Mastodon for Android
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Consider: There are various federated servers, often with some shared interest/allegiance. The operators can disconnect you from other federated servers they consider untoward. You now have to choose the filter bubble you most actively want to be associated with, and hearing dissent can become technically impossible.
Someone supporting Russia and someone supporting Ukraine in the current war may not be allowed to talk to each other about model trains, because their bubbles blocked each other.
I think this is scary. It's halfway between centralisation (Twitter) and decentralisation (e.g. Scuttlebutt) and thus creates an uncanny valley.
But even in the more generic sense -- they can't disconnect you, they can disconnect the account you have on their server -- and it's common practice for people to have alts on different ones just for different topics they post about.
Some people (notably, it seems, Eugen) think "the point" of federation is to provide a seamless Twitter-like global experience that just happens to be hosted modularly. A lot of the current site culture prefers to consider each instance like a little neighborhood, with federation augmenting a local-first experience. (Conflict over product vision ensues.)
But really, no matter what you're looking for, the vast majority of the time you can just use whatever instance and it's fine -- mod drama whole-instance-blocks get a lot of attention, but it's way more of a problem in theory than in practice (especially now you can move your followers if you move instances).
The ActivityPub protocol itself makes it very simple to keep activities out of the public view. It's Mastodon, and projects that implement AP as a compatibility layer with it that address everything as public.
Lots of speech is definitely not up to my clearly incredible and most certainly correct intelligence level and should be blocked!
/s
See:
> they can't disconnect you, they can disconnect the account you have on their server
There's nothing stopping you from having an alt on a different server that does connect to fascism.social or what-have-you, and the apps these days are pretty good about switching among alts so the UX isn't bad. I will also note, the "stories here" tend to focus on corner cases: instance blocking is predominantly reactive (with Gab being the big exception) and you can always just run your own instance if you want to control your own moderation. I run my own and haven't had any problems with instance blocking.
And again -- if you do end up on a server that implements a block you don't like, you can just move (which transfers your followers) https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#move
You shouldn't be exposed to or forced to interact with people, opinions or content you don't want to see. Want to interact with Nazis (which most instances block), feel your federation is too restrictive or disagree with their direction or rules? You can seamlessly migrate your account to another instance (or make an alt account). You can even spin up your own instance – your very own social network – if you want to, and federate with other instances as needed.
Centralisation in social media is a very unsustainable model, and impossible to effectively moderate a platform as you have a single central entity trying to be everything for everyone, and people and cultures are very different and have different ways of perceiving and viewing the world and others. Each side or party always feels the platform is biased against them, no matter what. Lengthy thread explaining all of this really well: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440
The internet was always meant to be and is decentralised, and the same should apply to social media. A platform's role should be to simply provide the network and tools for people to communicate, and end at that. The social part must be up to and controlled by the people. The issue with all current platforms like Twitter/FB is they try to control the social part and how people should interact with each other, and then there's AI and algorithms which is an entire thing and issue in itself as well where you have a corporation employing surveillance capitalism and controlling what you see and what you think.
Mastodon has no ads and no personalisation algorithms and strongly sticks to and follows ethical and humane design principles where only you control what you see.
Edit: Additionally, a user can block content from any other user or instance, and also filter content by keywords or phrases. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moderating/
Mastodon servers and clients are free and open source, and also ad-free. Most Mastodon instances allow you to sign up without providing any personal information other than an email.
I think of the fediverse more like email, where it is natural to have a couple of accounts for different uses and with the possibility to host/manage your own.
Sure, you could make your own bubble if you really want to, but that takes some conscious effort, like blocking your server of from the rest of the network, basically functioning as a walledgarden. That is not default behavior.
At worst it just becomes good old fashioned forums. Remember the 10s of forums & associated accounts we all had?
Probably for most people this is a benefit. Not having strangers shove their firmly held beliefs down your throat is a net gain for one's mental sanity in my mind. However I feel like this problem shows itself only because the vast majority of people think of social media in terms of an all encompassing amorphous mass of discussion where all ideas are worthy and all topics are valid.
As someone that builds a service in the same space as Mastodon I am trying to steer away from this behaviour. My project addresses itself to small to medium communities that are focusing their discussions on common interests and topics, and allow for moderators and system operators to police this with the help of individual members. The members on the other hand, can take part in any other community as long as they play by their rules, through the mechanism of ActivityPub federation. Think of it as subreddits but enforced on a service level but having the capability to intercommunicate both at a server to server level and on a client to server level.
