
| and two equally small, vocal minority groups love and hate
| him, respectively
| AnonCoward42 wrote:
| For what I see from Twitter, I'd say Twitter _is_ the vocal
| minority.
| guywithahat wrote:
| I've seen the exact opposite, everyone either doesn't
| care (specifically non-US citizens don't care) and people
| in the US are cheering him on. There was tremendous
| support for him when he reinstated the babylon bee and
| they haven't even posted anything yet
| [deleted]
| neither_color wrote:
| _Around one-in-five U.S. adults (23%) say they use
| Twitter. The share of Americans who use the platform has
| remained consistent over the past several years and is
| similar to the share who use Snapchat (25%) and WhatsApp
| (23%). But a much larger share of U.S. adults use YouTube
| (81%), Facebook (69%) and Instagram (40%)._
|
| Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
| tank/2022/05/05/10-facts-ab...
|
| Considering all the attention the acquisition received I
| was surprised to read that more people don't use Twitter.
| The idea that what gets posted on Twitter automatically
| becomes what the average Joe talks about is probably
| overstated.
| Kye wrote:
| It's indirect. Many of the people who influence what the
| average Joe talks about use Twitter, and few of them are
| self-aware enough to recognize Twitter is a fishbowl at a
| cafe by the ocean.
| concordDance wrote:
| In hackernews and reddit and my small RL sampling the
| haters outnumber the lovers about 3 to 1 atm.
|
| And about 1 in 4 or so care.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| In my friend group there were a handful of specific
| blunders that significantly changed the tide of opinion
| against him, all around the 2018 timeframe. "Pedo guy"
| was the biggest one mostly because of how stupid and
| unnecessary it was and his unwillingness to back down,
| but the "taking Tesla private for $420/share" drama was a
| close second.
|
| The increasingly pubic tawdriness of his love life was a
| factor too; prior to then he'd done a good job
| cultivating an image of a family man.
| vultour wrote:
| Specifically on Reddit I've never seen anybody support
| him anywhere near what one could consider "faboyism".
| They have this funny feedback loop where there's a
| (usually negative, or only marginally relevant) Musk post
| on the front page at least once a week, and the comments
| are all about how they hate Musk and how people need to
| stop giving him attention. Somehow everybody is
| completely oblivious to the fact that these posts are the
| only ones that most people ever see.
| raspberry1337 wrote:
| I'd like to see a poll on hacker news for this
| stiltzkin wrote:
| *SOME people.
| rchaud wrote:
| It won't though, this isn't going to be like the Digg exodus.
|
| Digg and Reddit were basically like-for-like, the friction in
| moving over was non-existent, because the focal point of both
| sites was the interesting links that people would post and
| discuss in the comments.
|
| Twitter is different because the 2010s social networks did
| everything to kill external links, and turn the focus on the
| 'personalities' on the platform.
|
| Also trying to go from Twitter to Mastodon is going to be like
| what beginners experience trying to set up a crypto wallet.
| Terrible UX, especially with dialog prompts with inscrutable
| messages about 'instances' that are meaningless to people
| coming from a walled garden.
| guywithahat wrote:
| I think a number of other people have tried and it turns out
| mastodon isn't a very good piece of software. Gab was based off
| mastodon for along time and what they found was it's just not
| set up to scale, and they were constantly removing features
| during peak use to keep the servers from crashing. Pleroma is
| written in elixir scales a lot better (which is why all the
| biggest instances like poa.st use it) but fundamentally you're
| still dealing with a lot of overhead sending and receiving
| messages from other servers. I think something would have to
| fundamentally change with the API if it wanted to grow past a
| few hundred thousand active users.
| langsoul-com wrote:
| I wonder if there's something like Twitter but a feed (RSS or
| otherwise) of interesting people's blog, YouTube, podcast or
| creative work?
|
| I feel the value of Twitter would be a feed of interesting
| people. But 280 characters is just knee jerk thoughts.
|
| Something to easily discover people, like Twitter, whist showing
| their content, seems more valuable.
|
| Right now, the discovery part sucks. It's possible to find
| interesting people and sub to the RSS, but not everyone has that
| (like my blog). Not to mention how spread out content is, someone
| might release a podcast, or interesting YouTube vid, instead of
| just blog articles. It's just too much work.
| nicopappl wrote:
| You may be interested in Fraidycat.
|
| Per the description:
|
| > Fraidycat is a desktop app or browser extension for Firefox
| or Chrome. I use it to follow people (hundreds) on whatever
| platform they choose - Twitter, a blog, YouTube, even on a
| public TiddlyWiki.
|
| This doesn't solve the problem of discoverability, but it
| solves half of what you described.
|
| https://fraidyc.at/
| anderspitman wrote:
| We need to decouple discovery and distribution of content.
| Discovery is much easier to manage with centralized platforms.
| Distribution is better decentralized. And since we have URLs
| there's no reason for them to be tied together.
| michaelbrooks wrote:
| People can add ActivityPub to their websites/blogs, and it will
| be a part of the fediverse. WordPress has a plugin for this,
| and you can add your own implementation as well.
| stefandesu wrote:
| I wish there was a way to integrate ActivityPub into static
| sites. As far as I know, you can't just add ActivityPub to
| your site hosted on GitHub Pages, for example.
| Duralias wrote:
| Isn't that what the Twitter founder is making with Blue Sky?
|
| An RSS feed, but for social media.
| kramerger wrote:
| I use Twitter to follow fellow engineers and honestly all the
| politics (regardless of the new guy in charge) was getting
| annoying. I might as well use this opportunity to become more
| active on mastadon.
|
| Can anyone recommend a good android client? Preferably from
| f-droid?
| sprokolopolis wrote:
| I think Tusky is the most polished android client.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| Not only politics but non-related topics you follow, I wonder
| if in-tags of tweets would solve this.
| dairylee wrote:
| > all the politics was getting annoying
|
| Dumb question but why would this be any different on Mastodon?
| kgwxd wrote:
| It's not, I followed a prominent Clojure dev on there and it
| was mostly politics. Politics I mostly agreed with but it was
| too much to keep following. That's not the only example, but
| it's the one I think of every time I think of going back. I
| don't think twitter needs a replacement, just quitting was
| good enough for me and that was long before mastodon came
| around.
| emaro wrote:
| I can recommend Tusky or the official Mastodon app. Both are
| available in F-Droid.
| infinitezest wrote:
| Fedilab has been pretty nice to use
| throwaway221017 wrote:
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| Is there a way to find the Mastodon instance you yourself signed
| up on? I am pretty sure I already made a Mastodon account, but
| not on mastodon.social and based on the list of instances,
| nothing rings a bell. :-/
|
| Edit: it was mastodon.social, the password reset email just took
| 15 minutes to arrive... Good tip in the comments though, thanks!
| Kye wrote:
| >> _" Edit: it was mastodon.social, the password reset email
| just took 15 minutes to arrive..."_
|
| They're waiting on a new database server to handle the load.
|
| https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109262705755044079
| Aissen wrote:
| Search your emails for "Welcome to Mastodon".
| anderspitman wrote:
| What we really need is for selfhosting to be as easy and secure
| as installing an app on your phone.
|
| Somewhat related: there should be a way to have a Mastodon ID
| based on a domain you control, regardless of what instance it's
| hosted on.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Webfinger technically supports that sort of delegation today
| in its spec: you can drop a /.well-known/webfinger JSON file
| on the domain's web server (or a cgi-bin app of some sort if
| you need to support more than one user because the protocol
| uses GET request parameters to differentiate) and tell
| ActivityPub servers "if you are looking for user
| anexample@thisdomain.com please forward to the inbox or check
| the outbox for anexample@mastodon.social". That works today
| for things like @ mentions or DMs of an account sending the
| right notifications. Unfortunately, this isn't yet the best
| experience because in many places including follows/follow
| requests Mastodon users will always see the forwarded address
| everywhere "anexample@mastodon.social" instead of the
| delegating address and so far as I'm aware there's no easy
| way to _send_ messages addressed as the delegating address.
|
| It would be nice to see this improved.
| cathy651 wrote:
| cathy651 wrote:
| fleddr wrote:
| Twitter's appeal is outrage and controversy. Their users are
| addicted to it, even if they don't care to admit it.
