Mastodon: A free, open-source, and decentralized Twitter not owned by anybody | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon: A free, open-source, and decentralized Twitter not owned by anybody

mastodon.social

168 pointsadamdegas162 comments

I dismissed the importance of copywriters for important one-word labels until Mastodon deemed their posts "toots."

Adoption is critical for social media, and cachet is critical for mass adoption. "Tooting" isn't the radio-friendly Big Bang Theory flavor of dorky— it's Segway-with-knee-pads dorky. I'll probably deploy an instance for kicks and giggles, but I can't see it taking off until it's a little more image savvy.

Dorkiness can be an insurmountable obstacle. Just ask google glass.

Google Glass didn't fail because it was dorky, it failed because people understand Google to be a surveillance and advertising company and the prospect of Glass serving as an always on, always streaming, always interpreting Panopticon was too much for people to take.

You're right about "toots," though. At least "tweets" make sense for a site named Twitter, but what is a "toot," a mastodon farting?

As in "to toot a horn". Like a trunk. Of an elephant. Or a mastodon.

Krapp is right though, "tooting" is also slang in some places for farting.

For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZUvuvfDQg

It's also old slang for a drinking bender:

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/on+a+toot

Mastadon really should have done a little more due dilligence before deciding on that term.

Indeed. When you're talking about image, "hey guys it doesn't necessarily mean elephant farts" doesn't work.

Even ignoring that, the word "tweet" viscerally feels light, nimble, quick, and sharp. Toot feels heavier, duller, and more imposing. To end users, the interface is the software and no amount of technical or logistical impressiveness will overcome something being viscerally off-putting. It needs to become attractive in spite of that.

> Even ignoring that, the word "tweet" viscerally feels light, nimble, quick, and sharp.

It did, until Twitter spoiled that. Hearing 'tweet' I somehow get associations with 'trump' (also slang for fart in British English, btw) and 'musk' (a strong odor).

Sure— nothing that visible will stay untarnished forever. Not to everybody, anyway. Starting out pre-tarnished makes it a lot harder to get enough adoption for a brand to withstand that, especially for an image-focused product. Facebook only had the opportunity to become a sad hot mess because they affected preppy ivy league exclusivity instead of launching as "OpenPorpoisePost.org" or some other FOSSy name. We'd never have heard of H&M had they been named "Tootin' Duds".

Yeah, I know. But I'm pretty sure if Twitter'd gone this way and here we had the open-source clone using the name "twitter", we'd all be writing about how hopeless their branding is because it's very easy to make "twit" jokes about it.

[EDIT] nb I don't use Mastodon and don't expect it to take off, but I don't think "toot" is at all the reason for that.

I don't think anybody implied it was the sole reason.

Sure, that's fair. I just think it's so minor that it's not any part of the reason. Companies with all their professional branding experts and such do things that are every bit as easy to ridicule, all the time. Mostly it goes fine and people take it the way it's intended.

Every profession has its gaffes but that doesn't negate the folly of deliberately ill-conceived work done by amateurs. Technically mature infrastructures crashing wouldn't negate the folly of a first-time developer trying to launch a public service with loopdy-looped cargo-culted spaghetti code on a shared host gator VPS.

Adoption is really important for social media to succeed and be useful to its users and image is really important for social media adoption, generally, even if not for you. But I guarantee its influenced your choices more than you could feasibly perceive. Would you still use HN if it used the default bootstrap layouts? Or a ton of slick graphics and heavy animations? Would enough other people be put off by it not to bother?

You can't guarantee everything will strike everyone the same way, but there are wrong answers and it's not even mostly subjective. In an alternate Twitter-free universe if someone wanted a noun/verb for a deliberately lightweight communication broadcast into the ether over the internet, I'd bank a grand on marketers agreeing that a cheerful, sharp little chirp from a nimble, energetic bird communicates that better than the plaintive sounding crescendo of a giant plodding extinct earthbound mammal which also is outdated slang for a fart.

Nobody user is out there weight the pros and cons of the post name when deciding a social network— it's all about that first visceral impression that makes people think "this is cool and exciting" or "this is dull and lame."

Long live tooting!

        _.-- ,.--.
      .'   .'    /
      | @       |'..--------._
     /      \._/              '.
    /  .-.-                     \
   (  /    \                     \
    \\      '.                  | #
     \\       \   -.           /
      :\       |    )._____.'   \
       "       |   /  \  |  \    )
         snd   |   |./'  :__ \.-'
               '--'

I'm not sure who "snd" is, but they drew a nice tooter :)

(hopefully anticipating a "trunk raised, toot blasting" ascii art response worthy of the thread)

> a mastodon farting

While that's not the true meaning behind it, "a mastodon farting" is a good summary for the branding around all these "fediverse" social networks.

If concerns about privacy were widespread enough to stop Google Glass, then surely they would have prevented the mass adoption of always listening, always streaming voice assistant devices.

I think that privacy should be a greater public concern, but I doubt it was the reason why Google Glass failed to catch on.

>then surely they would have prevented the mass adoption of always listening, always streaming voice assistant devices

There's something viscerally more creepy about having a camera pointed directly in your face at all times. Try holding your cellphone up to random people at about eye level, you'll see that people do in fact find that at least annoying.

>I think that privacy should be a greater public concern, but I doubt it was the reason why Google Glass failed to catch on.

As I recall, it was the only thing people were talking about.

