[HN Gopher] Mastodon's eternal September begins?
___________________________________________________________________
Mastodon's eternal September begins?
Author : robin_reala
Score : 207 points
Date : 2022-11-10 07:35 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hughrundle.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hughrundle.net)
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Okay, but hasn't Mastodon (users) actually been wanting it to
| grow? I see people on HN, reddit, etc. all the time promoting the
| use of Mastodon. You cannot have it both ways. You either want
| your favorite platform to be popular and used or you don't.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| The author is very quick to call Eternal September. It is
| entirely possible that a few months from now this will have
| turned out to be a flash in the pan.
|
| More broadly though, I thought the main USP of Mastodon was that,
| if you don't like the toxic behaviour of a group of users, you
| don't have to endure it? Why then would this influx be an issue
| for anyone?
|
| The post also seems very dramatic, bordering on hysterical, in
| the way it describes how "upsetting" it is that other people are
| joining Mastodon and the "grief" that has apparently struck the
| extant community there. Which, ironically, strikes me as very
| "Twitter" behaviour.
| fleddr wrote:
| It's an escalation of Twitter's micro aggressions into Mastodon
| nano aggressions.
|
| When I hear the word "trauma", I'm thinking of veterans, people
| that lost loved ones, victims of violence.
|
| On Mastodon, trauma refers to getting too many follow requests.
| redshark03 wrote:
| I dont think it will catch on, I have seen this exact mass exodus
| on bitcoin twitter to bitcoinhackers.org, it never stays active,
| after a few weeks/months everyone is back on twitter.
| djha-skin wrote:
| > The people re-publishing my Mastodon posts on Twitter didn't
| think to ask whether I was ok with them doing that.
|
| The OP lost me here. You posted your opinion _to the public
| internet_. Whether or not you didn 't think your audience would
| reshare using the platform, they could have shared it in a myriad
| of ways, including posting it to sites like this one. It's even
| harder to moderate how your opinion gets spread around on the
| fediverse than on Twitter, where blocking and takedowns are
| possible. That's sort of the point of the fediverse.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| _> That 's sort of the point of the fediverse._
|
| You're mistaking the technical implementation of the Fediverse
| with the social contract that maintains its existence. The
| Fediverse is built on the idea of _consent_ , where interacting
| with you happens because you consent to that interaction
| happening, and you can withdraw that consent at any time by
| e.g. deleting your original post. (That's also why the "quote
| tweet" feature from Twitter is absent on the Fediverse.)
|
| When people and instances don't follow that contract, they
| simply get defederated.
| albrewer wrote:
| That doesn't control the existence of screenshots and copy-
| paste though. Once you have released something to the
| internet, there's no guarantee it won't be copied and
| distributed via channels you don't desire.
| berkes wrote:
| Certainly.
|
| Just because it's technically possible, that doesn't make
| it "good" or even "sought".
| Cyberdog wrote:
| > You're mistaking the technical implementation of the
| Fediverse with the social contract that maintains its
| existence.
|
| People are unpredictable. If there are "correct" ways of
| using the Fediverse, they need to be implemented into the
| code. Otherwise people can and will use it in whatever ways
| the code allows.
|
| At any rate, there are many people, myself included, who
| don't really care if my posts get screenshotted or reposted
| outside of my server or circle of friends. How is someone
| supposed to determine to whom to apply this "social
| contract?"
|
| Again, the default mode of thinking when posting _anything_
| to the internet should be "everyone, everywhere, forever
| into the future, will be able to see this." The Fedi is not
| immune from this rule.
|
| > (That's also why the "quote tweet" feature from Twitter is
| absent on the Fediverse.)
|
| It's absent from _Mastodon._ Other front ends support it. Not
| sure why Mastodon is holding out.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Mastodon has multiple privacy request levels and there's a
| "follower's only" level. That may still be seen as "posting to
| the public internet" but there's a courtesy expected there
| that's different from "public" posting.
| lzooz wrote:
| >On Saturday evening I published a post explaining a couple
| of things about Mastodon's history of dealing with toxic
| nodes on the network. Then everything went bananas. By 10pm I
| had locked my account to require followers to be approved
|
| He locked his account AFTER he posted the post.
|
| So yes this rant makes no sense at all.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Locking an account doesn't obviate the expected courtesy of
| a "Followers Only" post. Locking an account just makes it
| harder for new followers to follow without a vetted
| request.
| lzooz wrote:
| Ah I misread - I did not know that there was that kind of
| glanularity, that you could set specific posts as
| private. My bad!
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| In the footer of the site:
|
| >> All content (c) Hugh Rundle except as noted in
| Acknowledgements. Text licensed CC-BY 4.0.
|
| >> Please ensure any redistribution adheres to the Creative
| Commons Best Practices for Attribution.
| jefftk wrote:
| That seems completely compatible with sharing a link, which
| was one of the things the author objected to?
|
| (I agree with them in not liking screenshot-sharing culture)
| dreamling wrote:
| I think their biggest issue was suddenly being viral, while
| also dealing with server incursion/tons of new accounts,
| which meant that lots and lots of people are suddenly
| clamoring specifically for their attention/making requests
| for said lists/asking what the rules are/responding
| directly to the post that went viral but without being
| vetted beforehand or understanding the previous implicit
| social rules.
|
| While they started with a small discussion with people
| informed about the differences and server stress became
| instead a tornado of a much larger discussion while also
| dumping more stress on the servers, as well as emotional
| stress of having to deal with all the incoming attention.
|
| So. They are overwhelmed, and everything seems like it
| needs to be solved with the highest priority, but they
| aren't set up with enough help desk/sub-admin people to
| filter/protect themselves.
|
| Basically all mastodon server admins have a need, at least
| temporarily, for some business style structure. They need a
| Janine Melnitz (Ghostbusters Secretary) to prioritize
| server is burning down messages, organize non-server is
| burning down contact requests, and direct help/press
| requests to appropriate people. And perhaps someone else
| available to work on social onboarding.
|
| All personal blog/toot/tweets posted by said overwhelmed
| server admins should also be taken with a grain (or more)
| of salt. They may feel differently when things are calmer,
| or might be able to be more diplomatic in general.
|
| Overall though, it was good to hear about how the Author is
| feeling, and how self-aware they are about how it was
| similar to when their cohort joined and had to adapt and
| how the previous fediverse admins might have dealt with
| similar things.
|
| "..there are names for the sort of person who makes lists
| of people so others can monitor their communications.
| They're not nice names."
| elliotpage wrote:
| This post is fascinating- it uses "I" and "We" so interchangeably
| that it is almost dizzying.
|
| I want to ask them: what do you want? If you run your own
| Mastodon server you have a large degree of control over how that
| is run and federates, so can customise your experience. To
| continue the analogy, you can stop people invading your house
| party.
|
| Then there is the cultural lamentation and the "no-one asked if I
| wanted that" line, which is wild because cross-posting has been
| around for as long as there have been platforms. It just happens.
| recuter wrote:
| I've been thinking of metaphors to try to understand why I've
| found it so upsetting. This is supposed to be what we wanted,
| right? Yet it feels like something else. Like when you're
| sitting in a quiet carriage softly chatting with a couple of
| friends and then an entire platform of football fans get on at
| Jolimont Station after their team lost. *They* don't
| usually catch trains and don't know the protocol. They assume
| everyone on the train was at the game or at least follows
| football. They crowd the doors and complain about the seat
| configuration. It's not entirely the Twitter people's fault.
| They've been taught to behave in certain ways.
|
| It ain't their fault its the way they were brought up.
|
| I/We/Gaia would like those gross football fans to not exist on
| their planet. There is only I/We/Gaia. Not asking what Gaia
| wants is bad. There is only I/We/Gaia.
| (https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Gaia) I
| struggled to understand what I was feeling, or the word to
| describe it. I finally realised on Monday that the word I was
| looking for was "traumatic". Suddenly having
| hundreds of people asking (or not) to join those conversations
| without having acclimatised themselves to the social norms felt
| like a violation, an assault. I know I'm not the only one who
| felt like this. The tools, protocols and culture of the
| fediverse were built by trans and queer feminists. Those people
| had already started to feel sidelined from their own project
| when people like me started turning up a few year ago.
|
| There is only I/We/Gaia.
| colinsane wrote:
| > cross-posting has been around for as long as there have been
| platforms. It just happens.
|
| there's a range between "something i posted to my public
| newsletter/blog" and "encrypted signal chat message". for most
| people, crossposting is OK in the former, but a clear norms
| violation in the latter. ultimately, this can only be enforced
| culturally -- and yet most of us still expect that as viable:
| "it just happens" is the thinking of a selfish CEO who does
| something blatantly unethical and defends himself by claiming
| "but i didn't _technically_ break the law!"
|
| Mastodon is somewhere on this scale -- and quite likely at
| least slightly closer to the chat end of that scale than
| twitter is, taken in whole. it also has features to signal what
| is appropriate (e.g. it's more of a violation to cross-post
| something with a lock icon next to it than with an unlock icon
| than with a globe icon). but new users aren't likely to have a
| strong understanding of this visibility setting, so it's even
| more the case that a norm violation might be _obvious_ to one
| section of the userbase while the (unacquainted) norm violator
| is completely unaware.
|
| yeah, defederating is a solution. in a similar sense that
| getting a restraining order is a solution to IRL disagreements.
| it's more pleasant for everyone if you can reach shared norms
| and only deploy the stronger tools against those who actually
| mean you harm.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Mastodon is somewhere on this scale -- and quite likely at
| least slightly closer to the chat end of that scale than
| twitter is_
|
| Even for public posts? Which show up in the federated
| timeline for thousands of people you don't know, are visible
| to anyone who loads your profile, and can be shared by URL?
| To me that sounds very close to a blog post (no need to ask
| for permission to share) and not much like a direct message
| (definitely ask first).
| colinsane wrote:
| here's how i see it:
|
| - a blog post is something i put out there for a wide
| audience to read, take something away from, and bring back
| to disparate communities. it's a prompt to start many
| discussions, with no expectation that i'm in or even aware
| of those discussions.
|
| - a public fediverse post is me opening a conversation
| directly with the readers. i'm dropping some idea in front
| of the other people at the bar, particularly the guy next
| to me with whom i've already exchanged pleasantries (my
| followers), but bonus if people near us overhear and want
| to join the conversation (maybe i'll make some new
| connections).
|
| it's this difference in distance between me and the
| recipient (both spatially and temporally). if a reader
| screenshots my words -- name attached -- and brings that
| elsewhere, that risks a faux pas: that's more likely to be
| them talking about me behind my back (why take the
| conversation elsewhere when i'm right here in this moment
| speaking with you? and why do so in a way which attributes
| me while artificially raising the barrier to obtaining
| context?)
|
| there's nuance here, for sure. someone with 50 followers
| might expect the bar-like experience, whereas someone with
| 5000 followers might accept that they're seen more as a
| spokesperson. screenshot-sharing (author's complaint) is
| different from posting the URL to an aggregator is
| different than sharing the URL in a group chat. most people
| i know out here are more interested in growing a dunbar-
| level number of connections than in becoming a spokesman.
| if you're crossposting i think that's the judgement you'd
| want to make first.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> if a reader screenshots my words -- name attached --
| and brings that elsewhere_
|
| The author wasn't just objecting to screenshotting
| though, but to linking ("some people had cross-posted my
| Mastodon post into Twitter"). Which seems basically the
| same as boosting, which is (I think?) normal no-consent-
| needed Mastodon behavior?
