The local timeline is the key to enjoying Mastodon
cfenollosa.com
cfenollosa.com
And this is exactly why I haven’t created an account yet. I went to Mastadon, and saw that I needed to choose a community. There are many communities I may like, and I have no idea how each community behaves until I actually join it. I use Linux and I like FOSS and I am still an oldschool BSD nerd, and I also like regional communities. So which one do I choose? I cannot even explore a server’s users and posts from the community list. And then I created an account in the wrong server, and then what? Can I migrate my account to another server?
Mastadon gives me a bit of the nostalgic feelings of the early internet of the 90s. In The Netherlands we had something called “The Digital City” (de Digitale Stad) which Mastadon reminds me of, combined with the IRC geekiness. But at least with IRC I could join multiple servers and a whole plethora of channels from a single client, so I didn’t have to “commit” to a single server and make the wrong choice.
All in all I want to try Mastadon, but the choices I need to make (and fear of making the wrong choice!) before I can even join and experience it scares me.
Also the author says that I should choose a community between 500 and 5000 people, which fosstodon exceeds.
All in all, my point is, there are so many choices and decisions to make before I can even create an account and experience it.
It’s fairly common knowledge that people actually don’t like choice. When you go to a restaurant and see a menu with 100 choices, people actually enjoy their meal less than when there would be little choice; they have this nagging feeling of “was that other choice perhaps better?”
For me, Mastadon has the same problem. Too much choice is a bug, not a feature.
Also, some nodes maintain blocklists of other nodes. [0] So while you can still follow those people and see them in your following feed, posts from users on that node will -not- appear in the public feed (posts from nodes in the federated network).
https://instances.social/ exists to help you find a node but I'm not sure how up to date or accurate it is.
As much as I wished that wasn't the case, most people just want to join an established network and don't care about federation as a concept. A long as a single server doesn't take over altogether, however, I don't think there is a problem with large servers.
If you are going to go with bigger servers, what is Mastadon doing to support them (socially, not technically)?
Also, mastodon.social has about half a million users, and they are having performance problems. I'm guessing if you want to scale that up by a factor of 10 or 100 you're going to need new infrastructure.
In short, it marks your old account as migrated, and messages is sent to your followers instances, asking them to subscribe to your new feeds instead. For the most part it's pretty seamless.
A month after I joined, they had a disk crash and my account was gone. It looked like everyone recreated from scratch, so I did the same.
Two weeks later and without notice they restored a backup, overwriting everything that had happened since. I continued, but with rapidly declining interest to accompany my total loss of trust.
Two more months later the server was down permanently.
This is a misunderstanding of what people like.
What people like is good defaults, because choosing is work. When 90% of everything is crap, nobody even wants to see anything but the 10% that isn't. They don't even want to see anything other than the one option which is the best for them, if somebody can give them that without making them do the work.
The problem is that the best option is not the same for everybody. Even if it's the same for 70% of people, that lets you make that option the default and make 70% of people happy, but the other 30% still need the option to do something else.
And sometimes there isn't any one option that can satisfy any majority of people. Then there isn't any better alternative than giving people a list of options to choose from.
But you could still put the list in a better order. Put the "editor's choice" options near the top and the crummiest ones near the bottom. If someone is in Queens, show them the regional server for New York City on the first page and the regional server for Los Angeles on the hundredth page, and a link next to it that says "show other regions" and leads to a regional map. That sort of thing.
You can, right from the homepage of any instance.
You have "discover users" button, which will show you any local user that wants to be there (by default you're not visible here, you need to opt-in in the settings).
You also have "see what's happening", which will show you latest public posts from an instance.
Using Fosstodon purely as an example: https://fosstodon.org/explore and https://fosstodon.org/public .
> And then I created an account in the wrong server, and then what? Can I migrate my account to another server?
...kinda. You can "archive" your account and redirect your visitors to the new one. You can't migrate who's following you and who you're following.
Also there's nothing stopping you from having an account on multiple instances, but that's mostly unnecessary since you can follow people regardless of what server they happen to be using.
