Mastodon is not Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon is not Twitter

digitalscofflaw.com

55 pointsrainbowmverse55 comments

This was what I got:

"Mastodon is different. It has all of the same functionalities, but it's different. Also, following and contacts and everything are the same, but you can export your info, and that's different. People don't understand, but it's different."

I honestly can't tell if I'm reading a piece of satire.

Having started with no knowledge of Mastodon, at the end of the read all I know about it is that it seems to have all the functionality of Twitter?

At the risk of being crass, this sounds like a desperate founder or investor trying to self-validate and coming up woefully short on evidence.

From what I gather, Mastodon is to Twitter what Usenet is to Hacker News: Both provide a way to have text-based discussions in a threaded fashion, but Usenet is a protocol shared by many computers, whereas Hacker News is a specific piece of software run on (what is essentially, to all appearances, from the outside) a single, blessed computer.

Upshot: Hacker News can go down and be erased forever, modulo archival efforts like the Wayback Machine. Usenet can't go down.

That's interesting, but doesn't seem super relevant to end users. I'm not particularly worried about Twitter disappearing, but if I was I'd use the export feature to run backups.

I think censorship resistance is the more interesting feature. Mastodon seems to be mostly used for content that isn't blessed by Twitter policies.

I've found it to be the exact opposite: Mastodon instances are a lot more likely to disconnect from others due to unwelcome content. That's by design, though! Suppose you and I host our own Mastodon servers (aka "instances") as part of a federation of 1,000 instances. I start posting lots of content you and your users dislike (where that could mean anything - porn, pro-Nazi, pro-Antifa, overly conservative, overly liberal - anything). With a checkbox in the web UI, you can start refusing traffic from my server. That would only affect you and your users, and I can still talk to anyone else as usual.

Some of yours users might dislike that a flee for more tolerant pastures. That's fine! Some of my users might dislike that my rules are so loose that my server's getting banned, and they'd flee to more closely moderated servers. That's also fine! In either case, our spat only involves the connection between you and me, but the rest of the network chugs away as always.

Basically, it's the federation model of email but with the functionality of Twitter. That's what makes it different.

Let's go in the opposite direction for a second. I set up my shiny new Mastodon server. Do I instantly get the feed from all other instances? Or do I have to go find other instances to connect with?

You don't really connect to other instances so much as other users. To further the email analogy, if you stand up your own mailserver, you can start sending email to someone at Gmail without deliberately configuring either of those servers to talk to each other.

A good way to discover new users is to visit a popular instance - say, https://mastodon.social/about - and look at its "A look inside..." pane (which is that instance's "federated timeline"). Find a user who said something interesting and click on their post to go to their profile. Click "Remote follow" to follow them on your own instance, and voila! You have a new friend. You could also visit the Mastodon instance list (https://joinmastodon.org) which maps the current state of the network (aka the "fediverse") and search around to find themed instances that appeal to you. Want to follow a bunch of furries? Find an instance that caters to them, then start following all the interesting users you find there.

One thing that's interesting for end users is full control over the UI. In principle, and in practice with Usenet, reader software can be completely distinct from server software, and everyone can use their own reader set up their own way, and not have to dumbly accept what the server's owners thought was the One Proper UI for their service.

Another, deeper concept is that one group of yahoos can't unilaterally change the rules, because new software has to be compatible with old software. For example, imagine someone wanted to make email which deleted itself after a sender-specified period of time. They'd design the protocol and implement their server and client and then... nobody would care, because there are many email servers and clients, and nobody is compelled to use theirs. The people who really want that functionality would use it, and nobody else would be bothered.

Last I heard HN doesn't just appear to be a single, blessed computer. It IS a single, blessed computer

Well people used to call Twitter microblogging. It was blogging, just limited to 140 characters, which a lot of people though wasn't a huge difference.

Mastodon: Twitter, except with moderators who will kick Angry White Boy Assholes (Nazis, gamergaters, trolls, etc) off.

Mastodon: Twitter, except with a 500-char limit and no "sponsored tweets".

Mastodon: Twitter, except without a whole bunch of VC investment that it needs to try and pay back by monetizing your eyeballs and keeping you on the site as long as possible for as long as possible, regardless of whether that's by making you happy or enraging you.

Mastodon: Twitter, except a bunch of technical bullshit you probably don't care about unless you'd like to run your own Mastodon server for you and your buddies.

I mean, all they had to do was say that first one, and a lot of people would probably perk their ears up.

Seriously! This is the initial value proposition that got me and all my friends to check it out.

Well, to be fair if someone wanted to, they could set up a Mastodon instance specifically for people that would otherwise use Gab. It's likely that most other Mastodon instances would block them though.

Oh. So Gab and Mastodon are pulling at Twitter from each side. I anticipate that the network effect is too strong. People seem to enjoy the conflict that occurs when swimming in the same pool as their political opponents, despite all the talk of echo chambers. The bubbles have to intersect on some platform eventually.