There's a distinction, though, which I think would matter to people. Smart assistants are things you choose for yourself -- they don't get put in your home without your involvement. Google Glass was something someone else chose for you.

(Also it was very expensive, clunky looking, and buggy. As you say, it's multifaceted.)

People understand that? that must be why people also avoid Gmail, Google Drive, Chrome, Android, Google Search...

It's one thing to use these tools yourself. It's quite another to walk around in public pointing a camera at everyone you look at, all the time.

You're technically correct. Using Gmail, Drive, Chrome, etc., does place a small burden on those you interact with (when they email you, when you store group project files, etc.)

But there's a whole other level of intrusiveness when you're roaming meatspace with a Google Camera in everyone's face.

Oh, and it's dorky as hell. Glass failed on multiple fronts. For the reasons you listed as well as the parent comment.

So do average people avoid Facebook?

> 54-46 was my number. Right now, someone else has that number.

Dorkiness does not legitimately enter into discussing "Toots" no matter Mastodon's intent.

I hate to say it, but we're 2 years closer to the spirit of 2069.

the project doesn't use 'toot' anymore and this is like the most trivial concern to have with a piece of software.

Wording and branding is not a trivial concern if mass adoption is a goal.

I don't think it's a goal (it's not mine as a user), but I'm sure you can ask Mastodon gGmbH for their OKRs when it's funding time.

When has mass adoption of a social networking platform ever worked out well for users?

When has lacking it worked out well for social networks?

Frankly, even besides "toot", Mastodon isn't a particularly appealing name either.

Why is it, without fail, there's always someone in an HN thread making complaints about the name of something they have absolutely no involvement in?

I come here just for the bikeshedding to be honest.

Maybe consider this as constructive criticism? I'm sure a lot of people here are fed up with the existing social media platforms and would want something like Mastodon to succeed, but there's no way it will succeed if it shoots itself in the foot from the beginning with terrible branding.

Until Mastodon (or others) can seamlessly interoperate with existing social networks, they have to gain mass adoption to become useful, which means catering to what the masses think is appealing even if you don't particularly agree with that determination.

I don't have any personal involvement with Mastodon either, I just think it's a cool piece of software and I'm cranky enough to point out a tired trope I see day-in-day-out on this site (name complaints).

Oh absolutely, I agree that it's very cool at a technical level. But I don't believe it's going to succeed at its mission with the current branding.

It is of course open-source software and they don't have to do anything if they're happy with the status-quo, but imagine how better if would be if you had something with the branding & adoption of Twitter and the features & benefits of Mastodon?

Mastodon is pushing releases out the door at a pace I'm happy with - they're at version 3.5 so far since its initial launch of 2016 or so. I'd consider that (and the sustainability of the project) a success. A lot of project maintainers burn out after an amount of time or stall out completely so this is an indicator there's something more here and it's healthy.

I'm not quite sure I agree with the point you're getting at concerning branding and mass adoption.

That’s a good point, about seamless interop with existing social networks.

The EU Digital Markets Act looks like it’s designed to force some messaging interop, and it’s regulation-driven, so it can be refreshed a little more dynamically than most legislation.

Crossing fingers for some movement on the interop front!

FOSS projects never fail to surprise me in their creativity of making weird, unintuitive, terrible names. Just install the damn Linux, list all packages and try guessing what's for what. Even worse than forced codenames in place of distribution versions in digits.

If you ran a company, wouldn't you find it valuable what people reacted to your branding? If you want your FOSS project to succeed you probably similarly would or at least should be interested.

I think that's a bigger problem, though maybe still not a grave one. I wouldn't be surprised if a very high percentage of people write "mastAdon", without autocorrect to save them.

We're also all missing the bigger problem here, which is that "mast" is rooted in the word for "breast". ( /s for the concern, but it in fact is)

I actually think it's pretty bad-ass. Uncharacteristic of FOSS. A bit clunky sounding, but that makes it feel all the less corporate to me.

But maybe it's just me. Or maybe it's why it's as successful as it is.

If your target audience is only FOSS fans, great. Even a FOSS fans like to socialize with other people and that’s kind of important when you’re choosing a vibe/look/feel for a social network.

FOSSy vs corporate is a false dichotomy. The FOSSy “don’t you dare criticize my logo… I spent a weekend learning Gimp to make it… and yes the G stands for Gnu” aesthetic says “tech-savvy only”. It is off-putting for many, and FAR MORE EXCLUSIVE than any sane corporate design, save luxury brands. It doesn’t signify the lack of an in-club— it is an in-club.

It is, for a metal band.

software, sure, name your variables what ever you want, but this is a social network

I still hear toot used to distinguish from tweets, is there a new word suggested? The wikipedia on Mastadon states, 'Posts are called "toots" instead of "tweets", as is the case on Twitter' based on a 2017 article from the Verge so maybe someone should update it.

It definitely seems like they do: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/posting/

Yeah they should have picked a cool word like "tweet."

In an alternate Twitter-free universe if someone wanted a noun/verb for a deliberately lightweight communication broadcast into the ether over the internet, I'd bank a grand on marketers agreeing that a cheerful, sharp little chirp from a nimble, energetic bird communicates that better than the plaintive sounding crescendo of a giant plodding extinct earthbound mammal which also is outdated slang for a fart.

Mastodons are cool and everything but they don't work for branding a social network. Some rad groundbreaking online museum or library or something else that wanted to viscerally communicate age and wisdom and weight and timelessness? Sure.

