[HN Gopher] StreetPass: Find Your People on Mastodon
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StreetPass: Find Your People on Mastodon
Author : doener
Score : 130 points
Date : 2023-02-07 12:48 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (streetpass.social)
(TXT) w3m dump (streetpass.social)
| tboyd47 wrote:
| This is really cool.
| shaunsingh0207 wrote:
| I love the name, Nintendo's StreetPass was such a cool tool. It
| was awesome just finding someone random to play with in an
| airport or waiting room.
| BuckyBeaver wrote:
| Maybe I'm missing something about this one, then. How is
| detecting "me" Mastodon links on Web pages similar to
| discovering people who are online near you?
|
| Or as that not what Nintendo's did? Anyway, thanks for any
| insight.
| yborg wrote:
| I guess that it finds people "near" to you in the sense that
| you visit their site.
|
| An actual mobile app that worked like StreetPass that
| broadcast your Fediverse address via Bluetooth would be fun,
| except that it would hardly ever find anyone unless you are
| at a conference.
| delecti wrote:
| Being in college when the 3DS came out was neat. Just wandering
| around the CS building (GCCIS) I got a ton of hits and was able
| to beat the adventure.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| I still bring a 3ds in my bag when I fly just on the off chance
| I get a street pass. Sure I know you can run your own relays at
| home, but it was always neat finding a random person, more so
| when you had a repeat.
| Fatnino wrote:
| I don't think the home relays have worked for years. Nintendo
| shut down the backend servers at some point.
|
| Nintendo had a deal with someone (att?) that all their free
| wifi hotspots would work as street pass relays. The way this
| worked under the hood is that your 3ds would see a wifi
| network named attwifi and then check the mac address of the
| ap, then it would report to Nintendo backend "hey, I just
| passed near mac xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx". Then Nintendo would note
| that down and also make it so the previous 3ds who visited
| that spot is now a street pass hit on your 3ds.
|
| So, you would setup openwrt to broadcast a network named
| attwifi and make it switch every minute to a random mac from
| a list shared by everyone else doing this and you had
| yourself a guaranteed 10 hits a day (10 being the artificial
| limit Nintendo imposed).
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| Ah, I haven't looked at it in a while, but that would make
| sense. I have a raspberry pi (1st gen) in a 3d printed
| nintendo 64 case some where around here that ran the PiPass
| stuff. I might dig it out and put it on display in the
| office now.
|
| Still, was a cool idea!
| cdevroe wrote:
| +1 for Safari!
| [deleted]
| Tepix wrote:
| > _StreetPass for Mastodon takes the same idea, but applies it to
| the web instead. Every time you visit a website, you can make a
| connection with the owner of that website, if the website has
| registered a verification on Mastodon._
|
| What is the advantage versus writing "my mastodon is at <link>"
| on the web page?
| nightpool wrote:
| The point is that this browser extension collects those links
| passively so that you can see a list of all of the Mastodon
| accounts on pages you've visited, even if you don't notice them
| at the time (when you were reading the page)
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| As far as I understand, that's the sort of links the service
| scrapes (as well as literal <link>-tags).
| drapermache wrote:
| I love the nod to the 3DS StreetPass. It would be nice to have
| this built into a Mastadon mobile app rather than a browser
| extension.
| nightpool wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand what you're suggesting--this
| extension is useful because it can basically passively surveil
| every single site you visit to determine which ones have
| Mastodon links, and make a list of them in the background. The
| whole point is that you don't have to take any additional
| action to seek out these links, you just collect them passively
| by browsing the internet already. How could a mobile app
| possibly add a feature like that?
| herrherrmann wrote:
| The original street pass feature of the Nintendo 3DS would
| let you "passively" play some games with other 3DS players
| you encountered in real life (even and especially when your
| 3DS isn't even opened). That way you would check your 3DS
| later and see the players you bumped into during your trip. I
| think OP is suggesting to have a similar thing for Mastodon.
| Users would keep the Mastodon app running and other users you
| meet along the way would be added to a list. (I'm not
| specifically fond of the idea, but just try to bring in some
| clarity and context here.)
| ty___ler wrote:
| Hey everyone creators here! The Fediverse Report recently posted
| a really good thread about the product if you're interested in
| learning more
| https://mastodon.social/@fediversereport/109813142639096272
| blfr wrote:
| It's a solid improvement but the move from Twitter to Mastodon is
| not happening[1].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34693037
| bovermyer wrote:
| Your comment is tangential at best to the topic at hand. This
| does not belong in this discussion.
