[HN Gopher] Monthly Fediverse posts cross 1 billion for the firs...
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Monthly Fediverse posts cross 1 billion for the first time
Author : mg
Score : 228 points
Date : 2023-04-17 06:57 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (masto.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (masto.ai)
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| We will never be able to accurately count the number of messages
| on the Fediverse so this likely happened earlier. We will always
| under count because some servers don't report statistics and we
| may not even be counting all the servers.
|
| I say this as someone who has spent time trying to measure these
| things and has written a fair bit of software attempting to
| measure things like this.
| mxuribe wrote:
| > ...We will never be able to accurately count the number of
| messages on the Fediverse...
|
| In many ways, I hope that blindness continues...While i know my
| opinion there hurts valid research studies (and any stats work
| like yourself might conduct - sorry about that!), I think the
| pseudo-privacy that the network affords is worth the likelihood
| that any data set is only a fraction of the true numbers. My
| intent is not to be flippant....i just really value this
| nebulous aspect of the network...Like someone who values their
| small town feel (warts and all), and dislikes Big City folks
| who charge into said fictional small town trying to change
| things that may not need changing. (Not saying you or other
| researchers do so...just using a cheesy analogy)
| rapnie wrote:
| To those who come here to say that Fediverse is too small to be
| in any way, shape or form viable, I'll repeat my comment from the
| other day [0] that the Fediverse is not in a contest to existing
| megascale platforms:
|
| > The growth-hacking folks around here should realize that from
| the perspective of the Fediverse there is no such "contest". This
| is probably the biggest difference why Twitter is by no means an
| alternative to Mastodon. There's no need to grow at all costs,
| move fast and break things, do crazy things to get engagement
| levels up, no commercial incentives, valuations, VC and
| shareholders to satisfy. The Fediverse is a network created by
| people, for people, and it is noticeable in the culture.. if you
| stop the frantic growth-hacking and take the time to discover it.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35584385
| rvz wrote:
| Seems like tons of Mastodon advocates are the ones always
| pitching it as an alternative to Twitter. Every time that
| happens, I'll just get the numbers out since you brought up the
| total number or registered users which is irrelevant to active
| users:
|
| Twitter: 220M+ DAU over 17 years.
|
| Mastodon: ~50,000 DAU (1.4M MAU) over 7 years.
|
| What matters in social networks is scale and it still means
| more users and there is already evidence that Mastodon not only
| was and is still struggling to scale, but eventually needed to
| re-centralize to handle their scalability issues, ie. using
| Cloudflare. Most of the instances there, are hosted by
| enthusiasts and hobbyists which intermittently struggle with
| more users.
|
| If an instance is too small, it will easily be at risk of
| getting attacked and overloaded with users, with the instance
| falling over and having to close signups. If its too large,
| they become more centralized and to incentivise federation they
| have to close signups. Either way, centralization is
| inevitable.
|
| It's already bad enough for normal users to 'choose an
| instance' if their can't register on a closed one or if a rouge
| admin bans you or an entire instance over something silly.
| Thus, It is quite clear to me, that for normal users who are
| not techies or geeks, Mastodon is not a viable alternative or
| even remotely to replace Twitter or even a recommendation.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| _> If an instance is too small, it will easily be at risk of
| getting attacked and overloaded with users, with the instance
| falling over and having to close signups._
|
| Co-admin of https://functional.cafe here. Mastodon lists us
| as having 213 active users currently, so I guess this counts
| as a small instance. Haven't seen our instance fall over for
| more than a day or two except for hitting hardware limits,
| mostly hard disk space.
|
| Also, I have no idea why you perceive closing sign-ups as a
| sign of failure. Closing sign-ups or going invite-only
| protects the current users and state of the instance (and,
| indirectly, the rest of the Fediverse) both from the dangers
| of attacks from new users and from explosive growth. Is it
| some sort of measure of success, to be able to always invite
| new people even at the expense of already existing ones?
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| > What matters in social networks is scale
|
| If you care about a revenue stream like ads, or are a
| prominence wanting a broadcasting platform.. but in general:
| why, no, not at all?
| qtzfz wrote:
| Because the more people you have to read or talk to, the
| better? Because you want all your friends and people you
| want to hear from to be already there?
|
| It's like those threads about Signal, talking about how
| much better it is compared to whatsapp and the rest - okay,
| maybe, but if my friends aren't there already, it's
| worthless.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| > Because the more people you have to read or talk to,
| the better?
|
| Not really. Having quality interactions is more important
| to me than having many interactions.
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| No, for some maybe, for others not. Also quantity vs
| quality.
|
| And also, what about those monopolies, I understand
| motivation, but the outcome is problematic.. If we want
| the everybody encompassing user platform it shouldn't be
| commercialized and owned like that, with a lot of
| idealism ;)
|
| > but if my friends aren't there already, it's worthless
|
| See that is another level problem there also.. if
| everybody jumps out of the window, I need too?How did we
| survive just prior to mega social networks.. huh.
|
| So again, I know for some what you mention is the
| important point. But don't tell evryone, and also every
| playform, that if they are not aiming for super growth
| they are doing it wrong, because (and likely even
| intentionally) they aren't!
| vidarh wrote:
| What matters is if the right people are there. Same
| reason why we're on HN even though it's tony compared to
| Reddit. And many of us are both places.
|
| For me, Mastodon now have more of the right people than
| Twitter, but I still hold on to my Twitter accounts too
| because there are others I still want to talk to there.
| mal-2 wrote:
| Scale isn't the whole story. The most noticeable thing for me
| on fedi was that people actually saw my posts and interacted
| with them. All the DAU on Twitter doesn't matter when you
| need to pass the Great Filter of the algorithm to get seen.
| Every post I made on Twitter got almost no engagement, and my
| friends who followed me would tell me they never saw it.
| Instead my timeline was full of influencers, bots, and that
| week's outrage.
|
| On fedi I feel like I have a small community who engages with
| my posts. I think that's what people want, even a few hundred
| followers is enough to feel heard. I can control my own
| timeline and find content I want. It really doesn't matter if
| it's only 1% the size of Twitter because my timeline is
| leagues better.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| Engagement on Mastodon is simply higher quality IME as
| well.
|
| Whether it's an "Eternal September" thing or not that
| Mastodon hasn't hit yet remains to be seen. It really
| reminds me of modern social media meets older school
| internet (IRC & web forums days).
| tedivm wrote:
| I posted on the #fedihire tag and got an amazing
| response, and then a job. My twitter engagement was
| basically a single "like" and then nothing.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _The most noticeable thing for me on fedi was that people
| actually saw my posts_
|
| How do you know that people saw your posts on Mastodon?
| mal-2 wrote:
| Replies, boosts, likes, follow requests.
| vidarh wrote:
| I have about 100x as many followers on my biggest twitter
| account as on my Mastodon, and yet typically get more
| engagement on Mastodon... Much of it down to the algo, but
| also, I suspect simply churn: A whole lot of followers who
| are now longer active. My Mastodon account hasn't had time
| to accrue many of those so far.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Mastodon: ~50,000 DAU
|
| Citation definitely needed for this number.
|
| It's not only false, it's egregiously false.
|
| These stats seem to suggest that there are well over a
| million DAU: https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics
| rvz wrote:
| > These stats seem to suggest that there are well over a
| million DAU
|
| Please. That is the figures for the MAUs [0] and you're
| clearly using that to attempt to pass that as a source for
| the non-existent daily active users metric and you know it.
|
| [0] https://joinmastodon.org/servers
| lapcat wrote:
| Wrong. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35602391
|
| Moreover, you're still attempting to pass off 50,000 as
| something you just didn't make up out of thin air.
| rvz wrote:
| > Wrong.