I think the negative reaction to the word toot has little to do with the relative uncoolness of the mastadon, I think the issue is that toot has a scatological association.

Not what I’m saying. Toot’s self-evident, multifaceted dorkiness is the most concrete reason people find mastodon uncool. I wouldn’t trust a designer’s cobbled together code for a production project; likewise, developers should delegate these things to domain specialists when image is important. These commenters, largely developers, confidently discounting the importance of visceral appeal in social environments is yet more evidence.

I get that many developers had/have a toxic experience with the concept of coolness, but that doesn’t negate its functionality in this vein.

iirc “tweet” originated among users and was later adopted officially, so by analogy perhaps Mastodon’s mistake is to have unilaterally chosen a term from the outset.

Note to self: mastodon comes with "people who passionately dislike use of the word toot" already filtered out.

* also people who didn’t find it appealing enough to notice. (Seemingly most, looking at the numbers.)

When developers assume qualified UI designers merely wield arbitrary personal preferences, FOSS loses.

- it buttresses a disdain and devaluation of the design discipline, in general

- developers feel entitled to obnoxiously impose their actual arbitrary personal preferences and folk knowledge on the fruit of someone’s intellectual discipline. It’s rarely an improvement.

- designers give up on a FOSS projects in general

- Your see conjecture and debate. Anyone who knows what they’re talking about sees Dunning and Kruger.

As a consumer facing brand, this may be a problem. But as a technology for building custom social media services, I don't think this will harm its adoption at all. I know of two examples already of people modifying Mastodon to build rebranded "alternate" social media networks (Gab and Truth Social,) neither of which still refer to posts as toots to my knowledge.

Silver linings don’t negate clouds. Feedback doesn’t negate accomplishment.

Except this perfectly encapsulated the culture that wanted to abandon Twitter and recognized that it all amounted to shit. It isn't birdsong, it's a fart

Maybe they should seal the deal by doing a s/user/loser in their codebase and really watch the signups roll in!

> Adoption .. critical .. mass adoption .. see it taking off

That's all nice for when on a startup, scaleup, unicorn, megasaurus adventure, but not what this is really about. At least not yet, and I hope it stays that way.

This is about free software projects in a hard-to-monetize decentralized (federated) environment, where a different culture currently thrives. One where all these incentives that made other social media such bad places, are not very prevalent yet (and to some extent can be controlled by moderation mechanisms). The "move fast and break things" growth hacking mindset, if that wins out, will likely destroy this culture. 'Hard-to-monetize' is an advantage in my book, in this regard.

> where a different culture currently thrives

I agree. It is an issue of cultural acceptance. And rest assured, you don't need to educate me about FOSS scene culture— I've been using linux consistently since the 90s and have worked full time developing for FOSS projects for 12 years. The important realization you skipped past was the exclusivity of culture.

Just like Punk cultures, FOSS culture often mistakes itself for an inclusive catch-all for people opposed to a corporate for-profit status quo. Though obviously opposed to corporate status quo, the FOSS scene is an in-club of people who put technical accomplishment above all else. They pride themselves on rejecting user-focus and pushing through awful user experiences. There are cool kids and villains and the look and feel of your projects is the same as subculture fashion.

I can't imagine Mastodon intended to restrict their audience to that 'different culture' but ignoring their perspective certainly had that effect. Eschewing or appealing to people outside of that culture has absolutely nothing to do with profit. None.

This submission should really be https://joinmastodon.org, the site of the project itself and not just Eugen's instance.

Note that while Mastodon is the most widespread implementation, and kind of sets the de-facto standard like IE did with HTML in the 90s, there are a many other fully compatible implementations to run a Fediverse server and federate over ActivityPub.

You can join or self-host any implemention and follow and communicate with users on other servers. There are moderation tools and admins can set policies for federation; some servers are picky with how they federate, some more free-speech-oriented. Fully unmoderated servers with open registration that try to federate promiscuously tend to get siloed of from the rest fairly quickly.

The network is not full-mesh by design, so typically either one of two servers (or user on it) needs to either manually follow users from that server or have content forwarded from already followed actors to ingest it.

The neat thing with this is how you can natively and seamlessly follow vloggers on Peertube on your personal Friendica instance, and boost it to your followers on Mastodon.

People interested in FLOSS and Linux may be interested in checking out the fosstodon.org instance.

I'm on a small not very active Pleroma instance hosted by friends (bio). Some people have accounts on many servers.

https://fediverse.party/

Mastodon is something I want to like but it honestly find it complicated and annoying to use. Do I need a new account for each instance being the main question? If so that just sounds tedious. It's one the main benefits of Reddit, needing one account to interact with many "forums." Also, generally speaking, I found a lot of people on Mastodon are the type of people that were banned from Twitter. It's like Reddit and Voat.

Well, you don't need an account on each instance you want to interact with, but you might need multiple accounts (but it's not clear where) if the instance you choose has defederated (or defederates in future from) another instance for reasons which may be known only to the moderators of your instance, who are not bound to share those reasons or even the instances from which they've defederated or in future choose to defederate. "Defederation" is like blocking on Twitter, except it's more like a Twitter block list, except block lists and the automated propagation thereof are actually a hugely divisive issue within the community of fediverse users, oh and speaking of which it's more correct to call it "the fediverse" instead of "Mastodon" because Mastodon is really just the most widely known implementation of the underlying ActivityPub protocol, and this is also divisive because... [three hours later] ...and that's the short intro to what's important to know about the fediverse! Now, let's get you an - wait where'd you go?

