[HN Gopher] Tech journalism doesn't know what to do with Mastodon
___________________________________________________________________
Tech journalism doesn't know what to do with Mastodon
Author : doener
Score : 211 points
Date : 2022-12-25 13:23 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (worldhistory.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (worldhistory.medium.com)
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Which means no one will end up using mastodon bc largely people
| do whatever the media tells them.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Journalism does several things.
|
| One of those is to inform and report. But in doing so, it almost
| always _tries to fit events into an existing narrative_.[1]
|
| And the existing narrative of the past decade-and-a-half of
| online systems, _with very few exceptions_ , has been privately-
| owned, for-profit, walled-garden, advertising-supported social
| networks. Mastodon is sufficiently disruptive that "John
| Mastodon" was invented out of whole cloth to match the terrain to
| the existing map:
|
| _Then, the platform removed John Mastodon, the founder of a
| competing social media company named after himself, for posting a
| link to the jet tracker 's Mastodon account._
|
| <https://boingboing.net/2022/12/18/mastodon-users-embrace-col...>
|
| Note the mappings:
|
| - "John Mastodon" is created as a figurehead.
|
| - And as a "founder" ...
|
| - Of a "competing social media company" (itself three sub-
| mappings)
|
| I can understand _how_ someone doing a sloppy hot-take could make
| those errors. But it also speaks to _not having the narrative
| language to comprehend the reality_. We don 't understand what we
| don't have language for, "I'll see it when I believe it" also
| becomes "I'll see it when I understand it". That this afflicts
| _those we rely on to tell the story_ is all the more problematic.
|
| (Camouflage works on a similar basis:
| <https://polination.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/animal-
| camo-l...>)
|
| I saw Newitz's comment and immediately replied (without checking
| the thread):
|
| _By "impossible to use", what they of course mean is "impossible
| to use to monopolize, monetize, and commit massive fraud with"._
|
| <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/109560464904178130>
|
| ... and quickly realised I was being anything but original on the
| thread.
|
| I've been in the tech orbit long enough to have seen multiple
| cycles of "tech is hard and can't be easily communicated", dating
| to the Apple II and Commodore Pet systems. By the mid-1980s, I
| was using uni campus Unix servers to write papers (formatted in
| nroff!!!) and communicate with my LDR grilf via email and talk(1)
| over a 56k leased-line network.
|
| I've seen mainframes, minis, PCs, the Internet, email, Usenet,
| FTP, the Web, Unix, Linux, mobile phones, smartphones, Twittr,
| and His Noodliness Knows What Else described as some esoteric
| geek-infused arcana up until the point it isn't.
|
| Two particular memories are of seeing a URL on a can of shaving
| creme ~1997, and of being in a bookstore (remember those) circa
| 1999 listing to a mother and young daughter talking about a new
| friend she'd met with her mother asking if they'd exchanged email
| addresses. Both were spillovers of my tech world into meatspace.
|
| Twitter ... has long been niche, relatively little-used, and
| fairly misunderstood itself. Searching phrases such as "I don't
| understand twitter" reveals many thousands of results. Facebook
| itself was largely niche until about 2010. Where both _did_
| become significantly adopted _wasn 't_ through argument, and
| probably benefitted relatively little from onboarding, but _when
| they became where the conversation or interaction was, and people
| and organisations found that that 's where they needed to be_.
| Not necessarily _everyone_ (I 've avoided both), but _a large and
| dominant fraction of online discourse_.
|
| _If_ Mastodon and the Fediverse become widely adopted, _then_ it
| will be due to similar dynamics.
|
| And journalists will likely have found their narrative by that
| point.
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. A great book detailing this is Edward Jay Epstein's _News from
| Nowhere_. It discusses the production of television news circa
| 1974, though much of the journalistic element applies to other
| media as well (including voice and video over the Internet).
| <https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret00epst>
| <http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=14C940300F3D0EA68652013E...>
| shortformblog wrote:
| As a journalist who often writes about tech and has found the
| transition to Mastodon pretty fulfilling, let me just say that I
| didn't realize how much of a problem this was until a fellow
| writer reached out to me about how to get set up over there, I
| offered to help, they posted twice, didn't appear to read any of
| my advice on where to start or who to follow, then ... completely
| dunked on the network.
|
| I am convinced that some journalists are using the wrong signals
| to decide whether a social network is good. It's not the
| onboarding, it's how the experience goes a month, or even a year,
| in. But tech companies are focused on building the userbase which
| means they're figuring out the infrastructure after the fact.
| Because the fediverse is open and has figured out this part,
| onboarding isn't as much a priority, when in reality it's the
| final coat of paint, the thing house flippers use to distract
| from the poor foundation.
|
| That has me convinced that there needs to be folks actually
| writing about this space in earnest as a phenomenon, because
| they're not getting it from their usual sources. I'm working on
| this now. If anyone here has thoughts on what that should look
| like, I'd love to hear.
| PixyMisa wrote:
| That's like telling someone that Dragon Ball Z gets good around
| episode 100.
|
| Maybe it's even true, but it doesn't matter.
| newsclues wrote:
| "It's not the onboarding, it's how the experience goes a month,
| or even a year, in."
|
| As a techie person, that makes sense, but as a normal user, if
| the onboarding isn't simple and easy enough, users won't make
| it to a month or year of using the service.
|
| If Mastadon is too complex to attract critical mass of users to
| achieve a competitive network effect, it will not replace
| Twitter.
| carapace wrote:
| Think about it as a filter: the early adopters are folks who
| are at least smart enough to join a Mastodon server.
|
| (And BTW that's really a low bar. A friend of mine was
| talking the other day about "the pain of switching from
| Twitter to Mastodon" and I had to stop him. You just click
| some buttons and type a bit. You don't even have to get out
| of your chair!? I am always reminded of the Jetsons arguing
| over who is going to push the button to make dinner.
| Anyway...)
|
| > If Mastadon (sic) is too complex to attract critical mass
| of users to achieve a competitive network effect,
|
| I would say it already has attracted critical mass of users,
| eh?
|
| > it will not replace Twitter.
|
| Question the assumption that it should?
| maxbond wrote:
| Mastadon is not a big tent community like Twitter. It's not a
| tech company seeking to attract every user on the planet.
|
| It's a toolkit for building communities. People will join
| because the communities they want to participate in are there
| (which eliminates the supposed dilemma of "which instance
| should I join?" - this is only a problem for people fleeing
| Twitter and looking for safe harbor, not for people
| discovering it organically). They'll stay because it's a good
| toolkit and they want to join more communities.
|
| Or those things won't turn out to be true and it will fade
| away, nothing is guaranteed, but if you judge it based on
| whether it _is Twitter_ , you're missing the value
| proposition.
|
| In my view, having everyone in the same tent is one of the
| mistakes Twitter made; it doesn't need to be replicated. It
| created opportunities for messages intended for a certain
| community at a certain time to be taken out of that context
| and misinterpreted to fuel flamewars. It made it possible for
| there to be this spectacle of the "main character" who was
| ridiculed for day and then tossed aside.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| This.
|
| Facebook's founding premise wasn't easy onboarding. It was
| getting laid at Harvard.
|
| And then getting laid by someone who knew someone at
| Harvard, or another selective-admissions university.
|
| The initial founding cohort was one that engendered _strong
| aspiration_ of others to join that group, though of course,
| in others joining the group, the specific appeal waned. A
| loss in _per node_ value however was offset largely by the
| _network value_ of the group as a whole.
|
| (I've argued that this dynamic of balancing _network value_
| with _network costs_ is key to how social networks grow,
| are limited, and ultimately decline. In particular, each
| new member adds a _variable_ value (not all nodes are
| created equal) but a _fairly uniform_ cost, in the form of
| additional friction, information overload, and the like. A
| large-scale network attacks those costs ruthlessly through
| hygiene functions, including content moderation and the
| like.)
| trenning wrote:
| I also remember when Snapchat purposely obfuscated
| features in the UI and was designed to not cater to the
| "Facebook boomer" audience.
|
| Bad onboarding and complexity was a growth feature.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I think networks like Twitter have created a demand for
| mass-scale socializing though. If that's your reason for
| joining Twitter, then Mastodon isn't the experience
| you're looking for. As others have mentioned, Mastodon is
| oriented around creating communities. But there are many
| tools for creating communities, everything from Discord
| guilds to mailing lists. What the journalist who bounced
| off Mastodon was probably looking for was access to the
| mass socializing on Twitter, not the focused community
| experience of Mastodon.
| shortformblog wrote:
| My point is that Mastodon is being judged for not focusing on
| the easy part.
|
| And I'm convinced that Mastodon does not need to be a Twitter
| replacement to be a success. That is an important distinction
| that we should concede. It just needs to be a vibrant network
| that lots of people like using to succeed.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Onboarding for a federated network is not easy. Answering
| "which server should I set up on" is almost inherently
| difficult and mired in politics. The issue is that advice
| has a centralizing effect. If it becomes common wisdom that
| a given server is the best and everyone joins it, then
| decentralization is over.
|
| This is an issue that neither a centralized service nor a
| pure p2p service has (e.g. Patchbay/SSB).
| fragmede wrote:
| Only if your important metric on which to join is its
| politics. If, instead, your goal is professional, eg
| https://infosec.exchange/ or https://mstdn.science/ for
| microbiology, the choice becomes much clearer.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I don't think they meant big-P Politics in the sense of
| political affiliations, but politics in the sense of
| intra-group and inter-group dynamics.
| concordDance wrote:
| Clicked on the latter link. Found no microbiology, just
| lots of anti-musk and leftist activist commentary.
|
| This might be an example of the Vote phenomena where only
| people quite unhappy with the previous big place leave,
| which means the new place will end up with a very big
| skew...
| friedman23 wrote:
| Building good onboarding is not easy and it's quite tedious
| work. It's also extremely important work that is frequently
| ignored because of how tedious and thankless it is. Why is
| it important? Onboarding is the single place in a product
| that every user is guaranteed to experience at least once.
| Small changes to onboarding can have effects on user
| retention like the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings
| and causing a hurricane.
|
| I'm not surprised an app with no profit motive behind it
| doesn't focus on this kind of work. It's very hard to
| motivate yourself to do it if it's not your job.
| shortformblog wrote:
| But in the scope of an open source project user retention
| is not always the most important thing.