|
| Correct. [0] "Monthly Active Users"
|
| That does NOT say "Daily". Surely you can read that.
|
| > Moreover, you're still attempting to pass off 50,000 as
| something you just didn't make up out of thin air.
|
| Even it is wrong, There are no sources out there that is
| verifiable and you haven't provided one after I debunked
| your figures (which is actually the MAUs).
|
| So as long as the exact DAUs is unknown, the figures can
| be estimated to be as low as 100,000 DAUs and even worst
| case 50,000 DAUs.
|
| [0] https://joinmastodon.org/servers
| lapcat wrote:
| > That does NOT say "Daily". Surely you can read that.
|
| Yes, I discussed the issue in the link I gave. Surely you
| can read that.
|
| > So as long as the exact DAUs is unknown, the figures
| can be estimated to be as low as 100,000 DAUs and even
| worst case 50,000 DAUs.
|
| This doesn't follow. I can estimate it as 2 people. Or 2
| billion people. Where does 100,000 or 50,000 come from?
| You repeatedly refuse to give any evidence that you
| haven't made those numbers up out of thin air.
|
| Anyway, it's redundant to argue the exact same thing in 2
| different threads, so let's stick to the other thread
| please, since it has more info and explanation.
| rvz wrote:
| > Yes, I discussed the issue in the link I gave.
|
| Nope. After 7 years that is the MAUs as clearly shown to
| everyone. There are no issues with that figure.
|
| > This doesn't follow. I can estimate it as 2 people. Or
| 2 billion people. Where does 100,000 or 50,000 come from?
| You repeatedly refuse to give any evidence that you
| haven't made those numbers up out of thin air.
|
| NO source exists for Mastodon that verifies the DAUs,
| since it is not given; meaning that one can only
| estimate. The problem with your 'link' is that you
| continuously use it as the wrong metric when it is for
| the MAUs.
|
| So until you provide a verifiable source for the 'DAU'
| figures it can only be estimated. I gave mine and you can
| disagree with it. But without such a definitive
| verifiable source confirming the DAUs, I can just dismiss
| it like you can dismiss my estimate.
|
| Furthermore, it is no good blaming a 'label' that has
| been there for 7 years and now having a problem with it
| given you still don't have a source for the DAUs.
| lapcat wrote:
| I'm not sure why you continued in this thread rather than
| in the other thread with more info and explanation as I
| suggested, but anyway...
|
| Even if we assume for the sake of argument that
| "active_user_count" in
| https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics is monthly active
| users, there's still a major problem with your daily
| estimate, because the monthly active user count is
| remarkably stable from day to day.
|
| We have 32 days of data, and on most days the change in
| monthly active users is only around 5000, sometimes less.
| There was one day where the active user count dropped
| 13K, and one day where it grew 27K, but those are
| outliers.
|
| How is it possible that ~92-96% of Mastodon users are
| _not_ daily active users, yet the monthly active user
| count only changes from day to day by an average of less
| than 10K? Your numbers just don 't add up. They don't
| even make sense, as far as human behavior is concerned,
| and it certainly doesn't align with what we see on every
| other social network.
|
| They certainly seem to be very loyal, consistent monthly
| active users. I'm not sure what Twitter means exactly by
| a "daily" active user. I think I would have been
| considered one, but I also definitely missed days, so
| what qualifies or disqualifies an account as a daily
| active user? How many days can you miss?
| boudin wrote:
| What's this thing with the absolute wish to centralise
| everything? The Internet is decentralisation, it's birth is
| interconnecting networks, having one massive network being
| just not scaleable. The web is a decentralise content system,
| allowing anybody to add content easily is the reason it
| scaled. Same goes for the domain name system. Companies like
| Twitter HAVE to decentralise their system in some ways to
| make it scale, because centralisation does not scale (using
| CDNs, caches, replication, etc...).
|
| Centralisation do makes seems much simpler to build, but it's
| not a strength, it's a big weakness and create single points
| of failure.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| All the important accounts I followed on twitter switched to
| Mastodon when Elon got his hands on the platform. I don't
| want Mastodon to be a Twitter alternative, really, even if it
| is only for some circles.
|
| The endless Twitter drama and hot takes being pushed in your
| face by Twitter's engagement algorithm is tiring. I'd be
| happy if that dredge would be kept away from the Fediverse.
| It sadly isn't, but at least the situation hasn't gotten
| nearly as bad as Twitter's thanks to smaller communities that
| aren't afraid to practice moderation. I know the idea that
| someone might kick you off your server for being toxic is a
| problem for some free speech absolutionists, but personally
| I'm glad to see them return to Twitter/Truth Social/Gap/that
| weird web3 Twitter without moderation.
|
| If you're trying to build a brand, Twitter is a lot better.
| Their fake engagement statistics below every post help a lot
| when it comes to inflating popularity statistics and you
| can't use ads on Mastodon to force your brand down other
| people's time lines. Only people who genuinely want to see
| what you're saying are seeing your content and that's why
| Mastodon will never replace Twitter:you can't buy your way to
| some twisted sense of popularity.
|
| I doubt complete centralisation will ever happen. We'll
| probably end up with a sort of email light, where it's quite
| easy to set up a smaller instance but the majority of users
| flock to a few popular servers the same way Gmail and Outlook
| have replaced ISP mail accounts. However, because Mastodon
| and other Fediverse services don't really have a way to do AI
| moderation in a way that pretends to work well enough, I
| don't think scaling up to servers of more than a few thousand
| people is really viable.
| rapnie wrote:
| > What matters in social networks is scale
|
| What value does scale have, if you get only lazy retweets and
| likes and low-quality responses? I don't need 'eyeballs-on-
| tweet' kind of exposure, but interesting discussions. I get
| these on the Fediverse, and yes I managed to pass the 15
| minutes selection of an instance. Which isn't all-too-
| important either, as instances federate with each other and
| you can migrate later, if you wish.
|
| Btw, for an example pitching that Twitter isn't a good
| replacement for Mastodon, see yesterday's thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35578226
| rvz wrote:
| > What value does scale have, if you get only lazy retweets
| and likes and low-quality responses? I don't need
| 'eyeballs-on-tweet' kind of exposure, but interesting
| discussions.
|
| Normal users use the block button, protected tweets and
| whitelisted or follower-only replies which those already
| exist. Problem solved. This is a non-issue.
|
| Even by looking at the so-called 'migration', it has failed
| to convince existing Twitter users to stick around on
| Mastodon which by comparing with the figures: 220M vs
| 50,000 daily active users, it is not even close to 1%.
|
| It's clear the Mastodon has decided to immediately
| disqualify itself and has decided to add more barriers to
| entry and migrations within migrations as features as you
| have just admitted:
|
| > ...yes I managed to pass the 15 minutes selection of an
| instance. Which isn't all-too-important either, as
| instances federate with each other and you can migrate
| later, if you wish.
|
| My point(s) still stand. An island for techies and geeks
| isn't a great pitch to normal people who dislike Twitter
| and are looking for a viable alternative.
| robga wrote:
| This seems erroneous "~50,000 DAU (1.4M MAU)". It can't be
| true that the average monthly user only interacts once per
| month (1.4M/50k). How do you explain the figure? Dividing MAU
| by 30 would not be a good approach.
| rvz wrote:
| At least one 'Toot' from a registered user a day = 1 daily
| active user (DAU), no matter how many times they toot,
| boost, reply or whatever.
|
| > Dividing MAU by 30 would not be a good approach.
|
| It is. By doing so with the top 20 Mastodon instances [0]
| we get even less than 50,000 users using it daily, hence
| the _generous_ approximation. Even if we don 't, we can
| only imply that the DAU is ultimately far less than 100,000
| users a day, posting at least once on the platform.
