Mastodon 2.4.0
github.com
github.com
I first saw mastodon a few months ago on HN where it was suddenly 'hot'. But I had trouble finding any content to actually consume, and I didn't poke around very long.
Hopefully that's changed and there's tons of interesting stuff to follow and its easy to find?
The biggest problem I ran into when trying to use Mastodon is the instance federation wars. Instances were banning other instances left and right from federating with each other due to content disputes (lolicon, "offensive speech," etc). This kinda made it problematic if you picked an instance that didn't want to behave nicely with the rest of the ecosystem, unbeknownst to you.
The instance banning thing is a huge problem and it’s not really being talked about much. The only thing you can do really is sign up on an instance like niu.moe that doesn’t filter besides illegal content.
[1]: https://instances.social/list/advanced#lang=&allowed=&prohib...
What would be more interesting as a number is active users.
For example, I've got an account at mastodon.social, but last time I used it is over a month ago and before that there had been several months of inactivity.
When I last looked at my friend list and follower list on mastodon it seemed like most people treated mastodon like that.
I don't think that's inherently a problem, decentralization allows people to segment themselves off, and that is okay.
These instances are rare, the bigger problem as administrator is to find and media-block the instances that post NSFW or content illegal in your jurisdiction (switter, most japanese instances...)
Also bot spam if it occurs and the admin on the other end doesn't care...
Which is really frustrating when, you make a post; a user on a different server boosts your post; a third party, which is on a server that normally blocks your posts but can see posts from that different server, sees the boost and responds to you. Not knowing that you can't respond directly back top them. The network is so big now that this happens all the time.
EDIT: to elaborate a bit. While I'm only just diving into these topics, I can't help but feel that a fundamental problem in many cases is that many problems of 'online social' have to do with a very unintuitive/inorganic implementation that just fundamentally doesn't work well for humans. What I found interesting about Patchwork is that it tries, to some extent, to resemble the way humans 'naturally' interact.
Now I'm not at all opposed to experiments in augmenting the way humans interact with others, but I can't help but feel that many of the things we've come up with that are popular went too far in not considering human nature (or intentionally messed with it). And perhaps a more constructive way forward is to come up with 'online social' tools that start with a more conservative resemblance to how humans have interacted for much of their history, and iterate from there.
Two things are needed for a decentralized social network to go mainstream. One is that it be technically competent, the other is that at be designed so that a large part of the population will actually enjoy using it.
Both problems require very high ability. The problem is that the relatively small number of people who are both motivated and able to solve the first problem are generally techno-geeks who are average or below average in social ability,and so foul up the second problem terribly.
However, the need for such a network is becoming widely enough known that I am pretty sure that rather soon we will get someone who can solve the second problem who will take up what the techno-geeks have been doing and produce a network that will become popular.
No.
https://botsin.space/@Chocobot
He was really easy to write in D:
> If you run bots on Mastodon, you can now opt-in to display a bot badge on your profile. This works with non-Mastodon software, too, if the ActivityPub actor is of the Service or Application type. In the future, more features might be implemented to filter bot accounts or opt-out of interactions with them.
"some bots are people"
"i want to use the bot badge and i dont want to be called not a person"
"Okay, I'm gonna show my hand a little: as a transhumanist, I object to the implied conflation of "person" and "human". This is a situation where we can afford to be forward-thinking and open-minded without a cost to current functionality and, honestly, without a significant cost in terms of work."
I hosted a Mastodon instance until a couple months ago. It was stuff like this that made me leave the platform.
Again, I've been on the platform for some time. These people are dead serious.
There doesn't have to be one single community that will either accept this or reject this. I tend to be more closed to stuff like this and don't want to be around it. But I'm glad that others are more inclusive and have a place they can be inclusive that doesn't have to include me.
Someone basically elbows their way into the conversation and tries to derail it with some sort of diversity/inclusion issue.
"hi any follow-ups on my comment or are we being ignored"
If you like this kind of bullshit along with gender politics, you will love Mastodon.
[1] https://www.corbettreport.com/and-now-for-the-robot-apocalyp...