|
| That's why no significant migration to Mastodon will take place.
| Even if you do manage to lift and shift your bubble (you won't),
| you'll then find yourself in a calm and slow place where nothing
| happens.
|
| For a bubble to exist and thrive, it needs a common enemy. With
| the enemy removed, it collapses. Everybody inside couldn't care
| if they never heard from you ever again. They were never a
| friend, just people who agreed.
|
| If you want a group of like-minded people sharing stuff, there's
| a million options. Go to Discord, start a Whatsapp group, a
| subreddit, whichever. But that's clearly not the point. Hardcore
| Twitter users want their hot take to be heard in public, with
| "enemies" listening in.
| mjhagen wrote:
| That was how twitter was and that was how I liked twitter.
| Nokinside wrote:
| > That's why no significant migration to Mastodon will take
| place.
|
| This sounds great. If we can leave 99% behind and get all
| substantive people, like John Carlos Baez, into Mastodon, its
| the best possible world.
|
| People think that all partitions are between people with
| different opinions, but that's not always the case. Sometimes
| people with substance from every corner flock into the same
| arena. For a little time everything is good, then eternal
| September once again.
| silisili wrote:
| Google had that. I don't even remember it's name now...plus
| maybe?
|
| Seemed a lot of tech people wrote there. Very peaceful, no
| outrage. It died. I think OP is right.
| fleddr wrote:
| "For a little time everything is good..."
|
| I hear what you're saying. There used to be a time and place
| where perhaps you could join some niche, a "non-political"
| one if you will.
|
| That barely holds up these days. People do not separate their
| politics from the niche topic, it's all intersectional and
| performative. Absurd examples are the "knitting wars" and
| "noodle lady".
|
| Besides constant outrage, many topics are engagement-farmed.
|
| I've said it before: Twitter rewards exactly the wrong thing.
| Reasonable and good faith people keep losing. And yet when I
| come back to my original point, in case they do make things
| fair and more calm, a major appeal is lost.
| ahallock wrote:
| Yes, it's all about the dopamine hit from getting engagement.
| I'm guilty of it--sitting there thinking of a sharp reply to
| get people riled up. You'd think positive engagement would give
| the biggest boost, but it's actually the more hateful, negative
| replies that are the most satisfying. It's so toxic.
| robswc wrote:
| >Twitter's appeal is outrage and controversy
|
| I feel like this is what a lot of people miss. I try very hard
| to avoid it but it eventually finds its way into my feed.
| People want to be angry.
|
| Just look at political accounts of similar stature but of
| opposite parties. The replies are rarely people supporting,
| rather people complaining.
| themadturk wrote:
| This is why I don't even look at my Twitter feed. I have
| Feedbin grab the tweets of a few users I follow and show them
| in with my RSS feeds. If I want to reply, yeah, then I go to
| Twitter...and still avoid the feed.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| You can tame it but it takes some effort. I've managed to do
| so by just blocking any account that shows up in my algo feed
| with outrage or politics. After a week or two of doing this I
| broke through to another layer of Twitter that was very
| wholesome and got a lot out of it.
|
| That said, I'd still rather go in on a protocol like
| ActivityPub or SSB so I'm now posting to both Twitter and AP
| and see what comes of it
| [deleted]
| shagie wrote:
| In a "ok, maybe I'll look at this..."
|
| Grab a client, launch it... it has a login and create account.
| Ok, create an account. It takes me to https://joinmastodon.org -
| find a server... and I see a list of foreign language, LGBT+,
| activism, technology, and furry. Looking at the technology
| ones... they seem to be aligned with the foreign language, LGBT+,
| and activism themes.
|
| The ones that look slightly interesting / "I just want generic
| news" have a waitlist.
|
| I scroll down this post and see mastodon.social being
| mentioned... I try that, and it is closed to new sign ups.
| indieweb.social has a wait list... I look at what its feed looks
| like... https://indieweb.social/public and its linked in posts
| (that I avoid going to linked in to see).
|
| In the category of "low friction, something to say 'here is where
| I chat'", mastodon is rather high friction and at this time looks
| to be more self promotion than topics of conversation.
|
| I realize there's a general "everyone off twitter" feeling going
| on, but for someone who isn't active on twitter in the first
| place, mastodon looks to be decidedly worse in terms of signing
| up and the content.
|
| I do acknowledge that this may be just my "spend a few minutes
| looking at it" but for the casual reader, this doesn't appear to
| be something I'll be sinking any time into and will more likely
| shrug my shoulders if twitter falls into disrepair rather than
| seeking out a replacement for it.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Almost like people with the will and knowledge to build
| distributed platforms like mastadon are out of touch with the
| average user of modern social media.
| [deleted]
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| > I realize there's a general "everyone off twitter" feeling
| going on
|
| Is there?
|
| I guess it kind of depends on what bubble you are in.
|
| I try to get myself into a wide range. Seems like where they
| are losing some, they are picking up some, and people who have
| come to depend on it (journos, researchers, political heads)
| aren't going anywhere.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Mastodon has been averaging about 1000 new users an hour for
| the last 3 or 4 days. Compared to a few dozen a month ago.
|
| It's not mainstream, and never will be, but it's in the
| process of becoming quite vibrant, TBH.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I don't really get your linkedin reference. I'm on indieweb and
| that's not my experience of the place.
|
| FWIW I moved from mastodon.social to indieweb, just put myself
| on the signup list and was on in a few hours. It didn't take
| long.
|
| And you could have just joined mastodon.social if you wanted
| the low friction quick signup.
|
| Though it is apparently under heavy load right now due to
| twitter exodus.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| > And you could have just joined mastodon.social if you
| wanted the low friction quick signup.
|
| Not sure how OP could have done it as it's closed for new
| registrations.
| shagie wrote:
| When I looked at the public feed, what I see is
| https://imgur.com/a/Cib6vvS
|
| From the "just looking in the store windows" perspective, it
| looks to be a place that people are self promoting their
| content that is hosted elsewhere.
|
| For the purpose of article discovery, Hacker News or
| /r/programming or /r/java has a closer alignment to that. The
| times I do go to twitter, I'm after engaging with content
| there.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yeah that's just one user, they seem to have spammed things
| a bit. Not really typical of the node.
|
| TBH indieweb rose to the top for me simply because "web3 is
| going just great" is publishing off there :-)
| 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.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| The reply button is always there: it's the left-pointing
| double arrow icon on the far left under each toot. (With
| the "sharrow" Boost icon next to that and the star icon for
| Like/Favorite beside that.) It even shows a count of
| replies sometimes (though sometimes it's things like "1+"
| because it isn't sure due to federation [1] or it is
| focused on a subset).
|
| You can even click it when not logged in and it will give
| you a Federated Login popup, which is a bit confusing but
| even allows you to reply on a different instance from the
| you are looking at the public feeds of.
|
| To see replies rather than to make a new reply you
| generally need to click into specific toots, in the common
| web UI that's by clicking the Date in the top right corner.
|
| Some clients have nice "subway diagram" maps of reply
| threading rather than the straight line that the main
| Mastodon web client presents them as.
|
| [1] The only instance guaranteed to see every reply is the
| originating instance, other instances only see a subset of
| replies due to vagaries in federation and who those servers
| follow. Sometimes even with a client that is better at
| threading replies it is still useful to follow toot
| "permalinks" to their originating instance to see deeper
| reply threads, especially when reading on smaller
| instances.
| 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. :)
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| You can also hashtag search the tech you're interested in, and
| find people that way.
| 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!
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| scrollaway wrote:
| How reasonable an idea is it to run your own mastodon instance
| for solo purposes? (eg. as one would run their own email server,
| or at least point a host's mx to their own domain)
|
| How much would this cost, and is it possible to reliably secure
| an instance to run as a one-person federated instance easily?
| riffic wrote:
| Run a wordpress instead and put the ActivityPub plugin on it.
| There are many places you can host PHP/MySQL very effectively
| and it is much lighter in weight than Mastodon's stack.