|
| One could argue that pre-2010 Twitter itself is proof
| that not having the slickest onboarding path is not
| something that will prevent success. Onboarding can be
| improved and reinforced over time. Infrastructure is much
| more complex and building it first prevents a fake-it-
| until-you-make-it mindset.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| At the risk of sounding like the snob that I am, isn't that a
| selling point for Mastodon? Keeping the complete morons out
| by making it slightly difficult or requiring a modicum of
| effort is a big plus, as far as I am concerned.
| schuyler2d wrote:
| Onboarding is very important but I think the metaphor to reach
| for is maybe (bad) corporate onboarding:
|
| People will point you in the right direction (if you ask) but
| everyone is busy with something else and if you don't get email
| or your slack account on the first day, you'll have it by the
| time that it matters. You're expected to figure it out because
| you have your own motivations rather than needing to make it
| easy.
|
| I'm very interested how journalists and others bounce off the
| platform. I get the sense that people are looking for some
| "hook" or that people used to 1000s of followers enter
| unenthused to the task of building things up with slightly
| different rules and none of the recruitment/support for
| "influencers".
|
| But it all seems pretty straightforward to me -- boringly so
| almost
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Before you write anything, please understand what Mastodon
| actually is. It is one of many pieces of software which uses
| the ActivityPub protocol to exchange messages between servers.
| There is no "Mastodon network" and using that term is like
| calling the web "the Chrome network" or calling email "the
| Gmail network." - the commonly-accepted term is "the fediverse"
| but you can call it "the ActivityPub network" if that sounds
| too silly. Similarly, trying to explain the experience of
| "using Mastodon" should be like explaining using a web browser;
| it's just a piece of software which can show you almost any
| sort of content, so there's really no singular experience you
| can have.
|
| In these regards, the OP article is yet another example of
| journalism from the last few weeks gushing about and/or bashing
| on "Mastodon" without really understanding what it is and
| conflating it with the underlying network, which existed before
| Mastodon and will probably exist after it.
| shortformblog wrote:
| I've been using it for five years. I know.
| schuyler2d wrote:
| I have news for you -- the public barely understands
| webbrowsers -- mostly not.
|
| Yes, we could take the time to explain that "the Internet"
| isn't just the web -- but you'll just lose your original
| point.
|
| I'd rather accept "Mastodon" as a (maybe temporary) moniker
| while we bootstrap familiarity.
|
| The worst that happens is people ask if something else is
| "compatible with Mastodon" which may end being a good
| baseline anyway if Twitter or another company try an Embrace-
| and-extend move
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I have news for you -- the public barely understands
| webbrowsers -- mostly not.
|
| It's also fine if most of the public doesn't understand
| Mastodon.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| It's fine if the public barely understands web browsers, so
| long as they are not journalists or other people with a
| facade of seriousness and stature writing articles
| explaining how web browsers work and why they're better or
| worse than gopher browsers or whatever.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _It 's not the onboarding, it's how the experience goes a
| month, or even a year, in._
|
| No -- as any product or marketing manager could tell you, it
| _is_ the onboarding.
|
| Using any product is a "funnel" that starts when you open the
| website/app for the first time. Every piece of
| friction/confusion that results in lost users, well it results
| in lost users, period. And that's 100% the fault of the
| onboarding process. It's _never_ the fault of users who won 't
| stick it out for "a month" or "even a year" (!).
|
| And journalists _should_ be reporting on the experience of the
| average user. Sure, they should get the perspective and some
| quotes from die-hard fans as well, but you certainly can 't
| expect a journalist to use a product for a year before writing
| an article about it that needs to be published tomorrow.
| patcon wrote:
| > No -- as any product or marketing manager could tell you,
| it is the onboarding.
|
| Agreed. Onboarding is the main control of the boundary. The
| boundary (whether in a cell, in a community, in a company, in
| a fandom, etc) it controls what is "in" and "out", self and
| non-self.
|
| Onboarding is the cell membrane of community. If you fail to
| onboard effectively, you are a different creature :)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Onboarding is critical where competition is fierce and
| opportunities are limited, and where if you miss one chance
| you're unlikely to have another.
|
| Arguably, the onboarding process for Twitter, Facebook, and
| other social media platforms _is not great_ , but people are
| given so many opportunities (and quite often: coercion) to
| join, that they did so.
|
| Google accomplished this for Google+ by hijacking its extant
| YouTube and Android registration-flow processes to create new
| G+ profiles. A platform with ~20m frequent users and perhaps
| 100--300m who'd _ever_ participated in the platform ...
| boasted over 3 _billion_ profiles. Because every person who
| registered a new Android device --- a _necessary_ if not
| _frictionless_ step in the chain of converting a $50 --
| $1,000 brick to something remotely useful --- was captured by
| the network.
|
| (Many of those devices also had pre-installed, non-removeable
| Facebook and Twitter apps on them.)
|
| Critical mass, market power, and monopoly abuse also play
| critical roles here.
| shortformblog wrote:
| This is a product mindset that's being applied to something
| that is not a product in a traditional sense. That's kind of
| my point here. Mastodon represents a presentation of open
| protocols, and all of the work was put into making sure those
| protocols and the broader network provided a good experience.
|
| Additionally, social networks are not things you use just
| once or twice. I would argue that social media is defined by
| how it functions as a mature tool much more than the initial
| experiences. We have not had much in the way of social
| networks that seem to be designed for long-time users.
|
| We focus too much on new users in a space where people use
| these tools for years, decades even.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Of course Mastodon is a product in a traditional sense.
|
| Are you going to argue qBittorrent isn't a product because
| it's a "presentation of open protocols"? Of course it's a
| product too. Mastodon is an _app_ on the Apple and Play
| stores, with a back end that 's federated. You don't get
| much more "product" than that.
|
| It's entirely possible to focus on a good onboarding
| experience for new users _and_ a good long-term experience.
| It 's not either/or, that's a false dichotomy.
|
| And the idea that we don't have experience of social
| networks "designed for long-time users" is ludicrous.
| Virtually _every_ social network out there wants its users
| to stay for a long time. And with Facebook and Twitter,
| there are many users out there using them for over a
| decade.
|
| The idea that we "focus too much on new users" is just
| bizarre, when the reality is that Mastodon isn't focusing
| _enough_ on that.
| [deleted]
| dasil003 wrote:
| Yes, the pursuit of scale at all costs is what has led
| traditional social media to become such a dumpster fire. Is
| Mastodon the answer? I'm not sure, but it's a legitimately
| interesting experiment at the very least.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| While true there is also the long-term survivability factor.
| And email began as super challenging to onboard before web
| mail. Today it's better, and not because federation was
| dropped. Rather email improved with better onramps to the
| network.
|
| Throwing out federation because of immature onboarding is
| like tossing the baby with the bathwater.
| tbossanova wrote:
| The onboarding to driving a car is pretty tough, but people
| stick it out because the product has clear use once you get
| there.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Depends on the area you live in and the surrounding
| culture. People from big cities in Europe, Asia, and NYC in
| the US often avoid learning how to drive a car. It just
| stands out in the minds of most Americans and many
| Europeans because there's no reasonable alternative to
| driving to transport yourself anywhere. It's a great
| example of how even a crappy product experience wins when
| there's no competition in the market.
| aeeifognionio wrote:
| [dead]
| Zpalmtree wrote:
| tech journalists hate crypto lol
| kleinsch wrote:
| The media will cover Mastadon when there's an event to cover. It
| has existed for six years, so far there's not a mass exodus from
| Twitter, so what's the news the author is expecting? It seems
| like the author wants journalists to write promotion for a
| platform that won't pay for coverage and where there's no news to
| cover. That's not how it works.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm sorry, but the idea that tech journalism doesn't know what to
| do with Mastodon because it's an open-source platform that
| doesn't fit into commercial startup narratives is... utter
| nonsense.
|
| Tech journalism does just fine with open
| standards/software/platforms like e-mail, domain names,
| torrenting, Linux, crypto. None of these fall into commercial
| startup narratives, yet journalists cover these things just as
| well as everything else.
|
| > _The media seems to be regarding Mastodon as a bizarre
| curiosity, something that the general public couldn't possibly
| grasp. Sure, the guys with a Linux server in their basement might
| geek out on it, but this thing isn't for the masses._
|
| I mean, that's pretty accurate. It's easy to sign up for Twitter,
| it follows all of your expectations of how apps work. Not only is
| it hard to sign up for Mastodon, but it's hard to even figure out
| _how_ to figure it out. Mastodon _isn 't_ for the masses in its
| current state.
|
| So as far as I can tell, the tech journalists are covering it
| quite appropriately.
| jancsika wrote:
| > Mastodon isn't for the masses in its current state.
|
| It's super easy to sign up for Mastodon. I read a blog from the
| creator of Mozilla and it seemed pretty straightforward to me.
|
| Simply Google it and then click "Create Account."
|
| Now choose one of myriad instances without having any idea what
| it the topic of that instance means for your user experience.
|
| If you requested an invite and never received it, or they
| aren't taking new members, just choose one of the other
| instances and join there.
|
| After you get suspended-- without any explanation whatsoever
| how you violated the short, vague ToS-- just go ahead and sign
| up on some other instance and try again. You should be getting
| good at this now!
|
| When your posts start to pick up some traction, watch as your
| blog gets hammered by a zillion requests at once simply to
| display a website preview in the posts. Is the load too hot for
| your personal site? Don't worry-- that's the federation working
| it's magic![1]
|
| > Mastodon isn't for the masses in its current state.
|
| _Summoning OG FOSS mailing list energy..._
|
| Which part exactly? Did you file a bug about this? Read the
| fucking manual?
|
| OR
|
| That's actually a feature, not a bug.
|
| Edit:
|
| 1: Also, why aren't you just using Cloudfare? Poor website
| configurations are hardly Mastodon's problem. In fact this is a
| feature, not a bug: it will cause enough problems for small
| website users to force them to just use Cloudfare. So good
| news, small time users-- Mastodon is for you! You're welcome.
| Also, fix your websites, small time users.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Ok, well here's my trip report.
|
| Clicked on Hank Green's link from his Twitter profile. This
| is the only way you'll ever get me to sign up, by linking me
| to content, I'm not going to be googling to sign up for
| mastodon just because. So wherever I land better have an easy
| way to sign up.
|
| There's a create account form right there, super easy stuff.
| I was ready to agree with you. After creating the account I
| didn't appear to be logged in. Checked my email for a
| verification link, nothing there.