|
| (I wrote more as a post:
| https://www.jefftk.com/p/mastodon-linking-norms)
| mangecoeur wrote:
| I felt this as well - ok so this person feels a bit 'assaulted'
| by the sudden surge on incoming people... but it seems bit
| silly to create open instances and then be shocked when people
| actually want to join them, especially when mastodon (AFAIU)
| makes it relatively easy to create private spaces if that's
| what you prefer.
|
| As for cross posting - re posting and re-mixing other people's
| content has been pretty much the basis of the internet since
| forever. Again, if this is something you're not happy with you
| should better create private forums for just your friends,
| that's a totally fine thing to do. Much like if you want an
| intimate house party you only invite your friends and eject any
| gatecrashers who try to sneak in.
|
| Perhaps the clue is in the 'anarchism' bit - in anarchist
| circles when you have a smallish and relatively close group you
| can manage a very positive and supportive atmosphere without
| rules and protocols. But as things grow you lose that,
| inevitably, as having more people means needing more formalized
| ways of handling issues. I can see how it feels like losing
| something but on the other hand you have to question the wisdom
| of an approach that is basically guaranteed to fall apart as
| soon as it becomes a bit popular.
| pmw wrote:
| > in anarchist circles when you have a smallish and
| relatively close group you can manage a very positive and
| supportive atmosphere without rules and protocols. But as
| things grow you lose that, inevitably, as having more people
| means needing more formalized ways of handling issues.
|
| This is eloquently explained in _The Tyranny of
| Structurelessness_ : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyrann
| y_of_Structurelessne...
| xurukefi wrote:
| It's absolutely beyond me how people believed (or still believe)
| that Mastodon will be a replacement for Twitter. That's a level
| of delusion I will never get behind.
| pimterry wrote:
| For me, it's largely replaced Twitter already.
|
| I mainly used Twitter to see what was going on in tech & open-
| source and discuss development topics, and comfortably 50% of
| the tech people I followed on Twitter have now set up on
| Mastodon, either additionally (cross-posting to both) or in
| quite a few cases as a full replacement. I post the same thing
| to both and I get far more responses & engagement on Mastodon
| now. For me personally it _has_ replaced Twitter.
|
| Depends which circles you move in and what you use Twitter for
| (it's certainly not useful in the politics & journalism scene
| yet, for starters) but there's already significant movement
| here in some areas.
| previnder wrote:
| You are like 1% of the 1% of the 1% of internet users. Most
| people have never heard of Mastodon, and even if they had,
| they'd find it hella confusing because there's no
| mastodon.com that they can go and sign up.
|
| This is the single greatest barrier to entry that's not going
| to go away without compromising the ideals of federation.
| xurukefi wrote:
| I'm talking about mainstream adoption. Mastodon is never
| going to be anything more than a niche phenomenon. Similar to
| how odysee is never going to be the next YouTube, which is
| even more ridiculous that people believed that.
|
| If you want the masses you need a "classic" setup: big
| commercial company, lots of money and a centralized
| infrastructure.
| asdff wrote:
| Eternal september only becomes bad when corporations start hiring
| positions to advertise on these new platforms. Otherwise, its an
| idyllic period of sharing information and cultural development,
| right up until media sinks their teeth into such a large market
| of consumer's eyeballs and attempts to shift the point of focus
| from interesting things that are genuinely interesting to
| profitable things that are often genuinely harmful, because its
| infinitely easier and far more profitable to engineer something
| that is harmful to a degree than to account for all the potential
| harmful externalities (In biology we see this as well; among
| symbiotic relationships, parasitic interactions are far more
| likely to evolve than mutually beneficial interactions that could
| take millions of years of evolutionary change to emerge in a
| steady state).
| not2b wrote:
| It will work out. There's been an initial bad reaction to a few
| things, like content warnings, but I think most of the new people
| will adjust. There will be some conflicts, but some features of
| Mastodon will prevent some of the worst problems with Twitter:
| the equivalent of "likes" doesn't cause things to spread, there's
| no quote tweets, and no algorithm trying to pump up the most
| outrageous content.
|
| If the desired of different people are too incompatible, then
| some servers may wind up blocking other servers. So be it.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| People whining about some Eternal September always remind me of
| people who moved to a city last year whining about newcomers. The
| internet is not usenet. You can have your own website (or
| mastodon server) and make it invite only. But a lot of us prefer
| "cities", not "villages"--or gated communities. And it seems to
| me that a lot of people like the city at some point and then want
| it to remain static and closed. When the fact that it is open is
| the only reason they were able to move there in the first place.
| noobermin wrote:
| I was about to post the same thing, this essentially is
| nimbyism and exclusivity. It's even worse as you say because
| unlike twitter, you can easily set up a private server and you
| never have to interact with the unwashed hordes again.
| sph wrote:
| I think the hate for the Eternal September these days it's
| misplaced. It's not "noobs" and average Joes that have ruined
| social media/the Internet, it's companies and businesses.
|
| It's because of them the Internet has become a sanitised,
| soulless, for-profit space. If Mastodon succeeds, companies
| will open their profiles on there, and watch how Mastodon will
| start to wither and die.
|
| Just wait for the first "<big multinational company> has opened
| their own Mastodon instance" post in the near future.
| amelius wrote:
| > Just wait for the first "<big multinational company> has
| opened their own Mastodon instance" post in the near future.
|
| Yes it will become like email where you can't really run your
| own server unless you want to spend the rest of your time
| fighting to get off corporate blacklists.
| matthews2 wrote:
| > Just wait for the first "<big multinational company> has
| opened their own Mastodon instance" post in the near future.
|
| The EU have had a Mastodon instance[0] before it was cool!
| (Although, it isn't open to the public and only has a few EU
| agencies as members.)
|
| [0]: https://social.network.europa.eu/about
| [deleted]
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _It 's not "noobs" and average Joes that have ruined social
| media/the Internet, it's companies and businesses._
|
| _?Por que no los dos?_
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I agree. I think that if there only were "non-noobs" and
| "elite joes" on the internet, these companies wouldn't have
| succeeding pushing their product.
|
| It takes two to tango.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > [...] _these companies wouldn 't have succeeding
| pushing their product._
|
| Supply- versus demand-side problems.
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| My pet theory is that it's both: I can imagine that the
| "classical Internet" with everyone on-line could be quite
| awesome, and the Internet of today with only "pre-September"
| folks on-line could be quite awesome, too - but everyone
| online in the "big multinationals" Internet is not much fun.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm old enough now that I've seen three or four waves of people
| moving into various neighborhoods, each and every one bemoaning
| the next wave and how terrible they were ... just like the
| folks they displaced (granted I say displaced indicating the
| typical movement of people, nothing forced).
| fleddr wrote:
| Yep. It will be hilarious to see once Gen Z owns homes. Watch
| attitudes change.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The September That Never Ended was the _worst_ thing that ever
| happened to The Internet.
|
| The September That Never Ended was the _best_ thing that ever
| happened to The Internet.
|
| Yeah, it brought all those obnoxious tourists, with their
| Hawai'ian shirts, straw hats, loud voices, and trash.
|
| But they also brought _money_. _Lots_ of money.
|
| That's when this whole "make lots of money in tech" thing
| started.
|
| Should be an interesting story.
| mcv wrote:
| And that money lead to Big Tech and walled gardens.
|
| I do miss the internet of the 1990s, but we can never go back
| there. What we can do, though, is fight for more open
| platforms.
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| Yeah we can, even seen the indieweb scene on neocities?
| Tons of web portals filled with nifty little personal
| websites.
|
| Can't forget this https://spacehey.com/
| ipaddr wrote:
| Where most average internet users never left aol and
| advanced users had a webpage?
|
| We live in an environment where most users don't leave the
| safety of facebook/twitter/instgram/reddit. Advanced users
| are running darkweb sites and doing a number of things the
| average person isn't.
|
| The world hasn't changed much. Are you seeking out and
| supporting the unusual or are you waiting for it to come to
| facebook/instagram first to tell you about it?
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Screw that money. I'd rather have the old Internet vibe back.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I do think that money has been extremely corrosive to
| Internet culture, but it has also been a huge motivator.
|
| It's kind of like, in the Nineteenth Century, large parts
| of the world were still unexplored, so authors like H.
| Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle, could write books
| like _King Solomon's Mines_ , or _The Lost World_ , and
| people could sort of believe "it could happen."
|
| These days, we know our world much better. We can call up
| satellite views of Base Camp, on Mt. Everest.
|
| But we are now looking much farther for "it could happen."
| ftyers wrote:
| Unexplored... by white people.
|
| [I realise that yes, there were potentially places that
| had never seen humans, but a lot of times when people say
| "discovered" or "unexplored" they implicitly mean "by
| white people", Indigenous people already knew about those
| places and in many cases acted as guides, but most of the
| time get written out of the history books. This isn't a
| personal criticism towards the previous post, but a
| criticism of society in general]
| lupire wrote:
| No one in the world, "white" or not, had access to
| documentation of the whole world. Indigenous people in
| South America could imagine what the land across the sea
| or over the mountain might be.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Unexplored by our current culture.
|
| I suspect we were just as mysterious to the Acapa, as
| they were, to us.
|
| Not everything needs to be turned into an opportunity to
| point out bias, because that's a neverending quest (to be
| human, is to be biased).
|
| The British, in those days, were about as bad as you can
| get.
|
| But the Carthaginians were probably every bit as bad, to
| their neighbors, as were the 19th-century colonial
| powers. Basic human behavior.
|
| I've learned that it's a waste of time, going around,
| trying to convince others to see things, our way. I find
| that it's always best to lead by example.
| anthk wrote:
| Iberian here. The Aztecs were scary compared to the
| contemporary Hispanics. So did the ancient Celtic/Iberian
| or Celtiberian tribes.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Just looked at what I wrote. Thanks fat
| finger/autocorrect! I don't even know what "Acapa" means!
|
| I meant Apache.
| [deleted]
| repler wrote:
| It's like when my toddler tells me I'm not playing with his
| toys right.
|
| "You're using it differently than I like to use it!"
| dsr_ wrote:
| Now imagine the toddler is part of a collective that has
| carefully built planes, mills, lathes, sanders and lumber-
| handling machinery to produce wooden toys and has been giving
| them away for free and sometimes accepting donations.
|
| Oh, and they aren't a toddler, they're adults.
|
| Oh, and they aren't your kids, either. Not related to you at
| all.
|
| Now your analogy is much more useful.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Now imagine the toddler is part of a collective that has
| carefully built planes, mills, lathes, sanders and lumber-
| handling machinery to produce wooden toys and has been
| giving them away for free
|
| This just makes the toddler's position that much more
| stupid. As the owner of the toys, he's free to set the
| rules for how they can be played with. But not if he's
| giving them away.
| ArekDymalski wrote:
| Those toys have been given under certain (More or less
| precisely/adequately defined and communicated) conditions
| that are constantly violated now. I still remember when
| ppl cared about little thing called netiquetteamd now
| even written terms aren't enforced :)
| dsr_ wrote:
| There you go. That's exactly the position they are in: if
| you want to play with mastodon.social's toys,
| mastodon.social gets to set the rules. If you want to
| play with the toys that they have given away, over by
| yourself, you get to do that.
|
| We are currently in the in-between phase where a swarm of
| kids have shown up to play with the neat toys, are
| ignoring the rules, and are about to be kicked out to go
| play with their own toys, unless they can learn the
| rules.