> Moving your account is the same as redirecting your account, but it will also irreversibly force everyone to unfollow your current account and follow your new account, if their software supports the Move activity. Your toots will not be moved, due to technical limitations.
Recently I was invited into one of those communities and I just used the migration feature in mastodon. Went pretty smoothly. I guess it went easier for me as I didn't mind "losing" my toots in this new era. For those who need/want to keep everything it maybe problematic.
My motto on modern web is: don't get too attached to things you don't own. You can't own a community so you shouldn't worry about losing it.
There is a github issue discussing using a custom domain and pointing DNS records to whichever instance you like but it has been dormant for 2 years
Additionally, DNS-based identity migration doesn't address the grandparent's real problem, which is that they feel expected to choose just a single community to live in in the first place. They want to live at the intersection or the union of multiple interests simultaneously, which doesn't fit the Mastodon model of social interaction (but does fit e.g., Twitter's).
$20/yr/user ought to cover DNS, hosting, and operations for a 1-2 person team as a part time project? Esp once you get past 50 subscribers?
The current answer is not as flexible, but requires no technical ability.
You can get bored because you aren't being fed a curated stream of engagement-boosting content; but you can also get bored you don't find an interesting community.
Mastodon has no unit of community smaller than "the local timeline", and it's really not cheap / easy to run your own (due to very high RAM requirements).
By way of comparison, 'one subreddit' is a group you can follow and post to from your main account. You can look at a single accounts post history, but the common case is to follow moderated interest groups. There aren't good ways to participate in interest-specific communities on mastodon (I'm not just whinging; I've tried to improve the situation but it's genuinely difficult at an ecosystem level).
A new subreddit is two minutes and there is no reason why a federated system has to be markedly harder.
What you want is, well, "groups" which is a feature that GNU Social had, and which is eventually going to come to Mastodon and Pleroma.
A lot of people seem to happily use Twitter which also doesn't have a concept of groups.
Then I could have one profile for coding, one for gaming, one for politics. The feed for each would only be about that topic so I can delve into what I feel like at that moment. The other big benefit is that I know everyone following me is following for that topic. On Twitter I mostly talk about tech and when I post about politics it may be uninteresting to 80% of my followers. Because one single account is supposed to represent me they have to put up with that and it creates a worse user experience.
The advantage of anonymous virtual accounts is we can have as many of them as we like, we should embrace that and build a better social network because of it.
The thing is: Do I really want another time sink? I've been on the Internet for over 20 years, and I think whatever gains I could have gotten from online forums/discussions have been attained. Time is a premium, and I'm actively trying to quash sites where I just browse for new content. I spend way too much time on HN as it is, and at some point I'll probably find a way to temporarily disable my account for a year or so (e.g. set a password that is a pain to access).
Most probably not, but I think the argument is it's a better time sink than the other social platforms it competes with.
Is there any chance for a federated interaction to effectively replace the local timeline? It'd be cool to be able to jump into a "community timeline" without that being tied to your account's "instance" (ie. using one account for multiple interests).
Thanks for the tip!
This is not the right way to do decentralized social media imo.
Why not just use a real social graph? If I want to branch out, just show me all of my 2nd degree contacts (friends of friends) and their content?
Not to mention people interested in the same rules like nudity being outright forbidden or being hidden by a spoiler tag.
Enjoy!
Thank you for the kind reply, but I think that would be an incorrect inference, because I actually provided you with a more natural solution to “branching out” than a server timeline. Use a user’s own social graph to discover new content. I don’t want to be associated with a movement, hobby, or niche club. I just want to be myself.
The Fediverse has a similar "friend of a friend" discovery method as Twitter in that you see the users that often get boosted (Mastodon retweet), and the users that often have interesting replies to toots that you follow, and can follow them directly (and then discover who they boost and who replies to them, etc).
(I'm also a solo user on a personal instance, and while I bootstrapped from the Twitter bridge early on, probably most of my follow expansion in the last several months has been through boosts and replies.)