|
| At this point both the Log In and Create Account button don't
| do anything. They just refresh the page with no error. An
| hour later I tried again on, same issue. Realized I should
| check the spam folder, and that's where the verification link
| is, with a big red scary UI. The email is from "trumpet"
| which I don't recognize myself.
|
| I click it, and that makes it so the log in button actually
| logs me in.
|
| This wasn't worth it to find out if I want to have a mastodon
| account. Simple fix though, the UI should tell me to check my
| spam folder instead of making the login and create account
| buttons do nothing except refresh the page.
|
| edit: There's more. I try to go back to it to check it out
| again and end up at mast.to which directs me to some foreign
| website, takes me a while to figure out it was mas.to that I
| signed up on. I decide using the browser maybe ain't it for
| this, so I install the iOS app instead. It wants to know
| which server I signed up on, which luckily is the thing I
| just worked out. I type mas.to to find my server in the iOS
| app, frankly a concept I shouldn't ever have to care about if
| you want me as a user, but OK. And all I get is a pop up that
| says HTTP 200 OK.
|
| I'm stuck again with zero indication of the error or how to
| progress. This is bullshit.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I haven't signed up.
|
| Not because I'm not interested in the technology.
|
| But because the technology isn't the point.
|
| People use twitter because it's NOT inherently segregated. It
| is a place to find things organically. Aside from Facebook,
| which had an initial purpose of networking your friends and
| family, social networks that do this are largely more
| successful than the ones which federate themselves because
| users aren't having to explicitly search for conversations
| that interest them.
|
| Mastodon is just a modern interpretation of Usenet with more
| moderation.
| btbuildem wrote:
| If you have to read a blog about how to sign up for it, it's
| not "easy to sign up".
|
| Signing up for mastodon is a series of hurdles with some
| extra steps in between. Conceptually it's pretty far from
| what people are familiar with.
|
| It's a classic trap of tech nerds being way, way off base
| thinking that others would enjoy jumping through obscure
| hoops just like they do. Most people really don't.
|
| (This is coming from someone who grew up on dialup / bbs /
| sweaty underground diskette auctions)
| pakyr wrote:
| They're pretty clearly being sarcastic; they don't actually
| think it's "super easy to sign up for Mastodon."
| petespeed wrote:
| I made the same mistake. Judging by the first few
| sentences.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Heh, you had me in the first half.
| rconti wrote:
| I suppose signing up for Twitter is 1 step easier than
| Mastodon, because you just go to the one site. But it's
| actually incredibly hard to use and find value from; I suppose
| people have forgotten this because the small percentage of the
| Internet who liked Twitter figured it out 10 years ago and it
| seems "normal" now. The good news is, that'll make Mastodon
| fairly easy to use, too, since many conventions are similar,
| though Mastodon is easier in some ways. I am not a regular user
| of Mastodon but I already find it somewhat easier.
|
| I attempted to derive value from Twitter on and off for,
| whatever, 10 years, and I still found it incredibly hard to
| use. I'm not a stupid person; obviously if I had a real reason
| to get used to it, I would have. Journalists, for example, "had
| to" use it, because they found it an incredibly easy shortcut
| to getting opinions from a populace that they assumed reflected
| a broad cross section of the world, even though it wasn't.
|
| Confusing things:
|
| * The reply format. If you reply to a tweet, your reply will be
| below the one you're replying to, which readers have to scroll
| UP from the beginning to see, even though the browser gives you
| the impression you're already at the top of the page. And
| there's a back arrow. But the back arrow takes you home, not to
| the parent post. And if you quote a tweet in your reply, it
| ends up below your words, indented out. That's the only
| indenting ever, and it's the only time your reply is above
| something, rather than below it.
|
| * There are ads and suggested tweets everywhere, cluttering
| your feed.
|
| * You don't know who to follow, or why you should follow
| people. People you follow might change their name every 5
| minutes, so you can't remember who anyone is or was. You're
| told to follow important people, so during a volcanic explosion
| in Iceland, you follow an Icelandic volconologist, but the only
| content you see is stuff they quote-tweet or reply-tweet to
| with no context that's apparently an inside joke in some other
| community they're in.
|
| * Am I seeing the whole feed? In chronological order, or?
|
| * Why the character limitation? And the awfulness of threads
| and how where/when to reply in one that came as a result of
| this.
|
| * Can't follow a hashtag, utterly inexplicably. About the only
| use case I found for it, wasn't available.
|
| * Limitations on number of characters
|
| * Utter toxicity of most of the userbase.
|
| * Inability to form smaller communities. Everything is public,
| just people shouting into the void for attention.
|
| And then, of course, the usual cultural things you have to
| learn from cues over time which I never got comfortable with
| because I didn't spend enough time there. Where the hashtags
| go; inline, at the end, at the beginning? The intricacies of
| when you @ people, when you DM people, etc. The discomfort with
| finding a voice in a public shouting match.
| fredgrott wrote:
| given the number of reporters and public figures that joined
| Mastodon in the past 30 days that seems to counter your
| narrative.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yeah. I mean I don't know what to do with Mastdon, and I have a
| few Linux servers in my closet. That's partly because I haven't
| used it, but more that Mastodon is still in the process of
| becoming whatever it's going to be now that Twitter is burning
| down. The story is still incoherent because the reality has not
| yet cohered.
| notpushkin wrote:
| > Not only is it hard to sign up for Mastodon
|
| I genuinely don't understand this point at all. You pick an
| instance - any instance, provided it's open for new users. Then
| you fill out 4 fields and confirm your email. That's it, you're
| now a proud citizen of the Fediverse. Does it get any easier
| than this?
|
| (Not trying to be toxic here or anything, just actually
| curious.)
| j1elo wrote:
| Because presumably, you also want to avoid this in the
| process:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34008165
|
| (in short: an implicit part of the process is that no one
| wants to end up in an instance that closes down in a couple
| of years because, after all, lots of them have a bus factor
| of 1)
|
| The common response of "just pick an instance" is hiding
| quite the important decision of choosing a reliable and
| future-proof (within reason, i.e. that it will be still alive
| at least for the next 5 to 10 years) one.
|
| The choice of technology and poor optimization of the
| reference Mastodon implementation, doesn't help at all the
| case of self-hosting, either.
| brainbag wrote:
| When I last was looking at signing up, one of the top
| recommended servers was for furries. Maybe grandma discovers
| something about herself very late in life, but mostly likely
| that's going to be a hard bounce.
| kevingadd wrote:
| "pick any instance" ignores that you're potentially
| subjecting yourself to really bad moderation, future
| defederation/partitioning, having your friends' posts hidden
| from you, or even (in the worst case) not being able to
| migrate your account to another instance later
| notpushkin wrote:
| Which would make sense for you later on, when you
| understand that bad moderation and defederation exist here.
| Once you understand how it works, _then_ you can migrate to
| a better server if desired.
|
| > not being able to migrate your account to another
| instance later
|
| I've never encountered this yet. Not even heard of it. I
| assume this only happens if your instance defederates
| itself from the rest of the network?
| dunham wrote:
| Which instance was a tricky point for me. And then suddenly
| one of my options wasn't accepting new members (turned out to
| be temporary). I now have an account that I'm not using on an
| instance that is semi-blocked by other instances, because of
| abuse/spam. And I do have an account that I actually use.
|
| I thought I had to weigh:
|
| 1. Will this instance be blocked and become useless 2. Will
| this instance go away because it's the altruistic hobby of
| someone who will be overwhelmed by users/traffic or graduate
| in the next year. 3. Is my content acceptable for a topical
| mastodon? (I'm on mathstodon, is it ok to post about
| cooking?)
|
| All of these can probably be hand-waved away with "you can
| just...", but they were a concern to me as an onboarding
| user.
| aniforprez wrote:
| Yes. The part where you don't have to pick an instance
|
| > provided it's open for new users
|
| This in itself is a massive point of confusion for most
| users. I've had all my friends and family ask me about this
| very point and I didn't know what to say. Especially when
| Elon fired everyone, literally none of the instances on the
| Mastodon page were accepting anyone. It's much better now but
| this alone confuses people into thinking they're locked into
| their instance. Why would my father, a retired mechanical
| engineer, join an infosec instance? Or my friends join a
| French instance when none of us are remotely French?
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| > I've had all my friends and family ask me about this very
| point and I didn't know what to say.
|
| How about something like: "Mastadon is decentralized, so
| instead of being one centralized service, it consists of
| many smaller communities. You can follow anyone in
| community, because they're all interconnected. Moderation
| happens at the community level, by people who run each
| community. You can join any community that is accepting new
| members. This is more complicated because you have to pick
| where you want to join, but then you don't have to deal
| with Elon Musk or whoever if you don't want to."
|
| I haven't joined Mastodon, but this is my understanding.
| Seems not that much more complicated if you're already
| interested in not being locked into dealing with
| centralization. If you're just looking for an alternative
| centralized network, then yeah this is probably confusing.
| Matl wrote:
| Is email hard because you need to pick up an 'instance'?
| Scarblac wrote:
| Well you first got one from your Internet provider, and
| after that there were a few huge ones (Hotmail and
| Gmail).
|
| I don't think most people feel they "chose" their email
| at all.
| corv wrote:
| This is probably how the fediverse will turn out too
| wpietri wrote:
| It was! Now we are down to a very small number of default
| instances for most people. I'm one of the weirdos who
| doesn't use Gmail (Fastmail ftw), but Google's ad-
| subsidized email really decimated the competition.
| ummonk wrote:
| I must have missed the part of internet history where
| people were constantly banned from their emails by
| capricious administrators for vague ToS violations.
|
| Like we are rightly concerned about Google suspending
| accounts without recourse, but the rate at which they do
| that is still orders of magnitude lower than the personal
| fiefdoms known as Mastodon instances.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'm not aware that this was a common practice in periods
| of early email adoption.
| smolder wrote:
| The beauty is it doesn't matter if some mastodon admin is
| an asshole, you can be that asshole or find someone else
| who isn't.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Well. Maybe you could help them pick one?
| nightpool wrote:
| Have you tried just sending them an invite link to wherever
| you are? Ultimately WHAT instance you choose doesn't really
| matter as long as you trust the admin.
| mikeryan wrote:
| _Ultimately WHAT instance you choose doesn 't really
| matter as long as you trust the admin. _
|
| Trust the admin? Trust them how? Why? Doesn't all of
| Mastodon abide by the same rules?