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ikari_pl wrote:
| I mean, that's something you can say about any tool or social
| network at its beginning. Imagine downdetector with 5 users
| being considered useless forever.
| Brakenshire wrote:
| It would be much more useful to search using the "people you
| follow" filter.
| drc500free wrote:
| It seems that this tool is fairly equivalent to everyone
| posting their mastodon and twitter handles to this thread.
| 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]
| davidork wrote:
| Embrace the fragmentation.
|
| The economic situation seems to be getting worse, there's tons of
| people without jobs that could get lots of exposure and
| experience working in tech related field by moderating all these
| small federated instances.
|
| Plenty of networking opportunities as well.
|
| There are going to be a lot more niche and diverse internet
| communities, and with things being spread out among the various
| instances it'll be a lot harder for trolls to summon concentrated
| attacks.
|
| Communities will be smaller and higher quality while still being
| able to co-mingle via federation.
|
| Unfortunately that stuff may also apply to more nefarious
| communities online and they may benefit by hiding amongst all of
| the other federated instances.
| plazmatic wrote:
| collegeburner wrote:
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| In the hypothetical example they did get a job. As a
| moderator.
| collegeburner wrote:
| that's not a job? there's a reason one of the most common
| ways to insult them is "they do it for free".
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Paid? By whom? At some level the experience might be
| useful, but we generally pay interns a decent wage.
| kupopuffs wrote:
| This post reeks of deeply rooted, unfounded assumptions and
| biases.
|
| You're saying janitors/unemployed peoples are a demographic?
| Come now. Anyone can be unemployed or a janitor.
| collegeburner wrote:
| sorry jannie is a derogatory term for a internet moderator
| who does it for free. nothing at all against actual
| janitors who have real jobs. sometimes i get too zoomer for
| hn.
| davidork wrote:
| Moderating content, while mundane is valid and valuable
| experience, not only in the technology aspects but in the
| human skills that you'd find in any sort of consumer
| relations focused career.
|
| Hopefully people would choose wisely and at least try to have
| some feel of a community before deciding to take on
| moderation duties
| dmix wrote:
| Content moderation seems to lack the transparency and
| culture awareness that existing jobs like journalism,
| lawyers/judicial, first responders, etc type public value
| jobs have developed over time. Maybe one day it will mature
| to being an honourable and socially respected job but they
| have a long way to go if Reddit/Twitter/FB is any
| indication (HN/dang on the other hand has done an amazing
| job).
|
| It's valuable no doubt but it's also littered with petty
| tyrants, power hungry nerds seeking an outlet for their
| lack of power elsewhere, and people acting with little
| regard for wider impact of their choices besides their own
| emotions and ideological quirks. The type of stuff that
| would never fly in other socially respected jobs.
|
| I personally don't see it as some sort of career promotion
| thing. But I'm sure it's valuable to jobs that have to deal
| with people everyday, but don't necessarily have any strong
| consequences for decisions or top down/societal
| oversight... like retail and low level sales jobs.
| [deleted]
| [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._
| [deleted]
| kache_ wrote:
| How do you expect it to work without that data? :P
|
| Also, I'm _pretty_ sure you can point the twitter API at any
| user you want to scan followers and following. I did it on some
| twitter accounts I'm interested in when I started out to find
| some accounts to follow.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Even protected accounts?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| As far as I'm aware, the default state of a protected
| account is that its tweets can only be viewed by followers,
| but anyone is free to follow it.
|
| It's also possible to prevent people from following your
| account without your approval.
| hedora wrote:
| Twitter just handed that and more to a plutocrat.
|
| I'm not seeing why anyone should assume an internet rando is
| less trustworthy.
| malermeister wrote:
| Oligarch might be a good term to describe Musk and his ilk,
| too
| pigeons wrote:
| Often mastodon servers either intentionally or naturally have a
| "theme", which is really helpful for discovering interesting
| content and users.
| wraptile wrote:
| it's also easier to start socializing as you can hop into the
| local timeline and instantly find relatable topics.
| 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.)
| agentultra wrote:
| It's also pretty easy to have alts. Most good clients can log
| onto and track several accounts. You can then flip between
| various communities; post about work stuff on one, alt for
| your hobbies or shitposting.
| 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.
| asmor wrote:
| mastodon.social is silenced (no federated timelines) on
| quite a few instances, simply because there's a lot of
| volume that's not very high quality.
| 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.
| CodeArtisan wrote:
| >Does it make any difference where I register first?
|
| Yes; Each instance has its own posting rules and an
| instance may suspend (block) another instance for
| different reasons. Mastodon.social has suspended quite a
| few instances, for example. Always read the about page of
| the instance before registering.
|
| https://mastodon.social/about
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 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?
|
| To be fair, that's an improvement over, say, Twitter,
| where they'd just be gone.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| IMO the bigger issue isn't getting banned, it seems the
| more likely scenario is having the operator of the server
| decide for whatever reason to shut it down. This isn't
| likely to happen with Twitter.
| _emacsomancer_ wrote:
| It's perhaps less likely for Twitter than any one given
| Fediverse server/Mastodon instance. But the impact on the
| whole ecosystem is very different too. A single Fediverse
| instance shutting down could be annoying/sad, but it
| would only affect a subset of users, and those users
| could still, if need be, create a new account on another
| instance. Twitter shutting down closes everything for
| everyone.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Relatedly, Twitter isn't going to throw a bake sale to
| try to stop from shutting down, it will get devoured as
| quickly as it files Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 and debt
| holders descend like vultures.
|
| Most Mastodon instances _are_ community run, and when
| they hit some rough straits in paying for their hosting
| some of them will have a (metaphorical) bake sale
| encouraging users to contribute to the hosting fund
| Patreon or will ask around if someone wants to take over
| the admin hot seat for a while.
|
| For those concerned about the longevity of specific
| instances that's generally the answer: ask the community
| how the admin pays for things, look for their Patreon,
| consider chipping in what you can each month.
| augustuspolius wrote:
| I agree. The idealist in me wants all of these aspects to
| be completely independent from the host I choose to use.
| But realistically I am not that worried about losing
| data, the social graph is far more valuable. Even if I
| have 100 followers, I would still really want to preserve
| their connection to me if I am banned.
|
| I understand that I can do this by hosting my own
| instance - that's a good enough solution (for me).
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The migration tool automatically moves your followers.
| It's a bit janky, it took an hour or two for it do its
| thing for me (there must be some batch component, I
| dunno). I don't know how it works between banned
| instances, or what your options are for when a server
| goes down fully.
|
| But all the of the follower/following data is available
| via CSV export any time, too. And there's obviously an
| open API as well.
|
| And honestly, you could also just run your own server if
| you're that concerned.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| How are permissions managed so that you can change your
| followers configuration to point at your new account if
| you move, but otherwise not allow anybody else to pull
| that same stunt against your wishes?
| jeena wrote:
| On your old account you have to start the process.
| khimaros wrote:
| you may be interested in something like nostr, nomadnet,
| iris, or ssb. these all have decentralized identities
| baked in.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| So moderate it the same as if you reposted everything? I
| don't understand.
| 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.
| SifJar wrote:
| > but the admin(s) will give you plenty of time to
| migrate to a new instance
|
| that seems like a big assumption - if I'm running an
| instance, what's to stop me pulling the plug with zero
| notice?
| davidw wrote:
| This seems like a big weak point. I went to check it out
| just now and it's like "pick a server" and... I don't
| know, which one is best? Can I change later? Seems
| confusing, pass for now.
| sigmar wrote:
| It's federated. Much like email. You can follow people on
| other servers and it pulls their feed. If you want to
| switch servers, you just make a new account (and just
| like email you'll need to tell your followers where you
| are going)
| davidw wrote:
| Ok, but which one is hotmail and which one is gmail?
| wraptile wrote:
| It's different because feature-wise all Mastodon
| instances are quite similar (some might have bigger
| character limit etc.)
|
| Generally it's best to choose a niche instance so you
| inherit a community of people with common interests
| instantly which makes onboarding much easier. For
| example, I'm on fosstodon.org for free software and
| photog.social for photography.
| Kye wrote:
| photog.social is an example of where it being independent
| is both good and bad. Good, because independent. Bad,
| because it's just someone else's expensive computer.
|
| https://photog.social/@ambassador/109080532230127913
|
| When you settle on an instance, make sure to contribute
| to its upkeep if you can.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > It's federated. Much like email.
|
| How feasible is it to have a username at a custom domain?