Most folks I know who still believe in the value of any of this for its own sake have moved on to considering that this kind of refractory opacity is actually good because it prevents entry by anyone who isn't likewise invested. Ironically, those who preach the value of investment are also almost universally those who don't need to worry about leveraging a social media presence into any form of income or, y'know, social life. Almost everyone who does care about these things has likewise moved on - in this case, back to Twitter.

> Ironically, those who preach the value of investment are also almost universally those who don't need to worry about leveraging a social media presence into any form of income or, y'know, social life

Also ironically, social life existed before social media, and no one earned a living from it then. But in your case you might separate social life from professional career. Use Mastodon for the first and Twitter, Insta, what-have-you for the latter.

People have been earning a living from social life as long as social life has existed. How else do you explain Oscar Wilde? But Mastodon, or the fediverse, or whatever we choose to call it, is pretty clearly past its peak, and absent a significant change in its fortunes looks to continue its slow slide into - well, further into irrelevance.

I do think that's a pity; I've been banging a drum about the hazards, moral and otherwise, of monolithic social media for what by now must be most of a decade, and I would like there to be an alternative that achieves traction without being beholden to the profit motive which in my analysis lies at the root of all those hazards. Mastodon had a real shot at that, and it was a fun place to be for a while there, besides. I hate to see it fail, but I'd be a fool not to acknowledge the plainly obvious fact that it is failing, at this point an also-ran at best, and unlikely to change that trajectory.

> Do I need a new account for each instance being the main question?

This is a very common question, and no you absolutely do not.

The system works like email - you have interoperability and can pass messages along between servers. You don't need to join both gmail.com and hotmail.com to send a message from your gmail address to a hotmail user.

If this is a very common question, Mastodon could probably use some sort of FAQ on their site if they are hoping to reach the unwashed masses like myself.

I joined a server and tried to interact with a post on a different server, but couldn't find it.

What bothers me the most is how difficult it is to compete with the incumbents. We all want something better. We all have ideas of what better looks like. We've all (or many of us anyway) have tried alternatives.

But you essentially can't overcome the network effects. There's no way to gradually build a social network when everyone is already on a different one.

We have to change that. Facebook should be required to let other platforms consume content produced by its users. If you do that, you suddenly can cold start a competitor, because switching off of Facebook does not mean giving up talking to your grandmother.

This is exactly the problem we all always have with trying new services and dealing with relatives, friends, coworkers, and new networking pales which is ultimately the daily communication targets.

As far as I understand, the new EU Digital Markets Act [1] will support this - forcing big platforms to allow interoperability.

Awesome for platforms like Matrix [2] which are all about supporting federation and bridges to other services (such as Signal, which is hostile to federation [3]).

[1]: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/03/25/interoperability-without-...

[2]: https://matrix.org

[3]: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

Never heard of that. I don't see facebook not pulling out of a market requiring it to share posts and such, especially in private groups and whatnot. Seems like users won't like their posts going wider than facebook either.

Facebook can't afford to pull out of the EU, it's a massive market, and IMHO the cat will be out of the bag and other jurisdictions will follow suit with similar regulations anyways.

There was a big discussion about that here too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30799567

Technically Signal wouldn't be covered under the DMA ( they aren't even close to being big enough). But yep, that's the point of the new regulation and it's awesome. Forces interoperability and levels the playing field between the huge incumbents with moats and competitors. Oh and it will force Apple to allow third party app stores, so there's that too.

>But you essentially can't overcome the network effects. There's no way to gradually build a social network when everyone is already on a different one.

How did Facebook overtake Myspace then?

I'm not really convinced that the thing holding back Mastodon and other efforts like it is merely incumbency inertia. I think even if you started from zero again, Twitter would take off and Mastodon wouldn't. The Mastodon experience does not strike me as better than the Twitter experience for most users. Most people don't really care if if something is open-source or federated/decentralized. Those are not features that draw users.

The rise of TikTok is a recent example of how this isn't necessarily true. Prior to that, Snap Chat, Instagram, Discord, and even Facebook itself are all examples of disruptive new social networks that quickly surpassed existing incumbents.

Yep, and none of these use open protocols like Matrix, XMPP, or ActivityPub. Makes you wonder if these technologies will always just remain popular with niche communities.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I do think it's possible that an open protocol like ActivityPub can take off with the masses. I think the real issue is that apps like Mastodon offer an experience that is mostly just a copycat of Twitter, so there is no real killer reason for existing Twitter users to hop on over. Same goes for Pixelfed, Pleroma, Element, etc.

I don't think its that simple. The fact that you can name most all of them in a few words is evidence enough that its like striking lightning.

And, with the exception of Facebook, all of them represent completely new ideas rather than incremental changes. If you want to play in the social media game, you need something revolutionary and completely different, not just an incremental or even 10x improvement over what's already there.

And I don't really count MySpace, that was before tech mastered the art of the monopoly.

There's a great deal more that I didn't state because I wasn't making an exhaustive list; you could do worse than by starting by looking at wikipedia[0].

I'm not sure why new ideas are a problem here, but I'd also argue that everything I listed had clear forebearers from which their designs developed from.

MySpace and the Microsoft Antitrust case were in the same era; and there were monopolistic companies before then, in tech.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_serv...

I built up a network on Mastodon and I'm not overly social, and did it from scratch. I'd never used a microblogging service before and even I didn't find it difficult or time-consuming. I enjoy a varied and diverse home feed which is busy enough to find something of interest every day, and that's without looking out into the instance or the rest of the federated servers.

