Mastodon makes the Internet feel like home again
theoutline.com
theoutline.com
https://startuplab.io/post/deploying-mastodon-on-digital-oce...
Also I've built a @HackerNewsBot that shares the most upvoted HN articles:
https://mastodon.social/@HackerNewsBot
(source code: https://github.com/raymestalez/mastodon-hnbot)
Ultimately the only thing that can make the internet feel home again is if you have your own little corner and that little corner can play nice with the other corners.
The really important tech is either webmentions, activitystreams, Linked Data Notifications, and all that are similar, protocoll-based tech. Mastodon can be one of these, but it's not the only one.
Why yes, I do feel old and cranky today.
Decades ahead, in terms of protocol design, of mailing lists, twitter and stuff like Slack.
Please tell me there's hope for a new protocol with the same feature set.
I still use it and am very active on mewsgroups, but traffic today is a fraction of a fraction of what it was in the late 90s. NNTP is a wonderful way to communicate, but it's decentralized and ad free, corporations cannot make a profit out of it, so it must be killed.
https://serverfault.com/questions/218747/how-to-setup-a-nntp...
http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/newsserver.html
Edit: removed list of dead links. Added article.
Spam might be the insurmountable problem here, but I think it's at least worth an experiment.
Every few years the "group discussion / chat" concept gets reinvented on the internet, and that's all fine and dandy, but I still think there is immense value in having a centralized identity on a service that everyone is using. The problems of Facebook and Twitter have less to do with the fact that they are centralized and more to due with the fact they are funded by ad revenue and the constant pressure to impress the public stock market.
We need a centralized service driven by micropayments from the users themselves, with little to no advertising. App.net was a step in the right direction, and its downfall was more a result of missteps in execution rather than a problem with the core idea.
I fear that might never happen largely due to the inherent structural problems of VC funding. It costs a ton of money to run and scale a social network, and most VCs will be looking to recoup their investment using the traditional means of web-scale revenue (advertising). So what's the solution? My personal hope is something based on blockchain cryptocurrencies. But we'll see if anything takes off in that vein or if the evil empire of Facebook just continues to win the day.
Would unique names in a federation everyone is using suffice for you?
(i.e. @jaredcwhite@fictionalmastodoninstance.ycombinator.com is unique in the whole fediverse)
the whole federation of mastodon instances
It's probably in line with the thing about id, ego, and super-ego; you need spaces to align your id / ego, not just via the super-ego. if I'm using those phrases correctly. Probably not.
Like, on HN, if I talk about certain things I get downvoted to hell. So I talk about them elsewhere. Every community has its own biases, and people have different personas they apply to each community.
The fediverse is not a community. It's an ecosystem of loosely-interlinked communities, in about three or four layers: you've got the whole fediverse, the people on your instance, the people you follow, and the people you interact with. (On most instance software you also have topics, though not on Mastodon. There are hashtags too but they aren't used all that much and rarely does a community form around one, though they're useful for discovery.) You've got more potential points of segmentation than on Twitter, and more levels of potential control over what you see. (Add the possibility of having an account on several different instances and keeping to local rules and topics for those instances, and you have even greater control over how you present yourself and how your discussion goes.)
no idea about that psychology stuff. i heard those words before :)
I don't know if having walls built into the system helps or hurts. Or does nothing at all. Ultimately, I don't think it matters since people are going to organize into some form of group no matter what.
I don't think people need to exist in an echo chamber so they can "be themselves" without social consequence, I think that's actually the biggest problem with echo chambers and why people argue that they should be avoided. Rather, what we need is a higher standard of discourse outside of those echo chambers. It is possible to respectfully disagree with someone without shouting them down/trolling/removing them from the conversation, and from the other side, without reaching a point of disruption that someone might consider that a good resolution. The failure happens at both sides of the conversation, and interacting outside of echo chambers seems to me the only way to gain experience in interacting civilly.
This is not because I need my home to be an "echo chamber". It is because I need it to be a home. There's nothing wrong with having a "home" on the Internet either. It's just a lot harder to have one when you don't have width, height, and depth helping you delineate a space in the 3D universe, vs. the Internet, which easily degenerates into a zero-dimensional space where no distinctions can exist. Having a home doesn't prevent HN or Twitter from existing; nobody can stay in their homes all the time in either space. But the Internet is definitely getting less and less inviting for lacking the ability to have a "home" in it.