| dools wrote:
| Perhaps Hugh can draw on the timeless wisdom of Snoop Dogg in
| these trying times:
|
| Now that I got me some Seagram's gin Everybody's got their cup
| but they ain't chipped in Now this types of shit happens all the
| time You gotta get yours before I gotta get mine
| DoItToMe81 wrote:
| Mastodon has been mostly filled with either people too disruptive
| for larger platforms, or obsessives looking to slice off a corner
| of something greater solely for themselves and people who fit in
| to their image. I don't see how more people could possibly make
| it worse at this point.
| duxup wrote:
| I don't think " corporate publishing systems steer people's
| behaviour" to .... share things they find interesting.
|
| I think that's just a human thing.
|
| A lot of what is described here just seems like human behavior,
| and I do not understand the authors description of it as "a
| violation, an assault".
|
| There's a weird glorification of the current participants of the
| fediverse in that article and yet outright rejection of anyone
| new, and by the description of the article no interest in
| welcoming them.
| [deleted]
| xg15 wrote:
| I think the real danger for the Mastodon/greater Fediverse
| community is that, should Mastodon really become the "next
| Twitter", it will catch the attention of the other FAANGs. And
| the way the Fediverse is structured currently, it appears highly
| vulnerable to the old Embrace/Extend/Extinguish playbook:
|
| 1) Establish a corporate Mastodon server and deeply embed it into
| your existing platform. ("We _love_ the Fediverse! We love it so
| much that we 've built native support for it into Google mail.
| That's right! Starting tomorrow, every @gmail address is also a
| valid Mastodon user! No need to sign up anywhere, you can just
| follow and toot and boost right from your Gmail app!")
|
| 1a) Think influx of a few 1000s of users is bad? How about a
| billion? [1]
|
| 2) Bombard the community with proprietary extensions and attempt
| to take control of the technical standards. ("We love ActivityPub
| too! That's why we're planning to add YouTube integration to it!
| And Google Calendar invites! And Maps locations and advanced
| emotes and and and... Developers of servers and third-party
| clients are encouraged to follow our new ActivityPub Extensions
| living standard. Feedback is encouraged!")
|
| 2a) Non-FAANG server admins or client devs now have the choice
| between continuously playing catch-up on technical features they
| have to implement or tolerate that a large part of messages
| become incomprehensible to non-FAANG users.
|
| 3) Pull up the drawbridges. ("While ActivityPub is great, we feel
| that ultimately it limits the platform's potential and does not
| meet our standards for privacy and security. Therefore,
| ActivityPub will be sunset at the end of the year for @gmail.com.
| Third-party clients and servers are invited to implement our web
| API instead. Just register your server as an app in the API
| console and apply for a key...")
|
| I think the Fediverse community would do good to think up
| strategies how to counter EEE takeovers right now, because if at
| some point Mastodon becomes big enough that there is money or
| influence to be made by controlling the platform, then someone
| will try a takeover, sooner or later.
|
| [1] https://financesonline.com/number-of-active-gmail-users/
| croisillon wrote:
| I love how you wrote the corporate blogs, it sounds so real!
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _1a) Think influx of a few 1000s of users is bad? How about a
| billion? [1]_
|
| Imo, that's a _W_ for Mastodon, not a _L_.
|
| > _I think the Fediverse community would do good to think up
| strategies how to counter EEE takeovers right now, because if
| at some point Mastodon becomes big enough that there is money
| or influence to be made by controlling the platform, then
| someone will try a takeover, sooner or later._
|
| That's exactly what happened with email, but haven't the folks
| at Matrix/Elemental built a nice playbook to tackle this?
| Mastodon can and should be its own company. Today, it largely
| remains a work of just one eng, and incredibly so!
| Vinnl wrote:
| Wait, what's Matrix's countermeasure to this? That sounds
| interesting.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| This sounded like a script of Black mirror, corporate edition.
| r00fus wrote:
| That's because it's actually not-so-distant history (e.g.:
| Microsoft)
| Adrock wrote:
| Yes! This is why counterantidisintermediation [1] needs to be
| deeply considered in social systems design.
|
| I really enjoyed Dmytri Kleiner's "You can't code away their
| wealth" talk [2] introducing the concept.
|
| [1] https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-
| Disintermediatio...
|
| [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FEU632_Em3g
| LesZedCB wrote:
| this is really interesting thanks for the links! venture
| communism isn't an idea i've come across and i'm intrigued. i
| dont think capitalism can abide being bought out and
| transferred by a bunch of anti-capitalist actors but its a
| new project and that's good!
| rusk wrote:
| Really interesting thanks!
| squarefoot wrote:
| Please don't give ideas to the enemy:)
|
| Anyway, could they trademark the Mastodon name and logo, so
| that a 3rd party partially incompatible client should be forced
| to identify itself as something else avoiding confusion? This
| would bring the next question: can Mastodon (the real one)
| nodes protect themselves against "compromised" ones?
| coldacid wrote:
| >can Mastodon (the real one) nodes protect themselves against
| "compromised" ones?
|
| Yes, you can always defederate from other instances if you
| want. In fact, a lot of fediverse instances do just that to
| protect their hugboxes from the rest of us who actually value
| our ability to communicate with each other. And there are
| certainly a number of instances that defederate from others
| on technical grounds rather than social ones.
| eddieroger wrote:
| > hugboxes
|
| I'm sure there's a nicer way of saying that. I've worried
| that I would end up in an echo chamber of my own on there,
| but saying things like "hugbox" are unnecessarily rude to
| people who have tended to prefer isolation because of the
| effect the world has on them. We can't choose how others
| react to content, but we shouldn't chastise them for
| wanting to protect themselves from harm, even if we don't
| agree with the definition of harm.
| mcv wrote:
| I think hugboxes sound nice. It took me a moment to
| realise it was meant pejoratively. I guess the most
| famous "hugbox" in that sense, is Truth Social.
|
| In any case, instances full of trolls, spammers and nazis
| also tend to get blocked by others who prefer to
| communicate normally. Blocking serves a useful function.
| If FAANG servers show up, I'm sure some would block them
| out of principle. Others once they start breaking the
| protocol.
| cf wrote:
| This is kinda what happened with Mastodon wrt to ActivityPub.
| Lots of what the Fediverse means is how Mastodon chooses to use
| the protocols. Often in ways that aren't even compliant with
| the specifications. So yep EEE is highly viable as an attack.
| coldacid wrote:
| I would expect that Google would quickly get the Gab treatment
| if they decided to go fedi (that is, everyone preemptively
| blocks/defederates from them before they even have AP support
| enabled).
| rolenthedeep wrote:
| While this is an entirely plausible (even likely) idea, I don't
| think it would play out that way. Fediverse is literally built
| of, by, and for people who _hate_ this kind of corporate
| bullshit. In this scenario, Google _will_ be defederated from
| the rest of the network, along with all their users.
|
| Just this week, some random person decided to start indexing
| every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was
| incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy
| got banned within hours of announcing his indexer.
|
| I think the core culture of the fediverse is sufficiently anti-
| corporation that it will be extremely difficult for someone
| like Google to corrupt it.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who
| hate this kind of corporate bullshit.
|
| You might have said the same thing about HTML, once.
|
| Now it's whatever the owner of the browser monopoly says that
| it is.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| The core culture? Did you even read the headline?
|
| _Eternal September_
|
| And this time, we're talking about _billions_ of new voices.
| Forget about core culture: that 's gone now.
| krapp wrote:
| > And this time, we're talking about billions of new voices
|
| No. Billions of people are not currently moving from
| Twitter to Mastodon.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Not currently, no. But if Google were to run an instance,
| there would be; which is the premise I was responding to.
| krapp wrote:
| Even in that case, I don't think it would happen. The
| only reason Mastodon is becoming "popular" is
| dissatisfaction with the way Elon Musk is running
| Twitter, and that's just a minority of the userbase. It's
| not like everyone went back to Usenet when Google started
| archiving it.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| The only reason Mastadon isn't getting popular (without
| airquotes) is that it isn't popular enough.
|
| Social networks require a critical mass of popularity to
| attract most users.
| rolenthedeep wrote:
| I think it will be very hard if not impossible for any
| entity to have a widespread effect on the larger
| fediverse, simply because we can defederate problematic
| servers.
|
| The moment a Google instance comes online, a lot of
| servers will block it on principle. Then every time they
| do something new and scummy, more servers will block
| them. Eventually, enough of the network will have
| defederated from them that they just don't have any reach
| outside of their own server.
|
| Not to mention that based on google's history, a mastodon
| server would last for maybe a year before Google gets
| bored and kills it.
|
| Sure, google could set up a server with a billion people,
| but how can that have an effect when nobody outside of
| that server sees any of it?
|
| If you wanted to force change on the fediverse, it'd
| probably have to be a massive undercover grassroots
| campaign. I'm talking spinning up hundreds of instances
| with a few thousand users each, and don't let anyone know
| that those instances are owned by Google. Then you play
| the long game where your users slowly influence other
| instances.
|
| I just don't see that happening.
|
| Every server in the fediverse is independent, and has its
| own culture. Thinking Google could cause change to all of
| those individual cultures is like saying if you put a few
| billion people in a new country it would change the
| global culture. Technically, yes, that could work on
| paper, but it doesn't really work in practice. Not on the
| sort of timescale any corporation is willing to invest
| in.
| Kye wrote:
| >> _" The moment a Google instance comes online, a lot of
| servers will block it on principle. Then every time they
| do something new and scummy, more servers will block
| them. Eventually, enough of the network will have
| defederated from them that they just don't have any reach
| outside of their own server."_
|
| The journa.host guy is speed running this just by
| accident of trying to figure everything out from inside
| the fire.
| nemothekid wrote:
| A lot of the examples in this thread are focusing too
| much on Google; Google will probably never touch another
| social network.
|
| What is more likely is some new company comes around, VC
| backed with some "ActivityPub-for-the-masses" pitch. This
| startup first comes with development resources; all the
| sudden 90% of the devs on Mastodon2 are employed by
| $startup. Not only that but they begin to build very
| polished native apps which aren't OSS. Because all the
| developers are $startup, the development process becomes
| less democratic. Then the VC dollars create marketing;
| then all your new users equate ActivityPub with
| $startup2. All the non-technical users are on $startup.
| Then they hit some critical mass and pull up the ladder.
| You find out 70% of the people you follow were on
| $startup, because for them it was easier to use the
| polished thing, and that 70% won't go back to
| ActivityPub, because all the people are now on $startup
| and maybe you should just ditch your crummy server and
| get with the times. It happens slowly, then quickly.
|
| All of the sudden mastodon looks like IRC in a world
| where everyone uses Discord.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> some random person decided to start indexing every post on
| the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A
| lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned
| within hours of announcing his indexer_
|
| The next person will do this without announcing it, in a way
| that just looks like a server full of lurkers. When you have
| a protocol that's all about broadcasting things to anyone who
| asks to be notified, it's very hard to enforce "no indexing".
|
| I also see Mastodon posts showing up in search results, so it
| looks to me like indexing is already happening: https://www.g
| oogle.com/search?q=%22How+I+write+chord+charts%...
| Kye wrote:
| You say that like you think it hasn't already happened.
| People noticed, admins compared notes, and they still ended
| up blocked.
| jefftk wrote:
| People catching some cases doesn't mean others aren't
| succeeding unnoticed.
|
| A privacy model that depends on "admins would probably
| notice something fishy" is not a model users should rely
| on.
