Mastodon for Metalheads | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon for Metalheads

metalhead.club

49 pointsstoerfall44 comments

For those reading the comments first, this is not the first Mastodon that came to mind in the context of metalheads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(band)

Trap, reading the title that was not what I was expecting. But my guess is that it was intended.

Not intentionally. Mastodon is also a name of a Twitter-like social network. So the title here makes perfect sense for people like myself who hadn't heard of the band with the same name.

This is just one of those occasions where name collisions happen through nobodies fault.

Metal has quite a few name collisions, but perhaps the most unfortunate is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isis_(band)

That’s an unfortunate name collision everywhere.

I know three women, all over 30, who chose the name Isis, and a kid who was given it and goes by Tara now.

Isis is also the name of an ancient Egyptian goddess.

It was also meant to be the name of a major ElementaryOS release IIRC.

The River Thames through Oxford is locally known as the Isis, so there are dozens of businesses called things like the 'Isis Guest House'. Many of them have rebranded.

I imagine it's a recurring problem. There were probably some people named Hitler in the 40's that faced the same problem. I imagine Adolf too, to a much lesser degree.

Same Oddly was listening to big short soundtrack late last night.

As someone else has pointed out, Mastodon is only one implementation of ActivityPub/OStatus, and arguably not the best (especially if you prefer Elixir/Phoenix, but I digress).

Would it be appropriate to request we stop referring to a mastodon (software) instance as anything other than an ActivityPub/OStatus instance? A more terse name would be ideal but naming is hard and I've not had enough coffee to be creative yet today.

> Would it be appropriate to request we stop referring to a mastodon (software) instance as anything other than an ActivityPub/OStatus instance

No. Branding and specialization is important. I mean, you can stop talking about its killer app if you want ActivityPub to die.

What is this, an ad that's also sort of a wordplay so it's not really an ad?

Mastodon is the currently most hippest open source alternative to Twitter. Don't know many of the details tho.

Mastodon is a decentralized, free software alternative to Twitter. Also see: https://joinmastodon.org

No it's not. Mastodon is not Twitter. Mastodon does not compete with Twitter. Mastodon was not meant to replace Twitter. It was meant to replace GNU social. Mastodon is also not the entirety of the fediverse.

Join Pleroma. Because it wouldn't eat your RAM and ignore the ActivityPub spec arbitrarily. [1]

[1]: https://pleroma.social

I knew that, I run one. (Please don't join it.)

But I don't randomly post it to HN, and it looks like the author of this post is the admin too.

For people who aren’t reading the linked page icle and don’t know the expression “metal head”:

> A metalhead is a member of the heavy metal subculture.

If one thinks metal head is a slang term for robot / AI, one immediately gets a Rudy Rucker short story feeling...

Another Mastodon instance hosted in Germany with the same copypasted left-leaning AUP[] from all the other Mastodon instances. What's the reason for this to exist when all Mastodon instances are linked to each other and this instance has the same ruleset and is hosted in the same country than the rest of instances? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding the way Mastodon works and instances are not linked?

[]https://metalhead.club/about/more

A little less sceptical but still I wonder about the same thing. If all are connected, why care for which server I connect to? Are there filters between each server? Is my data only hosted in this server and goes down with it when the server hoster decides he invested enough into his hobby?

> If all are connected, why care for which server I connect to?

Mastodon is like E-Mail: You chose who hosts your profile. YOu can send messages to people on other servers, but still the server which hosts your account, is your "home server": If it goes down, your account/profile is lost.

Also choosing your Mastodon server is about your personal interests: Mastodon servers have local timelines, which only show posts by users on the same server. These timelines often are topic related. E.g. on metalhead.club you will find more metal music content compared to e.g. mastodon.social.

Mastodon servers / instances group users by interest and still let all Mastodon users communicate with each other.

Btw: I don't consider the terms of use "leftist". They are quite neutral and generally "human friendly". Metalhead.club is not political, but the Terms of use try to prevent hate speech.

>They are quite neutral and generally "human friendly".

They are certainly reasonable and human-friendly! But "you shouldn't be xenophobic or transphobic" is still, unfortunately, a relatively left-wing idea. It excludes people who openly hold beliefs that are very popular within the mainstream American right.

No, it's not. It's asking you to simply not post nasty stuff. It doesn't mean you have to embrace other cultures, sexualities or whatnot. It doeesn't even mean you have to like them. It just means keep any nasty comments about such things to yourself (or go say it elsewhere).

It's a really sad time for humanity if common courtesy is now considered "left-wing".

>It doesn't mean you have to embrace other cultures, sexualities or whatnot.

The rules literally say:

>You shall Fight racism and discrimination

Which, on my book, is left wing. (And open to be arbitrarily enforced. How do I prove I've been fighting discrimination?)

This is only a guess, but from the context I would assume that he means that if you see someone posting racist or other discriminatory toots(?) that you should challenge them.

So if they check server-side that I've read a "discriminatory toot" (whatever that means) and I haven't "challenged the guy" (whatever that means) or reported him I can expect to be banned?

Clearly the intent of that line is just that people should feel encouraged to report any hate speech.