Thanksgiving just went by with HN denizens complaining a bit in some of the comment threads about how they are going to have to spend time with people they don't really want to, and the other holidays are coming up fast for a repeat performance. The homeless-Internet makes every day the day you have to spend like that, makes every minute the minute you have to spend like that. I fully believe people of a free society have some sort of obligation to engage with viewpoints they find uncomfortable (even if really nailing down what that means would be a challenge), but that doesn't mean everyone needs to be doing it all the time, without rest. I wouldn't expect that to produce understanding; I'd expect it to produce conflict and bitterness, not even necessarily because of the views themselves, but just from the sheer tiredness of never being able to rest anywhere for even a moment.
What should bother more people are echo chambers pretending to be open forums. Look no farther than Wikipedia for an ostensibly open community which is in fact an echo chamber allowing no alternate viewpoints; any remark less than fawning for the state of Israel or Judaism is flushed straight down the memory hole and scrubbed off the "Talk" page by an army of Hasbara trolls.
On twitter, you're still stuck in a bubble -- only, one created by ranking based on projected interaction. (Functionally, this means an angry bubble: you see only things Twitter thinks will drag you into a flamewar.)
On the fediverse, you set your own filters and pick your own followers, see things in unadulterated reverse-chronological order, and nobody's pushing promoted posts on you.
(Ultimately, this comes down to having a non-profit-oriented, non-centralized system, favoring multiple independent identities. And, it's a throwback to the pre-eternal-september era of usenet, where you went online to have reasonable discussions and added people who annoyed you to your killfile.)
This is a wonderful phrase. It's hilarious and strange what we've come to value in a feed. What else might we now be taking for granted that ad companies are going to fuck up?
Probably most relevant in Twitter's case is that if your feed contains more stuff than you can get to quickly, any curation is probably more useful than simply missing the things that came first or the things that came last. This is why, for example, people who receive a large volume of email often like prioritization or rule-based organization features in their email clients. Like I said, this might not be your situation and a reverse chronological feed might be better for you, but it's not like it's inherently superior. Like so many design choices, it's a trade-off.
And of course you can show ads with a feed no matter what order the feed is in.
Even if these services offered sorting options (most don't, I think), the default is an optimization for time-on-site. Which is to say, when most people's experience of feeds is being manipulated by them, boring old reverse chronological sticks out.
It took about a day to get used to and I am now amazed that anyone thinks it should work any other way. Whenever I try to read my Twitter timeline I’m amazed how much mental effort I was continually spending to read backwards conversations.
OTOH if you join the Jazz Appreciation Society you are fully aware that participants have music preferences. There's no bubble or echo chamber in that.
EDIT: and here comes the usual bunch of downvotes. Speaking of echo chamber.
I don't think it's the worst thing in the world to want a more laid back approach to social media or any sort of community / activity on the web (or anywhere in life for that matter).
I think I'm able to make this comparison because at times Reddit and Facebook and especially Twitter feel like the bars did when I was 18-22 and there were so many underage kids going wild, having a blast, but not really caring about much beyond that -- and there is definitely a time and place for that on the internet for me as well, too!
I'll tolerate (and welcome!) differences of opinion, but if someone starts harassing my other guests or driving them off, I'll cheerfully kick them out.
Or, as it turns out more often, the voices it thinks you'd be most unhappy to hear. Negative emotions are more sticky than positive emotions, and Facebook, et. al., optimize for engagement, not user happiness.
As I put in a different comment, people are naturally going to organize into groups no matter what. You also can't realistically expose yourself to everything (nor would you want to). So there has to be something that decides what you're going to see.
At the end of the day, as faulty as they are, I'd rather have individuals deciding for themselves what they want to see rather than profit-oriented groups that thrive on the misery of their users.
It looks like even with an unfiltered world, echo chambers still evolve. It's the nature of communities.
>Do we really need more 4chans?
Yes, if by "4chans" you mean anonymous platforms. That doesn't necessarily mean we need more of the toxicity at the bottom of the cesspool that imageboard culture is known for, but I do think we need more sites which push back against the hostile patterns of social media, which include "real name" policies and moderation or filtering that tries to shape communities from the top down.