| Kye wrote:
| All it takes is one person to notice for a #fediblock
| notice to propagate. The more instances, the harder it is
| to hide.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| A lot of lurker-only servers tend to get blocked, too. Some
| instances check _every_ follow /follow request and block if
| _anything_ looks off, including "lurker only".
|
| > I also see Mastodon posts showing up in search results,
| so it looks to me like indexing is already happening
|
| Mastodon has a configurable robots.txt. Some instances are
| fine with search indexing their _public_ timelines.
|
| The big thing is instances can want their _public_
| timelines indexed _but not_ their "followers only"
| timelines.
| gs17 wrote:
| > A lot of lurker-only servers tend to get blocked, too.
| Some instances check _every_ follow /follow request and
| block if _anything_ looks off, including "lurker only".
|
| Well, there goes thinking I can always just host my own
| instance, I probably wouldn't be active enough for their
| tastes. And it adds another concern to joining a smaller
| instance, seems like I have to rely on other users to
| make it look more legit if I don't want to be so
| centralized. Or are they looking for very strictly,
| literally "lurker only" instances?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| There's always an "everyone blocks me and no one likes
| me" fear in hosting your own instance, and yes you will
| run the risk of preemptive blocks if people don't like
| how your instance looks.
|
| The particular combo here, though, is "lurker only
| instance" that also spams follow requests. If you don't
| spam follow requests and are selective about who you
| follow (like a human rather than a bot), you have less
| risk of this specific paranoia. Lurkers are fine to many
| Mastodon users. Lurkers spamming following requests are a
| concern.
| xg15 wrote:
| Not a Mastodon user, but I'd imagine most admins follow
| common sense.
|
| If your server only has a handful of accounts that
| obviously correspond to you and your friends, I don't see
| why anyone would have a problem with that.
|
| On the other hand, if the server has 100s of accounts,
| each of which follows a large number of people off-server
| - yet somehow no one follows anyone else on the server
| and no one ever talks a single word, that would probably
| raise some suspicion.
| merlincorey wrote:
| > On the other hand, if the server has 100s of accounts,
| each of which follows a large number of people off-server
| - yet somehow no one follows anyone else on the server
| and no one ever talks a single word, that would probably
| raise some suspicion.
|
| Existing Twitter and Facebook connections (names,
| followers, friends, etc) to create many secret indexer
| servers made of easily verifiable Google searches of real
| people with real friends and GPT-like toot generation to
| fake just enough activity seems like a pretty
| straightforward route to avoid suspicion.
|
| Arms races suck -- public data is public, period.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Mastodon does have some verification tools. One example
| is rel="me" link verification on profiles. That's not
| impossible to fake, but it's another thing that makes it
| harder to just impersonate "real people with real
| friends".
|
| On top of that, arguably Mastodon is full of weird people
| who often don't look all that like real people and find
| themselves trying to be their weirdest selves (which is
| also why protecting the privacy courtesies on Mastodon is
| seen as important). Instances looking too much like
| Twitter or Facebook data are suspicious in their own
| ways.
|
| > Arms races suck -- public data is public, period.
|
| There will always be bad actors, but that's not excuse to
| ignore common courtesy, throw your hands up, and just
| claim all private data is public. Mastodon _isn 't_
| Twitter. Mastodon isn't intended to be 100% public. There
| is data with an _expectation_ of privacy. Just because
| people can violate that expectation doesn 't mean it
| isn't private data.
|
| A common analogy here is conversation in public
| restaurants: just because the restaurant itself is open
| to the public and serves anyone doesn't give you license
| to eavesdrop on any conversation you want inside of that
| restaurant. There's generally an expectation of privacy
| among the other diners. (And in the real world someone
| trying that might get their ass beat for trying it.)
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Some instances check every follow /follow request and
| block if anything looks off, including "lurker only"._
|
| That's rare, though, right? Since there's often a ton of
| following going around, especially now?
|
| It's probably also not that hard to make something that
| easily passes those sorts of quick checks?
|
| _> Some instances are fine with search indexing their
| public timelines._
|
| Which then means anything of yours that gets boosted by
| someone on a server like that will be indexed.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > That's rare, though, right?
|
| Not in my experience. I'm on a tiny instance and follows
| are so rare in general, I can watch them all
| individually.
|
| There are many users that require follow requests where
| they verify/vet every single follow.
|
| > It's probably also not that hard to make something that
| easily passes those sorts of quick checks?
|
| Maybe such that one person doesn't notice, but remember
| the scale here: if someone is trying to "follow the
| world" maliciously, they have to make sure that they pass
| the quick checks of _every_ paranoid person they try to
| follow. Once a malicious site is "discovered" the
| #fediblock hash tag moves pretty virally to encourage
| other paranoid users/instances to (re-)evaluate the bad
| actor.
|
| > Which then means anything of yours that gets boosted by
| someone on a server like that will be indexed
|
| (Courteous) Instances don't allow you to boost a
| Followers Only post to the Public timeline.
|
| Discourteous instances may exist, but when they are found
| out, they are generally blocked (again, the #fediblock
| hashtag sometimes moves swiftly and virally here).
| fediblock wrote:
| Fediblock just re-centralizes blacklisting to the
| (opaque) maintainers of that list, which defeats much of
| the point of federation
| WorldMaker wrote:
| There's no "Fediblock central list". At the moment it's
| just a search hashtag that federates with other toots (it
| federates as toots because it is just toots). It is
| _entirely_ up to instance admins what they do with what
| they see in that hashtag.
| easrng wrote:
| Authorized fetch makes it impossible to do this without
| either scraping the web interface (which some instances
| turn off (it's one switch in the settings)) or using a
| followbot which will get you #fediblocked immediately. RE:
| Search results, instances have a per-user option to add a
| noindex meta tag to your posts on the web interface.
| 2fast4you wrote:
| ActivityPub makes it easy to crawl and index the whole
| Fediverse, you don't even need to start a server. I played
| with the idea a bit before I learned more about the
| community. If you're being intentionally malicious,
| disguising your traffic as legit shouldn't be impossible
| sigstoat wrote:
| > Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who
| hate this kind of corporate bullshit.
|
| sure, but it's being loaded up with piles of users who were
| perfectly happy with corporate bullshit two weeks ago. you're
| not going to make cultural converts of them before some
| bright eyed product manager at google spots this opportunity.
|
| in fact, you'll probably _never_ convert them. they'll
| probably convert the rest of the place. hence "eternal
| september".
| yoz-y wrote:
| The comparison is apt, but you can ignore the federated
| timeline if your instance is what you came for. From what I
| understand though, the on-instance caching could be
| problematic if there is a sudden massive increase in user
| numbers (and people from your instance start following
| them)
| Cyberdog wrote:
| > Just this week, some random person decided to start
| indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to
| this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance,
| and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his
| indexer.
|
| Kinda puzzled by this. Who's out there posting to the open
| Fediverse with no expectation that their posts are going to
| be seen, indexed, and possibly archived? It's like publishing
| a web page and expecting that search engines won't index it.
|
| Just like with other services, you should expect that
| anything you post to the Fediverse will be there forever,
| tucked away in databases, indexed by search engines, and
| outlive you. Even more so, since editing or deleting
| Fediverse posts is more like a polite request than an actual
| command; some servers ignore such requests even if your home
| server complied.
|
| That people are getting upset at this idea gives further
| credence to the idea that these newcomers really have no idea
| what they're joining up to and are just hoping that
| "Mastodon" matches the ideal Twitter replacement they have in
| their heads with little to no understanding of the reality of
| its workings.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who
| hate this kind of corporate bullshit.
|
| Replace Fediverse with email. And it would still stand.
|
| Then realize where email is today. Two-three email providers
| and hosting your own email server grows less and less
| plausible each day.
| jabits wrote:
| This of course is nonsense. It takes some effort to host
| your own, but you can do it, and there are hundreds of
| email providers out there. And there is the middle ground
| of getting your own domain and "hosting" your own for
| $6/month with Microsoft 365 for example...
| tensor wrote:
| And this in a nutshell is why Mastodon will always be niche
| and will never be a twitter replacement. Indexing every post
| is _good_ and would be a solution to one of the biggest
| problems with Mastodon: discovering people to follow.
|
| As it currently stands Mastodon is a very toxic community of
| people in the sense that they don't care at all about what
| the average person actually wants or needs in a network like
| this. Any and all complaints or comments pointing out the
| problems with usability are met with exactly the sort of
| hostility you describe here.
|
| Hell, even as a very technical person I can't find anyone to
| follow on Mastodon other than developers. There was some
| large index of the most popular mastodon servers so I tried
| that and the top entry in the health category was an
| antivaxer spreading misinformation.
|
| Honestly what we need is a twitter replacement, centralized,
| with search and recommendations. Perhaps run by a non-profit
| council or something.
| not2b wrote:
| I think Mastodon or a subset of it can evolve into what you
| want. We'll start seeing specialized servers that vet their
| members. As Elon drives people away, you'll see more
| technical people, more serious medical people and the like.
| Shared404 wrote:
| Is your username a reference to the Minecraft server?
| /offtopic
|
| This is already happening somewhat. There's at least one
| server I can think of off the top of my head which is
| invite only, and purpose focused. Hoping to get an
| account there eventually, though I won't say the name and
| drive unneeded attention to it.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The danger isn't fediverse defederating with Google, it's
| Google defederating with the fediverse.
|
| Look at what happened to jabber/gtalk...
| pasquinelli wrote:
| > Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who
| hate this kind of corporate bullshit.
|
| will it continue to be?
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| > for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit
|
| That will entirely work in favour of big companies. If there
| was a split and only one split is capable of serving 100
| million users that split will win.
| Vinnl wrote:
| It might win in the sense that that would then also be a
| thing that exists, but would not necessarily mean that
| Mastodon can no longer be what it is now, I don't think?
