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Comment by zach43 | Hacker News Reader

Just wanted to say that i moved from twitter to mastodon sometime late last year amd couldn't be happier with it. Keybase integration is interesting to me, but not realky useful since i don't want to tie mastodon with my real life identity.

the Fediverse as a whole has a very different 'feel' to it compared to Twitter. Twitter feels significantly more commercialized amd stressful...mastodon / pleroma feel a lot more relaxed and pleasant in comparison.

Maybe i just accidentally joined nicer communities, but i see a lot of small-scale chitchat and genuineness on mastodon than i rarely see on twitter.

I've also had zero issues with the platform from a technical perspective...overall i think Mastodon, etc have done decentralization "right", and have a lot of potential for growth in the future

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I opened a Mastodon account and me and one other person I know who opened an account toot at each other every 6 months or so... I guess there is another person I know who opened one but never toots...

I try to pretend it doesn't matter to me, but calling individual posts "toots" really does keep me from talking about the service with other people.

There are lots of interesting people on Mastodon, I would recommend searching by hashtag and joining an instance that matches your interests (eg: sdf.org, sergal.org (furries), cybre.space, etc).

Many instances block Mastodon.social and other massive instances, and different instances will have different views of the network (based on who the users of the instance follow and how long toots are retained).

I do wish mastodon had the concept of groups so I could join all the groups I'm interested in rather than having to sign up for an account on each one.

Generally you just follow people, making accounts on each instance would be rather silly.

eh, I don't really even use Twitter to talk with randos online... I get enough of that here. But I can see that people do use Twitter and Mastodon that way...

just call them "posts" or "microposts" if you don't like "toot"

mostly off topic:

Most of my friends are on Instagram and think I’m funny for being on twitter anyway. They have a business twitter account that they only use at conferences and socialize on IG.

I tried setting up a new ig account (deleted my first when they sold to Facebook) and couldn’t get past the input phone number portion of the signup.

Anyway trying to convert people from twitter to mastodon is sorta hard. If I couldn’t get them to go from to IG to twitter there’s very little chance I’m going to get them to go from ig to mastodon.

> Anyway trying to convert people from twitter to mastodon is sorta hard.

That's because going from Twitter to Mastodon is a downgrade in pretty much every concrete way and only an upgrade in less concrete more esoteric terms.

From most people the main benefits I've seen cited are censorship resistance (how many people encounter significant censorship on twitter today?) and decentralization (which only really matters philosophically, to the user on the site the decentralization gets hidden).

On the downsides though there's plenty right on the surface for users: limited users (like all social networks if the people you want to interact with aren't there it's useless), mediocre default layout (the 3 column default doesn't make good use of space and give equal importance to everything cramping the main thing you want to see the toots) and discovery (the main way I've found people to follow on Mastodon? finding them on twitter where I already follow them and seeing they're on Mastodon too).

To a random user who doesn't really encounter censorship on twitter or care about decentralized/federated networks it's just a sub-par version of Twitter with a worse interface, a sparser social graph and longer handles.

> (how many people encounter significant censorship on twitter today?)

The point is not that you user are being censored, but that twitter "lies" to you about social dynamics with their obvious (yet hidden) biases.

Twitter promotes the extremes and hides the middle. If this is not enough they also apply a consistent political agenda (by protecting their main cash cow of liberal journalist) and lie about it.

Perfect example is what happened with the Convington kids and journalist calling for doxxing.

If "toots" is the one word that keeps it from getting ruined by mainstream adoption, then so be it. The cycle always seems to be:

1) Look at this great thing a few geniuses developed

2) The intellectuals and forward looking people early adopt

3) It slowly turns from being cool trendy and useful, into a Walmart-like all things to all people behemoth of gross negligence.

4) Some heavy abuses are uncovered, and using it is no longer valuable to anyone.

It would be cool to see everyone's Mastodon usernames/domains, I'm on my own self hosted instance where it's a bit more difficult to find other people.

Mine is: https://toot.jeena.net/@jeena

mine is: https://mastodon.social/@yogthos

Yeah, I self-hosted my own instance of Pleroma for a while, but eventually switched to a more popular instance with people who have similar interests as me (art + religion (specifically, rediscovering religion after rage-quitting Christianity @social.theliturgists.com)

What has your experience been with self-hosting?