| smolder wrote:
| They control the server that runs the software. So you
| trust them with every https request, your communication,
| your password. You trust their javascript.
| nomel wrote:
| You must also trust them to read you DMs:
|
| https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079
| notpushkin wrote:
| This. But more importantly, you trust their judgement
| when it comes to moderation and defederation.
|
| While you don't understand these issues, you can either
| rely on somebody else's advice for that, or join a server
| at random and see what happens. Unless you've joined the
| new Gab, you should be okay - if anything goes wrong you
| can just migrate to another server.
|
| As for the things you've mentioned: you shouldn't assume
| your communication is private anywhere on Mastodon
| (there's some encryption proposals, but that's a long
| road from now), and you definitely should use different
| passwords for different websites.
| [deleted]
| dredmorbius wrote:
| No.
|
| All of Mastodon, or more accurately, the _Fediverse_ ,
| runs on the same _communications protocol_. By analogy,
| think of the World Wide Web (HTML), email (SMTP), or the
| cell-phone network (IMSI, amongst others).
|
| A difference for the Fediverse from the World Wide Web is
| that _Websites largely don 't communicate with each
| other_, but rather _respond to specific requests_ from a
| _Web client_ (e.g., a web browser), in a _client-server_
| model. The Fediverse, like email or the cellphone
| network, consists largely of _peer-to-peer_ (p2p)
| communications between individuals, mediated by servers.
|
| Specific _instances_ vary tremendously in standards. My
| home instance (toot.cat) has a specific code of conduct:
|
| <https://mew.toot.cat/mw/Toot.cat/CoC>
|
| There are instances with highly incompatible rules and
| standards. Many of these are moderated (varying degrees
| of limiting interactivity, listed here:
|
| <https://toot.cat/about>
|
| Instance administration which is sufficiently
| unacceptable can result in near-total _defederation_ of
| that instance, that is, few if any other instances follow
| it. Two notable cases involve a service operated by a
| former US political figure, and of a neo-nazi group (I 'm
| not naming them, they're easy enough to find should you
| choose to do so).
|
| Most _mainstream_ Mastodon instances _do_ follow
| reasonably compatible codes of conduct, though there can
| be regional differences. For example, some Japanese
| instances permit comic content (loli) which is
| categorically illegal in numerous other jurisdictions,
| and face limited interactivity on that basis. There are
| numerous other grounds for limiting interaction beyond
| that.
|
| Again: this is similar to other p2p communications
| platforms in which abusive practices tend to give rise to
| limitations: Do Not Call registries, and under a
| phenomenal onslaught of robocalls, denying interconnects
| between telephony systems.
| nightpool wrote:
| "All of Mastodon" isn't even a coherent concept. Is it
| everybody using code derived from Mastodon's original
| 2016 source code release? That code doesn't even support
| the current protocol, it was written for GNU Social
| compatibility using a completely different protocol.
| Everybody who's updated to the most recent version?
| Plenty haven't. Anybody who can communicate with a
| Mastodon server? I wrote a 30 line Node script that could
| do that last month. Etc, etc, etc.
|
| What group of people are you talking about and what sorts
| of rules do you expect them to follow?
| cortesoft wrote:
| How do you know which admins to trust?
| beavisthegenius wrote:
| [dead]
| mathieuh wrote:
| I don't know if I'm weird (well, at least in this
| specific case), but the very act of picking an instance
| feels like I'm making a statement in support of that
| instance. If I say my email is @gmail.com I don't feel
| like I'm making a statement because everyone has a gmail
| email address.
|
| I realise that's kind of intrinsic to how mastodon works,
| but asking people to select an instance out of a whole
| load of them somehow feels like I'm signing up to be part
| of a cohesive group, which is unappealing to me.
|
| I don't use any social media because I think they're
| unhealthy, but a few people I've spoken to have had the
| same stumbling block with having to pick an instance.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Pick a generic or regional one. Don't think it's much of
| a statement if your account is on something like
| @mstdn.io (which is closed for registration right now; I
| don't want to mention any specific servers on HN in order
| to not overwhelm them but you get the idea).
| ldjb wrote:
| Anecdotal evidence suggests that people do find it too
| confusing and complicated.
|
| The official Mastodon website provides a list of instances,
| but most of them seem to be aligned to particular interests,
| and it's difficult to make an informed decision about which
| server to join.
| Off wrote:
| I don't think picking the right instance matters that much,
| Mastodon is a federated social network, you will be able to
| see what everyone is posting no matter what instance you're
| on and you can follow people from different instances
| without any problem.
| aszantu wrote:
| I'm just overwhelmed when I go on the mastodon start page.
| How am I supposed to decide for a server?
|
| And then I just close it again
| boudin wrote:
| Just pick one and try, there's no commitment anyway. You
| can access content from other servers anyway
| ummonk wrote:
| Is there some way to carry over followers between
| addresses that I'm unaware of?
| notpushkin wrote:
| Yes: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
| ummonk wrote:
| How exactly do you do this after the instance admin has
| banned you?
| notpushkin wrote:
| You don't. If your admin is a total dick and prevents you
| from migrating, you're screwed. If you have hundreds of
| followers, better reevaluate your initial choice of
| instance. If you have thousands of followers, host your
| own, or pay somebody to host it for you. This however
| doesn't matter if you're just getting started.
|
| There are talks about detaching user identity from the
| instance. If this gets traction, this problem might be
| solved once and for all.
| smolder wrote:
| Remember when you were a kid and you did things out of
| curiosity, to see what would happen? That's the mindset you
| need in this case. No real harm is done by picking the
| "wrong" instance.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| I mean, people do this for email. I want email, I heard
| Gmail is good, so I go to Gmail's site.
|
| The mere existence of a protocol isn't the issue here. I
| think the problem is more that the protocol doesn't have
| champions like your ISP/Microsoft/Google. Mastodon saying
| "come here then go somewhere else" isn't good; it'd be
| better if there was a default option somehow.
|
| It's a common problem with open source; I worked on Passit
| and we had to think about the problem when it came time to
| log in to the extension. We ended up saying something along
| the lines of "check the box if you're not using
| app.passit.io". The default choice matters a lot.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| With email, you don't go to email.com, click a sign up
| link, then get a list of hundreds of email providers to
| choose from.
|
| Also, the precedent for people looking into Mastodon is
| not email users looking for a more real time email
| client. It's Twitter users looking for Twitter on not-
| Twitter.com
| Veedrac wrote:
| Another key difference with email is that it's easy (the
| default) to find email providers that are overtly
| content-neutral, whereas Mastodon, for whatever reason,
| makes that shockingly difficult.
| quest88 wrote:
| Why do I have to pick an instance? Why can't I sign up like I
| did on Twitter?
| grepfru_it wrote:
| It's like IRC you need to pick the lowest latency server
| notpushkin wrote:
| I'd say latency doesn't really matter with Mastodon, no.
| notpushkin wrote:
| If that's a genuine question: don't think too much about
| it. Just join the same one where your friends are, pick one
| with a cool domain, or roll a dice or something.
| [deleted]
| Dawnyhf2 wrote:
| To my mind these websites are equally user hostile, twitter is
| extremely confusing to people who just signed up, too much
| influencer spam and it makes you login to find out that the
| stuff is just influencer spam. People who started Twitter
| earlier have a way better experience.
| robswc wrote:
| I noticed this too. I made an account for a business and it
| was just odd. Maybe they're targeting the younger generation?
| If not, that's certainly what it felt like when signing up,
| lol.
| robswc wrote:
| Yep. It sounds silly but I learn more and more to just make
| things as frictionless as possible.
|
| Someone explained how to sign up and the first instance I found
| said it was shutting down soon and to migrate off. A few others
| I tried said they weren't accepting new users and eventually I
| gave up. The funny thing is I swear I figured it out a few
| years back and don't remember it being like that but maybe I
| just had more patience.
|
| Is there a reason you can't just create your own identity,
| without an instance?
| Geezus-42 wrote:
| Why not just use the default instance? I believe it's already
| filled in (or at least mentioned on the page where you enter
| one) if you go to their website and follow their links.
| robswc wrote:
| I just tried and got a message that "this is currently not
| possible"
|
| It took me here:
|
| https://joinmastodon.org/servers
|
| Where it seems the majority of servers are overtly
| political and require an "application."
|
| I do see a few where I can create an account and look
| generic enough to where my entire identity/first impression
| isn't too niche. I may give that a try.
| nequo wrote:
| > Is there a reason you can't just create your own identity,
| without an instance?
|
| It looks like Mastodon has aimed for total decentralization
| like email, rather than the kind of decentralization that IRC
| does that still keeps identities centrally managed with nick
| servers (e.g., how irc.libera.chat works).
|
| Presumably, managing identity verification would be much
| cheaper than managing the content, so Mastodon or something
| like it should be able to scalably do it centrally, while
| still federating separate instances for the content.
| robswc wrote:
| I feel like if they did that, the service would be 100x
| more viable... but would lose its claim to total
| decentralization. Idk, good luck to anyone that does a
| social media site cause that seems like a hard problem to
| solve.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| I like Mastodon, i use it daily. BUT, i kinda feel it
| loses that claim already.
|
| I am disincentivized to run my own instance, aka
| "distribute". It pushes for centralization. On multiple
| fronts. Why? Well for starters the protocol as i'm aware
| of does not efficiently federate to smaller instances
| compared to bigger instances.
|
| I also fear that instances will eventually be plagued by
| spam / attacks from foreign small instances and will be
| pushed towards whitelisting federation rather than
| blacklisting. As the general philosophy of federation
| seems to match that of Email. Email.. tbh, feels like a
| failed technology. Yes i know, i love email and we all
| use it.. but it's incredibly centralized and insanely
| vulnerable to massive amounts of spam. The protocol
| almost pushes people to centralize to deal with problems
| that the Email protocol doesn't manage - spam. I fear
| Mastodon will eventually follow the same path.
|
| I use it, but i have to ignore the protocol and my desire
| to decentralize.. because otherwise i just get
| frustrated.
| robswc wrote:
| That makes sense.
|
| I was looking for an instance and they listed their
| server specs. They were very small servers. Would they be
| susceptible to simple DDOS?
| trynewideas wrote:
| It's possible, but not through Mastodon, and nobody working
| on anything fedi-related put much time into simplifying
| that for any end-users, much less non-technical end users.