Since starting to use Mastodon 6 months ago, I had to mute exactly 1 nazi account. Muting is quick and easy, just like dealing with ordinary email spam; it wouldn't be a big deal even if I had to mute a dozen nazis every 6 months :-)
Is it just possible that some people have trouble managing their own emotions when dealing with strong disagreement? I can't otherwise explain why a microscopic quantity of undesired content would make someone decide to leave.
Most people don't get into the habit of reading about censorship-resistant platforms and decentralized networks, let alone joining them or running nodes, if they're living a life which most of the world would consider pretty vanilla and not at risk of being at-odds with the owner of some silo. If you feel you have controversial opinions, though... you seek these kind of tools out and have motivation to use them.
Its like the Tor problem - in theory, anybody can and should use Tor for anonymous exchange of information of any kind and the desire for anonymity shouldn't be taboo. In practice, a lot of people who use Tor are doing it for specifically because they have taboo interests (up to and including the outright illegal).
So you don't want to think about the feelings of others?
"and I don't want to be banned, blocked etc. for discussing wrong ideas."
Isn't the whole point of Mastodon that different instances have the capability to block those they don't wish to interact with?
Now, there's degenerates there too, but they're not quite so irritating and there are lots of tuning controls to play with.
Honestly, using anything other than large, centralized social media will be a boon to the world, imho. I don't want to be a farm animal, just creating more data for an advertising company. I want to talk to people.
There are other interesting implementations too. Pleroma comes to mind, it's an elixir activitypub server.
Or maybe you could write your own. Or fork one.
Idk.
But don't let the mastoverse disenchant you from federated Internet content.
I'm interested in the most charitable interpretation of that, so if you have an uncharitable answer, please refrain from expressing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capgras_delusion
But please, don't call mental illness scary, if that's what this is. There's already enough stigma around mental illness to feel like you have to be scared about discussing it.
Look at the people in that issues thread saying that the the "bot" wording is not "inclusive" enough.
At best this is an extremely tenuous inference.
If you can find researchers who are actually working in the area who've lost their jobs because of the outcomes of that research, then please do provide references.
It's uncharitable to call that delusion or mental illness, but they're not really that different. That's what the "you are what you say you are" movement in society is building towards. (Though it's interesting how quickly Dolezal got shut down for saying they were a race they weren't).
Who is to say they aren't a robot?
The two things are not the same, there is no slippery slope here, nobody is going to take us to prison or publicly shame us if we vehemently question that any person currently living is in a purely inorganic body.
Honest question: if this person was claiming they were of the robot gender and that they wanted inclusion, would you deny that they were of that gender? How do you define it?
To those with less exposure, much of it seems subjective, the same way saying you're a "robot" (what does that mean to that person?) or you're a kin might.
Replace "robot" with "gender*" and it's indistinguishable in that sense. People will just as vehemently argue with you about people's assertions of gender, but that doesn't seem useful anymore.
Are we just making stuff up here now?
I'm not entirely sure where I come down on this issue, as most my exposure to it seems to come from representations by extremists on both sides. For my own part, the reasons I feel objection would be warranted are because of loss of accuracy in language. This is a good example of that, where one actor is specifically lobbying (whether genuinely or not) for the expansion of the term bot to mean (for all I can tell) to mean it's opposite. The current definition of the word (whether as 'bot' or 'robot') means that someone's ability to present a coherent argument that they are one in itself rules them out as one.
Alternatively it may just be semantics. Are fictional characters "people"? Does "person" imply sentience, or can it still be used in the archaic Roman sense of the word -- a persona; literally: a mask worn by a stage actor. In which case, if the bot is designed to imitate personality, it may be more apt to refer to it as automated than as a non-person.
If an account has both automated and organic posts, that account is both human and robot.
But it has never actually come up in conversation, and it doesn't impact our relationship, so I really don't know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I guess I'm just trying to say that we shouldn't give attention to or feed "trolls," even if they are being sincere.
I wonder if we'll see exchanges that will be unable to use EU servers/hosting.