| In case the server you sign up on goes out of service. Do
| you have to set up your own instance in order to do that?
| Is there a barrier from setting up a new instance and
| then participating immediately in the wider federated
| network?
| augustuspolius wrote:
| I was just investigating this. You can run your own
| Mastodon instance on your custom domain (e.g.
| masto.host), but due to how Mastodon federation works,
| your instance will 1. host all your content 2. handle a
| ton of requests when people interact with you or your
| content: follow, favorite, boost, etc.
|
| Also every time a user follows you from an instance not
| federated with your instance it's a whole complicated
| process because federation has to be established between
| your instance and their instance (and, I think, every
| instance that they follow users from).
|
| So if I understand your question correctly: there is no
| way to separate your identity from your content. If you
| want to own your identity you will need to self-host.
|
| I am realizing now that the solution to these concerns is
| likely going to emerge from matrix.org, not Mastodon.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Seems like there must be some sort of possibility for
| someone to create some sort of "lightweight hosting"
| option here. Where you get your own bespoke "host" where
| you own all the data and identity, etc. but it is
| actually physically managed on someone else's infra
| (something higher level than a vhost). Pay a small fee,
| get a subdomain, get your own masto node, get your own
| data, all encrypted, but someone else handles all the
| legwork of setting it up, federating it, etc.
| Spivak wrote:
| > "host" where you own all the data and identity, etc.
| but it is actually physically managed on someone else's
| infra (something higher level than a vhost)
|
| Isn't this just a normal Mastadon instance but with
| custom domain support just like email providers?
| augustuspolius wrote:
| Yes, you are describing a hosted instance. Masto.host
| looks good, and the cheapest option is only $6/month. The
| problem with this federated approach is that the actual
| federation features can become pretty expensive. Hosting
| is cheap but if you have thousands of followers from
| different instances federation processes will become very
| expensive.
| Kye wrote:
| As far as I know, this is all cached at an instance
| level. So only the first person to pull something from
| your instance actually hits your instance's resources. I
| can still see posts and users from dead instances because
| it's all cached on my instance. There's a rake task to
| wipe it, but people are advised not to since those caches
| have been what saved at least one instance whose name I
| can't remember.
| sigmar wrote:
| Feasible, but I don't think everyone having their own
| individual server was the intent of the design. Yes to
| question 2. I'm not sure about question 3, if there is a
| barrier, it isn't large.
| jeena wrote:
| Because you can move between different domains without
| losing your subscriptions and subscribers, there is no
| real need to use your custom domain. But because it's not
| possible to move your old content (I assume because
| moving files is difficult), I still am self-hosting so I
| can own my own content.
|
| Another way of doing it is if you're already posting your
| notes, pictures, etc. on your own website, you can make
| it ActivityPub aware and use your website instead of
| Mastodon.
| bpye wrote:
| > Another way of doing it is if you're already posting
| your notes, pictures, etc. on your own website, you can
| make it ActivityPub aware and use your website instead of
| Mastodon.
|
| I quite like the sound of this, do you have any
| references you can suggest?
| jeena wrote:
| As an example https://aaronparecki.com/ does it, but when
| it comes to documentation entry page
| https://activitypub.rocks/ and otherwise
| https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
| augustuspolius wrote:
| I found this announcement by write.as (check out the
| video): https://write.as/new/blog/federated
|
| Seems like it's possible to implement just enough of
| ActivityPub functionality that Mastodon users will be
| able to follow you.
| ekianjo wrote:
| I wrote about the differences and advantages of both networks
| here after using them for several years. Will probably be
| useful for people considering Mastodon.
|
| https://boilingsteam.com/mastodon-vs-twitter/
| rogerb wrote:
| :(
|
| Looking for Mastodon users progress, scanned 366 of 366 users you
| follow on Twitter. Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon who
| have previously linked their Twitter and Mastodon accounts by
| logging into Twitodon.
| shapefrog wrote:
| Given that there are (rounded to the nearest meaningful number)
| 0 users on Mastodon at the moment the scan is not going to take
| very long to find 0!
| tethys wrote:
| Was a bit surprised that it found 5 matches (out of 1659 people
| I'm following). A bit inconvenient that I can't just see these
| matches though, but have to download a CSV file first.
| 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.
| alwillis wrote:
| Right.
|
| There are some people who may decide to not vote due to what
| they're seeing on Twitter in places where it may matter.
| 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.
| LuisAPI wrote:
| No.
|
| Server A also sends messages coming from servers it
| federates with, so those on server C can see server B's
| messages, but C'ers just can't reply to them and expect
| B'ers to actually receive those messages.
| leereeves wrote:
| > C'ers just can't reply to them and expect B'ers to
| actually receive those messages.
|
| Wouldn't A also forward those replies to B?
| RobotToaster wrote:
| IIRC both Gab and TS disabled federation, so that isn't a
| good indicator either way.
|
| It is, IMO a good indicator that neither actually care
| about free speech, since they are basically "censoring"
| the rest of the fediverse.
| 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!
| [deleted]
| 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.
| macintux wrote:
| You don't even have to be on Twitter to be impacted if
| the people who are likely to believe and act on
| misinformation _do_ follow him.
| 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.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I'd do exactly what I would do if I saw someone
| threatening someone in real life, call the police and
| give them all the information I had. Twitter has dates
| and IP's, in a lot of cases that's as good as an address.
|
| Pulling the plug would be the easy way out, and would
| stop people incriminating themselves. Worse case scenario
| it drives people stupid enough to use a public un-
| encrypted network to plan a crime onto a secure encrypted
| network.
| alwillis wrote:
| _Twitter has dates and IP 's, in a lot of cases that's as
| good as an address._
|
| At this point, I can't put anything past Elon.
|
| The way the texts between Secret Service personnel went
| missing, even after congressional requests to preserve
| documents and data, if Twitter becomes the headquarters
| for seditionists, disinformation and threats of violence
| that impacts the outcome of which party controls
| Congress, don't be surprised if tweets go missing...
| 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.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| Expecting something like Twitter to moderate it's content
| doesn't mean we expect corporations to be a police force,
| judge, jury and executioner.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Yes - they can clamp down on channels that are used to
| incite violence.
| [deleted]
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I think it's depressing that droves of people are leaving
| Twitter because they believe that they _might_ tone down all
| the censorship.
| michaelwww wrote:
| I get what you're saying but I don't think it's that
| depressing or surprising, but that's a big discussion better
| had in other places.
| 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...
| arduinomancer wrote:
| Does Mastodon have the same moderation that the twitter users are
| used to?
| Gigachad wrote:
| Server admins each moderate as they see fit. Users can block
| users as well as blocking whole servers if they disagree with
| that servers moderation.
| greesil wrote:
| Fuck it, I'm going back to usenet.
| [deleted]
| tkk23 wrote:
| @haunter wrote:
|
| >According to some 3rd party services [0] a 2000 user instance
| will cost me ~$90+taxes/month
|
| How efficient is the usenet protocol? I would expect that it
| would require far less resources.
|
| What's the technical reason for not using the usenet protocol
| for a federated social network?
| greesil wrote:
| I'm not an expert, but by default
|
| -no way to moderate content. you may see this as good or bad,
| but spam can be annoying. it'd probably be a lot worse us it
| became more mainstream.
|
| -costs due to bandwidth if you are part of the infrastructure
| are driven by people posting binary data, far larger in bytes
| vs actual text. this is apparently why there are so many paid
| services.
|
| -no way to authenticate identity
|
| I'm probably missing a couple of items. There are ways to
| cope with these things, people use this every day, but it's
| not perfect.
| dmode wrote:
| Why isn't there a no login moweb version of this ? Would love to
| check out before downloading the app
| remram wrote:
| You can check any instance's public feed but there is no way to
| aggregate multiple feeds or build your own from specific users
| and hashtags without creating an account somewhere.
|
| For example: https://social.linux.pizza/public
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > Enter your Mastodon host's web address:
|
| What?
| remram wrote:
| Do you not have a Mastodon account?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Nope
| remram wrote:
| If you're not trying to log in, what's the problem?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| As someone that is now no longer using Twitter, I'm open
| to alternatives, but was turned off by this up-front
| complexity.
| 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).
| jeena wrote:
| Interestingly I started using Twitter as a write only medium,
| which means I didn't have any interactions there with anyone.
| This led to the subscribers stagnating, everyone who already
| was subscribed stayed subscribed but no new people would
| subscribe for years.
| hedora wrote:
| None of this addresses the question:
|
| Nitter exists and it is open source. Why not add a mastodon
| API to it?
|
| The existence of such a thing in no way has anything to do
| with existing mastodon instances TOS / acceptable use
| relationship with twitter (if such a relationship even
| exists).0
| remram wrote:
| Terms of use? Do you think you can just import content en-masse
| from any site to your platform and they won't care?
| andrewkdinh wrote:
| BirdsiteLIVE does this
|
| Source code: https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive
| Official instance: https://beta.birdsite.live/
| lookagain wrote:
| I saw someone familiar walking around my neighborhood. The view
| from my window is partially obscured by the garden. So as I turn
| my gaze, I see a man wearing a hat loosely. The hat was
| positioned far back on his head, exposing a protruding forehead
| whose silhouette was amplified by a receding hairline. As the man
| walked by, it looked like a bald _mounds pubis_ floating along
| the balcony. The things one can see from their home, right? Who
| the fuck needs social media when looking for a good laugh?