| roge7331 wrote:
| The fact that every mastodon enthusiast is publishing tutorials
| on how to use mastodon speaks for itself. As some in the bubble
| it may be easy to understand but for the default Twitter user
| it is not
| nicoco wrote:
| >It's easy to sign up for Twitter, it follows all of your
| expectations of how apps work
|
| I always find it funny when I read things like that about
| twitter, because I honestly wanted to see what it was several
| times and I swear I could never figure it out. I know I am most
| likely an outlier, and yes, I have a Linux server sitting below
| my desk (my basement is way too damp).
| le-mark wrote:
| You are not alone. It's always been inscrutable to me as
| well.
| nicoco wrote:
| FWIW, I've been giving the fediverse a try for 2 weeks now
| and it's slightly less obscure without the crazy
| "algorithmic" timeline. Chronology is less confusing than
| machine recommendations. Who would've thought?
| JadeNB wrote:
| > It's easy to sign up for Twitter, it follows all of your
| expectations of how apps work.
|
| Although it's probably too late, and not the place, to fight
| this particular battle, this kind of resigned circularity
| frustrates me. The reason the apps from big companies all
| "follow your expectations of how apps work" is not that they
| have reached some Platonic ideal of according with user
| expectations; it is that they have the time, the money, and the
| muscle (in the sense of being able to force you to use their
| apps to use their big product, whether you want to or not) to
| _shape_ your expectations of how apps work. Their apps work as
| we expect apps to work because their apps _defined_ how we
| expect apps to work.
| wildpeaks wrote:
| A recurring hurdle I heard is choice paralysis when picking
| which server to join (e.g. "which one is the Gmail of the
| Fediverse") ?
|
| It's just enough friction to make some users postpone signing
| up, thinking they'll get around to finish choosing a server
| later when they have more information, and never finishing.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| "Mastodon isn't for the masses in its current state."
|
| Fwiw, Even for somewhat geeky guys with kids and family and
| busy lives, Mastodon isn't friction less enough.
|
| That being said, for a somewhat geeky guy, twitter is also hard
| to sign up - if you don't want to give them your phone number
| and other personal information, it's full of dark patterns.
| Less of an issue for non geeky folks though.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| Yeah this is a good point. There's a lot of learned
| helplessness in my opinion. People who don't _want_ to switch
| away from Twitter and are used to its quirks (and yes, there
| are absolutely quirks) are far more incline to throw up their
| hands and say it's too hard.
| chefandy wrote:
| I think it's a bit disingenuous to say it's difficult to sign
| up rather than it being difficult to protect your privacy
| while signing up. That's a different thing and the
| distinction is important to any future attempt to get the
| general public to adopt FOSS social media.
|
| Twitter deliberately requires too much effort and knowledge
| to keep your info private. They do that because they know
| most people either can't or won't go through with it. The
| privacy-focused software world understands how problematic
| that is.
|
| Mastodon, because it was created as a tech-first solution
| without deliberately building user paths for non-technical
| users, requires to much effort and knowledge to sign up for
| and use _at all_. For some reason, pointing out that most
| people either can 't or won't go through with it is
| sacrilege. It gets met with minimizing statements about how
| simple it all really is, and stories about tech-naive people
| they've explained it to, or dismiss it by saying that it
| doesn't have to be for non-technical people while ignoring
| the larger discussion about what the FOSS world thinks they
| can replace with it.
|
| The only people who misunderstand mastodon are the people who
| misunderstand regular users capacity for complexity in social
| media, or the complexity of actually using it like users want
| to use it... A centralized asynchronous way to easily contect
| with everyone else that uses it. If it doesn't do what end
| users want in the most straightforward way possible, it will
| never be what end users use.
| api wrote:
| Investigate whether John Mastodon is in fact Satoshi Nakamoto?
| [deleted]
| deltarholamda wrote:
| They don't know what to do with Mastadon because they are not
| journalists. They are content creators.
|
| Most journalists fall into this category.
| sircastor wrote:
| >No one is trying to hack the attention of Mastodon users for
| profit, no one is bombarding us with ads.
|
| This is what happens when a new community springs up. It finds
| and audience, it grows because it's a safe, interesting place, it
| gets critical mass, and then people become desperate to exploit
| it - because it's where everyone is. It's a newly discovered mine
| full of ore.
|
| It's not that no one is trying to hack users attention, or
| advertise. They just haven't figured out how to do it yet.
| Because of its nature, Mastodon might end up being a little more
| resilient, but who knows. The instance I'm on is fairly small and
| they're already feeling the pinch of hosting expenses.
| dugite-code wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand why there is any confusion regarding
| Mastodon. If you understand email you understand Mastodon
| instances... where is the confusion?
| s0sa wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand how tech folks can't contemplate the
| obvious confusion the average person would have around
| something like Mastodon. The vast majority of people don't even
| understand what an "instance" is in this context without an
| explanation. Most people _don't_ understand how email servers,
| SMTP, etc work.
| aezart wrote:
| > Most people _don't_ understand how email servers, SMTP, etc
| work.
|
| Yeah, I have explained to my dad many times that he can check
| the same email account from his tablet and his PC but he just
| doesn't get it. To him, his gmail is only on his tablet and
| his Comcast email is only on his PC and that's that.
| dugite-code wrote:
| On a simpler level everyone "gets" that their work email ends
| with @company.tld and their personal ends with @gmail.com.
| Heck we all say "at" for @ so it's easy to grasp that signing
| up for that involves going to these domains.
|
| Hell I explained this to my elderly mother and she got the
| idea straight away. So no I don't see how the confusion is
| obvious.
| aendruk wrote:
| Yep, from experience this is the way. No talk about
| federation and instances, just "your account is _at_
| somewhere" and choosing where is a social question not a
| technical one.
|
| And acknowledge that social questions are messy. "Which
| cafeteria table should I sit at?"
| philippejara wrote:
| Tech journalism most often then not doesn't know tech in the
| first place.Safe from a very small number, often in specialized
| outlets like techdirt, they're effectively "culture" journalists
| in regards to social media, so it isn't at all surprising that
| something more complex than just another twitter drama or
| nebulous AI VC project #234 goes way over their head.
| i_am_toaster wrote:
| Article seems forced and comes to their conclusions based on
| poorly-informed opinions. For instance, this author seems to
| think that Mastodon is exempt from the bots and advertising
| because it is decentralized. However, I think the much more
| obvious reason is that it's not popular; people don't go there
| with their bots and advertisements. If it suddenly became
| popular, the bots/advertisements/"poor comment quality" would
| surely follow.
|
| (Just be clear, I don't mean literal website ads, I mean posts
| that advertise products and businesses, whether it be obvious or
| not.)
| bell-cot wrote:
| I noticed that _every_ "standard tech journalism template" on his
| list was either tech Corporate Press Release stuff, or tech
| celebrity news stuff...
|
| ...vs., jumping over to Ars Technica (called out in these
| comments for having 80% of commenters assume that Mastodon is a
| for-profit Twitter competitor), and their "20 Most-read Stories
| of 2022" article - gosh, maybe _three_ stories of their Top 12
| fit any of those templates.
|
| Conclusion: Article author's mental image of "tech journalist" is
| actually "tech gossip columnist" - for people who want to sound
| cool & informed, but wouldn't actually want to know anything
| useful about tech.
| nottorp wrote:
| For the record I'm a paid subscribed to Ars. But the comments
| on the Mastodon article were... wow.
|
| But then the article was syndicated from somewhere and not at
| the normal Ars level either.
|
| Linky to article: https://arstechnica.com/tech-
| policy/2022/12/mastodon-is-hurt...
| bell-cot wrote:
| From a quick glance at wired.com - the syndicated Ars
| article's source - the original article's postulates look
| even more delusional.
| notwokeno wrote:
| And that's one of the real differences between Twitter and
| Mastodon. On Mastodon everything is built around interacting
| with peers. Sure there might be celebrities on but that's not
| the main thing. Twitter on the other hand is all about
| celebrity access.
| p0nce wrote:
| Something I appreciate a lot on Mastodon is simply its federated
| nature. It seems to me like a nice middle-ground between: 1.
| niche communities like Discord, and 2. "everyone at the same
| time" like Twitter.
| jasmer wrote:
| Yes, but, people care about 'stuff that works' 10x before they
| care about the tech press or supposed 'values' of some FSF
| moralisation.
|
| Mastodon is has a usability problem in the concept of Federation
| and many other things.
|
| It's complicated, they don't provide a clear path to usability or
| understanding.
|
| I mostly agree about the problem in journalism, but it's not a
| Mastodon problem, moreover, there are ways to fit Mastodon into
| basic narratives.
|
| I also don't think that WSJ articles matter that much with
| respect to influencing tech trends.
| boudin wrote:
| I find that people being confused by federated network really
| telling on what it mistake it has been to let a few companies
| getting there hand on most of the content creation and
| distribution. I don't if it's the fact of having known the prime
| time of IRC, BBS, Usenet, and overall the web being a network of
| diverse communities, but I'm much more confortable with Mastodon
| than Twitter. Not having the possibility to host the service
| myself feels wrong. It's not that I want to, but I should be able
| to.
| dmix wrote:
| > what it mistake it has been to let a few companies getting
| there hand on most of the content creation and distribution
|
| Centralized services drove massive adoption of consumer
| technology (see: Hotmail/Gmail for email). They paved the
| way... via marketing, customer support, design, infrastructure
| (even OSS services will probably run on AWS), etc. That all
| takes big investments that OSS typically can't compete with.
|
| So it's a good thing they paved the roads for which OSS can
| take over.
|
| All services and companies eventually stagnate or mess up, with
| rare exceptions. If OSS can eventually mature enough to
| legitimately compete in terms of UX/UI/features then there will
| always be opportunities in the various market to transition in
| that direction.
|
| People haven't been trained or brainwashed to hate OSS, they
| just saw what was offered and aren't willing the make the
| various sacrifices that typically come with most services like
| Mastodon. At least until the gap in offerings narrows.
| nottorp wrote:
| Average commenters on tech news sites dont know either. I went
| through an ars technica comment thread and 80% of the posters
| were assuming Mastodon is a for profit competitor to Twitter too.
| zeruch wrote:
| Tech journalism has for a long time been in the tech industry
| circle jerk olympics. This is a trend going back decades, and I
| remember when FOSS first got traction and the reporting was
| somewhere between factually vacant and ideologically psychotic.
|
| "Tech journalism" by and large exists to boost industry insiders
| or act as the journal of record for collective schadenfreude.
