Comment by softwarelimits | Hacker News Reader

Comment by softwarelimits | Hacker News Reader

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What is going on here?

Mastodon does not come with features that enable the idea of "groups"?

I just found issue 139 [0], but "mastodon groups" is an extraordinary bad combination of search terms.

The author seems to dismiss the idea that "groups" are an obvious requirement (IMHO) for any "social" software. Instead he seems to be assuming that one instance of the software might serve one "group" - with no easy way to scale "instance" to many servers.

Pleroma seems to plan for a groups feature [2][3], also using a framework that might be much easier for scaling, but seems to be struggling with implementation.

I see GNU social seems to have groups [1], but in the linked issues people write about bugs with that.

I am not sure this is really how it is, so please correct me if I am wrong.

Would anybody with more knowledge please like to explain why such a basic feature is missing from "social" software alternatives?

I want to understand what the problem is here, I feel like this is the first feature that should be considered from day one. It seems to me trying to handle such a basic feature as an afterthought has a high potential for disaster score (PFD>80): will require a deep re-design and rewrite, trigger several different implementations, standards and endless discussions, in the end will destroy everything.

I understand that groups and p2p / federation is complicated - but is this not a solved problem?

If not, is it a good idea to put this on top of the agenda for "offer alternative for big social brother"?

[0] https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/139 [1] https://gnusocial.net/doc/groups [2] https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/issues/656 [3] https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma-fe/issues/625

No, tags can not replace groups.

You take this one "flaw" in your view and explode it into a major usability limitation that makes the whole software useless. If this was the case the platform would not be growing and developing as quickly as it is.

So maybe it isn't really that big of a deal?

> You take this one "flaw" in your view and explode it into a major usability limitation that makes the whole software useless.

No, I did not do that.

I do not want to discuss if "groups" is a "big deal" or not.

I am interested in the question if "groups" in distributed, federated systems is a solved problem or not.

There are people working on this. See for example https://github.com/wmurphyrd/guppe.

One of the creators had a conversation with kaniini, one of the pleroma devs, about this: https://social.coop/@datatitian/102893246730611249

Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter and not Facebook.

Which is sad IMO as Twitter - again IMNSHO - is one of the most overhyped and useless ideas there is.

I still have an account on mastodon thought and I'm far more active there than on twitter, mostly because new is interesting and to support a good cause.

I also sometimes follow development and hope that it might get more features from both Google+ or Facebook. Groups would be an obvious improvement in my book.

That way maybe it could become more than a twitter clone, which matters to me because in my opinion Twitter is close to useless except as a better way to receive spam and propaganda (it is even easier to ignore than the spam folder in my mail.)

I want to try Mastodon because it's open, federated, ethical etc, all the qualities I seek out in the software I run (not to mention new and interesting, like you say).

But at the end of the day it's still a Twitter clone, so offers absolutely no value to me.

> But at the end of the day it's still a Twitter clone, so offers absolutely no value to me.

Agree in the long run.

In the short run playing with interesting tech has its own value at least as long as it only replaces more useless stuff (I guess tv is the thing I "sacrifice" to have time for tech.)

Twitter is also very limited regarding groups, yes, this is right. Still very successful, but no groups. Makes it unusable for many use cases.

> Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter and not Facebook.

And that is the one reason I haven't already started a Mastodon instance and tried to talk all my family and friends into using it instead of Facebook.

Some people like everything to be public; fine. But some people, like me, want to be able to control who sees stuff; as far as I can tell, the only platform which allows that at the moment is Facebook.

Why not make "groups" an option, so that it can serve both kinds of people?

...because Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter, and not Facebook?

Last I checked, Twitter doesn't have groups.

That like saying making a phone that can take pictures is insane, because it is a phone and those are just meant to make calls.

Or, it's like saying that a browser that has a built-in email client is insane.

Usually, focusing on doing one thing only is how you make good products.

The old Opera had an excellent integration with its M2 email client. There's also Seamonkey.

Most email programs use a built-in rendering engine anyway, and sometimes browsers can actually use the email code (e.g. MHTML is basically MIME+HTML, HTML sanitization[0], Opera used M2 for RSS support). So a browser having a built-in email client might be undesirable, but it is not "insane".

[0]https://frederik-braun.com/firefox-ui-xss-leading-to-rce.htm...

Right, that is a better formulation of that argument: "Not currently in scope of this project" is better than: "This is a clone of X".

Browsing the web and reading / sending email are fundamentally different tasks. Twitter and Facebook are fundamentally the same thing. The key difference is that Facebook allows you to limit posts to specific people.

Mastodon not implementing a "limited visibility" option would be more like a web browser refusing to implement Private Browsing mode.

I love this example. Off topic but like yourself I too remember when camera phones were first released and most people (including myself) did shrug it off as an insane novelty which would never catch on. It didn't help that the resolution on those things were barely better than the original Nintendo Gameboy camera.

It's funny how something that seemed so insane at the time is now the de facto standard way of taking pictures.

I think this is a very limited (and limiting!) view of the world, that it should be one or the other, and that features cannot be borrowed from both.

Limiting scope is a very important part of delivering software.

If groups are what you want, why not use a fork that already has groups?

which fork has groups?

Gab has groups at least.

Using the Gab fork is basically asking to be in as many instance blocklists as you can.

Well, there is Diaspora, which has had groups (they call them "aspects") for many years now. I like it more than Mastodon, which is about as useless as Twitter.

I agree this is really frustrating. Even twitter has group chats. How can you have a social app without groups? I also would love events - then I could get rid of facebook entirely.

Twitter's group chats are just DMs with multiple recipients, which Mastodon supports too.

In Mastodon (or most ActivityPub software), a DM thread can even be splitted and recipients added/removed at any point.

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