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| For anyone considering which instance to join, the section "Tell
| me more about this magical community-building feature you love"
| in this post [1] and the section after that "What should I look
| for in an instance to join?" have pretty useful information that
| explains the subtleties beyond "federation works like email". It
| explained a lot of things about content visibility that confused
| me for a long time.
|
| There's also a tool [2] that lets you preview what the Local
| (within-instance) and Federated ("all" instances, though not
| really, as the mentioned post explains) timelines look from each
| instance. Keep in mind that you can always filter out users or
| whole instance domains, so the presence/visibility of interesting
| posts is more important to look for than the absence of a few
| spammy/non-your-language accounts.
|
| [1] https://wordsmith.social/elilla/a-futuristic-mastodon-
| introd... [2]
| http://www.unmung.com/mastoview?url=qoto.org&view=local
| srvmshr wrote:
| A nifty tool that I came across to find Twitter peers registered
| with Mastodon federated servers. Requires authentication though
| haunter wrote:
| Does Mastodon the software support ads?
|
| I always see the platform more akin to Reddit or Discord than
| Twitter tbh. Say I want to make an instance and want to host it.
| According to some 3rd party services [0] a 2000 user instance
| will cost me ~$90+taxes/month. That's a lot if you compare it to
| a reddit sub or Discord server which are free and where I'd say a
| similar sized sub/server are quite small (not all 2000 users are
| active all the time ofc)
|
| It's really hard to make people pay. Is there a plan to support
| ads or anything else besides begging for donations?
|
| 0, https://masto.host/pricing/
| kitkat_new wrote:
| I am glad it doesn't.
|
| Ads are unethical
| [deleted]
| andrewkdinh wrote:
| Mastodon doesn't support ads, but since it's FOSS, you could
| add it yourself.
|
| However, if people find value in your instance, they will
| donate. For example, see Fosstodon (which even has an excess
| amount of funds):
|
| https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| No, the open source software Mastodon does not have any ad
| mechanism, but obviously you could change that.
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| A model where Ad agencies work with content creators seems
| like it would work better, like how podcast ads can target
| users by picking shows - no tracking required.
|
| Side note, it blows my mind that Reddit shits the bed so hard
| at this. So many niche sub's would be the perfect venue for
| niche advertisers.
| 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.
| remram wrote:
| No, federation works great in practice. I personally chose an
| instance I trusted to stay up and available, not one with any
| fancy domain or topic.
|
| You can usually browse an instance without having an account,
| for example: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/explore (user
| directory) https://mastodon.gamedev.place/public (stream)
|
| And once your instance federates with it (happens
| automatically, just needs any user to follow any user on the
| other one), you can search for hashtags.
| 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.
| remram wrote:
| You might just be relying on the algorithm too much. Search
| for hashtags, follow people that show up in your feed from
| retweets or look at your contacts' own list of follows.
|
| If you wait for the algorithm to feed you the content you
| like you will find the limits of AI.
| 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.
| holler wrote:
| What incentive would Twitter or Hacker News have to
| support the protocol?
| 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).
| spartanatreyu wrote:
| > The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have
| not changed.
|
| Have they not changed? This is a genuine question.
|
| How much control does Elon actually have? Can he decide to
| take the company in a direction that don't match the business
| incentives?
|
| Can he tell an employee: "Do this or your fired" because it
| may make him feel better? Or because he misunderstood the
| situation and couldn't be told otherwise until he sees the
| results? Or both?
|
| Does he have certain responsibilities that he is supposed to
| honor? What happens if he doesn't?
| twblalock wrote:
| He could make bad decisions that make the company fail,
| although frankly the previous leadership was on that path
| already.
|
| It's clear from his recent announcements that he
| understands how much Twitter depends on advertisers.
| tkk23 wrote:
| >>The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have
| not changed.
|
| >Have they not changed? This is a genuine question.
|
| If Musk pays back the bank loans, there shouldn't be
| anybody who could force him to continue the ad business and
| he could offer Twitter for free.
|
| A billion users, with 10 tweets per day, that's 4T tweets
| per year. At 250 bytes per tweet, that's 1P data. At $20
| per terabyte, that's $20,000 per year. With the same amount
| for transfer and servers, Musk should be able to run
| Twitter for $100,000 plus employees.
|
| With those costs, Twitter could be financed by offering
| image and video tweets as a paid feature for $1 per year.
| 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.
| HellsMaddy wrote:
| Is there a hosted Mastodon solution, where you can bring your
| own domain name and they do the rest, like how I can bring my
| domain name to any number of email providers?
| jdeibele wrote:
| You can definitely set up your own Mastodon server. I don't
| know how hard it is to get other servers to federate with
| you because I don't want to take on the overhead of running
| a server.
|
| Discussions of running your own mail server make it sound
| like it's difficult because you have to get Microsoft and
| Google to accept your mail and they tend to let it go into
| the spam folder and not respond to you.
|
| Will mastodon.social federate with HellsMaddy.social?
| Maybe. Can you use me@hellsmaddy.com? No.
| robswc wrote:
| stupid question but I guess having a central ID would go
| against the whole idea of Mastodon? I like the idea of "self
| hosted discord servers" but it seems weird to have a
| different identity for each "server" at that point. Is there
| any difference between Mastodon and forums at that point?
| Consistent UX?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Consistent UX I guess is part of it (tho not necessarily),
| but I think the bigger thing is that they're all federated
| by protocol, so activity from one is viewable by the others
| (assuming they're federated) it's a bit like FidoNet or
| even UUCP of old.
| INTPenis wrote:
| There are both good sides and bad sides to that. In the same
| vein one could argue that the truly Verified identity should
| have their own domain. Why use Musks platform when they can
| have Bill@microsoft.com or Elon@tesla.com?
| smoldesu wrote:
| > Guess what? mastodon.technology is closing down. Any
| connections using that address are going to be lost.
|
| If you want a globally unique identifier, pay for it. I hate
| to be "that guy" but nobody owes you DNS namespace. If you
| _are_ caught on the unfortunate end of this, Mastodon
| explicitly offers account migration tools to mitigate the
| pain. That will redirect your old account to your new one, so
| at least confused users will be able to find you in the
| interim.
|
| On the flip side, letting you use "somebody@gmail.com" as
| your ID just gives Google control over your identity, which I
| would consider a downgrade.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Free services was the best and worst thing to happen on the
| internet. Everyone is connected and information is free,
| but all information is free including yours and there's no
| way to get people to make a change to something non free.
| saurik wrote:
| I'm not sure if, by "the federation that Mastadon is using",
| you mean the concept of federation (in which case, I agree)
| or Mastadon's specific flavor of it; but, if you mean the
| latter, I want to say that's just a fundamental property of
| the concept of federated systems (as opposed to distributed
| ones): e-mail is also federated, and "where you connect" is
| the hostname on your e-mail server... if Gmail shuts down, so
| to will all of the connected links of people who decided to
| use Gmail as their host instead of running their own. I use
| saurik@saurik.com for my e-mail address, and (if I were to
| use Mastadon) would presumably also set up my own Mastadon
| setup, so I wouldn't be reliant on a large Mastadon host.