Anyway, yes, the initial bootstrap is always the toughest to get those first few accounts to even have friends-of-friends to explore. Like I said, I used a Twitter bridge that let people link their Mastodon and Twitter accounts and if you signed in with Twitter it would show you everyone you followed who had a Mastodon account connected.
Unfortunately, that bridge (which was a part of joinmastodon.org) got shut down a couple years back due to maintenance headaches (Twitter API shifts).
Asking friends on existing social media if they use Mastodon is still probably the key bootstrap tool even with fewer direct bridges. There've been some "follow me on Mastodon" threads here on HN, too, and I have seen at least a few Mastodon addresses in HN profiles (and more rarely in Twitter profiles and on blogs and elsewhere). It's also a bit of a shame that Keybase's Mastodon support only really supports the Big Instances by design since instances have to be added manually by Keybase staff last I checked.
The way how I think about this is that there is a free and open market of communities and community rules. You can choose the one that resonates the most with you.
E.g. if you are in any way into Open Source, you could check out https://fosstodon.org/public to get a feel for the conversations that happen there.
Thank you for the kind comment, but I have browsed the servers before and nothing resonated with me. I don’t want to be attached to any one “movement” and I can’t be bothered to run my own server for something I’m not sold on.
This is oddly phrased and does not correspond to technical reality. Mastodon is a system of accounts that post messages that are delivered directly to followers, be they on your or other servers. Everything else is basically cosmetic. The local timeline is just a way to have a look into all public posts that originated on your server, the federated timeline is a look into all public posts that your server has received.
Have you personally been involved in pushing forward more portable identities / user data? Or do you believe that things should stay as they are?
There really is no guarantee that just because you follow person X, that you will be at all happy about what the people person X follows talk about. In fact, I'm willing to bet that if people started reading messages from most send-level connections we'd see a lot more flamewars.
Of course I haven't done any real research on this, but I have at time decided to randomly follow people who are mentioned by some of the people I follow. It inevitably led to a lot of bad content that I did not want to engage with.
Bundling "hosting server" with "shared interests" and "shared norms" has clearly been helpful to a certain style of Mastodon usage, but in the long-term/long-view, still strikes me as a bug not a feature. It still places such usage, and group-formation, at the mercy of a feudal federation of sysop-lords, "my land my rules".
The creation of lists/communities-of-commonality that can transcend any one server/delivery-path choice seems the purest option, with the most headroom for generative expansions. It should be most possible in identity-based, server-oblivious systems, like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB).
Who will moderate these cross-instance communities?
Moderation in such server-oblivious systems would chiefly be a label applied: "this conforms to our norms" or "this doesn't conform". Being a member-in-good-standing of a community would be a standing default that one's messaging is presumed conformant. Violations beyond the tolerance of the community would flip that "presumed conformant" bit to "presumed in violation", so that software wanting to show the community-conformant view knows what to do. (This only requires cryptographic identities & messaging, not centralized server sysops with delete privileges.)
Weird phrasing there! I think the author meant:
Mastodon is to Twitter what Linux is to Windows.
Let ML be the difference between Mastodon and Linux, and Twitter and Windows differ by ML too. That reflects the original sentence.
Let's call MT the difference between Mastodon and Twitter.
From the first sentence, Linux is separated from Mastodon by ML, and from Twitter by both ML and MT, and from Windows by ML, and MT, and ML again. But because Twitter and Windows difference is analogous but opposite to Linux and Mastodon difference, we can ignore them, so Linux is separated from Windows by MT, the separation of Mastodon to Twitter.
Which is exactly what the reworded version says.
Well, what server am I on? At the time I picked it because a well-known blogger I follow was on it. The timeline today is not offensive, but not interesting either. Which server is it? I have no idea, it is not shown in my profile.
What other servers are available? There is no way to answer that question from the home page (https://mastodon.social/web/timelines/home). Several links in posts here go to joinMastodon.org, a site that I'd never have known about except for this HN post.
While the list at joinmastodon.org/communities is interesting, it is also very shallow (where are "writing", "philosophy", "atheism", "photography" -- to name only a few of my reddit subs?) and, crucially, there is no search box!!