I'd love to self-host a Mastodon instance that two-way mirrors my Twitter account and acts as a Twitter client (letting me pseudo-follow folks from Twitter). But in any case, I'd want to ensure that no content from people I follow gets mirrored/hosted on my own instance; the only content actually hosted on my own instance should be the content I post.

What do you mean? No content other than what your users generate will be hosted on your instance.

There is a concept of a federated timeline, which does get synced to your local instance. If you follow someone on a remote instance, that instance feeds content into your instance so it can be loaded.

It syncs the people you follow, right? So presumably the only additional content on your instance is content from the people you follow, which should generally be low-risk.

You can also block just media if an instance is known to host images that are illegal in your country or your users don't want to see (silencing is a better option for the latter tho).

I still don't want to host anyone else's content, for much the same reason I'm never going to have an unmoderated comment system on a site.

I believe once you follow someone, you become federated with their instance. and you potentially receive all content from that instance... I think?

there are also admin controls for managing moderation and federation.

I've had a pretty good experience self-hosting with Pleroma. Its quite amazing that I can run a social media server with just a $5 VPS.

Not sure if there are bots / apps that can easily let you follow Twitter users on Mastodon, but I've definitely seen mastodon - twitter crossposter apps before.

https://mastodon.host/@stavros

https://sunbeam.city/@silver

I switched to Mastodon about a year or so ago. I fully agree with the grandparent post in that the atmosphere is very different compared to the major social media platforms.

As you allude to, discovery is harder since you don't have an algorithm pointing you in the direction of content you're likely to engage with (yes, engage with, and not necessarily enjoy) but once you have found the right people to follow, it's more rewarding because it's your community, not owned by a single corporate entity.

Although I didn't use G+ much in the later days, its closure showed my how irresponsible it is to rely on proprietary platforms. I'm committed to never be active on a proprietary, closed social media platform again.

My main account is here: https://functional.cafe/@loke

> I'm committed to never be active on a proprietary, closed social media platform again.

Including HN?

That's a good point. Clearly I still use this platform, but I do see a difference between them.

I don't “post” on Hacker News. I do comment, but I don't think anyone who are interested in following whatever it is that I may have to say would come here to look up my posts.

Or, to put it in another way, if this place would introduce some social media features, such as the ability to follow people and post to followers, then it is highly unlikely that I would be interested in using those features.

I don’t think OP meant “proprietary, closed” as “centralized”. If it’s about the code: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki

I referred to both, actually. It's about whether I own my own presence on the network.

Of course, I'm not hosting my own server, so I am in some way in the hands of its administrator, just like I was in the hands of Google when I used G+. However, I can talk to him directly, which is a huge benefit. Also, if he decides to shut down the server, I can still join a different instance and reconnect with all the people I was following on the old server.

Mine is: https://mastodon.social/@sei

I run my own instance too: @djsumdog@hitchhiker.social

I also made a guide for making your own Mastodon CSS:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/using-custom-css-with-mastodo...

I'm https://takeoverthe.world/@caff :) Self-hosting Mastodon has been an adventure, for sure. However, relays have definitely helped with federation. :)

https://mastodon.technology/@Loy

https://mastodon.technology/@temporal

https://nth.io/Luke

I literally haven't actually posted or done anything on it...

https://mastodon.technology/@tracker1

I've thought about putting one up for social.bbs.io or bbs.land

> Keybase integration is interesting to me, but not realky useful since i don't want to tie mastodon with my real life identity.

Ummm. I mean, https://keybase.io/mirimir has nothing to do with my "real life identity".

That's a good point but on the other hand, when you have no reason to connect accounts, connecting them in this way might not be good opsec.

I guess this could be useful to make switching mastodon servers smoother.

Mastodon and other fediverse software support pointing your old account to a new one. Keybase could be useful for confirming both are your accounts, but its hardly the only way.

"might"

Okay, how do I sign up for Mastodon? I went to mastodon.com, and I got a page that the domain was for sale. Are they having funding problems?

Okay, I'm not that dumb, but some users are. And I really don't know how to get started. Not that I've ever been a big social media user, but I'm enough of a hipster to want to say I was on Mastodon before it was ruined.