|
| This is why many Mastodon supporters would rather not tell
| me the daily active users and would immediately avoid
| mentioning it, which this is the real reason why they
| cannot claim that millions are using it 'daily'.
|
| [0] http://demo.fedilist.com/instance?software=mastodon&oni
| on=no...
| lapcat wrote:
| > At least one 'Toot' from a registered user a day = 1
| daily active user (DAU), no matter how many times they
| toot, boost, reply or whatever.
|
| This is _not_ how Twitter measures DAU. In fact, most
| Twitter users are quiet lurkers who rarely if ever tweet.
| Twitter makes money (or used to make money) from their
| eyeballs, not from their tweets.
| rvz wrote:
| We are talking about Mastodon's DAU which that is still a
| mystery. Twitter's DAU is already known to be over in the
| hundreds of millions approximately.
|
| The whole point is:
|
| >> Even if we don't, we can only imply that the DAU is
| ultimately far less than 100,000 users a day, posting at
| least once on the platform.
|
| Either way, it is safe to assume and with the data from
| Fedlist and matching it with the instances of 'active
| users' it is still less than 1% of the DAUs on Twitter,
| hence why Mastodon fans (like yourself) cannot claim and
| proudly show that there are 'millions of users' using it
| daily.
|
| Furthermore, debunking the so-called 'Twitter migration'
| that wasn't.
| lapcat wrote:
| > We are talking about Mastodon's DAU which that is still
| a mystery.
|
| Is this an admission that 50,000 was just an invented
| number out of nowhere?
|
| Here are some stats though:
| https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics
|
| > Mastodon fans (like yourself)
|
| Mastodon users like myself
|
| > there are 'millions of users' using it daily
|
| Not millions plural, but over a million according to the
| link above.
| rvz wrote:
| > Is this an admission that 50,000 was just an invented
| number out of nowhere?
|
| What do you think '~' stands for? It is approximate
| estimation and my point still stands unchallenged.
|
| > Here are some stats though:
| https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics
|
| You don't even know yourself. That statistic is "MONTHLY"
| active users, not DAILY active users. You gave a figure
| that is collected directly from the 'servers' page that
| literally says "Monthly Active Users". [0]
|
| Try again.
|
| [0] https://joinmastodon.org/servers
| lapcat wrote:
| > What do you think '~' stands for?
|
| I think it stands for, you made it up. You still haven't
| given any citation whatever for that number.
|
| > You gave a figure that is collected directly from the
| 'servers' page that literally says "Monthly Active
| Users".
|
| It also literally says right below that, "Data collected
| by crawling all accessible Mastodon servers on Apr 15,
| 2023."
|
| Look at the data. It has daily counts. For example,
| here's the April 15 data that matches with what the page
| says:
|
| {"period":"2023-04-15","server_count":"9509","user_count"
| :"6641082","active_user_count":"1201004"}
|
| I think it's actually the "Monthly" label there that
| seems somewhat misleading, unless perhaps it means they
| update the page once a month.
|
| In any case, as another commenter mentioned, DAU and MAU
| tend to be relatively close. You don't go from 1.2M
| monthly users all the way down to 50K daily active users,
| that's nonsense.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35600846
|
| Do you think Twitter has 6 billion MAU?
| rvz wrote:
| > I think it stands for, you made it up. You still
| haven't given any citation whatever for that number.
|
| We both know there are NO sources. You gave a source for
| the MAUs. Thus, we can only give approximations and
| estimations of its DAUs.
|
| > I think it's actually the "Monthly" label there that
| seems somewhat misleading, unless perhaps it means they
| update the page once a month.
|
| Now you think it's the label's fault, after 7 years? Oh
| no! "It's misleading"!
|
| Something that has been representative of Mastodon's
| monthly usage for 7 years is now not believable and is
| 'misleading'! /s Oh dear.
|
| > In any case, as another commenter mentioned, DAU and
| MAU tend to be relatively close. You don't go from 1.2M
| monthly users all the way down to 50K daily active users,
| that's nonsense.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35600846
|
| Not for federated networks, yet here we are comparing
| centralized platforms like Facebook, Twitter and counting
| the numbers as if they are the same which we both know
| they aren't.
|
| Henceforth, give a proper source that is verifiable that
| shows Mastodons DAUs and NOT its MAUs next time since
| you're still struggling to do so.
| lapcat wrote:
| You're being deliberately obtuse. I said the raw data for
| 2023-04-15 on https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics
| matches exactly the numbers on
| https://joinmastodon.org/servers for "Data collected by
| crawling all accessible Mastodon servers on Apr 15,
| 2023." Everyone can see that, including you if you
| choose. I didn't say the numbers were "not believable".
|
| The question is what "Monthly" is supposed to mean
| exactly, given that the raw numbers change every day, as
| everyone can see from the above link. And as I said, one
| possible interpretation is "unless perhaps it means they
| update the page once a month".
|
| > Not for federated networks
|
| Says you, with no evidence, again. What exactly was your
| methodology for producing the estimate "50,000"?
| rvz wrote:
| > You're being deliberately obtuse. I said the raw data
| for 2023-04-15 on https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics
| matches exactly the numbers on
| https://joinmastodon.org/servers for "Data collected by
| crawling all accessible Mastodon servers on Apr 15,
| 2023." Everyone can see that, including you if you
| choose. I didn't say the numbers were "not believable".
|
| And that represents the 'monthly' usage as I repeatedly
| said. That only shows MAUs, not daily. Never was a
| problem for 7 years.
|
| > The question is what "Monthly" is supposed to mean
| exactly, given that the raw numbers change every day, as
| everyone can see from the above link. And as I said, one
| possible interpreation is "unless perhaps it means they
| update the page once a month".
|
| It is clear that it is representative of the MAU of every
| "active" Mastodon instance and corroborates with that
| fedi-list link I gave which also clearly shows "MAU" and
| matches with that.
|
| There is no room for excuses or blaming labels after 7
| years of Mastodon's MAUs count.
|
| > Says you, with no evidence, again. What exactly was
| your methodology for producing the estimate "50,000"?
|
| Yet it seems that you haven't even tried refuting it with
| any verifiable source and you are continuously passing
| the MAU metric as the DAU which is clearly incorrect,
| which I can dismiss your so-called 'DAU' source for
| Mastodon. Until then:
|
| "Give a proper source that is verifiable that shows
| Mastodons DAUs and NOT its MAUs next time since you're
| still struggling to do so."
| lapcat wrote:
| Me: What exactly was your methodology for producing the
| estimate "50,000"?
|
| You: Yadda yadda yadda... [no answer]
|
| I'm actually fine with taking 1.2 million as the
| assumption for the monthly active user count, but it's
| still absurd and inexplicable to go from that to a 50K
| daily active user estimate.
| rvz wrote:
| Me: Do you have a verifiable source for the DAUs?
|
| You: This... https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics
|
| Me: That is MAUs, Not DAUs. Read this:
| https://joinmastodon.org/servers "Monthly Active Users"
|
| Do you have a verifiable source for the DAUs? Not MAUs?
|
| You: Errr......
|
| So once again, you come back and have zero verifiable
| source(s) for the DAUs count for Mastodon.
|
| > I'm actually fine with taking 1.2 million as the
| assumption for the monthly active user count, but it's
| still absurd and inexplicable to go from that to a 50K
| daily active user estimate.
|
| It has always been that source for Mastodon's 'Monthly
| Active Users' for years and you knowingly used it to
| prove the numbers for the 'Daily Active Users', then when
| questioned you blamed the 'label' as 'misleading'.
|
| The "Monthly Active Users" label could not have been more
| clearer and has been for years. You are free to dismiss
| my estimate, but once again you have admitted that you
| don't have any sources to even show me the DAUs.
|
| So again:
|
| "Give a proper source that is verifiable that shows
| Mastodons DAUs and NOT its MAUs"
| lapcat wrote:
| I never had a strong opinion about how exactly Mastodon
| measures "active_user_count". I did find it curious from
| https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics that they seem to
| be scraping the servers every day, and this suggested to
| me that they might be counting daily active users. I
| could be wrong though. I don't know the technical details
| of how they calculate it. And I already said earlier: "In
| any case, as another commenter mentioned, DAU and MAU
| tend to be relatively close. You don't go from 1.2M
| monthly users all the way down to 50K daily active users,
| that's nonsense."