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Google talk had XMPP which is very similar to Fediverse,
| but then XMPP (mostly)died and Google talk survived
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| Truth Social, one of the biggest private Twitter competitors
| with 4 million users (although obviously not appealing to
| Muskfugees because it's essentially a playground for Trump and
| his supporters), is _literally_ just a Mastodon instance with
| federation removed. It's already happening
| andridk wrote:
| XMPP :'(
| lupire wrote:
| The kids today don't know that their futurology is actually
| history.
| berkes wrote:
| While I love XMPP, it suffered from being just too early. And
| therefore lacking crucial features like e2e encryption,
| voice, video, etc. All of those are "possible" but all as
| afterthought, plugin or bolted on. Never a natural part of
| the core.
| f1refly wrote:
| xmpp doesn't really have a core - even the messages are
| more or less an extension. The whole point of xmpp is "each
| to his own extend", so your "missing features" are in
| reality "nice addons that most clients have but if you'd
| like to bring your own homebrew that's fine too" which is
| how I think more networks should operate. Have the
| features, but gracefully fall back when the client's don't
| support them.
| anthk wrote:
| That's for private IM save channels, Mastodon and all of the
| Activity Pub it's for public showcasing.
| opan wrote:
| Pixiv already did the first thing, All pixiv users have a Pawoo
| mastodon handle. I think it helped bring a lot more Japanese
| people to fedi.
| astrange wrote:
| Pixiv doesn't own them anymore so not sure if that still
| happens, but I do know Japanese users can't reach a lot of
| the rest of the universe because admins like randomly
| blocking their entire servers.
|
| https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1589188383376834560
| easrng wrote:
| It's not "random". Some servers have legal concerns about
| the art they host, but also last I checked their moderation
| in general wasn't great (not sure if it was a "no english-
| speaking moderators" problem or a "we don't care" problem
| though.)
| shortformblog wrote:
| This is 100% what Substack is doing to email newsletters right
| now. It doesn't look exactly the same, and they're not doing it
| with technical standards but with additional features, but the
| framework is very similar. They're on step 2.
| acheron wrote:
| You can just say "Google". I don't think Netflix or Amazon are
| going to be trying to take over any kind of social network.
| berkes wrote:
| I wouldn't be suprised to see ActivityFlow(tm) or such at
| AWS, some PAAS activity-pub server that can be connected to
| lambda, kinesis, etc etc to "add your product to the
| fediverse - infinately scalable (EUR0.002 per in- or outbox
| activity)".
|
| Naturally, that would be a proprietary service. Or a service
| lifted off github and extended - the patches never streaming
| back upstream.
| rcarr wrote:
| Mastodon is not going to become the next twitter. Based on what
| I'm seeing it's going to be substack. They're gunning hard for
| twitter atm, they've dropped lots of twitter like functionality
| in the last few days. The authors, thought leaders and journos
| all love it already because they get more interaction with the
| audience, they actually get to earn money, it's easy to use, and
| everything is centered around longform ideas rather than cheap
| throwaway comments.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I'm ready to bet you that most new people will not stay on
| mastodon because it lacks all what made twitter successful
| aaron695 wrote:
| rapsey wrote:
| These exoduses 9 times out of 10 only create some insular single
| topic community. For people who want to participate in an echo
| chamber.
|
| Anyone who thinks Mastodon has any hope of being the next Twitter
| is delusional. It is the next Parler/Rumble.
| rippercushions wrote:
| Parler/Rumble were very clearly designed for exactly one single
| topic, MAGA.
|
| The interesting thing about Mastodon is that it has the
| _potential_ to host countless single topic communities, similar
| to Reddit.
| mrlatinos wrote:
| The problem is I have no idea how to find them, so it seems
| more like IRC.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| Oh there's a discoverability issue between Mastodon
| instances?
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| No, the issue with IRC is that it's dead as hell most the
| time despite like 200 people idling in the room.
| ggm wrote:
| Maybe the best next twitter is not to BE the next twitter?
|
| I mean seriously, what if twitter turned out to be a bad idea?
|
| We haven't had "the next 8 track" or "the next Zoetrope" or
| "the next cutlass" -We do other things instead.
|
| Maybe a hyperfocal single issue social construct, is what
| trainspotters actually WANT?
| [deleted]
| rapsey wrote:
| That is what I said. It is for people who want an echo
| chamber.
|
| > I mean seriously, what if twitter turned out to be a bad
| idea?
|
| Twitter fills a void where there is no real alternative. How
| can it be a bad idea? If you are morally opposed to it or
| something don't use it.
| ggm wrote:
| > Twitter fills a void where there is no real alternative.
| How can it be a bad idea? If you are morally opposed to it
| or something don't use it.
|
| It's bad because of its 2nd order effects. On mental
| health. On conspiracy theory. On attacks on the integrity
| of the polity, on social cohesion. Freedom to communicate
| in the wide, semi-pseudonomously turns out to be something
| exploitable to undermine the fabric of society at times. I
| don't think we can put that genie back in the bottle, but
| "the revolution will not be televised" maybe turns out to
| be .. wrong?
| rapsey wrote:
| Yeah sounds like the comic books and video games are
| going to turn children into psychopaths argument.
| ggm wrote:
| It does, except it's about what led to pizzagate. So..
| also not about LSD being sold in sweets to small
| children, its lies being told to psychotic adults. And
| about what persisting supportive dements do to each
| other, once the fever hits.
|
| We're very probably poles apart on this one. I won't
| convince you of the risks and you won't convince me of
| the lack of them.
| paulgb wrote:
| Mastadon doesn't ever need to become the twitter of 2022, and
| most people would rather it didn't. It does remind me of
| Twitter in ~2008, which is arguably more fun anyway.
|
| (Anybody who thought 2008 twitter would become what it is now
| would also have been called delusional)
| rakoo wrote:
| Mastodon absolutely doesn't want to be the next twitter. It is
| antithetical with the spirit of the creator and the community.
|
| If an actor wants to hyper centralize its users, bets are other
| platforms won't federate with it
| ilyt wrote:
| I think they're being overly optimistic here. This will only keep
| up if musky boi truly sinks twitter, but if all he does is kicks
| out the "trendsetting"(lmao) "moderation" and _actually enforce
| their own TOS_ I think twitter will be just fine
| blitzar wrote:
| What happened to absolute free speech?
| fragmede wrote:
| Elon got made fun of (impersonated), and decided that was his
| limit on what constitutes "free speech".
| mikro2nd wrote:
| I think what _will_ sink Twitter will be if Mr Musk goes ahead
| with his plan (as he 's stated) to have "blue tick" tweets all
| float to the top while deprecating tweets from non-paying
| users. In my world $8/month seems an outrageous amount for the
| privilege of bloviating into the void, yet if I don't see my
| own comments and those of my other non-paying friends, what the
| hell is the point of even being on the platform?
| cbeach wrote:
| I think the $8/month charge will put spam and bots out of
| business. That's why Musk is doing it.
|
| I've just subscribed to Twitter Blue and aside from the extra
| features, I have a lot of confidence that if others do this,
| we'll have a more robust and civil platform.
| mikro2nd wrote:
| Funny... I think the exact opposite. The spammers and bot-
| herders will flock to buy blue ticks in order to look more
| legit. The rest of us don't basically give a fuck.
| jefftk wrote:
| I don't really understand the author's sharing preferences.
| They're upset that people didn't ask them for their consent
| before sharing a link to their post, but I'm having trouble
| telling what the norm is. Should people be asking before boosting
| (retweeting) posts? Writing blog posts replying to our referring
| to them?
|
| The internet norms I'm used to have public posts as available for
| that sort of response: if you shared it to the general world and
| it has a URL that anyone can load then it's fine to link to and
| discuss. If Mastodon has a different norm here then (a) that's
| going to be a hard lift because it is so different from the rest
| of the internet and (b) I wish people would make it clearer what
| the norm they're going for is!
| stoppingby wrote:
| The person is just incredibly sensitive and, frankly, doesn't
| seem to understand what either word in the phrase "social
| media" means.
| JanneVee wrote:
| That is blatantly just missing the point of the complaint.
| Mastodon is not "social media" and a bunch of "social media
| users" showed up triggering a change in culture of Mastodon
| to be more like the thing the author opted out of by using
| Mastodon!
| rndmio wrote:
| How is it not social media? Looking at joinmastodon.org
| tells me it is. How are people still having to rediscover
| the fact that posting something publicly means you lose
| control of it? If you don't want your posts to be
| publicised, don't post them publicly.
| JanneVee wrote:
| It is a quick comment by me that I didn't spend much
| effort on. So I'll rephrase it: Mastodon is not "Twitter"
| and a bunch of "Twitter users" showed up triggering a
| change in culture of Mastodon to be more like the thing
| the author opted out of by using Mastodon!
|
| Hope it brings the point across better!
| rndmio wrote:
| Ok yeah, I see what you're saying. I'd say maybe they
| didn't opt of of the things they thought they did.
| Mastodon is still social media, public things are still
| public, they opted out of the scale of Twitter but not
| the rest. They found something that wasn't Twitter and
| were happy until it became like Twitter, what they really
| wanted was something that _can 't_ become Twitter; like
| hosting a private Mastodon server.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| They even actually do host their own server, which they
| could make private any time if they hate to be seen so
| much.
|
| I'm sympathetic to the crowd of newcomers image they
| paint, but weakly. As in I agree it's annoying to have
| some quiet spot you had found get popular. But if you
| didn't own that spot and it was only quiet by chance, and
| it was fully public all along, OH WELL.
|
| I do not understand their complaints about consent to
| have their voluntarily and actively published things be
| seen and reshared. They asked to be both seen and
| reshared by publishing publicly on a public instance,
| whose publicness they even control themselves on top of
| the controls for any individual post, on a protocol in
| which other servers redistribute copies of the original
| to all other servers and users.
|
| Consent for all that resharing was well and truly given,
| yes including off platform. The only complaint they have
| is if any of the resharing stripped their name. Just like
| this blog post being CC-BY 4.0
| eddieroger wrote:
| Here's the problem, though - from the author's blog post
| and without being logged in to their Mastodon instance, I
| was able to see their posts. If they wanted limit
| interaction, they would do so through the post privacy
| settings, but seemingly haven't done that. If I go for a
| walk in a public space, I have to expect my picture may be
| taken. If I put something on the Internet without
| authentication or other protection, I may retain copyright,
| but it's in the public now. I appreciate that the default
| of the Fediverse is open, but it seems like a lot of people
| would have preferred be not that way not that others are
| using it.
| JanneVee wrote:
| The problem is that I read the author's blog post much
| more charitably than the comment I'm replying too. For me
| it is not overly sensitive. He used mastodon for other
| things than bring attention to themself, that is the
| currency of things what we colloquially name "social
| media". So when people brought that attention to them
| which is the norm on "social media" thinking they will
| appreciate it, but alas the currency on mastodon is not
| attention. The whole blog post is a lament on the change
| of currency. It is not solved with a technology like a
| privacy settings since it is a cultural shift.
| eddieroger wrote:
| Fair point that I hadn't considered - currency. Twitter
| definitely encouraged things that aren't sought after on
| Mastodon, some of which I hope don't move over, for what
| it's worth. They can lament it, of course, and mourn it
| even, but it isn't fair to tell new people how to use
| something because "it's always been used this way," which
| is partially why the Fediverse was built in the first
| place.
| JanneVee wrote:
| Part of the post is resignation to the fact that the
| culture shift is permanent. That is the whole connotation
| "Eternal September" you can't tell the new users how to
| "Mastodon" to protect the old culture.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Was it a link? The text read to me as if it was a screenshot,
| but I don't actually know.
| jefftk wrote:
| I read it as both, one person doing each: _Early this week, I
| realised that some people had cross-posted my Mastodon post
| into Twitter. Someone else had posted a screenshot of it on
| Twitter._
|
| I understand being unhappy about screenshot sharing, but my
| read is that even if only the link sharing piece had happened
| they would still be upset?
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Ah, it does sound that way. At any rate, we agree that it
| would be pretty silly to be angry about a URL being
| broadcast, but a screenshot is another matter.
|
| It really is a pity that the general public doesn't
| understand the difference today (or know what a URL is).
| saurik wrote:
| Pasting around screenshots of content posts back/forth
| across different social networks is not only extremely
| common it isn't even clear to me why it is a bad thing...
| unless you are a particularly intense zealot about
| copyright, of course :/.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Seems like being 'big mad' about this is a total
| misunderstanding of the social norms around social
| network usage. You can certainly be it, but it's not
| productive, it impacts your health and changes nothing
| about the public perception of your issue (ie 'everyone
| does this all the time, wtf is your problem') or the
| behavior.
|
| As in "Anything you do where anyone can sense you might
| be broadcast further than you thought. So either shut-up
| and shut-in or get used to it."
