Decentralized social media, and the fragmentation of control | Hacker News Reader

Decentralized social media, and the fragmentation of control

secretcave.co

62 pointsgozrik20 comments

I think Mastodon (and any decentralized social media) needs to be easier to host. The thing is relatively a beast to get working, whether you try and install the dependencies separately on a distribution that's not Ubuntu (IIRC) or if you're not familiar with Docker. I host quite a few instances of things for myself but I gave up on Mastodon (I wasn't trying that hard, to be fair) after trouble getting it working behind the same reverse proxy everything else is behind.

If we could get a cross-platform, statically linked, near zero configuration social media tool where I essentially just have to forward a few ports, that'd be fantastic for me and I'd hope many others.

The biggest draw of something decentralization is being able to own and control all my data and having some stranger on the Internet rather than BigCorp own it is not meaningfully different to me.

I'm not disagreeing with you that there is so much room for improvement in ease of use.

But tools help. It took like an hour to tweak an existing helm chart to get it running in my personal kubernetes cluster.

All the reverse proxy stuff is handled by the nginx-ingress-controller I use. external-dns set up all the DNS rules for me in Route53. kube-lego did all the LetsEncrypt ACME shenanigans.

Used to try to run these all using docker on a single VM, and do some manual nginx configging to route to them. This is much easier. Took awhile to learn, but get to benefit from those efficiencies for years.

https://mastodon.bengo.is/

I won't disagree with the fact that it's a pain to get one up - but I've never touched Docker before, and I was able to get my instance up and running in a Docker container on a DigitalOcean droplet in a few hours over a couple days.

Sorting out the account creation email took about a week longer, IIRC. I don't feel like digging through the earliest toots I made on my instance to be sure of that right now.

I'm curious: would having your data be controlled by someone only one or two steps of friendship away feel different from a total stranger, or a corporation?

I just want to say that I found Matrix's synapse server pretty easy to setup.

I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what problem it is trying to solve.

* Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers against something Twitter does really well.

* Creating interesting communities that can interact with each other -- See IRC, Slack, Reddit, forums, Wordpress blogs, etc.

Honest question: what problem are they solving, and/or why should I use Mastadon instead of older platforms such as IRC or Reddit?

there are some awesome mastodon communities that have moved off twitter because they are trolled too frequently on there, and aren't empowered to make their own rules to prevent that. If you're discussing somethign PTSD-inducing, for example, this struggle is so real and hard.

There are communities, for example, that block other communities that are 'freespeechers'. i.e. communities that don't ban people for sayign things that the former community operator deems as racist. At first I was like, "that's messed up, it's too subjective". But then I remembered that actually, unlike Twitter, that decision to block the people didn't affect me. They're allowed to create their own community how they want, and I'm empowered to join or self-host my own.

Pretty cool that vulnerable and very very helpful communities have tools like this.

How well has that worked to combat harassment?

Pretty well in my experience.

If a particular instance is harassing you, ask your admin to do something about it, they will ask the other instance to stop and if that doesn't work, block the entire instance.

Additionally, you can set your profile to locked so people cannot follow you without permission.

> I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what problem it is trying to solve.

Many aspects of Twitter-the-service are wonderful, but in many people's opinion the service's creator has shown (and continues to show) poor judgement and an apparent inability and/or desire to moderate bad actors. For example, Chris Sacca has been a prominent critic[1], and there's a long history of Twitter's somewhat-abusive history with developers[2].

[1] https://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/technology/12twitter.html

> Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place.

Decentralized services don't preclude that — see Google and websites, Apple and podcasts, etc. An open ecosystem means that one company doesn't have to solve every problem, and that multiple companies can compete to solve the same problem.

I run a Mastodon instance. This is what I have on the front page to explain what the hell Mastodon is and why you’d want to use it, in place of the standard text about that.

—-

What's Mastodon? Mastodon is basically Twitter, except with less trolls and Nazis. And longer tweets.

It’s also Twitter 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 for as long as possible, regardless of whether that's by making you happy or enraging you.

And finally, the last big difference is that instead of living on a bunch of computers run by people working for Twitter, Mastodon lives on a bunch of computers run by whoever feels like running an “instance”.

Each instance can set its own policies. If you really want to be a jerk to people, you can find or start an instance that’ll let you! But people on other instances can very easily filter out not just you, but your entire instance. The hope is that this will keep things more civil than what Twitter has turned into. The reality is that there are probably exciting new failure modes somewhere in the future.

The policies of this particular instance can be found here. The TL;DR version of them is "Imagine you have a cool queer aunt. Don't do anything that'd probably piss her off."

> Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers against something Twitter does really well.

Mastadon is a federated platform using the OStatus protocol, so you an interact with anyone on any server using that protocol (Mastadon, GNU social, etc.). That means you can follow anyone, boost (re-tweet) any message, and even see a feed from the whole fediverse.

Now, it is possible to block some servers from your server and vice versa, but this just allows you to find a community that shares the same values as you or even setup a server of your own if you can't find a server you like.

Correction, Mastodon has used ActivityPub instead of OStatus since version 1.6, only using OStatus to communicate with software such as GNU Social that doesn't support ActivityPub.

Ah, good to know, thanks. I knew it supported it, but Wikipedia made it sound like it was more secondary.

Your first point on Twitter's appeal is valid, but I don't think this is necessarily restricted to centralised systems. Discoverability is something decentralised networks struggle with - look at the role the very centralised (albeit endlessly mirrored) pirate bay plays, despite efforts like btdigg - but I think it's very solvable. Somehow. With some effort and ingenuity.

On your second point, the IRC comparison makes sense, but Slack and Reddit are locked in ecosystems. Don't see how they compare.

Mastodon is basically IRC with Twitter's format.

Saying that Slack and Reddit don't compare because they're "locked in" really misses the point that most users don't care about that.

Users care about lock-in. The fact they may not seem to care at the adoption point is more a case of lock-in, by design, being relatively opaque for most users, but they care when restrictions become apparent. Of course the nature of lock-in is that that's too late.

Censorship.

From the article:

> With around 100,000 users on mastodon.social — the biggest instance — it is just 0.03% the size of Twitter, and only growing at a rate of 1,000 users per week. > To give you an idea of the scale compared to Twitter: Mastodon is 13 months old and at that same age, Twitter was around 10 times bigger.

The Mastodon Monitoring Project (https://mnm.social) estimates 1,019,544 accounts across the nearly 2300 instances it knows about. Around ten times bigger than the number this person was comparing to Twitter.

I guess that means Mastodon is growing about as fast as Twitter did!

Most of those are probably Japanese accounts, which while still being real accounts, isn't comfortable with the Twitter crowd due to the kind of media usually shared on the japanese instances (the kind of content which is illegal in the US and most of the rest of the world but totally fine in Japan, which is another reason for Mastodon tbh)

Mastodon 2.0 speaks ActivityPub now! https://activitypub.com/

I made the world's first public ActivityPub implementation a little over a year ago: https://distbin.com

Now I have https://mastodon.bengo.is

Now I need to iron out interoperability bugs: But I look forward to the day that you can respond to a mastodon post anonymously via distbin, and vice-versa. And on both sides the conversation should render as threaded, etc.

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