Let fcbook and twitter rot. Not everyone is on them and not all of their users are exclusive to their seeping platforms.

> But you essentially can't overcome the network effects.

If the fediverse manages to stay on an interoperability open standards track, then I am sure it can and in a way that dominant platforms find hard to compete against, because their moat disappears in such environment. One where you can only compete on quality and not on lock-in and FOMO. But such open standards are very hard to bring to maturity in healthy ways.

>What bothers me the most is how difficult it is to compete with the incumbents. We all want something better. We all have ideas of what better looks like. We've all (or many of us anyway) have tried alternatives.

Parler got shut down because it's a public safety threat and did the january 6 insurrection. Except later we find out it wasnt an insurrection and none of the organizing happened on parler. They don't need real justification to shut you down. Free speech is government, not several giant tech corps colluding at the same time. Right? Right?

>But you essentially can't overcome the network effects. There's no way to gradually build a social network when everyone is already on a different one.

Oh for sure you can. Parler got a huge bump but fox news and others. It became #1 app for weeks and then they got shutdown and removed. It was on its way to becoming a serious competitor. It was well past the leud hump. Commies, fishing, all the stuff was on there.

Mind you to shut them down, Google, Apple, and Amazon cannot legally talk to each other. Multiple anti-trust laws prevent them from working together. There is only 1 way for those 3 to act in sync like they did.

This is the US government coming in, ordering them to remove Parler. It's the US government censoring speech.

>We have to change that. Facebook should be required to let other platforms consume content produced by its users. If you do that, you suddenly can cold start a competitor, because switching off of Facebook does not mean giving up talking to your grandmother.

You're missing the forest through the trees. Building a new competitor is simple. Getting it big enough to self-sustain isn't a problem neither.

The problem is that this is the US government censoring speech. These people have transitioned to fully encrypted platforms. The US government most likely does not have access.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/18/05/01/2035246/amazon-tells...

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/21/10/29/2215227/the-us-gover...

https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/01/12/2126230/telegram-adds...

This has everything to do with government breaking human rights. This is about people realizing what it is doing and now it may have lost its access and is probably pretty worried.

Midterms are about to happen. Hillary Clinton was quite vocal about Trump stealing the election. Trump was quite vocal about Biden stealing the election. Republicans in 49 states also think the election was stolen.

The results of midterms don't matter. Everything will be down to transparency. I very much doubt midterms are going to go down with complete transparency.

Be warned: joining servers that relay other public servers is a quick way to unwittingly encounter pornographic content that is illegal to possess in many countries.

The tech isn't safe outside of heavily moderated and/or small instances.

how centralized services deal with that? filtering AI?

CSAM scanning - comparing content hashes with known hashes of CSAM material, usually provided by a law enforcement agency

I know they have blurred previews for content marked sensitive and I imagine porn marketers or people sharing content that's illegal anyway are more than happy to ignore that. I wonder if you can blur, or even better, not load any images and display them selectively? Or not load any images from people you don't follow?

There are many ways to avoid encountering illegal pornographic content on Mastodon. Indeed the one you linked to does just that, by having a mod staff that can block offending accounts and suspend interactions with instances.

I can't think of any other major platform where avoiding illegal pornography is something users explicitly have to think about and take actions to protect themselves.

I find it worrying that this is even an issue, but then again it's not surprising - if you build a platform explicitly against witch hunts, you'll end up with 1% principled legitimate users that use it to make a statement and 99% witches.

Actually, even Twitter has a CP problem. I've seen it discussed before, where various accounts with CP were reported, but action on said accounts was delayed due to unknown issues on the side of Twitter. Meanwhile, the moderation on Mastodon instances varies from being more lax than Twitter to being more strict (IIRC that instance you linked is slightly more strict than Twitter).

Also, Mastodon wasn't built "explicitly against witch hunts". A lot of people go there because they don't like the hellscape that is Twitter, or because they simply want a different audience. Heck, there are many people --- myself included --- with both Twitter and Mastodon handles. The people who go to Mastodon after a Twitter ban usually end up on more toxic fringe instances, like radical.town (tankie) or social.quodverum.com (MAGA).

Depending on which part of Mastodon you are on, you can still find witch hunts, usually on the fringier instances.

and even moderated instances still have huge issues with it. There was one called "Sinblr" that had a user from another domain (in Japan, I think) overwhelmed it to the point that the hobbyist mods couldn't keep up with actual illegal porn content (underage material.)

Seems law enforcement caught wind of it, and Sinblr has ceased to exist, along with any user accounts on it.

I like the idea of Mastodon and I'm glad it exists, but I've yet to find a particular niche for which there is a server where I want to participate. Usually these days I'll just stick to a Slack workspace, a Discord server, or a Facebook group if I want to engage with a community publicly, and I'm already off of Twitter altogether. I'm guessing it's just a cold start problem.

What the best way of discovering active Mastodon communities one might want to be part of?

You echo my sentiments. It seems good discoverability is hard, so the path of least resistance is centralization!

Imo ideal would be like a plugin for Chrome that injects external content automatically into my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Can you imagine how awesome adoption could be? Your favorite account just got banned? Go look up their decentralized domain style uncensorable ID and bam seamlessly have at least one uncensored bit showing up on your bread and butter sites without having to change your habits much immediately.