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Remind me not to friend you :-)
|
| Joking aside, I didn't read OP as "big mad" about this.
| Just a little wistful. And possibly glad to have good
| subject matter for a public blog post...
| foobarbecue wrote:
| True in most cases, but it can be a pretty serious
| violation of privacy.
|
| For example, let's say you post pictures of your family
| with your children on Facebook, intending to share to
| friends, and then someone screenshots that and re-posts
| publicly.
|
| I've never tried a public-by-default social network like
| Twitter or Instagram. I'd be quite annoyed if one of my
| Facebook friends took one of my posts and published it to
| the whole internet. I realize it's something that can
| happen, but it would feel like a violation of trust.
|
| I also think that being able to maintain semi-private
| spaces on the internet makes it a safer place.
| [deleted]
| nineteen999 wrote:
| I don't see Mastodon becoming the next Twitter. It has a
| marketing problem. Whereas on Twitter one "tweets", what does one
| do on Mastodon, "masticate"?
|
| I predict a temporary influx of new users, which will leave once
| they realise that Mastodon is full of shrill geeks. In the
| interim the shrill geeks will moan that their beloved platform
| has become overrun with "normies".
|
| I don't use either so have no skin in this game, happy to be
| proven wrong. Sitting back with a very small bag of popcorn until
| all the noise blows over.
| Crespyl wrote:
| > what does one do on Mastodon
|
| toot
| barbazoo wrote:
| https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/posting/
|
| You "toot".
| tinalumfoil wrote:
| > Twitter encourages a very extractive attitude from everyone it
| touches.
|
| Twitter gives people the means to express the attitude they
| already have. "Influencer Culture" didn't start or end on
| Twitter.
|
| I've been on Mastadon for about a year now, on a small instance
| that's not accepting new users, and my experience has been great
| and hasn't changed. If you want to be inclusive and accepting of
| new users that's great, but that also means accepting their ideas
| and who they are.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| A ,, traumatic ,, experience, that some people posted a
| screenshot of his post on twitter.
|
| I think you lost me there.
|
| Best part was on the end: ,,All content (c) Hugh Rundle except as
| noted in Acknowledgements. Text licensed CC-BY 4.0."
|
| That made me laugh.
| ignaloidas wrote:
| The amount of users joining the network daily already started to
| drop. I see no Eternal September actually happening if the trend
| continues. I'd give a week for that.
| coldacid wrote:
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Oh great, the whole GNU/Linux argument all over again.
| coldacid wrote:
| Sorry not sorry. I felt that it was just too funny to not
| make this joke.
| [deleted]
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| Unpopular, there will be that "one" server, offering the same
| services twitter does, where everyone flocks to, breaking the
| concept of the federated servers, because the audience wants one
| public plaza.
| s3000 wrote:
| If Twitter had prepared an ActivityPub bridge and would
| activate it tomorrow, would Twitter remain the dominant player?
| Could they even expand their network to rival Youtube and
| Facebook?
| blowski wrote:
| Are you telling me that's an unpopular opinion? If so, I'm
| downvoting because I always downvote people who "predict" the
| popularity of their comment.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| Its unpopular in the "going against the narrative of
| dezentralisation that spawned the platform" way, as its human
| nature to have social places to gossip like a village plaza,
| church or in this case, many servers. Likely outcome is thus,
| one official battlefield of opinion, and some smaller echo
| chamber servers depending on political leanings.
| blowski wrote:
| I'm not interested in your assertion of the popularity of
| that opinion, though. If you have data to _show_ it's
| unpopular, that would be interesting. Otherwise, let your
| opinion stand by itself, allowing other people comment and
| vote on it.
| Karsteski wrote:
| Honestly same, I do not understand why people start their
| comments like that... Just say what you have to say
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| Because it filters out a large part of the federation
| concept defending noise, if you state this. It prevents
| decentralization vs centralization discussions, which
| always results in developers missunderstanding
| "centralization of a social organism" like the state or
| society, as a externally forced upon evil instead of a
| choice by the majority. If that concept were really even
| contemplated, it would be discussed constructively, as in
| "how can we integrate moderation and distribution of costs
| and labour for a service provided by the public for the
| public".
| blowski wrote:
| I want to understand what you wrote there, but I honestly
| have no idea what you mean. I can't even work out whether
| you're addressing the Mastodon issue, or trying to
| justify writing "unpopular".
| natch wrote:
| You literally started your comment with "honestly"...
|
| Just say what you have to say, indeed.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| Honestly I don't think mastodon will ever grow. The vast majority
| of Twitter users don't even know what it is. And those moving
| will eventually begin to fall behind and miss out on what's
| happening and ever silly end up on both platforms or just
| gravitate back to Twitter.
|
| 95% of those I follow are tech and prob about 10 are on mastodon
| and Twitter and no ones really talking about it.
|
| The average user who is following a bunch of celebrities isn't
| going to move because 1 celebrity moved. They prob won't even
| notice the celeb moved.
| _ph_ wrote:
| This depends on several factors. First of all, whether there is
| a Twitter in a few months. Elon might have fired too many
| people responsible for critical parts of the system, there
| might be a technical collapse.
|
| Even if not, we will have to see how the dynamics of Twitter
| evolve. Yes, if Twitter can survive on people following
| celebrities, then it might survive anyway. But currently,
| Twitter is seen as a reputable place to be for all kind of
| organizations. Media, the government, sports teams. Everyone is
| on Twitter. I am trying not to judge Elons ideas at the current
| state of things, but trust is difficult to obtain, but easy to
| lose.
|
| Currently, we do see quite a trend for "tech" people to at
| least also use Mastodon if not outright to migrate. This is
| quite an important user group. We will see, how many others
| might follow.
| berkes wrote:
| It has grown beyond six million users. How is that "will [not]
| ever grow"?
|
| Mastodon doesn't need to follow the "rules" of big tech, or
| corporations. Mastodon is a success the moment two people can
| successfully communicate with it. Or six million. Nothing else
| matters. There's no difference.
|
| There are no shareholders that want to see increasing MAUs.
| There are no investors that want to exit and therefore insist
| on ballooning the numbers. There are no employees that will
| loose their jobs when growth lags, nor advertisers that want to
| get ever more eyeballs else they leave for [other corp].
|
| It really doesn't matter what any of those fictional "average
| users" does: whether they follow, stay, go back, whatever: as
| long as the people using mastodon _now_ have a good time, and
| get value _today_ , its a huge success. There honestly isn't
| anything else needed.
| fleddr wrote:
| Mastodon will not be the next Twitter, for many reasons.
|
| It doesn't scale. A influx of some tens of thousands of users
| already breaks half the fediverse. Absorbing this relatively
| small growth means an instance owner has to reach deeply into
| their pocket to pay for extra hardware capacity. And sees their
| manual moderation workload explode. In between this scaling, the
| system will simply be dysfunctional or locked down. It all runs
| on donations and volunteer work.
|
| This is much different from Twitter where as a user you're never
| confronted with scaling or funding problems. Nor would you easily
| face the situation that all your content is wiped out because the
| instance owner retired. Or because a mod doesn't like you.
| Because moderation is completely arbitrary, Reddit-style. An
| instance owner may also decide to not federate with specific
| other servers that you liked, destroying your cross-instance
| posting and following.
|
| You could scale by making lots of instances, but people need to
| actually fund and run them. And it makes all of the above issues
| even worse.
|
| The culture clash is perhaps most interesting to see, as the
| author correctly lays out. The author uses the word "traumatic"
| when confronted with an abundance of follow requests.
|
| That sentence succinctly summarizes the typical culture. The fact
| that it's a request, requiring permission. And a type of extreme
| fragility that is opposite to Twitter's culture.
|
| Although policies vary between instances, most are designed for
| safety to the point that conversation becomes dysfunctional. One
| large instance stated to not post food, insects, and a whole list
| of highly generic items without a content warning (CW). Because
| apparently, somebody might be triggered by those. A user
| questioning this policy was soon circled and explained that it
| only takes seconds to do, whilst the "trauma" lasts for days.
|
| Extreme safety leading to unsafety in expressing the simplest of
| sentences. It's a clash of two extremes. Extreme toxicity and
| extreme fragility.
|
| The other limiting factor is the rejection of America's culture
| war. Don't be political or overly political, and especially not
| regarding the topics dominating US politics. Here the mismatch
| cannot be larger. Twitter basically IS the US culture war as of
| 2016 when Trumpism brought Twitter back from a coma. Twitter
| users have been exposed to this extreme polarization for 6 years,
| they've internalized and normalized it. And now they're asked to
| shut up about it and to not cause any stirs.
|
| The result, a perfectly happy and peaceful place is disturbingly
| unsatisfactory, I care to admit. Nothing happens. There's no
| enemy to bash, no drama, nothing to be outraged about. It's like
| watching the news where the reporter says: all is good today,
| carry on. Or watching a movie where nothing happens to any
| character.
|
| How many online "friendships" and communities survive without a
| common enemy? And if it survives, why use Mastodon, when you
| might as well open a Reddit community or Discord server?
| foul wrote:
| Eternal september is a problem if you depend from someone else
| for your fediverse instance. If you rely on your own server, you
| have an atom button for blocking traffic from selected instances
| at least at firewall level. It is not usenet or "social network
| du jour" anymore if you put some effort or cash. A decentralized
| cyber environment is hard for building stardom status and for
| making money, if you have both of those probably it has no effect
| be it positive or negative.
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| the people fleeing twitter over Musk's dedication to the freedom
| of speech will find themselves at home at mastadon, where
| problematic instances are defederated from - sometimes for as
| little as refusing to ban a particular problematic individual,
| and where developers are bullied into blacklisting those in their
| apps.
|
| even late pre-Musk twitter was far more tolerant than mastadon.
| for example, any instance hosting the harry potter lady would get
| defederated from by 90% of the network, I guarantee you that.
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| If it gained traction amongst the "general public" such niche
| ban reasons would probbaly become less common. And neutral
| federations would automatically emerge because at some point
| not every instance will bother to ban other random instances.
| easrng wrote:
| Refusing to ban queerphobic/antisemitic/racist users is by no
| means a niche reason for defederation.
| josteink wrote:
| > any instance hosting the harry potter lady would get
| defederated from by 90% of the network, I guarantee you that.
|
| That sounds crazy. If my instance did that, I would immediately
| consider moving to another, more politically tolerant instance
| or just run my own to traverse the censorship issue entirely.
|
| And the good thing about the fediverse is that a user has those
| options and isn't at mercy of other peoples limited tolerance
| for freedom of speech.
| mike_d wrote:
| > any instance hosting the harry potter lady would get
| defederated from by 90% of the network
|
| If you are getting defederated by 90% of the network, isn't
| that maybe a strong indication that 90% don't want to hear what
| you have to say?
|
| Freedom of speech is a protection against the government
| censoring you. It doesn't mean you get to spread hate and
| toxicity freely without consequence.
| fleddr wrote:
| Let's say that you're right, and that 90% of Mastodon
| instances would want to block the Harry Potter lady. This
| isn't really true, they're pressured into doing this by
| ruthless activists, but let's pretend that the blockage is
| genuine and voluntary.
|
| If that is true, it means Mastodon misaligns with probably
| some 90% of the political spectrum that would absolutely not
| want to take away her speech, regardless of whether people
| agree with her.
|
| Which means...Mastodon is a far-left echo chamber. Which
| doesn't have to be bad, everybody deserves to have their
| place. I'm just saying it's not suitable for mainstream
| usage.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| Wait.. why wouldn't the blocks be genuine and voluntary??
| Instance admins are volunteers, often times literally the
| instance is on their hardware. If they didn't like it they
| can ban activists and defederate from activist instances.
| fleddr wrote:
| Because an instance mod/admin can be socially pressured
| to join a ban party, or else be labeled as "fascist".