|
| (Not said enough, though, is that DNS is itself federated:
| .com could one day decide to shut down, or simply take away
| saurik.com from me for whatever reason. Given the tradeoffs
| involved, I feel like that's the best place for me to stake
| my claim--particularly as custom TLDs didn't even exist back
| in the late 90s, but even now with them there are too many
| dangerous-seeming restrictions and the cost is too high that
| I'd still go with a .com--and yet it means that I'm not in
| some ways fundamentally different than the people who attach
| their identities to Google, even if I would claim Google
| isn't trustworthy, as that's just my opinion. I _will_ say
| that gmail.com is also reliant on .com, and so there is an
| argument of my solution being strictly better, and yet I can
| make counter-arguments involving Google 's political
| influence and the such.)
|
| The issue, though--and maybe this is what you are focusing
| on?--is that, as far as I've ever been able to tell (just
| from perusing these random conversations: I do not myself use
| Mastadon currently), there seem to be features of Mastadon
| that simply work better if you are using a large shared host
| (which, to me, is kind of a fundamental design trajectory of
| federated systems: to obtain better discoverability,
| security, and ease-of-use, people slowly centralize onto a
| handful of larger players and over time the protocol becomes
| corrupted or limited by these large players who want to
| collude "for the good of the user" rather than remaining
| limited by the shared protocol).
| Macha wrote:
| Is this not the same as email? If you ran your own you could
| use your own domain. If gmail ran an instance you could use
| @gmail.com . Otherwise you're at the whims of your host
| shutting down, like when google nearly pulled free google
| apps, or when microsoft used to reclaim accounts that didn't
| use the web UI often enough.
|
| I guess what's needed here is an ecosystem of "point your DNS
| at us and use your own domain with your hosted service" ala
| fastmail and other providers for email.
| jdeibele wrote:
| I do run firstname@lastname.org I would love to be able to
| use that with Mastodon as my one and only identity,
| regardless of which server I happened to be logging into.
|
| I like the idea of different servers as being Special
| Interest Groups. I use lists a lot on Twitter. But people
| who I put on a Mac list also talk about baseball, the war
| in Ukraine, etc. Google+ wanted to have each person
| separate out their posts by topic and that isn't the way
| most people seem to want to operate. For selling something,
| like Craigslist, OK, I'll put it in a specific category.
| But just things I want to write about? Unless there's a
| House of Dragons server, a Houston Astros server, a Rust
| server, etc. it's not going to happen.
| Bubble_Pop_22 wrote:
| > 99.9% of users do not care about federation as a principle
|
| Decentralization as a principle is currently responsible for at
| least some part of the enormous market capitalization of
| cryptocurrencies.
|
| Nowadays everything is politics and identity politics.
| Especially on twitter which is the favorite hangout spot for
| the crypto crowd, journalists and political junkies....I mean
| twitter for sure is not the social media for pushing commerce
| and e-commerce, that ship has sailed long ago. They only have
| politics.
|
| Given the preponderance of politics on twitter, Musk is the
| worst owner for the platform as he's alienating all left wing
| people in the US (and potentially abroad) and also right wing
| people who don't fall for cults and are still against
| subsidies.
| colinsane 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
|
| this is largely the same for the public instances.
| Mastodon/Pleroma/etc servers default to open/automatic
| federation when you install them. unless you're joining a
| community with a very specific theme -- say freespeechextremist
| -- you're likely to be able to @ >95% of other users who signed
| up to a public server. if you joined a public server that's
| been blacklisted by a significant portion of the network,
| you'll find out about that soon enough that ditching that
| instance and registering at a more "neutral" site isn't any
| cost. Poast is maybe the most edge-case to this, where a new
| user might be attracted to the internal meme-driven aspects,
| and not notice until a couple days of use the relatively
| smaller patterns of harassment which would lead other (large)
| instances to de-federate with them.
| eichin wrote:
| hmm, that's the example that made it click for me: my
| identity has little or nothing to do with my topic, in email,
| twitter, blogging - having an identity that's related to a
| themed server doesn't feel like the right layer at all.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| > (Twitter has 'tweets' but Mastodon has 'toots' because the
| logo is an elephant!)
|
| It's a mastodon, not an elephant!!
| rvz wrote:
| Even worse when Mastodons are extinct creatures. Probably
| tells us about the platform itself being used by little to no
| one, other than just techies that won't admit that they still
| lurk on Twitter.
| tkk23 wrote:
| To add to that, toots sound like farts.
|
| The different connotations for birds and mastodons suggest
| that the platforms will reach entirely different user
| groups. If Musk doesn't push video and other technologies
| then Twitter has already reached its full potential market
| share. This leaves many opportunities to Mastodon. If the
| social climate gets colder, mastodons are better equipped
| than most birds. In a world of gene technology, extinction
| is only temporary.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| :-)
|
| Ok but Mastodons were not arctic/northern animals like
| Mammoths. They were a temperate (& subtropical? i think)
| climate creature.
|
| Apart from their bones another piece of evidence of their
| existence is the way many of the plants in the eastern
| Nort American forest adapted to have spikes/thorns that
| seem ineffective against deer & moose etc but would be
| deadly against browsing with a trunk. Black locust is
| like this.
|
| I would have loved to have met one.
|
| Now, for silly analogies, I dunno, it's likely that the
| ancestors of today's native Americans hunted them to
| extinction. (They were probably delicious). Can someone
| build an analogy from that? :-)
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Oh noes I invalidated my whole argument ToT
|
| edit: y'all are taking this exchange _much_ too seriously.
| [deleted]
| varenc wrote:
| This is a digression, but in reply to:
|
| > 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_
|
| Twitter originally was even simpler than that! Replies were
| just new tweets prefixed with "@user" and retweets were just
| copies of the source tweet prefixed with "RT: ". As these
| conventions arose Twitter eventually turned them into first
| class features. Also it was originally named "Twttr", though
| that didn't last too long.
|
| Edit: and you mainly searched on hash tags (#tags) since full-
| text search wasn't very far along. Amusingly their search index
| on _hash tags_ worked a bit like _hash tables_! Though I assume
| that's entirely a coincidence.
| panic wrote:
| The advantage of federation is that it will allow Mastodon to
| outlive Twitter.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| 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.
| [deleted]
| 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
| jeena wrote:
| Also wouldn't it make sense to have different friend finder
| tools with different content/parts of the fediverse?
|
| I'm thinking if I'm a Nazi I mostly care about other Nazis
| and would not go to the normie mastodon friend finder tool
| but the one which finds all my friends on our Nazi mastodon
| instances and vice versa.
| remram wrote:
| This tool would look the same if you were moving from a
| centralized platform to another centralized platform.
| 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.
| qchris wrote:
| Can you expand on b)? I'm not sure I understand why this
| would be difficult. If you already had a list of instances,
| as it seems like asynchronous clients could probably handle
| the scale of instances (source below list about 4k, which
| isn't out of scope for simultaneous async tasks), and
| processing the results is probably fairly simple.
| Especially if you were to cache that list and just do an
| updated request every few minutes (so not a new full-
| network request set every query) it seems like this
| wouldn't be too crazy complicated. Have I missed something?
|
| [1] https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon/
| jacooper 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)
|
| Nope, It will only show accounts followed by local accounts.
|
| Mastodon doesn't do any kind of per server search, And your
| "federated feed" is basically accounts on other instances
| followed by local accounts.
|
| This makes hosting a private Mastodon server, for personal or
| family use, incredibly hard as discovery is basically
| impossible.
|
| This can be fixed by using Activity pub relays, but guess
| what? Mastodon's official servers don't use them, which are
| the servers that really matter.
|
| Its a big part of why I'm hesitant to use Activitypub, as I
| believe discovery is a big part of modern social media, and
| Mastodon absolutely sucks at it.
|
| This is coming from someone hosting his own Matrix server.
| 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.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| This is in part due to Mastodon's weird style of federation
| which almost comes off as a second thought compared to using it
| as a centralized service, since to federate with others you
| have to either know who to follow already or need to use a
| relay.