| Nothing has changed.
| tasuki wrote:
| Why is this about Mastodon? Isn't ActivityPub or Fediverse the
| real secret sauce and Mastodon just one of the many interoperable
| implementations?
|
| (These are genuine questions, I've not used Twitter, am not
| participating in Fediverse, and could be missing something)
| Kye wrote:
| I still remember that tech journalist saying Mastodon would fail
| because he couldn't find William Shatner in 2017. To me, the lack
| of William Shatner is a feature.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| He got a life. But not as we know it.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Don't tempt fate.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I think it's also that most of them write with investors in mind.
| In this case there's no investment angle.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| Mastodon doesn't even know what to do with Mastodon.
| beastcoast wrote:
| Turns out Mastodon is "malware"? I can't even read posts at work;
| it's completely blocked...
| LastTrain wrote:
| Or maybe it's just too much of a PITA to actually use.
| jtode wrote:
| I loved this line, cause I hadn't looked at it from this angle
| before:
|
| "For some reason, people who would never read an article in the
| Wall Street Journal about Procter and Gamble acquiring a new
| shampoo company will devour content about Microsoft acquiring a
| tech startup they've never heard of."
|
| This is so true. I've known people who get this instant passion
| for an area they know nothing about, if it brushes up against an
| area they do know something about, and want to start analyzing it
| like baseball card stats or something. But they're basically
| reading a card that's a square kilometre in size about a sport
| they have never played or watched for any amount of time longer
| than it takes to momentarily look at, and then flip past, a PBS
| cricket match (if you're North American and have no British
| relatives).
|
| edit: Only modification I would make to the article would be to
| emphasize that not only does Mastadon work in a way that is
| antithetical to contemporary understandings of how the internet
| works, it more importantly _embodies_ the way that the Internet
| worked before capitalism showed up.
|
| I gave up on slogans as a means of social change decades ago, but
| I would love to see "Protocols Not Platforms" get more traction
| in the zeitgeist.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >it more importantly embodies the way that the Internet worked
| before capitalism showed up.
|
| Does it really? I miss the internet of the late 90s and early
| 2000s, but Mastadon feels like precisely none of that.
| ergonaught wrote:
| For me, "Mastodon" more closely resembles the BBS-with-
| Fidonet experience, which I suppose might be similar to
| UUCP/Usenet to a degree "before capitalism".
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| I never had a Twitter account and so never migrated from
| Twitter to Mastodon, and hadn't checked it out otherwise
| either.
|
| But this comment is the first thing I've heard that makes
| me think I might love it. I loved the message subs on bbs
| networks.
|
| The fact that an ordinary user/commenter conveyed that
| useful essential impression that all those journalists
| never did in the years since it's been newsworthy, would
| seem to fit right in with the article's point.
|
| This article itself also finally presented some useful
| "what is the point? why might I want this?" points too
| about no algorithm manipulation.
|
| Mostly all I've seen are vague stuff that it's not Twitter
| and that it's federated kind of like email. But that really
| doesn't say anything useful. If it's like email, we already
| have email. How is email an alternative to Twitter and
| Facebook? They really have failed to write effectively
| about it.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| The dot com bubble was the very definition of capitalism.
|
| It's the MBAs (that HN hates) that turn "the internet" into a
| product that makes money- or that they can convince investors
| will make money some day.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It feels kludgy and slow and unreliable to get what you want.
| That's kind of like my 90s web experience.
| rsynnott wrote:
| On 'slow', this is very instance dependent; perhaps try
| another. My original one was pretty painful, but my current
| one is fast, certainly faster than Twitter of late.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| You're right. But that's a non-start for the majority of
| potential users. Recommending it to family and friends
| feels like I'm recommending Ubuntu.
|
| I really want it to succeed but the current landscape
| isn't going to cut it.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| to be fair most of my family and friends without tech
| jobs didn't really get twitter either
| kalleboo wrote:
| A lot of people have forgotten just how long it took for
| Twitter to get the mainstream appeal it has, and for a
| long time just how confusing all @, # and RT stuff was,
| and how hard it was for people to find good people to
| follow etc. Twitter has been working hard on that for
| many years with all the onboard and the algorithmic
| stuff.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| The internet but with only privileged people, is it still the
| internet?
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It's the "let's do this together" attitude. Whatever than the
| "how can we get rich quick" one that powers most of the
| internet now
| jtode wrote:
| It does really, and that's why it doesn't work as well in
| this current environment.
|
| Mastadon is a DIY app/ _platform_ , which constitutes one of
| any number of implementations of ActivityPub, which is the
| underlying _protocol_ , and can speak to any of the other
| implementations without limitation, save those imposed by the
| protocol and self-imposed by the two implementations
| currently speaking to each other.
|
| There are multiple types of SMTP/POP/IMAP servers out there,
| but they all implement the same protocols, which means that
| my email client can reach your email client no matter what
| our clients, or the servers we connect to, look like. This is
| how _the internet_ works; platforms will always be a limited
| subset of this fundamental reality. It 's also how
| ActivityPub works, you can wrap whatever user interface you
| want around it, Mastadon or otherwise, but the protocol, not
| the platform, defines what is and is not an ActivityPub
| packet.
|
| Platforms, FB, Twitter, Tiktok, Insta, none of these work
| this way, they are closed platforms that you enter through
| secure gates and must play according to their rules, and they
| will always decide who gets amplification and who does not
| based on what makes them money, and good luck taking anything
| back out to the open internet with you, even if it's 100%
| your work. If you put it there, don't expect to get it back
| easily, and forget about control. It is a fundamentally
| hostile user relationship that cannot be improved without
| removing the profit motive. There have been other recent
| posts on HN about User Hostile software design. It's a thing
| and it's a bad thing.
|
| Mastadon is... tofu dogs. Mastadon is an attempt to feed
| healthy, protocol-based internet food to people who have been
| subsisting on bad, algorithmically-manipulated corporate
| internet food (the aforementioned user-hostile platforms) in
| a way that feels familiar to them while they get used to the
| idea of not consuming the internet equivalent of Twinkies and
| Pork Rinds and Liquor for the rest of their lives.
|
| It doesn't taste as good as Twitter, sure. Maybe that's not
| the most important thing.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _Mastadon is... tofu dogs. Mastadon is an attempt to feed
| healthy, protocol-based internet food to people who have
| been subsisting on bad, algorithmically-manipulated
| corporate internet food (the aforementioned user-hostile
| platforms) in a way that feels familiar to them while they
| get used to the idea of not consuming the internet
| equivalent of Twinkies and Pork Rinds and Liquor for the
| rest of their lives._
|
| Mastadon is hand-rolling cigarettes instead of buying them
| at the gas station. Brewing gin in your bathtub, instead of
| going to a liquor store.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Mastadon is... tofu dogs.
|
| "Health" food made with one of the most common subjects of
| severe food allergies, and which tastes like crap compared
| either to what it imitates or well-made, less-allergy-
| producing, plant-based food that doesn't attempt the same
| imitation?
| mepian wrote:
| By the late 90s capitalism was already there, even Microsoft
| was already dominating.
| paulcole wrote:
| > I've known people who get this instant passion for an area
| they know nothing about, if it brushes up against an area they
| do know something about
|
| See also every HN thread about nutrition, sleep, health,
| exercise.
| hannofcart wrote:
| What's a PBS Cricket match? Am an avid Cricket follower but
| haven't come across the term so far.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| PBS is an American TV channel - Public Broadcast Station.
|
| I'm guessing that is what OP ment
| mattkrause wrote:
| Crucially, PBS member stations[0] run a lot of
| international---often British---shows, so it's one of the
| few places you might possibly find cricket on American TV.
| Otherwise, your only bet might be one of the niche cable
| sports channels: not the main ESPN, but maybe ESPN2 or
| something.
|
| [0] PBS is more like a network (the S is for 'service')
| that provides member stations with a common identity and a
| shared pool of programmming. They're usually non-profits,
| and so would not be able to afford a national news bureau
| (etc) on their own.
| jtode wrote:
| As Geoduck put it, PBS stands for Public Broadcasting
| Service, which is a publicly-funded and viewer-supported
| network of highbrow and foreign content that's been around
| for my whole life, not sure if or how much longer than that.
| It's also the primary way that North Americans have consumed
| British culture for my whole life, until the internet brought
| widespread, umm, "availability".
|
| So all through my Canadian youth I would flip through
| channels and periodically happen upon a Dr Who episode, or a
| British sport like Cricket, and wonder at the strangeness of
| my ancestral line (I'm extremely British, genetically
| speaking, and my family were both heavy socialists and also
| kind of cryptically proud of being part of the Empire. But
| they never admitted that, even to themselves I think...).
|
| It's no surprise that it was hard to key into why Dr Who -
| for one example of a show I came to love as an adult - is so
| cool. I would read about it in Starlog, here and there, and
| the doctor sounded like a real badass on paper, but when I
| came across Tom Baker for the first time, he was no Han Solo,
| shall we say. Which is great, cause there are aspects of Star
| Wars that I kinda hate now (mostly the fans), but maybe not
| so much when you're 8 years old and have been watching laser
| blasts and ships exploding and whatnot. Even godawful tripe
| like Jason Of Star Command was more captivating at the time.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Before capitalism? As in pre-AOL? The internet was the
| exclusive purview of the monied elite and the highly motivated
| tech nerds. The motivation was needed to spend so much money as
| everything was so expensive. The only way I could afford entry
| was by repairing old equipment. What ruined the culture for me
| was the Eternal September and I've been complaining about that
| ever since. The people yelling get off my lawn need to get off
| my lawn. Personally I'd like a BBS front end to Mastodon (does
| one exist? I haven't checked) so my experience of the internet
| can go full circle and end up where it started.
| robswc wrote:
| I find that comment funny too. Internet has only gotten more
| accessible.
|
| I do miss when it seemed almost everyone you talked to was a
| hacker in their own way but at the end of the day... you have
| everyone from kids on tablets to your grandma being able to
| use it now.
| pentachoron wrote:
| Mastodon (and potentially other ActivityPub-based Fediverse
| services) has Toot
| (https://toot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html) which is a
| CLI/TUI interface that probably looks like you want? (I know
| there's also at least one other project for Pleroma + forks
| specifically called Pleroma-CLI too...)