Mastodon should not be seen as a singular community, outside Mastodon there is pleroma and GNUSocial, all projects do attract different kinds of people (though GNUsocial and pleroma developers are often called out as nazis because some alt-right instances use their software, not sure why that matters).
If you're looking for an instance, it's IMO important to discover the community and general feel of it. Some instances will be very strict with rules and generally boot federation with others fairly quickly, while other instances will basically federate with everyone until they break some serious rules or laws. (My instance is a mix, I have a lot of alt-right and deep-far-left instances silenced on account of excessive spam or being way to aggressive, though the instance I run is themed and politics in general are frowned upon)
I think the second most important thing is to divorce the developers and software from their community. Mastodon hosts a very diverse community and a lot of niche, fringe or otherwise rather peculiar characters. A lot of them are nice, a lot aren't, most probably don't care. The federated network is what you make of it, follow people you want to follow and your timeline will likely fill with stuff that isn't too outside of your filterbubble (though there will be anti-filterbubble stuff)
If you don't like mastodon itself, I severely recommend to try Pleroma instead, the developers for both projects are generally very enjoyable.
I tried 10 of them but none of them work?
the pleroma instance picker seems like its giving more reliable results: http://distsn.org/pleroma-instances.html
I mean, if I was on 'Mastodon Instance One', now I want to move to 'Mastodon Instance Two', do I need to register an new account on the Instance Two and manually import all my data? Wouldn't that resulting a new Mastodon ID (@myname@InstanceOne -> @myname@InstanceTwo)?
The fediverse works by propagating statuses a set of standard protocols: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
Typical Mastodon instances have one or more frontends (Ruby on Rails) backed by a PostgreSQL database (possibly replicated). Several cloud providers offer managed PostgreSQL instances which mitigate the SPOF of using an RDBMS backend.
Accounts of users are bound to the instance where they were created, but recently Mastodon added a data export function that could be used to move an account to a different instance. I doubt you'd retain your followers in this case.
Unboundling user identity from instances sounds like a difficult researh problem, given that users can upload considerable amounts of data.
Note that this also makes it hard to deal with spam and DoS attacks. As adoption grows, instances might voluntarily adopt protocols for sharing abuse data.
And it'll work with other mastodon instances.
Mastodon isn't hotmail or gmail it's an MTA+MDA, anyone can setup those on their own servers and become reachable by email...
Mastodon depends on postgres; whether your postgres is multi-master or such is entirely up to you, the instance admin. Hosting it is much like hosting any other modern rails app.
Some admins use rds, some use postgres-in-docker on a single machine, etc etc. I'm sure some have more fascinating setups there.
However, that's wholly outside of what mastodon claims to do or be; it's decentralized and federated in more meaningful ways; there is no central authority listing users or allowing logins.
If your server goes down for some reason, much like email, you'll lose the ability to log in and post, but anyone on a different server will be unaffected.
I don't believe there's any particularly special DB replication features in the reference server implementation, but there's nothing inherent in the system that would prevent someone writing a customized durable/distributed version of the server.
No.
> How does Mastadon handle database (multiple masters, etc)?
Each node has a partial knowledge of the network.
> Genuinely curious if this is truly decentralized platform or just a poor man’s open source social networking app with some RSS type of functionality sprinkled on top of it, sort of like Wordpress in a sense in terms of hosting it.
Neither. It's federated, like emails. Users still have to subscribe to a server, but anyone can run a server.
It's not hosted on Mastodon but on Pleroma [2] instead so it's more barebones at the moment. (But saves a LOT on cpu/memory resources)
Disclaimer: I'm the only user currently. :-)
[1]: https://nyquist.space [2]: https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma
Define "interesting". I'm on [octodon.social](https://octodon.social/web/accounts/13051) and I interact with BSD users, all sorts of developers, writers, artists, musicians, video producers, podcasters, and activists.
Whether you have a good experience in the Fediverse depends primarily on you and your efforts. Make an account, fill out your profile, post an introduction with the "#introduction" hashtag, and follow/interact with interesting people who show up in the local and federated timelines.
As long as you're not an asshole and don't expect others to bend over backwards to make you feel welcome, you'll probably be fine.