I don't really understand why you've taken such an objection to the very concept of keeping hurtful comments to yourself on some specific public forums; but in any case I get the feeling that you're now just arguing for the sake of arguing.

As a society I think it's a good thing that we are increasingly stigmatizing open bigotry.

Off topic but is transphobic a word the way it is being used. Shouldn't it be trans-a-phonic. Transphobic sounds like being afraid of vampires..

Sorry that someone telling you, essentially, "Don't be shitty to people who are different from you" is a left vs right ideological issue for you.

Under those rules, for example, you can be expected to get banned for saying "refugees do not belong in Europe", which is not a personal attack and is pretty much a normal right-wing stance to take.

If you're a refugee and someone posts that, how would you feel? Would you consider it a personal attack? Someone challenges your very existence in a place you escaped to only because the circumstances you came from were so dire you felt you had no choice but to uproot your life and leave the land you were born into...and that's not personal?

You can hold whatever selfish, "fuck you, got mine- try being born into better circumstances next time, losers!" opinion you want. Your free speech doesn't mean everyone else has to listen intently and earnestly and keep themselves from thinking you're being an a-hole for holding the opinions you do. It also doesn't mean some private social media outlets can't tell you to piss off for posting them in a forum about metal music. There are plenty of places online where you can post such an opinion and be back-slapped and congratulated; lamenting that one takes a preemptive stance against opinions you hold is pretty tender for one who takes such a cold-hearted stance against refugees.

The same could be said of every other political stance to take, no? Socially, or economically.

See how libertarians see taxes. They could also write some melancholic paragraphs like yours. "Imagine you're a hard, honest worker and someone told you part of your money is not yours, you have to give up some of it and give it to the government. Would you consider it a personal attack? Someone challenges your very right to have your own property... and that's not personal?"

The thing is that, yes, wanting to reduce the amount of immigrants (for example) is a mainstream political stance. Brexit happened over less! We should be able to have and express our own political ideas as long as we don't go out of our way to harass people over them.

This is not about that Mastodon instance in particular, since most instances have the same left-leaning rules.

The difference between our two stories is that one is about your property and one is about your right to exist. Surely you see that these are not equivalent. One is telling someone "I don't want you here, so go back home to be murdered by the warlords you fled" and the other is "give me some of your money otherwise carry on".

>The thing is that, yes, wanting to reduce the amount of immigrants (for example) is a mainstream political stance.

We were talking about refugees, not immigrants.

If you don't pay your taxes you go to jail, which in some places could be in the same ballpark as whatever is actually happening in Syria (I don't really believe in what the UN says).

Most refugees are economic migrants, as their going to the most favourable countries instead of the closest ones shows: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/europe-grapples-distincti...

Anyway I'm over with this, I was defending free speech, this "refugee" charade is already finished anyway.

What most "right-wing" thinkers ignore is the fact that they consider excluding others IS THE REASON that people exclude THEM.

That's also part of what is freedom. Your freedom ends at the point where you limit the freedom of others. Otherwise the other person wouldn't be free.

That's also why most non-right-wing thinkers don't consider that another point of view, but simply selfish and asshole-ish.

Therefore if you want to argue your point, maybe you shouldn't highlight what you fight AGAINST (i.e. "left-wingers out", "refugees out") but what you fight FOR, which in some regards also boils down to respecting each other's freedom, right? Show that and you will find that doors will open for discussion.

I personally discuss with both people who would be defined as left-wing as well as with people who would be defined as right-wing. Both sides have reasonable people and some reasonable arguments, that are sadly sometimes hidden underneath many layers of bullshit.

> Are there filters between each server?

There _might_ be filters. Mastodon server admins can filter posts from certain foreign servers. For example the metalhead.club administrator chose to filter some instances which spam a lot or post extremist text and /or child pornography.

Often these filters are necessary for legal reasons, e.g. some jananese servers allow sketches of naked children ("loli"), which are considered child pornography in Germany and are therefore illegal in the server's home country.

Each server can have its own rules and can choose to block whichever other servers it wants. But besides that, they're pretty similar. The big draw of Mastodon is that it doesn't really matter that much which server you use. If the admin of your server starts doing stuff you don't like, you can move to another server and direct your followers there. (Compare this to centralized social networks like Twitter and Facebook. If you don't like what their owners do, your only option is to leave and lose access to the network entirely.)

In addition to the other replies: one big draw of specific servers/instances is the local timeline, a feed of every post on a server. While you can connect to anyone, discovering new people is much easier on the same instance. For this reason people prefer small, specific instances.

The Mastodon culture is also fairly opposed to large instances. Mastodon.social (the "flagship") is widely criticised for allowing itself to grow much larger than other instances. The community prefers small, homely intantances, median size is probably about 500 users, like this one. This may seem weird to outsiders, but instances like this one are one of the main draws of Mastodon.

That's not copypasted at all, what the heck are you on about?

I noticed that too with a lot of instances, the one I settled on has rules that sets off less red flags (and honestly, I'm really tempted to self host)

I am very interested; I've been unable to find an instance with rules that are not involved in politics. What's that instance?

http://layer8.space The rules boil down to "Don't be a dick"

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