This is why I don't think that the successor to Twitter will differentiate based on political ideology, on the first order, at least. You need the perception of a level discursive playing field in order to attract all the sorts of people who are looking to "have it out".

Gab? What is... googles

oh god its a social network by Pepes for Pepes that we are only hearing about because Google doesn't want to have the White Boy Hate Twitterlike in their store, hahahaha

Personally I liked Twitter a lot better before it became the place you could go to get into arguments with racists and Nazis with frog emojis in their display name, and this is one of the things driving me away from it. Having political arguments is not my idea of a good time, and nor is supporting a platform that lets people reinforce these sorts of views at each other or harass people who don't share them.

YMMV, I guess. Please go tell an angry racist idiot off in my stead if that's the kind of thing you enjoy. Unless you are one.

You've been led a little bit astray here. Mastodon as an entity is apolitical and solves the politics problem by allowing administrators to create 'federations' that can choose to be part of the same network as other federations or not. This means that the network is home to the left, the right, Japanese fetish communities, and whatever else an enterprising admin may have chosen to create. It's more analogous to a mix of twitter and old school BBS's with a bit more connectivity. It's completely up to the admins of each federation how their federation interacts (they get a file permissions like specification) with the rest of the network.

Mastodon: Twitter, except you regret trying to host it several times per week.

(nb: that was back when that hype wave started, instructions were ok'ish, but after a few weeks of still fiddling with it I just gave up - it was not fit as a single-user instance with those 3-5 docker containers and stuff. Even configuring a mailserver is easier.)

> Since all instances are more or less part of the same federation, it’s as simple as clicking follow when they see you’ve followed them from a new instance.

That's not simple, not at scale. It doesn't tell you who the new account is, match them up to the old account, unfollow the old account, automatically remind you when you go to @mention them, or otherwise make the transition automatic.

Simple would be the old account that you trust signing a message saying they're now the new account, and when your instance saw that message, it automatically moved your follow over, remembering the old account and using that as a hint to help you switch over.

Decentralized projects never seem to gain steam until mainstream users are forced away from centralized services. Take a look at this recent article looking at why the majority of mastodon users are from Japan: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2017/08/18/mastodon-is-bi...

What are some examples of decentralized projects that won over centralized services?

Okay, and anything from the umm.. past 20 years or so?

Not exactly. Gamil, Hotmail etc. are some successes that had clearly centralized email despite remained on the same protocols.

Gmail and Hotmail are still part of a federated email system. Email won over messaging on centralized services like Compuserve and Prodigy.

GNU+Linux

> Federated distributed servers > Refuse to federate with certain servers because of content > Somehow different from the status quo

So we end up with a balkanized sea of Mastodon servers with arbitrary interconnection. How this becomes a compelling Facebook competitor to all but a tiny minority is not obvious to me. Groups may as well set up their own bulletin board sites each with their own vision of allowed content. I.e. what we have now.

Exporting is the differentiating feature?

As someone who worked in the social space for years, I find this quite misguided.

Users want more than exporting. When building a social produdct, you have to be able to excite a mainstream audience.

The math behind a superior network connection model or techy-feature like exporting is practically useless to these people.

Build something people (from St. Louis) want.

It's not a differentiating feature. The article it's replying to says that Masotodon et al. don't have large networks. But since the little networks are federated, they still get most of the benefits of having a large network. This article points out that exporting and moving somewhere else is not a showstopper.

The two biggest differentiating features in my circles seem to be:

* less nazis/gamergaters/people who think it is fun to be assholes on the internet (unless you wanna go hang out on an instance that welcomes them, which is probably banned from federating to a lot of other instances)

* you can actually emit a paragraph containing a complete thought instead of a very simple sentence

Being able to hide the bulk of your post behind an arbitrary user-entered "content warning" tag is damn nice too.

> you can actually emit a paragraph containing a complete thought instead of a very simple sentence

This is one of those interesting things about a two-sided product. That is a feature for writers, but it's not always feature for readers. I use Twitter for breadth; I follow a lot of people. The more people can write, the fewer people I can follow. So for me, "they can write more" is an anti-feature.

How many of these people regularly make 3-4 tweets in a row, in which they emit a complete thought?

How much of your Twitter feed is people quote-tweeting the first of many of these, with a comment along the lines of "Thread"?

That's what the unfollow button/muting 'Thread.' is for.

Of the people I follow? It's a pretty rare for me to see multiple tweets in a row.

The quoting of one tweet in a thread is more common, but that's fine by me. Indeed, I follow a number of people specifically because they're good at that; it helps me increase breadth.

There's still a limit on how much people can post, it's just more forgiving than Twitter's increasingly-archaic 140 characters. IIRC, Mastodon defaults to a 500 character limit, which is more but not War and Peace more.