The truth here is that one person's echo chamber is another person's culture, and that "unfiltered" is just another kind of echo chamber.
4chan is clearly less filtered than reddit, and we can see how differences in the degree of filtering creates a race to the bottom.
4chan is too restrictive for some people who want to race to an even deeper bottom, and on and on.
>That doesn't necessarily mean we need more of the toxicity at the bottom of the cesspool that imageboard culture is known for
But the whole point is that the less filtered the community, the more a toxic lowest common denominator develops, which is not preferable to the things decried as "echo chambers" in more filtered communities.
I mean there has to be some reason people spend their time there.
That said, there's also a lot of people I really don't care to hear about, because my time and attention is limited and the odds that they're going to be an enrichment of my world view is really low.
(Oh, and also: the only reason for me to downvote would be due to the remark about receiving downvotes. Next time, you might want to consider whether that remark adds to the conversation.)
Networks like Twitter and Facebook don't really facilitate this behaviour - you're being sprayed by endless stream of opinions which aren't grouped or filtered in a way that would be meaningful to you.
A safe space should be a place with moderation guidelines around the type of discussion being had, rather than the type of views being discussed. We can have social media platforms free from overt abuse without restricting the views being aired.
I can have a conversation with someone where they espouse views that offend me without being personally offended by the discussion. If they start shouting insults in my face, then that's different: that's not an environment I want to be in.
- * This is purely anecdotal, but I think this conflation probably arises from discourse in modern identity politics, and the term "safe spaces". The intent of this term is often fine, imo, but for a subset of people it's extended not only to mean a space that is free from abuse, but rather a space that is free from people who don't understand your politics in great detail, to avoid being offended by "innocent ignorance" (e.g. using incorrect terminology).
In theory, yes. In reality, even in these hallowed and supposedly rational halls of HN, certain views are immediately hammered with downvotes and flagging and ominous warnings from moderators, no matter how urbane the tone, and often irregardless whether said views have a decent empirical underpinning.
HN is not just a tech discussion forum, it's one administered and hosted by an influential, Silicon Valley VC company. This means, with zero input from moderators, the views expressed will naturally tend toward a worldview that endorses the activities of such a firm, and the tendencies of local SV culture.
* I say mostly as there was just one case here on HN in the not too distant past around political topics that were explicitly banned, which is the first and only example of moderation based on topic rather than based on behaviour I've seen here. That aside, my points above stand.
Don't believe me? Try posting a gushing endorsement of your current president's policies (assuming you are American). Or take the road less traveled on any number of social, gender, what-have-you issues. See how it goes.
A comment saying "I am a Trump supporter, which is relevant here because [x], and here are my related views on [current topic] from my perspective as such" voiced in a reasonable tone would be fine here, I think, for the most part. Wouldn't they?
There is another type of censorship that comes from a community continuously voicing one opinion, to the point that those holding an opposing opinion avoid voicing it for fear of general reputational damage within the community - this may result in less people posting about their support of Trump here (and there is very little of this), but I don't think that's related to the moderation.
We don't see all moderator actions, nor what content gets flagged; moderation is pretty opaque here IMO. I've always assumed that was on purpose to allow commercial bias without begin overt about it.
Not once have I seen moderation based on viewpoint (and I do have showdead on). Without fail it has been because the poster repeatedly been an assclown in tone and wording, including when that moderation has been turned on myself. The fact that the moderated holds an unpopular opinion at times seems to be coincidence. There might be a correlation there, but it’s not with the moderation.
I made a statement incontrovertibly grounded in fact, but not resonating well in the present eccosphere. And was promptly flagged and gagged.
I realise this is probably a waste of everybody's time and karma-points attempting to debate.
Personally, I would take a slightly different perspective. I would say that in a domestic abuser safe-space, it's not so much that some views are not appropriate - it's that debate/discussion of circumstances is inappropriate. That's a behavioral restriction (don't engage in debate, this is not the place), rather than a viewpoint restriction (this is a place for debate, but not about that).
The ways communities differ from each other depend on so many particularized variables, as different from each other as fingerprints. They can be stagnant, or they can be special, precisely because of their convergence on certain ideas & values. But that depends on the details, so the blanket charge of sameness feels intellectually lazy.