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35602391 So I was
| _already_ granting that 1.2M could be the monthly user
| account, even while considering the possibility that it
| might be the daily count. I don 't really care either
| way. I don't think it helps your argument if it's the
| monthly user account. So let 1.2 million be the monthly
| user count. _Now_ will you explain your estimate
| methodology?
|
| At this point I doubt that you will. You seem to be very
| committed to avoiding the question, even though I've
| granted the assumption that you wanted.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Mastodon: ~50,000 DAU (1.4M MAU)
|
| Hold on, are you... getting DAU by dividing MAU by 28? That's
| very much not how that works; perhaps the easiest way to
| illustrate this is by considering Facebook, which has ~2bn
| DAU, but obviously does not have 48bn people using it every
| month.
|
| In general for social media stuff, DAU and MAU are pretty
| close to each other; Facebook is 2bn vs 3bn or thereabouts,
| and AIUI Twitter is even closer.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| I didn't find anything interesting about Mastodon. It felt like
| just another Twitter to me. I don't care about some random
| dude's cat pictures or their takes on politics or what they had
| for lunch. Is there something I'm missing?
| nicoburns wrote:
| I've found twitter/mastadon useful to follow updates from
| specific open source developers whose work I know and am
| interested in.
| nstart wrote:
| To be fair, if you don't use Twitter then you are already
| well removed from the target demographic that might find
| Mastodon useful. That said, there are a lot of really useful
| takes on Mastodon on various topics. Politics is probably the
| area where you will find the most number of takes. But in
| infosec, and game development at least, there's a lot of
| interesting info. The biggest issue with Mastodon or the
| fediverse rather is the lack of full text search and the
| cultural push back against it. I don't view the push back as
| negative. It's a sign that the community has strong opinions
| and that's a good thing. But the lack of search does make it
| hard to peek into a conversation around a topic which to me
| takes away from the experience of jumping into communities of
| interest.
| WA wrote:
| I agree. I find it interesting that we took search on
| Twitter for granted and only realize later that it is
| probably more important than expected. Maybe a search
| engine for Mastodon can fix this.
| robin_reala wrote:
| The Mastodon argument against generic search is that it
| leads to pile-ons. If you want to opt-in a post to be
| searchable then you expose it via hashtags. To a Twitter
| user it feels a bit over-exuberant new social media
| manager, but once you understand the context it becomes
| more understandable.
| noirscape wrote:
| The real reason is mostly just speed. Pleroma has a full
| text search and its frankly kinda ass in terms of speed.
| You need fairly beefy hardware to make full-text searches
| an option if you're dealing with that many "documents".
| Doubly so on Mastodon, which is already fairly bogged
| down by being a Rails application.
|
| The infra can't really support it without _heavily_
| centralizing the model (something for which Mastodons
| questionable tech stack already doesn 't do itself any
| favors).
|
| There's also a bit of a privacy concern in that many
| instances just don't like it when big nameless entities
| start scraping the posts of their users, which also leads
| to a fairly hostile mentality towards the concept.
| rapnie wrote:
| There's another aspect to Mastodon search that
| distinguishes it from Twitter. When you search you do so
| in your own history of prior interactions. It is like
| 'personal search' that way and becomes more valuable the
| longer you are active on the Fediverse.
| nstart wrote:
| Unfortunately not enough people use it. And
| realistically, in the middle of a formula 1 race or a ufc
| fight, there's no time to be hashtagging each and every
| keyword if you are live sharing your thoughts or replying
| to others. A single key hashtag is fine like #AusGP. But
| when I want to search for Albon and Red Flags and
| opinions on that, I can't expect people to do #Albon and
| #RedFlag. Full text search is sorely missed :,(
| WJW wrote:
| AFAIK there have been several attempts at this, but
| Mastodon deliberately does not support arbitrary search
| and some communities are extremely hostile to having
| their posts scraped.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| This seems like it guarantees political battles of some
| sort? Whether intra or inter-community.
| WJW wrote:
| Given how many political battles there are on platforms
| that do have full text search, I don't think it's the
| lack or presence of full text search that causes such
| things. Rather it seems likely that political battles
| naturally arise on any social media platform that allows
| broadcasting your opinion to the whole world.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I meant battles between different instance hosters and
| moderators.
| IanCal wrote:
| My mastodon feed is generally people talking about stuff they
| find interesting. Twitter is 95% like this
|
| X is really important.
|
| 5 things you have to know: (thread)
|
| All because of trying to game/use all the engagement figures
| about what shows your post more. Splitting your content into
| two tweets with half the people clicking through after
| reading the first results in half the people actually getting
| the information but massively more engagement stats so
| Twitter thinks it's much more important.
| blitzar wrote:
| > 5 things you have to know: (thread)
|
| This seems to be a trend amongst wannabe influencers -
| sader than the lack of actual content is that you see the
| same thread copied and pasted and used by multiple
| accounts.
| a_bonobo wrote:
| I deactivated my Twitter account (set to private), from
| time to time I take a peek and it looks like the new
| algorithmically generated timeline really seems to push
| these garbage listicle tweet-threads.
| blitzar wrote:
| If your version gets pushed I might as well do copy &
| paste and get my impressions up too ...
| skrowl wrote:
| [dead]
| tptacek wrote:
| If you don't care about Twitter's service model, you don't
| care about Mastodon.
| DoItToMe81 wrote:
| You aren't missing anything. It's not a forum, it's just
| people from mainstream social media who have sought to leave
| mainstream social media for various reasons. There are some
| interesting tech people on some instances, but it's generally
| not worth wading through the hundreds of people attracted to
| the idea of a more hugbox Twitter.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Quite correct. I'd argue it's not even the right framework to
| consider the question.
|
| _Individual_ Mastodon nodes might be interested in maximizing
| their userbase. But talking about "Growth goals for Mastodon"
| is like trying to talk about "Growth goals for the Internet."
| safety1st wrote:
| This is right. The Fediverse and Mastodon aren't products. As
| the most widespread implementation of ActivityPub (and AGPL'ed
| to boot), Mastodon, like WordPress and the Linux kernel before
| it, is more like a force of nature.
|
| It's something that more and more people will adopt over time
| because it's free and "good enough" for some use cases. A
| fraction of those who adopt it will contribute to it and it
| will improve. The longer this virtuous cycle continues the
| harder it is to stop. Over several decades it will commoditize
| a chunk of a technology layer that's currently proprietary
| (basically, the social graph). Maybe a huge chunk of it.
|
| Again just like Linux and WordPress - there will be lots of of
| critics and naysaying from people who don't understand the
| economics of the software industry (or in some cases simply
| don't want to). They will be wrong, again. They will moan about
| it for many years after it has become successful. History
| repeats.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Cultivate ecosystems, not products. Ecosystems persist,
| products are at the whim of...everything.
|
| EDIT: @madeofpalk Better comment than mine, great links.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Protocols, Not Platforms
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/2019/08/28/protocols-not-
| platforms-...
|
| https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-
| platforms-a...
| ertian wrote:
| I hope you're right. But it does have to achieve escape
| velocity. There are lots of interesting open source projects
| that never quite made it. Jabber/XMPP, for instance: it
| seemed like it would inevitably take over messaging for a
| while in the early 00s...but then a flood of richer chat apps
| washed it away, and we were stuck in a world of walled
| gardens again. Jabber never quite died, but it certainly
| didn't live up to it's full potential.