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Interesting, thanks. I did look it up after writing the
| comment and it appears that I'm not the only one getting
| BBS vibes. I do wonder how much the ability to post images
| changes the culture and if a text only for everyone social
| network could be an alternative.
| jtode wrote:
| I feels ya buddy. I just said to someone yesterday that it's
| kind of a Law Of The Internet that it got ruined basically a
| short time after the subjective "you" onboarded, and the
| longer you're here, the more grumpy you get about it. This is
| true of me and anyone I know who thinks of this place as a
| figurative home.
|
| There are endless high-profile examples, such as the time
| that Stephen Fry, having just recently achieved some major
| follower milestone (million I think), got very upset about
| being called out on some faux pas or other - in retrospect, a
| minor offense and a failed attempt at cancellation, if it was
| even an attempt - and decided to leave the internet, with
| this long almost-crying essay about the internet he had
| gotten onto, which made it sound like some sort of Victorian
| fairy glade where the air was laden with cocaine and he got
| to make out with Oscar Wilde, vs the stinky plebian unsubtle
| and bestial place it had become. It was an overreaction
| worthy of Chris De Burgh, and one he obviously didn't follow
| through on in the long run. But even as I was loling at the
| tone of his rejection letter, I also recognized an emotional
| stream of my own in it.
|
| I have a somewhat different view of AOL than you. I was
| firmly middle class, neither monied elite nor genuine nerd,
| but my family could afford to buy me a C64 and as a young
| adult I bought myself a 386, strictly for the fun of it. I
| also started out on BBSes and was a sysop on both 8-bit and
| 32-bit systems, but I did have an uncle who logged me into
| the local U's mainframe as a kid, and I found my way to the
| early, command line internet before the WWW was born, though
| I mostly just hung out on irc, I was no leet hackz0r.
|
| But once the winsock era ramped up and that "invasion" of AOL
| kiddies happened, I have to say, I had a very good few years
| in alt.music.ween as well as some groups centred on my local
| community. a.m.ween had quite a few great contributors from
| AOL, actually, so for that group, it was a net benefit. The
| band also pioneered direct interaction by participating in
| the group, at one point doing an all-request livestream (this
| is _maybe_ 2000 I 'm talking about, very early, and it was
| awesome) which newsgroup members voted on. Deaner, the
| guitarist, was especially active in internet fan engagement,
| and would phone in from on tour using AOL as an easy onramp.
| Nothing salesy or memey, he'd just do your typical "tour
| diary" letters like any band of the time might have done for
| a fan club, which we more or less were.
|
| Perhaps places with too wide a net, such as rec.pets.cats,
| took the brunt of it in ways that niche bands or interests
| didn't have to. I recall a great war between them and
| alt.tasteless, many casualties.
|
| I was also put in a room once, this would be in the late 90s,
| to see if I could in any way help a woman who had complained
| some time previously to local media about porn on early
| usenet, and it ended with a newsgroup created by trolls
| called alt.sex.herlastname; mostly I had to reassure her,
| after looking at the content of the group, that there was no
| troll army keeping tabs on her movements, it was a totally
| dead group that someone probably created in a moment of f-you
| energy and never looked at again, but the internet never
| forgets.
|
| Not that I could have done more than that anyways, other than
| maybe send emails to every usenet admin I could find begging
| them to blacklist the group. But that incident, which I could
| definitely dig up some receipts about but I don't want to
| revive that part of her life for her, there are some
| undeniable resonances with Gamergate, are there not? The
| truth is, this place is exactly the same place it always was,
| just bigger and more dangerous, and that was inevitable when
| people came.
|
| That being said, I would say that there was definitely a pre-
| capitalist Internet, which had a certain culture and - say it
| with me - netiquette. I don't know, and could not begin to
| speculate, where the line is between the pre-capitalist
| internet and now. If I _was_ going to put forward a candidate
| for when Capitalism "arrived" here, I think one good
| candidate would be, whatever day it was that Joshua Quittner
| handed over mcdonalds.com to the McDonalds corporation.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| My initial experience of the internet was much more private
| and ephemeral. Basically an invite only private IRC like
| terminal where most people knew each other in real life
| first. The experience was tied to those friendships, many
| which still exist today, but I don't know how I could
| recreate those circumstances again to make new friends, or
| even if I want to.
|
| I said something wrong once and was mortified by it so I've
| avoided public forums ever since. If I do post it's
| anonymously. So I've always watched the broader internet
| culture from an outsiders perspective.
|
| The Eternal September was no surprise, the thing people
| said was going to happen happened. For me the internet took
| a noticiable turn for the worse when Facebook opened up and
| absorbed so many niche communities. These days I lament the
| intentional manipulation of search, it's like I'm being
| algorithmically gaslit.
| jtode wrote:
| Yep. I actually was a big fan of Facebook early on, and I
| remained a fan for as long as I was able to set my feed
| to show me "what my friends post in the order they post
| it."
|
| At first they made you manually select it every time you
| loaded the screen (user hostile design intended to corral
| you into accepting their algorithmic Ludivico Machine),
| and eventually they eradicated it entirely, and that is
| when the problems really started - only took a few more
| years before Steve Bannon was ready to make his move.
| dale_glass wrote:
| I'd say that's because shampoo is a commodity and has next to
| zero side effects for most people. I'm sure there's people out
| there with very special needs who care about whether a given
| brand dies or goes multinational, but that's a very niche
| thing.
|
| But take say, Facebook buying Oculus. Oculus revived an
| effectively dead technology. Facebook gave them the ability to
| build much better tech, sell much more of it, and then coupled
| it with Facebook's love for sucking in private data. It
| absolutely had a huge effect on that part of the industry.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| No normal person cares about either of those things except
| insofar as it affects them. That's the point. Facebook
| acquiring some startup is as relevant to the life of a heavy
| FB user as P&G acquiring a consumer goods company is to a
| heavy user of P&G products. Oh, it's virtual reality. Who
| cares? If it ever becomes genuinely relevant it will show up
| in real life. If not reading about it is a waste of time.
|
| Remember, most people care about friends, family, work and
| things that come up relevant to those, and they mostly don't
| care about work.
| yosefk wrote:
| Protocols Not Platforms - like Bitcoin which is mostly traded
| on a few exchanges, or email which is mostly handled by a few
| giant services?
|
| Mastodon will be no exception with high likelihood. Choose it
| over eg Twitter if you prefer where it's going _as a platform._
| I actually prefer where Twitter seems to be going, but to each
| his own
| devjab wrote:
| ActivityPub is sort of the protocol though. Mastodon is just
| the platform incorporating it that is becoming the twitter
| replacement. Maybe not for everything, but programming
| andtechwise my mastodon feed sure is more interesting than
| any of my other social media feeds in the wake of Elon.
|
| I think it's hard to say where things are heading though. We
| had RSS before, and that didn't stand up to American tech
| giants. I have my doubts this iteration of ActivityPub and
| the "fediverse" will, but I do think we need a decentral
| protocol like it if we want an interesting internet going
| forward. I mean, which of your centralized social media feeds
| are interesting in 2022? Even HN is becoming a page I visit
| on a weekly basis rather than on a daily basis, and this is
| the SoMe I use the most aside from mastodon and LinkedIn.
| Maybe I'm just the oddball, but at least in my circle of
| influence things like Facebook are now solely used to arrange
| things like Blood Bowl tournaments.
| robswc wrote:
| I think thing the biggest threat to mastodon will be the
| "mods" and "admins." It's a matter of when, not if there
| will be drama and it'll be interesting to see how that is
| handled.
|
| A lot of subreddits went so far as to make a bot that will
| ban users for posting on other subreddits. With mastodon
| that's more or less "built-in."
|
| You're right though. Social media in general seems to be
| going downhill. Can't really put my finger on "why" but
| "uninteresting" being a word I wouldn't disagree with.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| Because bots have been trained to get people to reply
| like bots do.
| brigandish wrote:
| > I mean, which of your centralized social media feeds are
| interesting in 2022?
|
| Don't you choose who you follow? I'm not sure how that is
| related to decentralisation anyway, other than the
| revelations in the Twitter Files about manipulation of the
| network. Still, the Mastodon network isn't free from that
| kind of censorship either so it seems I'm still at a loss.
| ido wrote:
| Where is Twitter going?
| 0x445442 wrote:
| Toward a platform and away from a publisher.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| What exactly is that supposed to mean?
|
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-
| platform-...
| 2devnull wrote:
| Users will pay instead of the FBI. At least that's one
| interpretation.
| infotogivenm wrote:
| Just out of curiousity, where do you get your news?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The FBI paid _legally required_ reimbursement for records
| requests.
|
| Twitter has kept this policy under Musk:
| https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-
| law-e...
|
| > Twitter may seek reimbursement for costs associated
| with information produced pursuant to legal process and
| as permitted by law (e.g., under 18 U.S.C. SS2706).
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2706
|
| > a governmental entity obtaining the contents of
| communications, records, or other information under
| section 2702, 2703, or 2704 of this title shall pay to
| the person or entity assembling or providing such
| information a fee for reimbursement for such costs as are
| reasonably necessary and which have been directly
| incurred in searching for, assembling, reproducing, or
| otherwise providing such information
|
| $3M out of about $5,000M worth of annual revenue, and
| again, it's reimbursement.
| heartbreak wrote:
| Bankrupt, according to Musk himself.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| Hopefully it will stay on the internet rather than move to
| somewhere like the drive-in. Worst movie night ever.
| europeanguy wrote:
| > "For some reason, people who would never read an article in
| the Wall Street Journal about Procter and Gamble acquiring a
| new shampoo company will devour content about Microsoft
| acquiring a tech startup they've never heard of."
|
| Good point, I'll grand you that, but I'm on the other side. I
| don't want to hear less about Microsoft acquiring tech
| startups, I want to hear more about Procter and Gamble
| acquiring shampoo companies.
|
| My guess is that journalists that write such articles exist,
| but possibly they publish in specialist journals /
| magazines...?
| jtode wrote:
| You seem like a prime candidate for a subscription to the
| WSJ, my good europeanguy.
| europeanguy wrote:
| Can you go on the WSJ front page and point out to me one
| story that's like the "Procter and gamble acquire something
| obscure"? The WSJ send to be to be exactly like regular
| news, but themed to look like business, as opposed to what
| I'm looking for, actual business.