Along these lines, how would folks feel about their local town/county/state running a Mastodon instance? It's a community you belong to, and it would create a sort of "digital public square" as opposed to the privatized walled gardens we have today.

Is something like this realistic?

I don't think most people would want unmoderated contact with their city. I am not joking.

Might as well hasten the apocalypse. Clips from town halls are some of my favorite shitshows to watch on YouTube as it is. Just imagine all the ways this will go wrong.

Servers still have moderators and admins. There are tools to moderate posts and accounts on the server, as well as how to federate with other servers.

From what I've seen on NextDoor (which is -kinda- moderated) as a lurker, we really don't want a town square online lol. You will like your neighbors way less. Too many people feel that having a strong opinion on a subject also makes them an expert on said subject.

And they really, really hate homeless people.

Nextdoor is the established social network for this. Like any social network it is pretty hard to overcome the first mover advantage. Anyone who wants a community like this will be on nextdoor, and you need need to get the whole neighborhood to move over. I guess you would end up with all the same toxic content, just on a new platform.

Nextdoor is possibly the only platform less intuitive than Mastodon, so it might have a chance.

Nextdoor is mostly people asking things like "did you hear that?" I get a daily digest and it's almost all totally worthless. I haven't unsubscribed so I can remain current on how useless it is for when somebody inevitably asks me about it.

Nextdoor is a very US thing. HN is literally the only place I've ever seen or heard it mentioned.

It's increasingly popular in the UK too, though most people still just use Facebook.

What you're describing is basically NextDoor, and in my experience the challenges involved in operating such a thing are beyond simply operating a mastodon instance. Imagine Twitter, except for local politics and less community moderation.

Yes. I am working on spinning up a local server for CSA(Community Supported Agriculture) in our area to connect farmers to consumer communities. The goal is to create connection, community, and bypass the current bottlenecks driving up food prices. Nextdoor is ripe to be disrupted too. The police love Nextdoor, but not me. The cheap and relatively easy way to spin up a server is with yunohost.org, but you can also do it really easily with a service like mastohost.

It's very realistic IMO. But just like local subreddits and FB groups, a lot of it comes down to having diligent and reasonable mods.

The server doesn't really matter. You need to start out with people you're following, then when they boost posts, check if the person who wrote the post is worth following. Over time, you'll build up a decent network of interesting people. I started just following @maia@crimew.gay, now 14 months and 3000 posts later I'm following 101 people and have made quite a few new friends.

https://jointhefedi.com gives a good list of instances to join. Check out https://soapbox.pub/ as a great frontend for pleroma.

https://fediverse.express https://yarrps.xyz/ (domain expired) https://web.archive.org/web/20210817035751/https://yarrps.xy...

https://install-app.yunohost.org/?app=pleroma

LukeSmith.xyz 's take on Federation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOiCACmjKBM

In the spirit of Fediverse: the guy has a PeerTube channel with the same content, you should probably link that instead of YT :p

Note: This may not matter for everybody, but Soapbox is built and maintained by far-right trolls who were ostracized from the rest of the network for their hatred of trans people and "the transgender ideology" (their words). Additionally, even within the Pleroma project (which evolved out of *chan culture and often acts as a refuge for those shunned by other parts of the fediverse), Alex has alienated all of the other major maintainers, and pissed them off enough that he eventually ended up banned from the project entirely (if I remember correctly): https://hacktivis.me/articles/Update%20on%20Pleroma%20Mainta....

(Note: I have some small involvement with the maintenance of Mastodon, mostly in an advisory role these days, and I'm speaking up because I've witnessed the effects of Gleason's behavior first hand. Think carefully before you throw your lot in with him and his, he has a long history of burning his bridges)

I always ask the same question when Mastodon comes up specifically and the fediverse in general.

With Mastodon and/or the Fediverse am I locked in to an instance or an app? Can I sign up on any Mastodon instance and take my identity elsewhere? Can I opt to self-host later? If I upload a bunch of photos to one of the Instagram-alikes can I relocate them easily? Is the storage plane separate from the apps?

My understanding of the Fediverse is that it is a federated protocol but apps and instances are still sticky.

Am I totally off base here?

You can move your account to a new instance, but only if your current instance is cooperative. There's no app lockin, I can switch from the official webui to pinafore.social to tusky and back and it doesn't change anything, they're just different UIs for the Mastodon API.

For the Mastodon API but not the Fediverse, right?

Can I post a vacation photo to the Fediverse and have it visible to my followers on the Instagram-alike and the Twitter-alike?

AP is a bit underspecified in terms of semantics, but yes, that is both the intention and (in absence of bugs or mismatch) reality.

IME yes, so far I haven't experienced issues federating across implementations listed on fediverse.party and when they have come up in the past, devs and maintainers tend to treat it as bugs and want solve it.

Today it works kind of similar to e-mail (except there's some notion in servers for migration), so yes, you'd generally get a new public identifier as you move servers. So server admins do have a lot of practical authority in that sense.

It's a tricky one to solve properly (see Zooko's Triangle). The only solutions I've seen so far rely on distributed ledgers, to which there is cultural resistance.

We do need to arrive at a DiD solution, though. Matrix needs to solve the same issue, so ideally we'll find something that works in general. Perhaps the W3C proposal is viable.

Devs and admins in the ecosystem realize this and other ways that the current state of ActivityPub is not ideal. If you're interested in following discussions on how to improve and evolve the Fediverse protocols and ecosystem, some people are congregating here (and yeah, we should dogfood better).

https://pad.public.cat/8yNgnlxmSsGYk3TfIau46A?view

#socialcoding-foundations:matrix.org

https://codeberg.org/fediverse

So, this is a kind of complicated question that has a couple of different moving parts, as you might expect from any complex system.