| riffic wrote:
| the AP ecosystem is a genie that can't be placed back inside
| the bottle, it can not be bought by a single malicious actor
| (or nation-state), and it was built openly by folks
| associated by the W3C as a standard specification for anyone
| to freely implement. looking forward for media and the public
| sector (emergency comms etc) to get on board.
| gsatic wrote:
| Dont worry about the "growth" hackers. Attention is finite.
| They cant hack that.
|
| How many books get added to a library, or how many ppl get
| shoved into the library, has no effect on how many books one
| person can actually read and digest at a time.
| HopenHeyHi wrote:
| And yet the vanity metric is right in the title.
|
| Most of what we hear of the Fediverse is rants about twitter
| and a few of the same subcultures over and over again.
|
| There used to be a site long ago, lost to the mists of time,
| called Big Boards, tracking the biggest forums:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20130223011947/http://rankings.b...
|
| 10 years ago it was a thing called Gaia online with Chibi anime
| thingies and 2 billion messages. The more things change..
| rvz wrote:
| Funny thing is I don't see lots of people screaming about
| MySpace for 7 years on Twitter or Facebook.
|
| Looks like those hundreds of millions of users _really_ did
| move on.
| fogzen wrote:
| Gaia Online! What a blast of nostalgia. I miss my chibi
| avatar...
| HopenHeyHi wrote:
| Son, I still think about my green Neopets T-Rex.
| Operyl wrote:
| That website is somehow still kicking, years later. It's
| a shell of its former self, though, having been sold a
| few times now.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I created my Gaia Online account in 2003.
|
| Sadly, I can't regain access to it, as it was deactivated.
| Last time I tried, I needed to create a new account in
| order to create a support request, and things got weird.
| That was a decade ago, I think.
| nstart wrote:
| > Most of what we hear of the Fediverse is rants about
| twitter and a few of the same subcultures over and over
| again.
|
| I feel like this isn't true anymore. There's definitely a lot
| of chatter about Twitter of course and even more so now that
| there's regular Twitter related drama happening. But I have 7
| federated instances on speed dial that range from general
| purpose, to infosec, to art, and to game development. They
| all talk about a lot of stuff, not just the things related
| purely to the server theme. I checked all of their local
| timelines just now and found only one post talking about
| Twitter and it was just a link to a news item where Elon
| talks about government access to Twitter.
|
| Notably absent were any growth hack posts. Everything was
| just stream of consciousness stuff.
| HopenHeyHi wrote:
| [flagged]
| stephen_g wrote:
| Yeah, I think over the last few months the number of posts
| about Twitter (from the people I follow at least) have
| dropped to about 10-20% of what they were.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| 10-20% less of previously how many?
| tedivm wrote:
| Honestly as a pretty heavy fediverse user who ditched
| twitter, I see maybe two or three posts a week about
| twitter. Most people have other things to talk about.
|
| The exception is when twitter does something
| exceptionally stupid or controversial, but even then I
| don't think twitter ends up overwhelming my feed or
| anything.
| rapnie wrote:
| A lot of the rants came from frustrated people migrating
| away from Twitter by the shenanigans of Musk. There has
| been a bit of a culture change due to the large influx. But
| now that these people get to be comfortable in their new
| 'home', these discussion also become less frequent. Of
| course it is also who you follow that determines how you
| are exposed to these rants. If you are in a Twitter exodus
| group there'll be plenty more ranting.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| Maybe open source can project such a thing as "deathzone"
| around social networks once funding for growth hacking rounds
| out.
|
| Once matrix is up to discord levels of features, and the
| horrors facebook will be willing to todo for one last sip of
| growth get revealed, things might turn sour fast. All it takes
| is the social carawanne lead animals leaving the beaten track
| and the whole network will unravel following them.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's interesting to see how much of a boost the Fediverse
| received simply from the inept handling of Twitter.
|
| Social networks operate on an attention economy.
| lapcat wrote:
| As a Mastodon user myself, I don't find these low-content,
| context-free, analysis-free Mastodon stat post submissions to HN
| to be useful. It's just an excuse for people to argue.
|
| I'm not even sure why people need to argue about this. If you
| want to use Mastodon, then do it, and if you don't want to use
| Mastodon, then don't. Is anyone forcing you? It's a personal
| choice. And no, Mastodon will never replace Twitter for hundreds
| of millions of people; it was never designed to do so. Mastodon
| vs. Twitter is a false dichotomy. It's more like Twitter vs.
| itself, Twitter vs. not-Twitter. From my own perspective,
| Mastodon is simply a place I happened to go after I already
| decided to stop using Twitter.
|
| I suspect that to a large extent, arguing Twitter vs. Mastodon is
| only a proxy for arguing for or against the new owner of Twitter,
| and this argument has been rehashed ad infinitum on HN from
| various angles.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _I suspect that to a large extent, arguing Twitter vs.
| Mastodon is only a proxy for arguing for or against the new
| owner of Twitter_
|
| I'm perfectly capable of hating Elon Musk and Mastodon at the
| same time.
| lapcat wrote:
| > I'm perfectly capable of hating Elon Musk and Mastodon at
| the same time.
|
| That's fine. So, don't use Twitter or Mastodon, and don't
| argue Twitter vs. Mastodon?
| Hamuko wrote:
| Why am I not allowed to argue about those things?
| lapcat wrote:
| What do you want to argue about exactly? You didn't even
| explain why you hate Musk or Mastodon.
| Hamuko wrote:
| It wasn't about why I hate Musk or Mastodon. Your claim
| was that if you argue against Mastodon, you're actually
| just a Musk lover, or if you argue for Mastodon, you just
| do it because you hate Musk. I can dislike Musk and think
| that he's making Twitter worse, and still think that
| Mastodon is a shitty social network. Those things are not
| related. But if I dislike both, I'm supposed to not
| "argue Twitter vs. Mastodon"? It doesn't make any sense.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Your claim was that if you argue against Mastodon,
| you're actually just a Musk lover, or if you argue for
| Mastodon, you just do it because you hate Musk.
|
| No, my claim was specifically about "arguing Twitter vs.
| Mastodon".
|
| > Those things are not related.
|
| Exactly! That's my point. They are entirely separate
| issues that are too often conflated.
|
| > But if I dislike both, I'm supposed to not "argue
| Twitter vs. Mastodon"? It doesn't make any sense.
|
| If you dislike both, then it doesn't make any sense to
| argue Twitter vs. Mastodon. It's a false dichotomy.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _They are entirely separate issues that are too often
| conflated._
|
| You're the one that is conflating them.
|
| > _If you dislike both, then it doesn 't make any sense
| to argue Twitter vs. Mastodon. It's a false dichotomy._
|
| How?
| yborg wrote:
| >It's just an excuse for people to argue
|
| Q.E.D.
| krapp wrote:
| It's weird - there was a lot of support on HN for Mastodon
| before Elon Musk took over Twitter, albeit in the midst of a
| lot of criticism, mostly about UX. Now that the narrative of
| people fleeing Twitter because of Elon seems to dominate
| discussion, it seems like everyone wants to double down on
| hating it or dismissing it. Even with evidence that Mastodon's
| UX problems aren't insurmountable, everyone still wants to call
| code on Mastodon and declare it dead.
|
| You'd think more people would be happy that the FAANG hegemony
| is being broken, at least a little, but I guess not.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Entinel wrote:
| There is a very simple answer to this. The people that were
| leaving Twitter went to Mastodon and found it unsuitable.
| It's not that people who were cheerleading Mastodon turned
| coat or went away, they just got outnumbered.