It's in your username and the domain, eg.:
@username@fosstodon.org, so the server is fosstodon.org.
What's your username and that should tell you.
Though I agree with the article that the Federated timeline is also useless. (Who reads the public Everything on Twitter feed? It's a fast scrolling mess of useless. Federated is that.) The only timeline that matters is the Home timeline where you see the people you follow, and who they boost (if you like). That's just like Twitter. The whole point of Federation is that it doesn't matter which instance you are on you should be able to follow just about anyone you want.
As others point out, focusing people on the local timeline forces people to "pick a lunch table in high school" before feeling like they can use the network. It's a distraction when picking an instance, and it's a "sunk cost fallacy" feeling that leads to so much of the angst about "portable identity" because it puts the cart before the horse. It ties you identity to something someone else owns "the cafeteria table", rather that the classic answer in federated systems: if you want a portable identity that you own/control, get your own domain name.
(Yes, that's a tough answer for non-technical average users, but there are solutions to that too, just as "custom domain email host" is just about googleable to solve today there are a couple of Mastodon hosts that will run just about everything for you and BYOD or buy one through an affiliate link with them.)
This leads to a weird UX: you pick an instance, you sign up, you flip through the onboarding, and now what? This lack of discernible way forward drives people away. They sign up, play with it for a bit, like some cat pictures Eugen boosts, and abandon their account.
Virtually all social services that had any semblance of success offered at least one of two ways to bootstrap your network when you signed up: a global search of some sort, or importing your contact list form somewhere else (Facebook/Twitter, phonebook, etc). Mastodon offers none. Now, I understand that it's a technical challenge to have anything resembling globally-searchable account directory in a decentralized environment, but it's certainly solvable. I'm thinking of DHT for my fediverse project for example.
This definitely depends on what kind of social media you like. Facebook is for following people you know. Twitter is for following people you're interested in hearing from but don't necessarily know personally. Tiktok is for watching videos that you find entertaining from anyone who posts that type of video. Tumblr is about following your interests and finding people who post content you like and potentially interacting with them anonymously.
If you have a raspberry pi you can self-host pleroma and still follow mastodon users that you like. Mastodon is a bit resource intensive for a pi still, I believe.
It's not that the stuff I post is worth that much a month to spin it out into the network, but that it has been worth it to have so much control over what I receive from the network, including no ads and no "brands".
And provide a scraper for FB events which users can run.
Supports federation, so you should be able to RSVP using Mastodon or any other compatible software.
Here are some fediverse platforms that are already making forays into events (which will/should eventually be used by platforms such as Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.):
I've been on larger instances with more interesting people before.
I've found following certain instances and looking for people that interest you works better.
Literally
Article then written 100% about Not That. Really: thinking this had anything to do with censorship would only be defensible in the context of a realllll naive bag-of-words model, not a human brain.
~15 years ago, when blogs and forums were where most Internet discussions happened, we had that same scenario, and we now consider that at least a silver age of free speech.
(And if you went and made your own blog, it was much harder to connect with other bloggers and commenters, compared to running your own instance and tooting at other like-minded instances).
If the Fediverse grows and create something similar to that age, I will be overjoyed. I will certainly prefer it to the giant cloud conglomerates' "professional community managers", whose rules may or may not be clear but it doesn't matter when they're based on the politics and concerns of Silicon Valley instead of those of my country or my community.
I think the point is to make it as close to Twitter as possible.
Internally, Twitter itself must be a federation of servers, right?
In fact, as a Twitter early adopter I watched the public feed go from a useless but sometimes interesting curio that sometimes had fun surprises to a useless fire hose full of uninteresting garbage and not worth sifting through. The Federated Timeline on every Mastodon instance gets that wild that most people turn off or ignore the Federated Timeline. I certainly find it even more pointless to use bots to try to ramp that fire hose all the way up to "as much of the network as possible at all times". I just cannot see an ethical use of that today, and I cannot see why someone would want that when Twitter itself proves that a single massive public feed is way more of a bug than a feature.