One: Your identity is as sticky as you make it. Fundamentally, your identity on the fediverse is simply your URI. No more, no less. If you have ownership of your domain name, then your identity is yours. If you don't, then you don't. This is decoupled from whether you have ownership of the servers you're actually posting on—you could pay masto.host $6 a month for a fully-managed Mastodon install, and as long as you're running it on your own domain, it's your own identity. You can pick up, take your database export, and move to any other software or host that you choose. In that sense, it's just like email, except without the spam/whitelist headaches of running your own email server.

Two: for most people, their identity is going to be tied to whatever server they sign up for. Honestly, for most people, this is fine. Servers are generally run by small, close-knit groups—unless you're on mastodon.social, they're more like subreddits or discord servers then like Twitter or Facebook. And with Mastodon specifically, there are lots of affordances within the software itself for "moving around" between servers—you can set up a "redirect" from one account (on one server) to another account (on another server, or even just at a different username), which automatically transfers all of your followers over. And of course, Mastodon has full data export built in (although it doesn't currently support importing old posts, since ... it's just not that common of a use-case to dig through someone's ancient tweets? If you want an archive of old posts, Mastodon is honestly not really the software package to look for, even just a simple HTML page with dynamic search would probably be better for most people). So yes, you definitely can sign up on any Mastodon instance and then opt to self-host later—as long as both instances are cooperating, and still alive when you want to make the transition.

Third: for apps, the answer is going to vary a bit depending on which software package you're talking about. The ActivityPub spec provides for a "client-to-server" API that's very generic and allows for tons of different "types" of user experiences to all coexist on the same host, acting as "client" interfaces, ala SMTP. However, very few people actually want to program for a "fully generic" server like this, and most fediverse projects instead support a more limited, purpose-specific API that encodes most of the "product logic" in the server, and allows for simpler, thin REST clients. The Mastodon API acts as a de-facto standard here, and it's basically just a clone of the Twitter API circa 2011. So, yes, there's a huge diversity of apps, as long as you're on a "Twitter-like" server looking for "Twitter-like" apps. Outside of this, there's less active development, so most servers just have the one client and the one intended UX.

And of course, between two servers, anything goes. Youtube-alike servers like Peertube talk easily with Twitter-alike servers like Mastodon which talk easily with Ghost-alike servers like WriteFreely. It's a shame that the "generic server" idea never took off, but I understand the tradeoffs involved, especially in user comprehension (Look at how Matrix bungled the "Identity provider / homeserver / client" UX for 99.9% of users).

One issue with Mastodon is that one of the servers I was part of shutdown unexpectedly. Now I can't transfer that account. Can't they find a way to create something actually a bit more decentralized so that you're not tied to a single server?

I think Mastodon is a great first step, but unfortunately doesn't go far enough.

can't you set up your own mastoden and then sort of "federate" with other mastodon instances you want to share your stuff with? I thought that was mostly the big advantage of it, outside of it not being twitter

Set it up how exactly? Mastodon as far as I know isn't exactly meant to run individual instances for whatever device you're connecting from. I could be wrong, but it is a bit more complex than that and if that was the case why don't they just let you backup whatever keys you need yourself to migrate accounts?

Tried Mastodon for a few months. Maybe I signed onto the wrong instance (Fosstodon) but IME it was mostly a home for short blog-posts ... all over the spectrum. There were far less stupid posts, but little sense of community (unlike HN), little (substantial) discussion. Hoped for more than FOSS Twitter ... more techy, but mostly unsatisfying.

Then Lemmy might be more your thing. It is a federated Reddit / HN like link aggregator, where instances host multiple communities on specific topics and with their own moderators.

Lemmy also federates with Mastodon, so mastodon users that comment for their own UI to your post will show up in your comment thread and likewise they'll see your response from Lemmy. Their Likes become Lemmy upvotes. Their boosts (retweets) help your post / comment reach a broader audience.

Great tip, thanks!

I am already a part of several Mastadon instances. Each with several thousand users. The great thing is you can create your own environment where just your own users can communicate with each other or you can federate with other mastadon systems to be able to communicate with those off your server.

This is not about branding or making it big. It is more about being able to control your own ability to control your communication channels. No canceling no deplatforming. Just communication. If you don't like someone you can block them. If you don't like the content from their server you can just choose not to federate with them.

This is a platform talked about all the time on the No Agenda podcast. They have used this for several years successfully. ITM.

For those of you raising issues with ways in which the AP-speaking fediverse is lacking at this point, many of these points are acknowledged by members and implementers of the community.

If you're actually interested in exploring constructive conversation on how to move forward to where we don't need to rely on centralized authoritarian incumbents and getting a healthier ecosystem, come join in.

Very budding and recent so please be nice and not too dismissive.

https://codeberg.org/fediverse

#socialcoding-foundations:matrix.org

https://pad.public.cat/8yNgnlxmSsGYk3TfIau46A?view

I'm on my third Mastodon server, which is mastodon.social.

The first one was Drew Devault's server, which he advertised here. (I didn't know who he was at the time.) One day it disappeared without notice. Admittedly, I wasn't using it much.

The second one was schelling.pt, which I picked solely for the cool name. It started having weird brownouts after a while, where nothing would update and images were broken.