I know you're joking, but if you found your way on to a site called "Hacker News" at a URL like https://news.ycombinator.com , it it really going to be so much more complicated to understand that https://mastodon.social is the website of the Mastodon social network?

I'm honestly fine with the mastodon devs not having to spend 1000s of dollars to get the mastodon.com domain. Evidently that domain is so expensive that even the popular heavy metal band "Mastodon" haven't bought that domain (they seem to be at https://www.mastodonrocks.com/ )

BTW, if you're having difficultly finding an instance that caters to your interests, https://joinmastodon.org has a signup flow that shows mastodon instances based on interests. That might help.

> I know you're joking, but if you found your way on to a site called "Hacker News" at a URL like https://news.ycombinator.com , it it really going to be so much more complicated to understand that https://mastodon.social is the website of the Mastodon social network?

Yes it is, because when people thing of $something, they assume the website is $something.com.

If Mastodon plans to appeal to the general public then it will need to be easier to find.

I'm personally not at all attached to the 'mastodon.social' domain (i'm self-hosting my own account on a different instance), but I am somewhat surprised at this perspective on TLDs.

Most users of the internet have been exposed to TLDs other than ".com". For example, wikipedia is at a .org TLD, US government sites are at .gov domains, university websites are at .edu domains. Most non-US users will frequently interact with their country's (and neighboring countries') ccTLDs, like .de, .uk, .in, ... I find it surprising to assume that users of social networks who have already understood abstract concepts like "like vs retweet" or "like vs share" would find it difficult to understand the difference between .com and .social.

Also in a sense, it is more accurate for Mastodon to be at a .social TLD instead of a .com since Mastodon is a Patreon-supported FOSS project, and isn't a commercial entity like twitter.com or facebook.com. But yeah, I know that .com doesn't really mean "commercial" anymore, and is more of a general-purpose TLD now.

Mastodon has a number of issues that could stifle broader adoption, but I can't convince myself that the TLD is really relevant here. Most users will just be linked to Mastodon from other sites, or find it from a web search. Once its in their web history, web browsers will just autocomplete the site name in the address bar. And isn't the domain squatting and exorbitant pricing on ".com" the main reasons why the new TLDs have been released anyway?

I would like to add a few things on top of the relatively technical reasons why this lack of .com doesn't matter.

I'd say most users won't type "mastodon.com" in their "browsers". They will type "mastodon" in their "internet" or, if technically savvy, into Google first. Second, from following the fediverse (not just mastodon, but also pixelfed, peertube etc), i have a feeling that they aren't into mainstream, general audience anyway. A lot of them are small focused instances and as such, won't even be attracting new people via Google, but by invites anyway. Many instances have closed registration anyway. So if you need to land anywhere it's likely not on mastodon.social, but something like ...(checks last five accounts to post directly on top of timeline): icosahedron.website, fostodon.org, mastodon.social, mastodon.technology (my instance) and hackers.town.

> Second, from following the fediverse (not just mastodon, but also pixelfed, peertube etc), i have a feeling that they aren't into mainstream, general audience anyway.

Ultimately this is kind of a problem, as we desperately need an general audience alternative to FB/Twitter that isn't about turning outrage into dollars. Right now I'm sure it's nice to hide from the Eternal September, but in the meantime Facebook is enabling ignorance, wasting everyone's lives on purpose, and proposing laws that only they can afford to comply with.

OP is about Keybase, which is trying to solve the problem of why the whole world isn't using GPG. I'm just pointing out that Mastodon has some public adoption issues still, despite the benefit that it can bring to the world.

twblalock wasn't arguing that TLD bias is rational, but that it's a real factor that somewhat hinders large-scale adoption. Sure, Grandma or Jane Preteen has seen ".org" or ".gov" a few times, and sure the ".social" is a logical fit, but will those facts materially influence their habit of defaulting to ".com"?

You make a good point about how many users will simply Google the name, which naturally opens the question about whether users will want to scroll past info on the band & prehistoric animal before finding the service.

Mastodon will only have robustly succeeded in their mission when people don't think of it as joining Mastodon but as joining some particular social hub which happens to run Mastodon. Think of how people aren't joining academia but are joining Foo University.