| blfr wrote:
| What's the point of automatically finding Mastodon profiles
| if they're either not there or not posting?
| bovermyer wrote:
| You're assuming that Mastodon users are all Twitter
| refugees. I assure you, this is not the case.
| blfr wrote:
| I know that after initial influx, Mastodon is losing
| momentum and activity. Both from the article linked and
| my own experience.
|
| Theoretically, Mastodon could tap some previously
| untwitterized microblogging niche but I haven't seen
| that.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| my timeline there's is very active, and interact more
| with my posts than on Twitter. But thanks for your
| opinion
| bovermyer wrote:
| This changes nothing about my original comment. Whether
| Mastodon is popular or not, growing or shrinking,
| "Twitter light," or microblogging-fed is entirely
| irrelevant to the original topic in question.
|
| If you have something useful to say about StreetPass or
| social account discovery in general, please do
| contribute.
| jacooper wrote:
| Both are crap now. English and technical people are on
| Mastodon, while institutions and official bodies are still on
| twitter.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Not everyone I think. I'm still on Twitter mostly because I
| for the life of me can't figure out how Mastodon works.
|
| I think I'm just too old for this.
| TehShrike wrote:
| If you're on iOS, install the Ivory app from TapBots - I
| wouldn't be able to use Mastodon without it.
| system16 wrote:
| It's actually pretty simple. Just sign up to any
| instance/server. It doesn't really matter which one. You
| can follow and interact with anyone, regardless of which
| server they signed up for. Then it's just like Twitter for
| the most part.
|
| I feel the "multiple instances" aspect of Mastodon really
| confuses people. Highlighting it to new users is not
| working in their favour.
| haswell wrote:
| Does the instance one registers on become part of their
| identity?
|
| I think this is the thing that always made me pause - I
| didn't want to pick a server I'd regret later.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Does the instance one registers on become part of their
| identity?
|
| Yes. You can't transfer your posts, you can't transfer
| your filters, and you can only transfer followers if the
| server cooperates.
|
| > I didn't want to pick a server I'd regret later.
|
| This happened to me:
| https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/mastodon.html
| system16 wrote:
| Sort of, similar to how an email domain does and how
| others might perceive you based on whether you have an
| @hotmail, @gmail, @outlook address.
|
| I'm using mastodon.social since I signed up years ago,
| but if I were to create an account today, I'd just look
| for the coolest sounding instance that has a lot of
| users. Like the other comment mentioned, you can always
| migrate to a different one (although you might lose your
| post history, you'll keep all your followers/followings).
| suddenclarity wrote:
| Yes and to my knowledge whomever set up the server will
| have full access to your private DMs so choose wisely.
| r00fus wrote:
| Institutions move slowly.
| dasil003 wrote:
| The point of Mastodon is not for everyone from Twitter to move
| there.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| True, and good point.
|
| It's also completely counter to the popular narrative of
| people who now hate Musk (but lately used to love him).
|
| Let's not pretend that Twitter hate has anything to do with
| technology or intended uses.
| r00fus wrote:
| The point of Mastodon is that it allows for diversity of
| opinion (even in the meta-level - opinion as to what's
| allowed/not).
|
| Some want to find their Twitter peeps on Mastodon. You're
| free to feel othewise.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Our statements are in 100% agreement.
| INTPenis wrote:
| That was a funny news story because I'm sure it was a case of
| Hanlon's razor, but had they talked to any old school fedi
| admin they would know that the user retention is normally
| between 20 and 40%. So if that holds true for the latest
| twitter waves, we won't just lose 30% of active users, we'll
| lose 60%!
|
| No service has 100% user retention, and unfortunately the
| Mastodon software was counting each new sign up and login as a
| monthly active user.
| system16 wrote:
| I guess it depends who you follow. Most iOS Developers I
| followed on Twitter have all migrated to Mastodon, as well as
| many indie game devs. My Mastodon feed is actually
| significantly more interesting these days than Twitter. For fun
| I just logged into Twitter and the first 20 tweets I looked at
| in the "For you" tab were from brand accounts, major media
| accounts, sponsored tweets, suggested accounts, and tweets
| others have liked. Over half were from accounts I don't follow.
| The "Following" tab was entirely brand accounts and media
| accounts.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Twitter's replacement will not look like MySpace -> Facebook.
| It will look like the decline of Craigslist. It will still be
| here a decade from now, but people will have moved on from a
| number of different types of reliances on Twitter to a number
| of different other options.
|
| Mastodon will be one part of that.
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(page generated 2023-02-07 23:02 UTC)