| jacooper wrote:
| Or these people actually tried it and saw it isnt
| alternative because or boneheaded decisions.
| krapp wrote:
| I know plenty of people who moved and wound up perfectly
| satisfied with it.
|
| Maybe people here are just projecting.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Huh, wonder what happened in January. It returned almost to pre-
| Musk growth rates for a month, then resumed extremely rapid
| growth.
|
| Also somewhat surprised there wasn't more of a spike in April
| 2022; IIRC that's when Musk made his offer and it's certainly
| when I started un-mothballing my old mastodon account.
| mkl wrote:
| ActivityPub came out in 2018, Mastodon in 2016. Twitter got to 1
| billion a month in 2010, at about 3 years old:
| https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2010/measuring-tweets
|
| So the Fediverse took ~2 times as long, but in the face of much
| tougher competition and network effects. Better than I would have
| guessed!
| suddenclarity wrote:
| On the other hand, Twitter basically predated smartphones and
| tablets. I recall a time when you had to use WAP to read and
| SMS to send tweets. To avoid absurd fees, most people would
| only use internet on their stationary computer. Compare it with
| today when there are supposedly 7 billion smartphones while
| most colleagues seem to use them 24/7.
| riffic wrote:
| it's fair to note that the Fediverse is much older than the AP
| protocol. It originally came up through a duo of protocols,
| OStatus and the Diaspora protocol.
|
| Before Mastodon we had Status.net, Identi.ca, and GNU Social.
|
| The Fedi will be celebrating its 15th year soon:
|
| https://fediverse.party/en/post/fediverse-14-years-in-2022/
| mg wrote:
| Another factor is that protocols propagate much slower than
| individual pieces of software
|
| Email, the thing with the "@" symbol, was invented in 1971.
| Most people did not use it until 30 years later.
|
| ActivityPub, the thing with the two "@" symbols, is now 5 years
| old. If we assume it will propagate twice as fast as email, it
| will take another 10 years until it hits the mainstream.
| viernullvier wrote:
| This also implies that a future generation social protocol
| with three "@" symbols will only take 7.5 years to become
| mainstream.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Calling it now: long-lived assistant personas that hold
| context for years at a time.
| "@engineering@orgdomain@openai.com where can I find the
| Frobber service documentation?"
| edwcross wrote:
| Is there some tutorial about Fediverse for organizations, in a
| way that is really simple for non-experts?
|
| I mainly use Twitter for town-level information (as a glorified
| RSS), and the local administration barely masters Twitter, let
| alone more complex tools. But if there is a simple way to copy
| their messages towards the Fediverse, that could help bootstrap
| it.
| rapnie wrote:
| Information is dispersed, and created by many independent
| volunteer initiatives. A lot of info is in all kinds of blog
| posts, so some internet search may find good input. There's the
| "Increasingly less brief guide to Mastodon" at
| http://guidetomastodon.com, by @Noelle@elekk.xyz and sites like
| https://fediverse.info and https://fediverse.party provide
| overviews. At https://delightful.club you find curated lists of
| fediverse app, client and developer projects.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| There are various tools that will mirror tweets to Mastodon.
| Many of them worked the other way around (replicating Mastodon
| posts on Twitter) but with the ridiculous pricing Twitter asks
| for API access I doubt they'll still work in a few months.
| There's also a tool that will directly mirror RSS into
| Mastodon, so if that's the source of your tweets then you're in
| luck.
|
| There's also a decent, chance your posts are already readable
| on Mastodon through https://bird.makeup/. I wouldn't use that
| as an official source, but it's probably good to know about. It
| should also be noted that some servers block dedicated Twitter
| forwarding services like these because of the massive
| moderation task blindly forwarding the Twitter cesspool can
| cause.
|
| I can't tell you what tool or program suits your needs most.
| There are systems ranging from fully custom ActivityPub servers
| to simple set-and-forget IFTT automations
| (https://ifttt.com/explore/how-to-crosspost-mastodon-twitter)
| that can solve the problem of "post the same stuff on two
| platforms". Sadly, the most easy to use tools that I know of
| are useless without access to the Twitter API and I doubt
| you'll be willing to spend the ridiculous amounts of money
| Twitter demands for that for a few replicated tweets.
|
| As far as simple guides, everyone has their own idea of what
| "simple" means. In its most basic form, you type or paste text
| into an input field and hit the send button, just like on
| Twitter. You give people your username to follow
| (@user@server.com),they type that into their dashboard and they
| hit the follow button. If you want to reply to people, you
| click the reply button and type a reply. Retweeting and liking
| works the same way as on Twitter, with similar icons. Usernames
| are a bit longer because they include a domain name, but
| honestly who even cares about usernames on social media.
|
| If you've ever emailed someone outside your organisation, using
| Mastodon shouldn't be harder than using Twitter. The hard part
| is synchronising the two, because the only people who have put
| effort into that so far either used the Twitter API or are
| comfortable with running shell scripts.
| riffic wrote:
| ask chatgpt to digest it for you lol. otherwise all you'll hear
| is technobabble
|
| perhaps try WordPress out with the ActivityPub plugin?
| gtunic wrote:
| Unless the Fediverse sorts their censorship issues out, it's not
| going to get anywhere near as much usage as Twitter. If you don't
| follow a very narrow political viewpoint then you'll almost
| certainly get banned from whatever server you signed up for.
|
| They all enforce this on each other as well, with a shared block
| list of servers on which the operators allow users to say things
| outside of this narrow political viewpoint.
|
| This sort of restriction on speech isn't conducive to a healthy
| community where ideas and thoughts can be shared freely. Instead
| it's more like an authoritarian state where you have to be super
| careful about what you say, under threat of exile.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| > This sort of restriction on speech isn't conducive to a
| healthy community where ideas and thoughts can be shared
| freely.
|
| I disagree with your overall take for a few reasons. Some of
| the best forums on the Internet in the days of yore were
| heavily moderated. Some of the best subreddits are the most
| heavily moderated (AskHistorians is the example people provide
| routinely).
|
| Not every place should be about an open free speech debate
| about everything. Having topic-focused spaces is perfectly
| reasonable and you as the user are owed nothing if you join one
| and start posting off-topic content.
|
| Users are not owed a spot in any given community.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| I wrote about this a few years ago, when Wil Wheaton tried to
| move to Mastodon, and promptly got booted from his instance
| by a mob.
|
| The "heavy moderation" of IRC days is markedly different than
| the "heavy moderation" that exists today. Back in the day,
| the ircops had all the power of the ban hammer. Today, the
| mob has all the power, and overwhelm the admins.
|
| The mods try to hold onto a semblance of power by pointing to
| a strict set of rules and codes of conduct, but the reality
| is the mob gets the final say in who stays or goes,
| regardless of what the "rules" say.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| The Wil Wheaton example is actually something that
| absolutely could have happened in the IRC days - a big mob
| flooding another channel to ban user X could lead an oper
| to decide the same thing (this was in fact the source of
| much drama back in my EFNet days).
|
| There's nothing stopping a moderator/operator from simply
| blocking accounts on-instance who are erroneously
| flagging/reporting people.
|
| There's also nothing stopping Wil Wheaton from finding a
| more sympathetic server admin or starting his own Fediverse
| server instances and ignoring people reporting his accounts
| (see also: Kevin Beaumont).