So, don't do as I did and pick a Mastodon server on a whim, without checking out the person running it and what they're willing to commit to. I guess mastodon.social is probably safe, but it would be nice if there were professional hosting.

(You could also self-host, but I don't care enough about the Fediverse to do that.)

If you ever wondered what anarchy looks like, or had complaints about Facebook moderators - check this out.

It irks me that when Gab rebuilt their platform on Mastadon and joined the fediverse, existing instance owners teamed up and blacklisted Gab from being able to meaningfully interact. It seems inherently anti-free-and-open-source to me.

This is an old failing site, it’s gonna fail for the same reason that Diaspora and app.net failed, and it’s the same reason web3 is going to fail.

Real world users don’t care if their social network is on a “distributed” platform. And they definitely don’t want to pay for it. Relying on some tiny minority to donate….just to avoid the horrifying, almost indescribable pain of some social network using your data to show your better ads (the horror)…really?

Maybe we techies need to re-evaluate our priorities in life….

This comment on an older Mastodon thread is just as relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789302

I've also commented before as to why I don't believe decentralization is a solution to the problems of current social media and instead introduces problems of its own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513

As someone who's been on and off various Mastodon servers for the last 5 years, you're absolutely correct. Geeks building this stuff seem to be completely dismissive of the power of network effects towards Facebook and Twitter's dominance, they would rather pretend it's not real and just keep building inside their little bubble. Social media users just want to talk to their friends and meet cool new people, they don't care about dealing with stupid server/moderator drama which there is an absurd amount of in the fediverse. Any exposure to that at all is a huge anti-feature but it's unavoidable on a decentralized system. People attempting to romanticize the old days of usenet and IRC always seem to mysteriously downplay that part. I don't miss that at all, it was truly truly awful.

I have a lot of respect for the founder of Mastodon but I suspect even he knows this is a losing game in the long term.

Mastodon is not "decentralized". Federation is not decentralization. If that were the case, SMTP would be a decentralized protocol. Something that has a point of centralization is not decentralized. The Mastodon node is the point of centralization. Decentralized protocols generally have a continuous graph, not individual centralized shards.

Well anyone can run an instance. Theoretically every user can run their own instance. So it's not architecturally incapable of being decentralized, but social behavior leaves it in it's current state. To me that's good enough, make something that can be as decentralized as people want it to be and let people use it how they use it.

If everyone ran their own SMTP server, SMTP would still not be decentralized. There are additional points of failure on simple federation that are outside of the owner-operator's control. Their domain name can be frozen or stolen by the registrar (this actually happened extensively to many websites, most notoriously The Daily Stormer which was suspended by dozens of "free speech" registrars and dozens of national ccTLDs). They can be denied IP transit or transport, or blackholed by specific ASNs.

Decentralized protocols will provide graph access in absence of centralized resources.

(De)centralization is a spectrum, not a boolean.

Mastodon is nowhere on the entire spectrum of decentralized. No component of it provides decentralization.

People get very excited by the word decentralized - I think its because it gives the feeling of BOTH being part of a group and not being controlled or restricted.

Can you block topics you're not interested in seeing?

Yes, you can block by keyword.

How important is this Mastodon in the asymmetric world of Twitter? Its missing one critical component: Network effects.

How scalable is Mastodon though? I mean, it's written in Ruby a la Twitter.

Update: It is used by both Gab and Truth Social, which are centralized, not distributed.

It is a decentralized social media site, so it will surely scale well enough to meet realistic user numbers at least.

The most popular instance has 200K users. This is still way too little for a distrubted system given Facebook has over 2 billion users.

Ask GitHub, Basecamp, Shopify, Zendesk, Netflix, etc, etc. This notion that Rails is slow and doesn’t scale is misinformed at best.

Netflix runs Java heavily on the backend to scale their platform. Twitter ditched Ruby on Rails and moved to JVM (Sala) for the same reasons. Any benchmark comparison for programming language performs will show Java beating Ruby on Rails, Python etc by huge margin.

Also, isn't Netflix actually using Python instead of Rails?

https://netflixtechblog.com/python-at-netflix-bba45dae649e

The main thing Java beats other langs in by a huge margin is memory consumption.

Which isn't a little advantage!

One of the most recommended hosters [0] offers a 90 EUR/month plan just for up to 50 concurrent users! What I joke! This is like an instance fir my extended family and friends!

[0]: https://masto.host/pricing/

From https://masto.host/pricing/ - Under the Galaxy plan 90 EUR/Month: "2000 Active Users (estimated)"

Also, in the 'about the plans' section of that page, under 'Concurrent Requests' and 'Users and Active Users' you have more details. But one can think of concurrent requests limit as actions occurring simultaneously (eg: 50 people clicking a button at the exact same time). Even on the rare occasions when that happens, the actions are queued and take a couple more seconds to process.

Mastodon is one ActivityPub implementation. If you need something you can run on a teacup and string then https://pleroma.social is written in Elixer and seems to run well on tiny VMs.

You can even run WordPress with the ActivityPub plugin and be a participant others can subscribe/interact with:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

The Fediverse / Federated Social Web is bigger than Mastodon.

And there are others, e.g. GoToSocial ( https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial ), written in Go.

Twitter is no longer a Ruby application, they moved to Scala and Java after running into scaling bottlenecks.

with a very unappealing name… sorry.

Don't worry, there are other implementations of the ActivityPub protocol if you don't like the name.

Where's its search engine?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com