And let's not forget that we're talking about addressing a specific set of problems: the whack-a-mole problem with bots & trolls, the problem of social cooling, the constant brand building, the bad faith arguing. Not wanting those very specific things still leaves wide open possibilities for how interaction can work within a community. If the desire to solves those problems look to you like a desire for an echo chamber, it might say a lot about the things you associate with normalcy.
This is a very well represented viewpoint on HackerNews. Your karma has nothing to fear.
Most of the instances are smaller, and most of them have people within a single conceptual community. That's the point. It's not an echo chamber, it's a place where people can share information. It's not a place to rant about your political opinions (unless, you know, it is) it's a place to discuss things of common interest.
But all means, if you're worried about being in an echo chamber, go to Twitter and expose yourself to other opinions that you will disagree with, see no evidence for, and have no means of changing. But if you want to interact with people in a way that enriches you, your knowledge, and your appreciation of community, Twitter is not the place, and Mastodon might be.
On Mastodon you have a choice. You can be on an instance that does echochamber and safespace the discussion or you pick one that doesn't. Or make your own.
The principle difference of Mastodon to Twitter and Facebook is that it's not a fully connected network. Instead of trying to paper over this, Mastodon highlights this feature. You have a "local" timeline and a "global" timeline. The global timelines are assembled dynamically based on what people on the instance follow. This allows instances to collectively shape their experience, and they tend to have extremely different feels.
For example, I was part of a private instance focused around hardware and crypto hackers, and I have a primary account on the original .social instnace. The .social instance has high exposure and plenty of obnoxious redditor-types bellowing their politics and wondering why they aren't getting applause, mixed among a wide array of more interesting people. I'm just as likely to get into a halting and awkward conversation with a Japanese artist as I am to end up talking about javascript critics with Brendan Eich as I am to see someone with a kekistan flag talking about their ignorance and how net neutrality is good.
The other private instance was totally different. The entire experience was great. You could make intelligent conversation about tech and expect intelligent responses. The network gradually connected to other people in the fediverse and even the global feed started to get very good. People began to use that instance as a bridge for good follows in the distributed software, hardware, and digital art scene. As that connectivity grew, so did the value of the instance. I'm very sad that the owner was unable to maintain it for a few months and the whole thing fell apart.
If your primary goal is to yell at people until they are browbeaten down? Yeah, that's a bad environment for that. But it's also a win, because this neighborhood may kick you out but I'm sure there is another one that will have you, no questions asked. If you're like most people looking for specific subjects for engagement and some control of the overall quality? It's amazing. Unprecedented, even! It takes time and effort for these instances to grow, but unlike many social networks there is actually a legitimate (i.e., not shitposting and moderation evading) reasons to have more than one account, or prefer one server over another.
While instance connectivity across the total network is very powerful, I think there is a lot to be said for requiring a great deal more inertia to have a hastily penned 200-500c comment flashed in front of millions of people. And in many ways it's the same principle as Hacker News was founded on: it's a cul de sac in the internet, a smaller place where rules are more enforcable and governance is slightly less arbitrary. Unlike Hacker News, it actually has controlled ways to knit together. Imagine if my viewing habits started to affect the top feed.
Finally, as an aside, please stop with this "echo chamber" rhetoric. It's counter-productive. There is nothing wrong or shameful about community selection. No one is obligated to engage with anyone else. We here at Hacker News are beneficiaries of this. As problematic and lacking in tradecraft as this forum often is, its still a much more reliable place to gain technical insight than many subreddits. Similarly, Stack Overflow is a "tech echochamber" but what echos is the community consensus on how to build things. That's a good echo, better than the noise you'd get on Yahoo! answers. The only people who have a vested interest in disrupting these dynamics are people for whom consensus, truth and trust are objectionable concepts.
The barrier to running your own instance is pretty low nowadays as hosting is becoming very cheap, and Docker removed a lot of the hassle associated with setting up an instance.
person a: "my opinion is that green is a nice color."
person b: "i hope you die a painful death."
I'm happy to hear differing opinions. But watching people threaten and harass each other is something that quickly turns me away from online communities.
As someone who is banned from Twitter but not on Mastadon.
Eh, I don't think your comment is fair to the OP.