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > Unless the Fediverse sorts their censorship issues out
|
| The fediverse is not one thing, and the major and minor
| instances that I am aware of, admins do not hold the opinion
| that there are "censorship issues" specifically in "too much
| censorship".
|
| > If you don't follow a very narrow political viewpoint then
| you'll almost certainly get banned
|
| I'm sorry that your extremist trolling didn't go down well in
| the absence of a for-profit platform and it's "engagement
| metrics", but it seems like no-one wanted to hear it, no-one
| wanted to host it, and I feel that I'm better off for that.
| Have a nice day.
| gtunic wrote:
| [flagged]
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| It is hyperbole, correct. It is the exact same hyperbole as
| you saying "a very narrow political viewpoint". No more
| than what you gave.
|
| Now I don't know and don't want to know what opinions you
| are referring to, but based on my experience of mastodon,
| that "very narrow" characterisation is very much false.
|
| BTW, I also disagree with you on what "the problem" is.
| guntherhermann wrote:
| Not following a proscribed political viewpoint is now
| "extremist trolling". Yeesh!
|
| Some of these points aren't even controversial to most people
| in the real world, just on the Internet. See: men in women's
| sports. Go and ask a random person in real life what they
| think and then compare that with the Fediverse.
|
| Is that viewpoint "extremist trolling"? I don't think so,
| personally. You've just assumed the parent must be a
| horrendous person with horrendous viewpoints. But you
| actually haven't read them.
|
| Here's some rules:
|
| > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-
| examine. Edit out swipes.
|
| > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of
| what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Have a nice day.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| The idea that "the fediverse", an inherently decentralised
| network even has "a proscribed political viewpoint" is
| extremist and troll-y, yes. it is the technique of skating
| right over the bad-faith misframing of the issue in the
| hopes that we go along with it.
|
| > You've just assumed the parent must be a horrendous
| person with horrendous viewpoints
|
| No worse than what they assumed. I refer you to my other
| comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35601135
|
| And I'm not going to engage with your other talking points.
| DoItToMe81 wrote:
| Mastodon and Pleroma seem to have just soaked up the worst of
| the Fediverse. Most of the big Mastodon servers are MASSIVE
| echo chambers. I didn't check Pleroma as much, but the ones
| that I did were the same, but with an "I live in a basement and
| make white genocide infographics all day long" flavor.
|
| I've seen hobby chats that do not actually discuss the hobby
| they're designed for, because the keyboard warriors moderating
| the place have decided that their political flavor of the month
| is more important. It's not a healthy atmosphere for
| discussion, but it's the dominant one across the platform. And
| you WILL be aggressively blocked if you do not fit into it.
|
| Peertube and Pixelfed have fared so much better, I guess
| because the SocMed(tm) format is inherently designed around
| creating a bubble.
| gs17 wrote:
| Exactly my problem, I thought I had found a decent topic-
| focused instance, and then the local feed was dominated by
| one guy being pretty much who I didn't use twitter because
| of. I can block him, of course, but I'd rather we be able to
| talk about the techy stuff I signed up for.
| vidarh wrote:
| Nothing stops you from running your own instance for people who
| want to share the same ideas or want less stringent moderation.
| Freedom goes both ways: It includes others right to not want to
| deal with you. Just like Gab and Truth Social who both runs
| Mastodon have either wholly or mostly defederated.
|
| And as it happens the reason most Mastodon instances are
| moderated the way they are is that their users demand it.
| [deleted]
| egypturnash wrote:
| Dude it's an open protocol. You wanna dunk on the libs? Spin up
| a server. Presumably if you're on HN long enough to want to
| make a new account solely to bitch about the Fediverse's
| overall political stance then you have the skills to run one.
| Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, whatever, as long as it speaks
| ActivityPub it's on the Fediverse. Find new people who feel the
| same way by using #fediblock as a suggestion of people to
| follow, instead of people to block.
|
| But the Fediverse is not one monolithic network. And nobody is
| obligated to listen to a single thing you say. So if you start
| hassling a bunch of people who are there to talk to their
| friends while also being openly queer, non-white, and liberal,
| then you'll start racking up the blocks. Keeping a community
| healthy involves kicking out people who want to destroy it,
| too.
| halfjoking wrote:
| If you're on HN long enough you should know of a superior
| protocol called Nostr that doesn't tie your identity to
| Federated servers.
|
| By tying each individual to a server you are allowing cancel
| by association culture. Individuals should not be put in
| left/right buckets (or any other buckets) and have that
| association be used to censor/exclude them. The structure of
| the Fediverse encourages in/out groups. That's why it sucks,
| and that's why giving individuals the power over their own
| identity will be the future of social.
| mal-2 wrote:
| It's pretty hard to avoid putting individuals into _any_
| buckets whatsoever. How do I discover community on Nostr? I
| connected to a few relays but nothing seems to be themed or
| organized around interests. On Akkoma I can make friends
| with people on my local server and sibling servers in our
| Bubble so it 's very easy. Focusing on an independent
| identity at the expense of any kind of association is not
| particularly appealing to me. I'm not surprised it has
| tended to attract individualists in the crypto and
| libertarian crowds with those design priorities.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Honey, I run a Mastodon. At least half of the server blocks
| I do come from my users saying "hey have you seen this post
| on #fediblock yet". If I stopped dealing with that stuff,
| my users would migrate their accounts (and their donations
| for the server upkeep) to another server that's better at
| keeping up with that. They've _got_ "power over their own
| identity" without having to deal with the network effects
| of using Yet Another Social Media Protocol that's
| completely incompatible with existing open protocols; part
| of their power over their identity includes _delegating me
| as the social plumber who maintains the Asshole Filter on
| our social space_.
| xvilka wrote:
| So far, the biggest problem is the UX. Following someone from
| another server is not one click away. Until it's resolved, it
| will not gain mainstream acceptance.
| mal-2 wrote:
| I think this is really overblown. It only matters when you see
| someone's handle posted elsewhere. When you discover them
| naturally in your timeline you can just follow them. It could
| be solved with a new URL protocol scheme easily (instead of
| linking to your account on your home server, create a link to
| your handle on its own: fedi://@myname@myserver.place)
|
| The reason it's confusing currently is that people link to
| their home server, which is not useful to someone trying to
| follow them.
| gadders wrote:
| I'd have thought the child exploitation material would be
| pretty high up the list as well, now that they have started to
| be thrown off Twitter.
| rapnie wrote:
| In the Mastodon web UI for interesting people that pop into
| your timeline (via boosts/retweets) it is 2 clicks, go-to-
| profile + follow. Some clients have it as one click directly
| from the timeline. That is hardly a high UX barrier. OTOH when
| I am in Twitter UI I am always surprised how cluttered it is by
| Twitter recommending me all kinds of people I should be
| interested in somehow. Any UX takes a bit of time to get
| familiarized to, and then you no long notice its warts so much.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I disagree, this is a problem that needs solving. Clicking
| the link on my phone brought up Mastodon's web interface
| (which is fine) but there's no way for me to easily follow
| this account. My phone doesn't prompt me to open the link in
| an app because those prompts are domain based and the follow
| button showed me a whole bunch of text and instructions to
| copy/paste something somewhere else.
|
| It's perfectly understandable to me, but it's also not
| exactly great UI design.
| mal-2 wrote:
| There have been proposals to use a custom URL scheme to
| accomplish this (you don't need the link to point to the
| person's home domain at all), but they were shot down by
| Mastodon lead Eugen due to browser support and UX concerns.
| I think that is a mistake and it needs to be looked at more
| seriously. Perhaps another fedi software project will adopt
| a useful standard and then Mastodon can follow after the
| kinks are worked out.
|
| https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19679#issuecomm
| e...
|
| https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2291
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I think most people will use Mastodon and Twitter through their
| respective apps (or different apps om the case of Mastodon).
| Inside the app, following people isn't really that different
| from following people on Twitter.
|
| I do think Mastodon can use a better follow button, though, but
| I don't know how to really do that without a browser extension
| that can access arbitrary websites (aka "a bad idea").
|
| I know web applications can register protocol handlers, so
| perhaps an web+activitypub:// protocol combined with installing
| such a handler upon login at one's home server might help? Of
| course Safari doesn't implement this, but all other desktop
| browsers do and on mobile you can just use the apps.