|
| This, I feel is especially notable for Western nodes since they
| don't really seem to bother with relays (which I think largely
| defeats the point of federation by creating incentives to stick
| to large nodes). A lot of the relay lists are either super
| sanitized/focused on uninteresting topics or are dead.
|
| In comparison, in the Japanese community there are several
| fairly active open relays (with some moderation to prevent
| abuse) and thus it's pretty easy to setup a custom node and
| have it populated with some basic content to build off of. As a
| result of which, ~75% of the traffic to my node comes from
| Japan, ~20% from the US and ~5% from Europe.
| 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.
| rakoo wrote:
| Briar and Manyverse (based on ssb) come to mind
| [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.
| jeena wrote:
| I wonder how email as private information would be different
| to the mastodon username, aren't both practically identical
| with the exception of one additional @?
| johnchristopher wrote:
| The way I see it your mail is not publicly displayed on
| mastodon, only used to confirm/identify. Does @handle on
| mastodon has the email associated to my friend Peter ? If
| so it's a match.
|
| Of course it's a whole other can of worms, reminds me of
| Linkedin/Fb that would spam me because they had access to
| my friend's rolodex..
| 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.
| EnKopVand wrote:
| I think it has more to do with the way Mastodon decentralised
| and I imagine the people who figure out to do e-mail as a
| platform first, will be the next twitter.
|
| The big issue with Mastodon is that your "twitter handle"
| depends on the server you join, which makes it hard to find
| you. If it was just your e-mail address, however, then everyone
| would be able to find you, and keep finding you even if you
| decided to change servers.
| zaik wrote:
| Ironically, Mastodon addresses work just like email
| addresses.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Some hosts/domains even mirror Mastodon addresses and email
| addresses. There is nothing stopping an address from being
| both, especially if you control your own domain.
| EnKopVand wrote:
| until you need a new server.
| zaik wrote:
| Just like email.
| jeena wrote:
| So instead of Mastodons @user@server.tld we would use
| user@server.tld and that would help how?
| EnKopVand wrote:
| You would be able to change servers and keep your username.
| Mastodon isn't really decentralised, it's just twitter with
| more twitter companies.
|
| SoMe should be email based, and servers should just be
| relays. That way you could also create private SoMes for
| things that you'd do in Facebook group by simply setting up
| a relay on something cheap.
| 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/
| detaro wrote:
| that seems like a substantially more useful way of building
| such a thing
| 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.
| contravariant wrote:
| Ah I see, thanks for the explanation.
| 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.
| kixiQu wrote:
| > + There is almost little to no one on Mastodon to talk
| to.
|
| I have found that this is an accurate description of the
| first impression one gets; this is not _true_ , but we're
| all so used to recommendation algorithms easing discovery
| that the impression is equivalent.
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| What kind of friend do you have that you can't just say,
| "Hey, what's your handle?"?
| colesantiago wrote:
| The one that can't be bothered to say "Hey what's your
| Mastodon handle" to like 500+ of my friend group on
| Twitter where is the main Mastodon instance is closed.
|
| Twitter is just fine and everyone knows it.
| jupp0r wrote:
| Of course people use a variety of email providers, what are
| you talking about?
| 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.
| SantalBlush wrote:
| I may be mistaken, but it looks like you brought up email
| in the first place.
|
| >Centralisation is more convenient in almost ALL cases,
| even in email (nobody except people on HN host their own
| email)
| colesantiago wrote:
| Okay? My point still stands and users don't want to host
| their own email or Mastodon instance and prefer
| centralised solutions when it comes to a social
| networking.
| 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.
| teawrecks wrote:
| Gmail isn't a protocol, nor is it open.
|
| People don't self host email because 1) the protocol
| doesn't make it easy to deal with incoming spam on a
| small scale, and 2) giants like gmail tend to
| automatically flag unique email domains as suspicious.
| Which is a valid criticism of the federated model, or
| rather the people using it.
|
| If more people found value in decentralization, in theory
| they would also be more critical of their node
| management, opting to reject anti-competitive behavior in
| a democratic way. Unfortunately, for democracy to work,
| citizens have to be educated and fight for it. If they
| don't, it's easy to have centralized, ostensibly
| totalitarian walled gardens.
|
| We just need to make sure fediverse accounts are easily
| transferable between nodes in a standardized way,
| something I don't think mastodon does well, and email
| doesn't do at all.
| lupire wrote:
| Gmail is especially bad because they'll spamblock your
| domain for no reason, but Google customers are allowed to
| violate ToS and spam everyone.
| 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.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| Google isn't as bad as Microsoft or AT&T in my
| experience. My personal server now is working fine with
| those now too.
| 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.
| shapefrog wrote:
| Yet my bank(s), linkedin, netflix, microsoft and a bunch
| of mailers all had message arrive in my inbox this
| morning.
| ajford wrote:
| Though that's basically Google (and other large hosts)
| breaking the decentralized nature of email in their
| "effort" to combat spam.
| 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.
| devman0 wrote:
| I'd argue the trend is that most companies don't. They
| host it with a custom domain on Google Workspace or M365.
| sbarre wrote:
| I work for a 100-year-old company with 30k employees.
| Last year we moved from self-hosted Exchange to GSuite,
| because it's just easier to spend money on that than to
| spend money on an increasingly complex and hard-to-staff-
| properly internal service.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The issue is not self hosted versus GSuite. It rarely
| makes sense for any company to self host their own email.
| I think the parent poster was saying few use Gmail versus
| hosted outlook
| themadturk wrote:
| My 40 year old company with about 12k users switched from
| self-hosted Exchange to Azure-hosted Office 365. I'm
| assuming part of the reason for this is to ease
| complexity, and it's working quite well for us.
| EarlKing wrote:
| Email isn't truly decentralized anymore. Think I'm
| kidding? OK, try this: Try sending something to Gmail.
| Roll 3d6 and consult the oracle bones to see whether or
| not it magically gets caught up in the spam filters for
| no discernable reason.
|
| Seriously: Transforming spam filtering into a black box
| service has decommoditized email and everyone knows it.
| 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.
| kodah wrote:
| I would call the GMail situation pseudo-centralization. As
| it has more _actual_ competitors who aren 't just _hosting_
| but also actively developing their own platform it 'd go
| back to decentralization.
| 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.
| mahathu wrote:
| This whole comment chain has been an interesting
| discussion for me, I just checked out of curiosity:
| Blogspot vs Twitter popularity on google trends
| 2004-today
|
| https://trends.google.de/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q
| =bl...
| colesantiago wrote:
| this means that centralisation works better?
| [deleted]
| soundnote wrote:
| It depends on the thing at hand. Some things have value
| because others use them. Chat apps tend towards
| monopolies because of this.
|
| Email's just so damned old everyone uses the standard and
| it kind of dodges the issue.
|
| Email's also structurally a bit different - it's a set of
| one-way sends to select recipients, with chats you moreso
| go to a place and read the place's signboard.
|
| You could in principle just use mailing lists under the
| hood instead if the UI wasn't garbage.
| 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.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Reddit is actually the best positioned Twitter alternative
|
| If they do, Elon can buy Reddit for about $44.00.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Reddit's censorship is even worse than Twitter's, so I would
| expect Reddit to be next on the list of places to liberate on
| the Internet.
| malermeister wrote:
| "Censorship" has always been a dog whistle for "not letting
| propaganda and incitement run rampant".
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Comrade, don't forget about the satirical news by the
| Babylon Bee. They are a danger after all, because if a
| subject thinks you are funny, you cannot control them.
| lodovic wrote:
| "propaganda" has always been a dog whistle for suppressing
| inconvenient talking points
| emptysongglass wrote:
| I find it pretty depressing that Telegram links are banned
| across Reddit because it makes moderators' jobs easier.
| There's no nuance just an enormous hammer. That's an
| example of censorship without sufficient cause.
| xigoi wrote:
| Reddit banned r/TumblrInAction, a subreddit whose purpose
| was pointing out hateful content on other social networks.
| 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.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Not really. There's a centralized committee that will
| blacklist or even dump your subreddit down the memory hole if
| it doesn't meet its standards of moderation.
| collegeburner wrote:
| cool idea except that would require _using reddit_. twitter is
| full of retards, but reddit is full of insufferable retards who
| think they 're very intellectual and will let you know it. it's
| an entire site full of IFL Science type bozos.
|
| also didn't reddit proudly make a blogpost earlier this year
| that they now censor _more_ speech than the bird site and
| calling on it to do the same?
|
| (oh and i've been linked normal, SFW stuff where reddit now
| tries to make me create an account to see it because it's
| "18+". no, i am not "becoming a redditor" especially not to
| view one link. if they kill old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com it
| will be literally unusable.)
| InCityDreams wrote:
| The login/ create an account/ nsfw bs has increased
| dramatically over the lastfew days . Nsfw? It's a war channel
| im following....
| 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.
| xigoi wrote:
| How do posts from other Fediverse networks work on Mastodon?