(Personally I would remove the limit altogether and just hide everything above 500 characters behind a "read more" link; this would let people write as much as they want/need to without cluttering their friends' timelines any more than a hard 500-character limit does. But that's my opinion, not the Mastodon devs'.)

Yeah, my scaling limit is words read, so more characters is generally worse for me. I do think it would be better if Twitter allowed people to write longer posts that would show up as an attachment to a tweet, sort of like images and videos. But they can do that easily enough now with a Medium account or some other blogging tool, so it's not a huge need for me.

Mastodon really isn’t a replacement for Twitter. The original Wired article did a poor job of critiquing it.

I think this guy does a much better job of critiqueing Mastodon than the article linked in the parent post.

https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e...

Key points:

“The foremost problem is that federation is a lie. Well, it’s partially a lie. The benefits described above do work; if you send a message to anyone at @username@custom.website, it will be delivered to them. But if @custom.website is a domain that mastodon.social deems inappropriate, replies from that users on that domain don’t show up in your notifications or on your feed, unless you explicitly follow them. So if you’re having a conversation with your friend, @person@custom.website, and another user from custom.website wants to chime in, they will be invisible to you.”

And

“Suppose you’re a semi-famous content publisher. You have 10,000 followers on Twitter, whom you converse with regularly and have a large history of communications with. If you decide to switch networks to something like Mastodon, you immediately come into contact with the Hardest Problem of Identity on the Internet, which is that your social graph is not portable between platforms.”

I feel these are two very important limitations to understand about Mastodon.

I see Mastodon as basically Wordpress for people who want a twitter like experience off of twitter. Aka niche communities.

For the first, you're always at the mercy of the whims of the mods for whatever service you're on. The difference with federated services is that you can move to or even set up a server with different mods. Can't do that with Twitter.

For the second, that's a limitation of Twitter. If you had 10,000 followers on a federated system, you could switch networks and your old followers could just re-follow you there. They wouldn't have to switch with you.

Yep, fair points. To clarify, I think Mastodon is really cool and a big step in the right direction. I don't mean to come across as overly critical.

I do feel the second issue he raises is still valid. re-following is a lot of friction, even in a federated system, albeit less so than moving from one centralized service to another. It would be nice if Mastodon provided some way of altering users when someone switches to a new instance.

That would still require your followers to know about it, and do something.

I think like in any (federated) service (email/jabber/web etc), it makes sense to bind your identity to your own domain, so you can move it between providers. This gives you mostly the benefits of both worlds (fixed handle and provider independence).

Not sure if mastodon supports (widely) such use yet, but if it doesn't I sure hope it is somewhere high on their priority list.

So far, @otheruser@custom.website is probably @gamergater@assholes.town in practice.

If you're happy with having people like that show up in your mentions, then you're quite free to go find an instance that is "focused on free speech" that will cheerfully federate toots from brownshirt.party, angrywhiteboysontheintern.et, and babyrape.horse.

Personally I consider this a feature, not a bug. Nonetheless, it seems to have been been fixed in the latest release of Mastodon: https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-and-the-w3c-f75f376f422

As to the "social graph is not portable" problem, this one applies to every single social network. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, that app your kid* downloaded yesterday that you've never heard of but will be constantly told is the Hot New Place All The Teens Are Going next year, all of these social networks face this problem.

I can see that first point as a potential problem, but also a good thing. If GamerGaters decide to pile on you, you probably won't see it. Which is a good thing.

I agree. It’s a double edged sword. I can see scenarios where I’d want something like this.

How is Mastodon not like Twitter? I didn't understand after reading the article, it mostly repeats:

> Mastodon is different. <describes how it's similar to Twitter>

It's a reaction to this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15244596 which is linked in the first sentence.

I read that, and I still don't understand the point the article is making about how Mastodon is different to Twitter.

Mastodon is very interesting to me but discoverability would seem to be an issue. Despite Twitter's flaws, I can at least search all of it.

What are people using to find things across Mastodon servers? Google search?

Not really sure what point to take away from this article. It's not Twitter, because of some differences in the way the network is set up? It doesn't really seem to make any arguments to the first article (or more so comment thread) that it links to. Obviously Mastodon is a different service than Twitter, but to ignore and dismiss the comparison seems lazy and misguided.

I feel that trying to dismiss criticism of something by saying "It's different!", without actually saying why those differences matter is pretty weak sauce.

I think this was in response to some articles flying around earlier this week that said, essentially, that Mastodon will fail because some of its features are slightly different from their Twitter equivalents. The target audience was like people who had read them.

Yeah, but just saying, "It's different! You don't understand!" doesn't really inspire confidence, or reflect well.

It's the same because of how it is but different because of techy features no one who is needed for it to get traction cares about so it's doomed to obsolescence.

i wish this was about the band.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com