| mal-2 wrote:
| I think the web-based protocol is the correct solution.
| Unfortunately it has been shot down already in Mastodon
| github issues, so another fedi project would have to take up
| the mantle on solving this.
|
| Akkoma has 'Remote Follow' which uses an OAuth flow to
| execute the follow action on your home server. I think that's
| too heavy of a solution but it is pretty decent UX.
| Definitely better than Mastodon's which primarily prompts you
| to 'Sign in' 'On this server'. That's almost never relevant
| to the user and should not be the primary prompt when you
| click Follow.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > I do think Mastodon can use a better follow button
|
| Mangane (fork of Soapbox) UI running on my Akkoma instance is
| a two-click follow - click on the username, click on the
| follow button (which isn't wildly different to Twitter,
| technically - one click on the three dot menu, one click to
| follow; only difference is that you don't leave the tweet
| you're looking at.) Should imagine some JS/UI whizzkid could
| replicate the three dot menu and copy the follow (mute, etc.)
| functionality there (alas, this is far beyond my skillset.)
| mg wrote:
| It does not need much to add the "follow with one click" to
| your browser. This code works for me: let
| your_instance="masto.ai"; document.location=(
| "https://" + your_instance +
| "/authorize_interaction?uri=" +
| encodeURIComponent(document.location) )
|
| You can make it a bookmarklet or a chrome extension to have it
| at your fingertips. (Set your_instance to the Fediverse server
| you use first)
|
| You can use my bookmarklet editor to turn it into a
| bookmarklet:
|
| https://www.gibney.org/bookmarklet_editor
| truckerbill wrote:
| but the point is people won't do this.
| rvz wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Why is it so hard for techies to understand that
| celebrating and optimizing for complexity and difficulty,
| isn't a great selling point for Mastodon?
| MrJohz wrote:
| Most people don't browse the internet with an adblocker, let
| alone know how to write their own bookmarklet.
| mg wrote:
| Most people don't use a standing desk. Despite health
| benefits such as reducing back pain, improving posture, and
| reducing the risk of obesity and other chronic diseases.
|
| Yet, standing desks exists.
|
| I think that's a good thing.
| MrJohz wrote:
| Standing desks and bookmarklets are both cool things that
| should definitely exist, I'm not knocking either of them.
|
| But if software has a UX problem and the only viable
| solution requires copying snippets of code around, then
| that is a reasonable criticism of the software.
| mkl wrote:
| If it's so simple, why is it not part of the default UI?
| mg wrote:
| When you go to https://masto.ai/@mg the UI of masto.ai
| cannot know which Fediverse server you use.
|
| Just like when you see an email on a website, that website
| cannot know which email service you use.
|
| To easily follow someone on the Fediverse, your browseer
| needs to know how to handle Fediverse links for you.
|
| Just like your browser needs to know how to handle email
| links for you.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| But with email, there are mailto: links, and email
| clients (locally-installed apps or webmail) can register
| themselves to handle such links.
|
| What's missing here is a standardised protocol scheme.
| noirscape wrote:
| It used to be. Mastodon removed it when they rewrote their
| entire UI in React in favor of their current messy "copy-
| paste a url into search" setup.
|
| The old follow button would just open a popup where you
| entered your home instance + username. It would then
| redirect you to your instance (not needing a sign in cuz
| you're already logged in on that) and your instance would
| do all the magic for following.
| hnarayanan wrote:
| And anecdotally, I find the amount of discourse just the right
| fit for my needs
|
| I'm on a server with similar enough people and between the list
| of people I'm following and the "local" timeline for my server, I
| have a healthy stream of nerdiness and silliness.
| lynx23 wrote:
| I can't help it, the name always triggers me. The first
| association I have with this name is "a social network built
| especially to be controllable by the feds."
| rahmeero wrote:
| I consider myself somewhat plugged into social media (Twitter,
| Insta, Tiktok, etc). But I admit I didn't know what Fediverse
| was and though it was some kind of government project, maybe
| for contractors to share documents relating to grants.
|
| Still don't understand the connection between "Fed" and
| "Mastodon". I think a Mastodon-based social network should be
| called "Tuskverse" or "Pachyverse" or "Stompverse"
| pferde wrote:
| The connection is that Mastodon is just one of the
| "applications" built on top of ActivityPub protocol. Others
| are Pixelfed, Pleroma, Peertube, Writefreely, and several
| more.
|
| Being based on the same protocol, they are all to some extent
| interoperable - e.g. you can follow Pixelfed users from your
| Mastodon account.
|
| "Fediverse" is the umbrella term for all of these
| applications working together. It is a portmanteau for
| "federated" and "universe". The "federal police" association
| is unfortunate, but it is something USA only - rest of the
| world doesn't really see this.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >but it is something USA only
|
| The US holds no monopoly on the concept of a federation.
| Germany (Foderale Bundesrepublik) is one too, so is India
| or Russia.
|
| It's the first time I hear someone take offense with the
| name. I think it's nice honestly, captures the essence of
| the network well.
| malermeister wrote:
| It doesn't hold a monopoly on the concept of a
| federation, but it does (as far as I know) hold a
| monopoly on the association of "fed" = (federal) police
| in people's minds.
| pmyteh wrote:
| Intriguingly, "fed" is British youth slang for the police
| despite Britain not being a federal state and there being
| very few national police. A US cultural import,
| presumably.
| ericlewis wrote:
| The Fed is short for Federated. Fediverse is an ensemble of
| federated servers. It's use more broadly than mastodon.
| [deleted]
| Grum9 wrote:
| [flagged]
| HopenHeyHi wrote:
| [flagged]
| rapnie wrote:
| The "web" also doesn't sound so appetizing, esp. for people
| with arachnophobia. At least it is short. "Internet" is a
| rather technical sounding name. Metaverse? For people who want
| to be all meta? Or subjects of Meta? Once you get used to a
| name, it doesn't sound so strange anymore.
| mal-2 wrote:
| Yeah it bothered me at first too. A relic of the euro-centric
| history of the network. It helps (marginally) to think of it
| like Star Trek's Federation.
| oldfashioned1 wrote:
| [flagged]
| quaintdev wrote:
| I have more activity on my pixelfed account in last 3 months than
| what I have on Instagram after half a decade of presence.
| bmarquez wrote:
| Took a look at pixelfed and it seems fascinating. I have no
| interest in leaving Twitter for Mastodon, but I'm desperately
| looking for an Instagram alternative.
|
| I wonder if pixelfed is going to have storage issues someday
| with the videos uploaded. I guess its dependent on the server
| but pixelfed.social is the only one with a large userbase.
| prox wrote:
| Do you have any tips to get started?
| quaintdev wrote:
| Nothing special. I signed up for pixelfed.social which is
| default instance and started posting occasionally.
| akudha wrote:
| What is the point of these vain/vanity numbers? This is like
| saying "I read 50 books last year" - ok, so? One great book is
| better than a million shitty books.
| Enjoying/understanding/implementing the learnings from one book
| is better than reading a thousand books for reading sake.
|
| How many of these posts are non-spam, useful etc?
|
| Shouldn't we measuring usefulness of info, friendships formed,
| partnerships created, things learned etc? Though I don't know how
| to measure any of these, or if it is even possible.
|
| 9 times out of 10, this "data driven" stuff is just useless and
| annoying
| lantry wrote:
| I think it's a somewhat useful proxy. You can't measure
| "friendships formed", so you find something you _can_ measure
| that hopefully correlates with "friendships formed".
|
| As you point out, it's not without it's flaws, but I think most
| people would say that some data is better than none.
| techaqua wrote:
| most of post on twitter is botted anyway.
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