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Think of Fediverse as akin to the email system, where there
| are thousands if not millions of different servers out there
| hosting email and exchanging them to each other.
|
| Now consider Mastodon as an email client which is hosted on a
| web site, like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail. That web site
| gives you an interface with which to interact with the
| network of email servers, but people using other servers with
| other interfaces can still see messages from each other;
| someone using Yahoo! Mail can send and receive messages with
| someone using Gmail.
|
| The difference is that Mastodon is open source, so that
| _anyone_ can download the code and run their own Mastodon
| instance (whereas nobody can download and run their own Gmail
| instance), but that instance can still exchange messages with
| instances running any of the several other Fediverse
| interfaces there are out there, such as Pleroma, Misskey,
| Soapbox, etc. (Unless an instance at either end has
| "defederated" the other; that is, the administrators have
| configured it to not exchange messages with the other
| server.)
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| Is that true? I thought that e.g. PeerTube was part of the
| Fediverse, but Mastodon doesn't work as an interface to
| PeerTube.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| I'm not an expert on the details of the protocol, so I can't
| give you a good answer to that. I believe it's just a matter
| of Mastodon not accepting messages that it knows it won't be
| able to display correctly. But other "microblog"-oriented
| Fediverse instances can exchange messages with Mastodon
| instances just fine.
| 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.
| rchaud 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.
|
| Yes, and it was much harder to shill newsletters, courses,
| conspiracies and cryptocoins back then on the back of minor
| internet blogger fame.
|
| There is significant money to be made in all of the above,
| which is why a replacement for Twitter (holding people in a
| dopamine cage) is inevitable, whether we need it or not.
| howinteresting wrote:
| Networking.
| cgh wrote:
| I follow various scientists, authors and so forth and I like to
| read their thoughts or see their recommended reading. And as
| silly as it sounds, it's wild to see eg William Gibson and
| Gerry Conway, two guys responsible for some of my formative
| adolescent reading, interact with one another at random.
| hedora wrote:
| For academics, why not read peer reviewed work?
|
| For authors, other communities exist as well.
| bigfudge wrote:
| Peer reviewed work has a much higher bar for people to say
| stuff. If you want to know what academics think, as opposed
| to what they are motivated to write and get past a
| reviewer, you need something like twitter. Plus, some
| academics are interesting people and say stuff of interest
| away from the specialism.
| 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.
| zaik wrote:
| Is there any information on this working group? I had hopes
| for the IETF standard XMPP, since the largest IM provider
| WhatsApp uses it internally.
| scrollaway wrote:
| The messaging services never opened their protocols. Trillian
| (& pidgin etc) has _always_ played catch-up. It was just more
| difficult for the "major players" of the time because for a
| protocol update, you needed to release a new version of your
| software, and somehow have all your users seamlessly migrate
| to it before releasing breaking changes.
|
| MSN/WLM, AIM, YIM, ICQ, Gadu-Gadu, Skype... all of them were
| reverse-engineered. The only open protocols it supported were
| IRC and Jabber.
| panic wrote:
| AIM had the open TOC protocol, but it never got all the
| features of the OSCAR protocol the official client used.
| shapefrog wrote:
| I can see the headling now - _Developer builds the ULTIMATE
| stalking tool_
| 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.
| notpushkin wrote:
| I'm oretty sure Twitter still allows this, but the API is
| crippled and this reflects the poor experience in custom
| clients. I used to use Twidere extensively, but it's been
| very limited for the last ~8 years or so.
|
| You could make it use private APIs by copying OAuth client
| id|secret from an official application. This would enable
| _some_ features (notifications and polls, and higher rate
| limits). Later Twitter fixed that and also sent a DMCA, so
| Twidere had to remove the code that worked with said APIs.
| yosito wrote:
| I'd imagine part of mandated interoperability would be
| regulation forbidding such ToS.
| malermeister wrote:
| That's actually a part of the EU's planned Digital Markets
| Act!
| qwertox wrote:
| If Elon would migrate Twitter onto Mastodon, with the post
| history and all, now that would be a change for the history
| books. It would change social networks forever.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Without some way to capture value it would also be one of the
| biggest acts of capital destruction in recent tech history.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Banks would hate him! They might even sue him.
| plazmatic wrote:
| mattacular wrote:
| Why would he do that. What about anything he's ever done makes
| you think that is even a remote possibility
| qwertox wrote:
| He did make Tesla's patens available for anyone to use for
| free.
|
| Also, with its weight, Twitter would become the first popular
| open social network, a beacon among them. It would still be a
| very valuable brand.
| mattacular wrote:
| He was sued into buying it for way more than it was worth.
| The first changed announced so far (in addition to printed
| code reviews by senior Tesla engineers) is to charge a
| subscription fee for verification.
| collegeburner wrote:
| how is he supposed to pay off a huge LBO by making it harder to
| monetize?
| neetdeth wrote:
| The iMessage model? Somehow make having a Twitter brand
| Twitter account into a status symbol. Turn the screws on
| monetization while giving the product away for free to VIPs.
| Banish the poors and undesirables to the fediverse, where
| they can green tweet as long as they like.
| collegeburner wrote:
| the imessage model works because its a "status symbol" that
| actually isn't: the majority of people in America have the
| blue bubble (and way more among demographics that care).
| this in turn enables building cool extra features because
| it's a "status symbol" but actually common enough for them
| to work, even though both parties have to have an iphone.
| this produces a network effect, almost like a social media
| platform..... oh wait
| hedora wrote:
| Ars Technica ran a "how to download your twitter account"
| article on Friday. Surely, there is a way to upload it you your
| own mastodon instance, right?
| [deleted]
| lazzlazzlazz wrote:
| I've been wanting decentralized social networks for a long time.
| Unfortunately, Mastodon and other federated networks are really
| awful and I hope people learn that sooner than later.
| oftenbluemostly wrote:
| Wait, why are they really awful?
| BryanBeshore wrote:
| No
| ivanhoe wrote:
| What happens if/when Mastodon gets mainstream and gets plagued by
| all the same problems as twitter? It being the distributed
| platform there's a very little options to fight fake news, hate
| speech, bots, etc. on Internet-wide level. Is there any option
| other than users gravitating to servers hosted by like-minded
| people, creating a clear separation into social bubbles?
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I think social bubbles is sort of built-in to the fediverse
| concept. There's some hope that a decentralized moderation
| problem will be more tractable than a centralized-for-profit-
| company moderation problem.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Good moderation is _labor_ (and likely forever will be) and
| Mastodon by its very nature has a lot higher moderators per
| consuming users ratio than Twitter ever had (even on messages
| originating on and "not leaving" Mastodon's biggest
| instances). (Just like if you are evaluating school districts
| you want a higher teachers per students ratio.)
| qprofyeh wrote:
| AFAIK you can block individual users, entire servers, and
| servers can also block other bad rep servers. I think a
| federation of servers with open source software is better
| equipped to fight fake news and bots not in spite of but
| because of decentralized protocols and how solutions must
| involve democratic values by definition.
| rpgbr wrote:
| Admins share lists of extremist instances and block them. This
| strategy helps to not viralize hateful/illegal content.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Gonna repost my standard question on Mastodon articles: cool, how
| do I get into it?
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| Go to a server and sign up. Http://fediverse.party
| 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/
| HellsMaddy wrote:
| Why does Moa need so many permissions? I don't want to give it
| +RW on both my accounts.
| icy wrote:
| It's a cross-poster. It quite literally needs +rw to post to
| both accounts.
| HellsMaddy wrote:
| Oh, duh. "bridge" makes sense now.
| TsukiZombina wrote:
| "Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon" :'(
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