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| yea, that's what I'm saying - mastodon is the perfect fit for
| those people, so this is not an Eternal September kind of
| event.
| [deleted]
| paul_funyun wrote:
| No, it indicates only that the administrators of 90% of the
| network don't want others to hear what you have to say. If
| the admins don't want to hear you they'd use the block
| function.
| blowski wrote:
| In which case, somebody will set up an alternative server
| which doesn't block them, and people will move there.
| People who love the free market should _love_ Mastodon.
| paul_funyun wrote:
| That doesn't follow from the fact that admin decisions
| don't reflect the will of the userbase. I'm not a fan of
| my state' laws about fishing licenses, but that doesn't
| mean I'll move to another state. Same for Mastodon users.
|
| I expect clients that combine timelines from alt accounts
| using different servers to become the norm. Users get all
| the benefits, with more ability to opt out. If I've got
| Jim@alt.net on banning-instance, and Mike@tim.com on the
| banned instance, and their timelines are combined client-
| side, it's the best of both worlds.
| easrng wrote:
| If you don't trust and share ideals with your admin you
| are doing it wrong.
| pimterry wrote:
| > even late pre-Musk twitter was far more tolerant than
| mastadon. for example, any instance hosting the harry potter
| lady would get defederated from by 90% of the network, I
| guarantee you that.
|
| As a user of the network in general though, this doesn't have
| to matter to you. You can sign up on an instance that
| defederates according to whichever rules you like (or on an
| instance that defederates nobody at all). You can still talk to
| the rest of the network just fine, in addition to talking to
| anybody other instances want to defederate. There's no silo,
| you don't have to pick a side.
|
| You can even self-host your own single-user instance (or rent
| one, from e.g. https://masto.host/, although they've closed
| signups due to demand right now) and control federation
| directly. With that, the only people you won't be able to talk
| to are people & instances that decide to block you
| _personally_.
| tomlockwood wrote:
| > Musk's dedication to the freedom of speech
|
| In his first letter to staff he said they need to focus on
| "banning trolls". Oof ow.
| janmarsal wrote:
| wishful thinking
| bhoops wrote:
| Mastodon could go either way, but i think as an experiment its
| sufficiently differentiated to warrant a rethink on how social
| media should be. Only a couple of years back Mastodon UX was too
| poor to be usable, but it has grown leaps and bounds now.
|
| Mastodon might not be the next twitter, but maybe it has already
| succeeded as a refuge for people not wanting to be on twitter.
| The bigger problem mastodon has is that its servers are running
| full to take on new people.
|
| We have been running a few instances of mastodon which now have
| more space for new users. Link in my bio if anyone wants to use
| them, but might run out anytime.
| robin_reala wrote:
| It's worth checking if your instance accepts donations to
| defray running costs. E.g. mastodon.social gets funding from
| the Mastodon Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mastodon
| Shoue wrote:
| There are also interesting instances like social.coop that
| are run like a cooperative - you join and are expected to
| donate monthly, as little as $1, and in return you get
| democratic control over the instance. It can be a cool
| incentive to "donate"/invest in the instance.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > Only a couple of years back Mastodon UX was too poor to be
| usable, but it has grown leaps and bounds now.
|
| I see strong parallels between this and blender when I was
| active in the community around a decade ago.
|
| Everyone nowadays takes blender seriously as a contender in
| that market now so keep the faith, peeps.
| blowski wrote:
| Twitter's model is between an individual and their followers,
| which is bad for organisations because the individual leaves and
| takes the followers with them.
|
| Mastodon allows companies to own those relationships on their
| server.
|
| For example, I can have the BBC Mastodon server, and all the
| accounts are @bbc. If the employee leaves, they lose the account.
| The BBC can do their own moderation, but still be connected.
| Smaller organisations can do to the same for customer support.
| They can own the advertising and the UI. And if Mastodon goes
| weird, they can take their URL with them. They can add their own
| plugins rather than being dependent on the API.
|
| I think this is a big reason why Mastodon is getting attention,
| rather than simply being an alternative place for cool kids to
| hang out.
| ekidd wrote:
| > _If the employee leaves, they lose the account._
|
| The Mastodon software actually allows moving an account between
| instances fairly easily, though it requires cooperation from
| both the source and the dest instance. When you move an
| account, you keep all your followers and everyone you follow.
| But your old posts stay on your old server.
|
| I do agree that it probably makes sense for big organizations
| to have official instances, however.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| This is exactly why people love twitter. They care about
| individuals, not organizations. Individuals tweet, and usually
| are not paid to tweet. (Nor would any organization want to be
| associated with any fleeting thought that an employee has.) And
| what's fun about twitter is precisely that it's a neutral
| ground where everyone, from every organization, dukes it out.
|
| Of course, this model is possible in the fediverse as well,
| just as it's possible with email. (And note that many people
| prefer a gmail address to one that they'll lose when they get
| fired.)
| vvillena wrote:
| > Individuals tweet, and usually are not paid to tweet.
|
| Tweeter is the poster child of personal branding. A near
| totality of the high-visibility posts are transactional in
| nature. The posts are either crafted by PR people, meaning
| someone got literally paid to tweet, or are done personally
| with the aim of increasing personal branding or as part of a
| contract.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| That's only mostly true for the high follower accounts.
|
| Which is why some folks, including me, keep their account
| at a purposefully low follower count by tweeting dry
| unengaging stuff as well.
|
| And avoiding all topics, such as political discussions,
| where there are incentives to virtue signal.
| blowski wrote:
| > This is exactly why people love twitter. They care about
| individuals, not organizations.
|
| Sweeping generalisation. Some people care about some
| individuals more than the organisation to which they belong.
| Think Trump funs who would vote for Trump whichever party he
| stood for, or Tucker Carlson fans who would watch him on any
| network, or Tom Brady fans who would follow him whichever
| team he played for.
|
| But for every Trump, Carlson or Brady, there's a 1000 Liz
| Trusses or Huw Edwards, in whom most interest is solely
| because of the organisation to which they belong.
|
| And there's no reason an individual can't have both an
| organisation account and a personal one. Even aggregate
| accounts which pull everything together. Mastodon offers a
| lot of opportunities to do things differently.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| The federation aspect is the most interesting to me and has the
| most potential but it also the least important to most users.
| So much so because moderation issues, computing power and
| maintenance and simple powerful network effects all point to
| centralisation.
|
| That's what we are seeing, people are choosing one thing not a
| federation of things.
|
| There needs to be some reason and big benefit that people get
| for choosing federation. The only thing I can see would be if
| there's some kind of major and controversial moderation
| defederation event (e.g. a cancel culture controversy) but very
| soon before people get entrenched in their patterns and can see
| why federations are useful.
|
| Possibly then, having instances run by media organisations
| might actually show the difference in moderations in the
| fediverse.
| blowski wrote:
| Sure, people have been choosing that approach for the last 10
| years. But there's no law baked into the universe that says
| it will be ever thus.
| ignaloidas wrote:
| Out of the things you listed, moderation is for sure one that
| gets harder to deal with the more centralized the network
| becomes. All large instances have comparatively bad
| moderation, and that's a fairly well known fact among the
| older users.
|
| For what it's worth, moderation is the best thing about
| fediverse. So many communities that have grown up there over
| the years couldn't have done it without decentralized
| moderation.
|
| And it's not like there hasn't been a "some kind of major and
| controversial moderation defederation event" - there have
| been several. There are several collections of instances that
| are fairly closed off from the wider network. And honestly,
| that's fine. If some people get tired of others shit, they
| should be able to close themselves off from them.
|
| The simple fact that a single administrator can moderate an
| instance of about 100 active people in their free time is
| what allows the moderation in fediverse to scale. Adding more
| people makes it a job, and from what I've read from
| professional moderators of social networks, that job is not a
| nice one.
| telmo wrote:
| I love the idea of Mastodon and I would love for things like
| that to take us back to the less centralized and less corporate
| internet of before, but I am pessimistic that it will happen
| anytime soon.
|
| The real reason why people are "migrating" to Mastodon right
| now (and can't seem to stop talking about it on Twitter) is one
| and one only: to signal their tribal affiliation. Twitter used
| to be controlled by the blue tribe and now it was bought by a
| member of the red tribe. That is all that is happening. Nothing
| more, nothing less.
|
| I don't know if Elon Musk will destroy Twitter or if it won't
| matter in the long term. I suspect the latter, but I'm close to
| 50/50 on that. What I am sure is that the average Twitter user
| will not actually stay and use Mastodon right now. Most people
| are on Twitter for the audience and/or to follow those with
| large audiences, and Mastodon does not have that not will it in
| the near future (which makes it sound like a really nice place
| to hang out now that I mention it :)
|
| I would also point out that, in my experience, internet
| communities are great until they get noticed by the mainstream.
| Once they become mainstream, they attract huge masses of users
| that want to fight for their political tribe with high
| hostility / low creativity content, and the eye of Sauron
| (politicians in general) falls upon it, and opinion piece
| writers start fanning the flames of moral panics, and the good
| times are over.
| ignaloidas wrote:
| Oh, these tribal migrations have happened before. Most people
| indeed leave, but some do actually find that they like it
| more each time such a wave happens.
|
| Fediverse is in the best sense of the word, weird. You have
| to embrace the weirdness to understand it. Not everyone can,
| or will. It would take a lot of time for that weirdness to be
| ironed out so that most people would be comfortable using it,
| but I don't think many in the community developing it are
| interested in that.
| telmo wrote:
| I agree. I like the weirdness, and I don't think it can
| survive mainstreaming. Mainstreaming always means
| blandness.
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| To be honest though, I've been in many weird enough places
| on Twitter that I can confidently say that Mastodon is
| really dull, quiet, and less diverse compared to there.
| ignaloidas wrote:
| Did you come to Mastodon over the last couple weeks?
| Because a lot of the signal from the more interesting
| parts of fedi got lost over the twitter newcomers yelling
| how it is much better.
|
| And like, from people I follow, most of the more
| interesting ones aren't even using Mastodon, but rather
| Pleroma, Miskkey, or some forks of those. It's a diverse
| network, not only in types of people, but also in types
| of software. I would suggest you explore it more after a
| month or so, after this twitter wave blows over and dies
| off once again, as there's certainly some very nice
| communities out there.