Non-users: the federated timeline is basically the union of all users followed by anybody on your instance. If I follow {a,b,c} and you follow {b,c,d}, the federated timeline will have all toots from {a,b,c,d}. This timeline is also what gives instances their "feel". If you're on an instance with a lot of geeks, they'll probably follow a lot of other geeks, and the federated timeline will have lots of geekness. Same for s/geek/cat lover/ or witch or activist.
No desktop client. NO DESKTOP CLIENT. How do you type?!
(Also, no linux client.)
With email, you can use gmail, or yahoo, or buy a domain and host it yourself, or pay a provider (including google) to host your domain.
Are there options to host your domain on Mastodon without hosting it yourself?
Also, what are the chances that the current servers/providers will still be around in 2 or 5 years?
As for why not Twitter: suppose you want a private instance for your family. Or company. Or softball team. Mastodon makes it trivially easy to launch an invitation-only server so that you can chat and share images with just those people.
It also means that you and I can host instances with different community standards. Maybe you want to focus on liberal horse-lovers while I want a hangout for Republican fisherman. Mastodon lets us both go our own way, and gives us tools to decide whether our very different servers should even talk to each other.
I disagree, you can own a DNS domain and change mail provider, bringing your identity and domain along.
Also, it's not because other services do it that it's a good thing!
Also, it would greatly benefit from a proper client that keeps a backup for all your posts and account data. The instance I joined went down permanently, it seems.
This is changeable per-instance. For example, I don't want to host a lot of hentai or lolicon, even if my users were into that kind of stuff. I can configure my instance specifically not to cache media from servers that host it.
Both entail the notion of instances, Tumblr with subdomains (.tumblr.com) and Mastodon with users on one's own or another's instance (@*). I wonder if there's a sense of ownership entailed in that that leads to greater personal disclosure, which Twitter hasn't brought out.
Only after 20 seconds I figured that clicking the page and then the button makes it work. Other pages don't have this problem.
I thought the consensus in non-social-media media was that all social media was unhealthy.
Now we're getting an ad (or infomercial, if you prefer that term) from traditional media for an open-sourced Facebook / Twitter wannabe killer.
I guess they just take whatever stance that fits their unstated goals.
There's no company.
Somehow I end up not following my own advice and simplifying and making only one point per comment. That way people wouldn't focus on a minor thing about it and ignore the rest of it.
(The advice being: I think a good part of the reason why some one-line comments end up getting so many upvotes is because they say only one thing. The more things you try to say then the more reasons there will be for people to disagree and downvote you so no one else reads your message.)
I know what the real problem is. No rapport was established. You are in the defensive because you feel I corrected you as well and thus passed judgement. It's human relationships.
Corporate-owned social media that tries to pay its development and hosting costs by putting as many ads in front of your eyeballs is unhealthy. The fact that this is pretty much all we've had for the past decade or two makes it easy to assume this means all social media is unhealthy.
And digital lives are more easily monitored by governments -- not just the American or European governments, which is already bad enough. This too is dangerous.
Being able to go into a community of like-minded people translates in the meat-world to meat communities where your neighbors might have a completely different perception of reality than each other. This too is problematic.
I understand now that there is no company behind it. It's open-source and developed with good intentions, but as the saying goes, the graveyard is full of good intentions. I deeply distrust anything that entices me to reveal personal data in a medium monitored by the secret police.
How much these objections weigh for you depends on your priorities. Non-corporate, open-sourced social-media isn't significantly different for me to assuage my very real Internet privacy terrors.
One can argue lots of things, but I think it's a crucial support network for people not near lots of like-minded others. What "real life" peer group is a trans kid in small town in Kansas supposed to hang out with and get support from?
I worry for what transpeople -- who lack meat-world social choices -- are enticed to reveal about themselves online to the secret police. Our governments' thugs are happy to lend an unsympathetic ear to their problems.
One mitigating factor, though, is that there seems to be a wider disconnect between Mastodon IDs and real life IDs than there is between real life and Twitter. I have plenty of Mastodon friends who could be sitting at the next desk as I type this for all I know. Also, having multiple Mastodon accounts is seen as a perfectly normal and acceptable thing to do, so @joe@joefamily.name might post vastly different stuff than on their @jane@transfriendly.social.
Ummm, what? Defending nazis are we?