As far as I know Mastodon has no particular mission. If it exists, not every instance shares it. And that's not even considering other stuff that works on ActivityPub.

First step is explaining that Mastodon is like e-mail, not like Facebook. People know that to get an e-mail address, you don't go to to e-mail.com - you sign up to any e-mail provider to get an address you can use to talk with all other e-mail users. It's the same with Mastodon.

> Keybase integration is interesting to me, but not realky useful since i don't want to tie mastodon with my real life identity.

Yeah, this is it for me. Also I don't want to tie my various online profiles together in general. Providing an open, strong, independently verifiable cryptographic link between my online profiles seems like something that a bad actor could exploit to harvest data about me far more easily and with a far higher degree of confidence than would be the case without it. It might even be hard to get rid of if integrating websites aren't careful about deleting your keys when you want them to, leading to a bunch of cryptographic litter linking your profiles even when you don't want that.

I'm also willing to bet the personal attacks are kept to a bare minimum at Mastadon, where as with Twitter, you just have be idk...opposed to one popular political thing publicly to be regularly attacked and harassed.

How much of that is just because there aren't as many people there though? Both in the lack of enough people to make a critical storm of people and just not enough people to form an audience for that kind of action. I doubt that would remain the same if Mastodon took off and became a huge thing.

Mastodon is great. snouts.online is one of several furry instances. We boop snoots instead of boosting toots, but it talks to other instances just fine.

I understood atleast a couple of those words

Translation: every weird niche interest can have its own server for its community with its own rules, culture, and user experience while still communicating with other servers.

That is correct in theory. But in practice, other servers will block your server if the rules deviate from the mainstream rules, effectively isolating your server.

Well yeah, what's the point of having rules on an instance if you can just break them by moving to another but still participate?

Then the comment I replied to was wrong. There is no interconnected network of servers with different rules.

If your users post hate speech, child porn or run amok reply guying, then yes your likely to not federate with other instances.

For other differing rules, instaces generally silence from the federated timeline. Eg: I can still follow Humblr.social and Sinblr users, but Federated timeline users won't have to drown in porn if the admin silences the server.

Your server will be isolated from some other servers, but it's actually pretty hard to isolate your instance so that you're completely alone in the fediverse.

I mainly got hung up on these words: "We boop snoots instead of boosting toots". Are these mastadon-specific terms?

I googled this, and was very very sorry that I did. Suffice it to say this terminology is specific to a subculture of people who dress up as animal mascots. Booping snoots apparently means touching the nose, I think? I also ran across something called “cub porn” and now I need a shower so hot it can melt glass.

fwiw, after reading this post, i searched "boop snoots" (with quotes) on both duckduckgo and google, and came up with nothing disturbing in the first page of results for either search. nothing that even indicated a connection to furry subculture, far as i could tell.

maybe other variations on that search come up with much more risque results?

I didn’t just google “boop snoots;” I googled that, googled “furries” and went down the rabbit hole a bit.

...A decision I now heartily regret. The two major things I found is that some people are very weird, and some other people hate the weird ones disproportionately considering their prevalence and general demeanor.

ah, yeah, well, sorry. maybe don't chase that rabbit like that next time?

also i find the "rabbit hole" metaphor and a username beginning with "dbased" to be pretty "on the nose" in the context of this thread (sorry, i couldn't resist any of that, and i only realized i ended with a pun after typing it out).

Welcome to the Internet!

Cub porn is generally frowned upon among furries. Don't judge a group of tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of people by a glance at a few dark corners.

Ummm if cub porn is what I think it is and it is frowned upon which it sounds like it is then imho I suggest not using a community-specific euphemism as the euphemism implicitly grants it a place and status within your community.

Toots are posts. Boosting is reposting so your followers can see it. Instance owners can change the terms to whatever cutesy terms they want, so this example has boost replaced with boop and toot replace with toot.

Also this is a FINE example of why niche communities need unbiased online infrastructure. A casual google-searcher may judge them by whatever google's AI decides is representative of the group, and choose not to deal with them at all.

it's basically twitter when you're not following very many people and all the people you are following share your political views.

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