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| No, I toured some servers around three years ago... and
| ultimately there wasn't really anyone who I was
| interested in. Unlike Twitter, which I have seen all
| kinds of interesting people and interesting discussions.
| (Maybe it's because Mastodon is a bit too much slanted in
| the tech space, and I really want to have some distance
| from it since I pretty much already fill all of my tech
| discussion quota here.)
| r00fus wrote:
| > Twitter used to be controlled by the blue tribe and now it
| was bought by a member of the red tribe.
|
| This is so reductionist. Elon advocating for team red is one
| thing, him introducing a rootkit into Twitter
| (blue/verification without any actual validation of identity)
| and laying off half the employees to defray Twitter's
| leveraged buyout fees incurred by the buyout is yet another.
|
| People are leaving because they're losing confidence he has a
| plan that isn't lighting the place on fire. In fact, DMs
| between Jack and Elon indicate that was entirely the plan -
| to promote Jack's BlueSky venture.
| pfraze wrote:
| > In fact, DMs between Jack and Elon indicate that was
| entirely the plan - to promote Jack's BlueSky venture.
|
| That's not the impression I got from those texts.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| > The real reason why people are "migrating" to Mastodon
| right now (and can't seem to stop talking about it on
| Twitter) is one and one only: to signal their tribal
| affiliation.
|
| Having a Twitter account is largely also about this. There is
| a "Twitter Tribe", and people feel it deeply as part of their
| identity. This is why there is so much emotion around the
| Musk acquisition.
| telmo wrote:
| Tying one's personal identity to a private company that can
| be bought and sold always ends in heartache...
| blowski wrote:
| > The real reason why people are "migrating" to Mastodon
| right now is one and one only: to signal their tribal
| affiliation
|
| That's an assertion. I've moved because I genuinely want to
| own my network and not get suddenly blocked, losing access to
| everything. And I've moved because I want to encourage others
| to move. If everybody else moves, then it becomes easier for
| me to remain moved, and thus promoting it on Twitter is
| entirely consistent with that goal.
| telmo wrote:
| Allow me to propose to you the following thought
| experiment: had Elon Musk not bought Twitter, what do you
| figure would be the probability that mainstream media would
| be talking about Mastodon right now?
| blowski wrote:
| Fairly low, I agree with you. And the chances of me
| having set up my own Mastodon account would also be
| fairly low.
|
| But that's not to say that my reasoning is to signal
| tribal affiliation.
|
| I haven't moved before because I didn't know anyone on
| Mastodon. I now know quite a few, so moving is more
| valuable. It could be the network effect happening in
| reverse, and that's interesting for the media to report
| on.
| blitzar wrote:
| Half formed thought ... however.
|
| I am more than just my job (or hobby, or location) - say I am a
| worker and have my @work, and I am deep into digital art so I
| am also on @mastodon.art.
|
| I _should_ really only talk with my work hat on @work and my
| art hat on @mastodon.art - should these be able to be
| optionally linked. Should the follwers of me @work also see my
| @hobby etc without having to follow me all over the federated
| universe?
|
| Movie star X on twitter will promote their new movie, talk
| about their kids, pump and dump crypto, slag off a politician,
| rip the latest death etc. All one the same 'instance' or
| server.
| blowski wrote:
| Maybe both? With a meta account that aggregates from all your
| other accounts.
|
| If the BBC are giving you a megaphone, it's useful that they
| can take away that megaphone when you leave. You can always
| choose to speak without the megaphone.
| paulgb wrote:
| I agree that this is an eventuality, but is anyone actually
| doing it yet? Everyone I've known who has migrated has either
| been to community-run or self-hosted instances, and I haven't
| encountered any corporate or university domains when lurking
| around.
| blowski wrote:
| No, I haven't seen anyone doing it yet. I might just be
| voicing some wishful thoughts.
| tpm wrote:
| One often mentioned example is the EU.
| https://social.network.europa.eu/about/more
|
| One swallow does not make the summer though, as we say in our
| country, so we'll se if there will be more.
|
| Edit: there is also on for the German Federal Government.
| https://social.bund.de/about
| xg15 wrote:
| > _One often mentioned example is the EU._
|
| From one toot in the timeline:
|
| > _Our Director and Head of Translation Department paid a
| visit to @EMSA_EU@twitter.com_
|
| ...wait a minute, which instance is that? :)
|
| But seriously, it's amazing to see institutions and
| official account getting on the Fediverse!
| nirimda wrote:
| I think the main issue a media company like the BBC has with
| moderation, is that they want to discourage harassment of their
| employees. I understand it can be particular bad for women and
| minority journalists, because some people will make sexualised
| or sexists and racist comments in response to an article the
| truth of which they cannot contest, but the existence of which
| they abhor - in order to discourage such journalists from
| writing on this topic.
|
| Does the federated model deal with that? I understood that the
| owner of an instance can moderate any posts that come from that
| instance, whereas the only moderation you can do of external
| instances is to ignore the whole thing. That would mean a BBC
| journalist could neither hear legitimate criticism from
| positive participants, nor harassment from negative
| participants. And anyone on that second host would continue to
| see the harassment, and it might simply have its chilling
| effect on the next generation.
|
| I think the interest of journalism companies in having their
| own instance would only be met if they could moderate replies
| and mentions no matter where they're from. In such a world,
| perhaps the user could say, "Please ignore moderation from
| these instances" - so that you could continue to see a post on
| a third-party instance excluded by the BBC if you didn't trust
| their moderation.
|
| Alternatively, they would only want to have two-way federation
| with trusted third parties, who they could trust to moderate
| extensively. It would end up the way some people say today,
| "You can't run your own email server" because Google and
| Microsoft tend to look askance at any email not sent from the
| servers of one of them. (If the trusted third party instances
| allow federation, it might be much more interactive than email
| is.)
|
| A final possibility would be that the BBC and other major
| content producers would treat Mastodon as "write-only", in much
| the same way that Reddit links to content and people discuss
| it, but generally the major media companies ignore it.
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| A company like the BBC can post content to their own website
| completely under their own control. They can build their own
| platform that completely controls commenting. They can pay a
| large staff to build and maintain that platform exactly as
| they see fit. So why do they need Twitter?
|
| Seriously, what is the value of Twitter for them? It isn't
| the same as for the masses who need somebody else to build
| and maintain all that infrastructure. For entities capable of
| running their own networks, Twitter and TikTok and all the
| other "social media" serve a different function. Indeed, when
| you are not only capable of running your own datacenters but
| actually do run them and operate your own media network, but
| still include Instagram as a core component of your business
| strategy, it is because it provides a value you aren't
| realizing from everything within your own datacenter.
| nirimda wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand the way your post relates to
| mine. Are you genuinely asking why BBC needs Twitter and
| Instagram? The last sentence makes it sound like you have
| your own hypothesis but you're withholding it. In any case,
| I disclaim any notion that "need" is a relevant verb here.
| They want to be on these platforms, and their readers want
| to be on these platforms, and there's no doubt some
| interrelation between their desire and their readers'
| desire. I don't think any organisation is ever fully
| rational, even an organisation the size of the BBC. On the
| other hand, I think the journalists themselves provide a
| lot of pressure for themselves to be on these platforms.
| Ultimately they're where it seems to make sense to be. It
| would harder to not be where the eyeballs are, than it is
| to be there. It's like the old saying - no one was ever
| fired for choosing IBM.
| blowski wrote:
| > I think the main issue a media company like the BBC has
| with moderation, is that they want to discourage harassment
| of their employees
|
| That's certainly one issue, but there are many others. Owning
| your own Mastodon server should make it easier to find a
| solution compared to having to use Twitter's tools.
|
| > It would end up the way some people say today, "You can't
| run your own email server" because Google and Microsoft
|
| There are more trusted email servers than just those two.
| Fastmail, Apple, Yahoo all come to mind. Albeit that's not
| the perfectly distributed model, I would rather an oligopoly
| like that than just Twitter.
|
| Highlighting ways in which Mastodon is not utopia isn't a
| valid reason to stick with what we've got.
| nirimda wrote:
| My comment was not highlighting ways in which Mastodon
| isn't a utopia and it certainly wasn't an argument to stick
| with what we've got. It is dismaying to think someone might
| have read it that way. I was trying to make some
| constructive criticism and analysing possible usecases and
| possible consequences, while very clearly requesting more
| information about whether the possible usecases are
| fulfilled yet or not.
|
| > There are more trusted email servers than just those two.
| Fastmail, Apple, Yahoo all come to mind.
|
| My comment completely survives this pedantry. In fact, I
| can hardly think of any way whatsoever that such pedantry
| weakens my argument in any degree, or could be thought to
| speak to any of my concerns.
| ekidd wrote:
| > _Does the federated model deal with that? I understood that
| the owner of an instance can moderate any posts that come
| from that instance, whereas the only moderation you can do of
| external instances is to ignore the whole thing._
|
| Mastodon has a lot of tools for muting and ignoring, both at
| the account and at the instance level. Here are the admin-
| level tools: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/
|
| Right now, it looks like admins can "suspend" or "silence"
| external instances as a whole, but not individual users.
| "Silence" is interesting, because it's essentially a "soft
| ban": Users from that server will only appear to local users
| who follow them, if understand correctly. It's essentially,
| "Mostly we don't want to hear from
| @wretchedhiveofscumandvillany.example.com, but some of our
| users want to follow specific people from there, and that's
| cool."
|
| > _Alternatively, they would only want to have two-way
| federation with trusted third parties, who they could trust
| to moderate extensively._
|
| This is already true to a certain extent. It appears that
| instances that won't moderate especially abusive users may
| gradually be defederated from other servers (or at least
| silenced). And of course, individual users can also ignore
| entire instances.
| nirimda wrote:
| Thanks; the tools are more extensive than I had understood.
| Silence, as you note, is very useful. The tools that are
| provided should allow them to protect their employees' to
| about the extent that they are protected on Twitter, while
| allowing about the same degree of interaction that
| available on Twitter. It seems that the main issue that is
| missing is third party moderation, to allow third parties
| on other instances to opt into their moderation without
| actually having accounts on their instances. To the extent
| that users can be trusted to sign up on decent instances,
| it's probably no worse off than current. Whether the media
| companies see it that way, of course, is a different
| question.
| asdff wrote:
| It's no different than email, though? If you sign off all your
| blog posts with your BBC email address, and you leave BBC and
| no longer have email access and can no longer log into your
| blog or wherever else you have grown dependent on that address
| for, then you are rightly an idiot for putting all these eggs
| in a basket you don't own. No one says we have to reengineer
| the email protocol, they just say to have an email address you
| control.
| perlgeek wrote:
| y'know, this would be _the_ opportunity for Google to gain some
| clout in the social network world.
|
| Start up a hosted mastodon instance, make a bit of fuzz and PR
| around it, and then over time invest some resources into making
| it more awesome. All for relatively little effort, compared to
| starting a new social network from scratch. The largest effort
| would likely go into moderation on that instance.
|
| Who else could do that? Maybe New York Times? Apple? It needs to
| be someone with an established brand, and the engineering skills
| to run it at scale.
|
| (Disclaimer: not my own idea, heard it somewhere else -- maybe on
| risky.biz?)
| dmitriid wrote:
| Google bought Orkut. Shut it down
|
| Google had Google Wave. Shut it down
|
| Google had Google Plus. Shut it down.
|
| ...
|
| If Google unveiled a Mastodon instance tomorrow, why would
| people believe that Google had any interest in developing and
| _maintaining_ a social network
| blowski wrote:
| Indeed, this sounds like the very definition of "out of the
| frying pan into the fire".
| jefftk wrote:
| It wouldn't be anywhere near that simple:
|
| * If there are security vulnerabilities in Mastodon and Google
| is hosting an instance then Google would be blamed, which means
| they would need to do a very thorough security review before
| hosting one.
|
| * If they announced it and lots of people wanted to join it
| would probably have far more members than the biggest Mastodon
| instances do today, so they would want to make sure they had
| something that could scale horizontally. I don't think the
| current codebase can do that?
|
| * There are various places where the current design of Mastodon
| doesn't match user expectations around privacy and control over
| their content. For example, if you delete something it looks to
| you like it's deleted but that delete may not fully propagate.
| By hosting a server Google would be taking responsibility for
| this, and would have people mad at them (likely with lawsuits)
| when it didn't do what they expected.
|
| This isn't to say that Google would never get into the
| federated social network space, but it would be after building
| their own activity pub implementation.
|
| (Disclosure: I used to work at Google)
| emptyparadise wrote:
| I remember what Google did to XMPP with Google Talk.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-11-10 23:02 UTC)