| 88j88 wrote:
| I think mastodon sucks. I think most people think it sucks,
| compared to twitter- which they likely already use. Is the
| friction of having a worse user experience worth moving from
| twitter, just because Elon is being a twit? I don't think most
| people care because- what is the value of twitter anyway? Most
| social media is- you get to hear what your friends think, and
| respond to them. With twitter it seems to democratize access to
| influencers. Would you switch to Mastodon if- none of the people
| you care about are there? I don't think so. And if most of those
| influencers don't move to other platforms, will those other
| platforms be covered by tech journalists? No.
| [deleted]
| gumby wrote:
| It's a very good point. Linux was basically invisible until Red
| Hat showed up. RH wasn't even the first for profit business
| distributing Linux, but they were the first with a marketing
| department.
|
| And after some publicity, people who wanted to try Linux were no
| longer just the usual nerds who would download it or get a copy
| from a friend, but were folks used to paying for software so who
| were happy to pay someone to send them a disk with a distro on
| it.
| Proven wrote:
| [dead]
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| anon223345 wrote:
| As a software engineer, I found using Mastodon very confusing and
| nonintuitive.
|
| I want it to work and be successful, but trying to think of is
| anything but a curiosity until it's more user-friendly for non-
| techies is a pretty fair argument...
| dmix wrote:
| Even worse, users can signup on a random server then it can end
| up on one of the big server blacklists (or get shutdown) and
| they won't be able to see or participate in major portions of
| the network.
|
| Try explaining to your mom why she needs to sign up again on a
| different URL, its no walk in the park (especially if you want
| to keep your old 'tweets' via backups):
|
| https://nerdschalk.com/how-to-switch-servers-on-mastodon-eve...
|
| If Mastodon grows bigger and blacklists grow, it could easily
| Balkanize, and it will be clear it's more of a competitor or
| add-on to existing niche forums/communities. Something not
| really in the spirit of public social networks like Twitter.
| Which is totally fine, just different.
|
| ...assuming they figure out the UX/UI issues to help it "cross
| the chasm" (which I'm skeptical will happen soon, that usually
| takes core leadership, good design is rarely tacked on
| afterwards).
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm?wprov=sfti1
| asn1parse wrote:
| This article is poorly written and utter nonsense and just shows
| a clear confirmation bias with the author. lmao.
| dmix wrote:
| It's oddly bitter.
|
| It's normal for journalists to look for human narratives. He
| makes it sound like it's some conspiracy that an OSS project
| lacks a good PR team to craft & communicate a good narrative.
| Journalists can still dig in to find the stories... even when
| the projects are hostile to it.
|
| Just look at the Dwarf Fortress: a small project that's hacker
| made w/ an anti-gaming mainstream UI and not backed by monied
| elites but still has multiple fascinating journo friendly
| stories about it.
| groestl wrote:
| Mastodon. It's bitcoin for your tweets. You're welcome ^^
|
| (Edit: just for clarification, this is not meant to be serious,
| hence the ^^, but rather a play on bad analogies in newspapers
| trying to explain something the writer has not understood to
| people that probably never will)
| [deleted]
| sph wrote:
| I know how Mastodon and Bitcoin work, yet I have no idea what
| "bitcoin for your tweets" even means. That's a terrible
| analogy.
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| The analogy has some merit as both Bitcoin and Mastodon are
| decentralized services that are not driven by a tech company
| with commercial interests in the background. Well, Bitcoin
| miners receive transaction fees and Mastodon instance operators
| donations but owners of Bitcoin or a Mastodon account have to
| create a meaning of these services by themselves.
|
| And I would argue that the article's thesis is not far off as
| traditional media are confused by both projects due to this
| non-alignment of the services' ownership and value they create.
| The typical crypto article focuses on advertising or
| scandalizing imploding crypto startups but fails to convey the
| benefit of international, distributed and programmable money.
| Similarly, the typical Mastodon article is about negative
| campaigning of Twitter and its new generally hated CEO but
| fails to explain the fundamental idea of a non-commercial
| distributed social network.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I think this breaks down because one assumes there's some
| financial element (like other cryptocurrency projects) but
| that's not really the case with mastodon.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Things are now interesting with Mastodon! I joined 2 1/2 years
| ago but until a month or two ago, not terribly interesting. I
| only follow 181 people there (and just have 299 followers, a tiny
| number) but for me there is now a critical mass of people and
| interesting content.
|
| I have not given up on Twitter. I decided to pay for it and I am
| curious how a mostly paid for social media platform might evolve.
| People like Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan seem enthusiastic still
| about Twitter, but it is after all a large platform for them. Joe
| Rogan is interesting in part because of how much he advocates for
| other people, an example been his saying very complimentary
| things recently about Krystal and Saagar's independent news
| channel (well, they are awesome).
| jrs72s wrote:
| It is an awkward platform to be honest. And can you trust the
| instance you are using??? The instance operator can see
| everything because there's no encryption.
| nishs wrote:
| There are many instances and instance operators to choose from.
| At least one of the choices may be sufficiently trustworthy for
| many users (e.g. an instance for their city run by someone in
| the neighborhood). You could also run your own instance.
|
| These options sound better than trusting a corporation.
|
| > The instance operator can see everything because there's no
| encryption.
|
| What additionally is an instance operator seeing that isn't
| already public? Are you referring to direct messages and
| privacy/blocklist settings? Regardless it's no different than
| having a corporation see (and mine, or sell) this data.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Likewise Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook.
|
| Hadn't stopped them.
| tootie wrote:
| Ben Collins, Micah Loewinger, Taylor Lorenz. They're all MSM
| reporters and they are very much internet people.
|
| https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/mastodon-p...
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| Tech Journalism absolutely knows what to do with Mastodon which
| is write the same lazy article over and over again about how
| Mastodon is dead.
|
| I personally love it because techbros read it and conclude it
| isnt worth checking out and the rest of us dont have to tolerate
| another techbro joining mastodon to jump into rando conversations
| and mansplain arch linux.
| rsynnott wrote:
| This confusion will get worse, not better, because non-mastodon
| activitypub things are about to become more of a thing. Tumblr is
| going to add activitypub support, apparently, and Flickr is
| muttering about it. I'm fascinated to see how they frame this to
| users.
| zainhoda wrote:
| Agreed. I just posted a guide on how to do it in another thread
| and it's actually not that hard. The only thing that won't be
| familiar to all devs is HTTP signing. I expect that we're going
| to have more HTTP middleware frameworks that support
| ActivityPub if Mastodon gains more traction.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > this thing isn't for the masses
|
| it could be _if_ signup and user discovery processes was much
| more frictionless; once you get past that, it 's not any harder
| to use than other social networks. If there's anything the core
| devs should apply their efforts to resolving, it's that.
| college_physics wrote:
| I think you can generalize the sentence to "xxx doesnt know what
| to do with Mastodon" where you can insert into xxx any of the
| major actors of modern life, including the public sector and its
| still a true statement
|
| The idea of empowering, democratic, relatively "low" tech that
| doesnt abuse its users has been expunged so effectively from the
| public consciousness (and tech journalism and others are so
| complicit) its not a mystery this new narrative doesnt fit
|
| But maybe its a blessing in disguise. As the fediverse is still
| rather immature, too much attention from ill-wishers might turn
| the baby into a stillborn
| dmix wrote:
| Expunged by whom?
|
| It's a UX problem not a conspiracy
| college_physics wrote:
| The conspiracy is defining UX narrowly enough that trivial
| matters trump vital ones
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| "The idea of empowering, democratic, relatively "low" tech that
| doesnt abuse its users has been expunged so effectively from
| the public consciousness (and tech journalism and others are so
| complicit) its not a mystery this new narrative doesnt fit"
|
| It isnt just that, its also the fact that the media's
| conversation around moderation is childishly underdeveloped and
| nuanced. Moderation IS the hard problem of social networks, you
| cant automate moderation away, you cant not have moderation but
| any moderation policy you choose is going to have edgecases and
| problematic instances and the distortions those cause are going
| to threaten to overwhelm the spirit of the moderation (which
| is, dont be a dick). Also, people stuck at those edgecases
| (someone talking about their experience as a victim of an
| illegal crime for example) are going to get banned or silenced
| in extremely harmful ways.
|
| The reason Mastodon is the future is that it attempts to solve
| this moderation problem by having many different communities
| with different moderation policies that have unique wordings,
| red lines for behavior and different moderators enforcing the
| established policies. When different communities federate, they
| do so on the basis of similar philosophies about moderation.
| When more and more communities with similar value systems
| federate the edgecases of any one particular moderation policy
| begin to become less important as a vulnerability or
| exploitation point since any one particular community is small
| and the shared spirit of the moderation policies ("dont be a
| dick) becomes more important as a guiding principle in
| moderation disputes. Also the red line of unnaceptable behavior
| is different for each community which creates a fuzzy region of
| more and more unacceptable behavior that trolls cant exploit
| the way they can tip toe justtt around the edge of a singular
| red line.
|
| No moderation system is sustainable since it will by definition
| have edgecases which will cause problems or be exploited by
| trolls. No moderation isn't an option. Mastodon/the Fediverse
| is the third option nobody knew we had and really I have NO
| idea how corporate social networks with monolithic moderation
| policies projected across millions of people have any
| capability of adapting this innovation. It is the massive
| elephant in the room for corporate social media companies and
| yet tech journalism is still stuck on "should we have no
| moderation or a single moderation policy?" which Mastodon is
| FAR past at this point onto more interesting questions like how
| do instance admins negotiate moderation disputes? What does
| that look like and how can it be improved? There have been
| disputes between predominantly black communities and
| predominantly white queer communities on the fediverse and it
| gets absurdly complicated and nuanced fast but there is the
| capacity for that conversation to happen and different people
| to make their own choices and part paths (defederate) that
| makes Mastodon undeniably a far more advanced social technology
| than any other corporate social media platform where it just
| becomes person A is right or person B is right.
| college_physics wrote:
| Absolutely this. This comment should be required reading for
| anybody trying to report on that new phenomenom as it goes to
| the core of the real social network problem and the space of
| possible solutions.
|
| Its a radical paradigm shift: from adtech to modtech.
| Building platforms not geared towards user addiction and
| "engagement" but towards effective moderation and healthy
| communities.
|
| I said that the fediverse is still immature precisely because
| standards and tools around moderation are still missing. E.g.
| the celebrated activitypub protocol, while a key enabler in
| other ways, knows nothing about it.
|
| Its not a wild goose chase. Frictions and strife and trying
| to control others are core to the human existence and so are
| the antidotes. We just need to make sure that our social
| networks are no worse than the rest of society 8-)
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