[1] https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/10909
The federated timeline is a firehose of all of the posts on instances that the home instance talks to and whilst it has plenty of chaff can also yield some gems which are sometimes worth the pastime.
Although the use of tags in posts and profiles are the primary methods of discovery on the Fediverse, I've found both these timelines crucial in building a network and generally enjoying the platform.
Look for clients further afield if you think these would be interesting or useful for you. My personal preference on Android is Fedilab https://fedilab.app/ , a snappy, feature-rich client that does not decide what content you're permitted to consume and even has a third-party push notification system which reduces the data footprint Google collects.
The project made an intentional design decision here regarding their own official client, and personally I don't have feelings one way or another about that choice. It's good to hear the use-case towards local timeline inclusion though.
Its also probably against Twitter's TOS to tweet2toot so YMMV.
To see a Twitter user on Mastodon, you can follow them from Mastodon under the account [twitter handle]@beta.birdsite.live.[1]
"the wall" was basically a classic feed without the algorithms and bullshit
Smithereen actually takes this idea to extreme and completely recreates 2011-era VK look and features and especially "the wall"
I'm on Twitter every day, mostly following artists, tech people, and political shitposters.
its a "federated" service only insofar as large groups of admins openly advocate for, and agree to ban traffic from certain servers with speech they disagree with, so thats also been a sticking point with me as well.
You can have everything from total firehose to catholic nun levels of moderation all on the same network.
That's exactly how http websites already work...
The network doesn't operate by manipulative, abusive algorithms that are designed to addict the user. One has to understand and put in some effort to curate a network.
Tags are the one of the primary discovery methods - searching for your type of content can be as simple as searching for relevant tags, which can be subscribed to and followed as their own timeline.
One can pin tags to one's profile and find, and be found by, users searching other users. There's also a selection of specialised instances for art, tech, sports, writing, etc. As someone who joined with very little social media experience or knowledge, I found curating my own network rewarding and not overly difficult.
If some people prefer to be force-fed content that's designed to rile and instigate, without putting in the groundwork, then they're welcome to it.
Since this was one of the main attractions for me, that was not a problem. Although I have far fewer followers on Mastodon than Twitter, I always get a much better discussion and engagement on Mastodon.
Twitters algorithm seems to "kill" most of my tweets (by not showing them to my followers), except for a few where I write about a specific topic that interests me, where I suddenly get a lot of reach. But mostly likes and retweets, not many reactions or any interesting discussions. I find this really discouraging in the long run. Mastodon just feels much more human and community-like, akin to how the good old forums felt.
Or Facebook which monetizes this same interaction for what benefit of mine? I am getting the same/similar interaction with people I care about, on my own dime.
You might start by choosing an instance that is more on-topic than others, like https://hackers.town and discover people from the server timeline, or browsing the website. Then filter on various hashtags and see who interacts with them.
Having some good people you follow you also see whose posts they boost and this will lead you to find more.
2 million users after 6 years is more or less of a slow failure to move users off of Facebook, and Twitter on to Mastodon's own platform.
I had high hopes for Mastodon to compete against the likes of even Twitter. It still cannot. It is also not 'early days' either.
Mattl, you can chime in and tell us what things were like back in the Gnu Social days or maybe someone else remembers the StatusNet/Identi.ca era further back. How many installations did you have, roughly? It wasn't a very active scene. Seems like Eugen Rochko and Mastodon gGmbH know what they're doing.
Yes it's not 'early days' but we can also argue the whole system (based on ActivityPub, including software like Pixelfed, Peertube, Misskey, etc) is a genie unable to be returned inside its bottle. It doesn't really matter if Mastodon gets mass adoption or not, as long as it follows the same path taken by email, DNS, or other internet standards it'll do okay in the end (Lindy Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect - these old and crusty standards have proven the test of time and are not going anywhere soon. Twitter could collapse tomorrow depending on what Elon decides to do with it.)
Identi.ca was a lot of fun, but it was basically a silo. I’m glad to see Mastodon having lots of servers but I feel like Mastodon.social runs the risk of being seen as the only instance that matters to many.
I firmly believe that as a whole, the Fediverse needs diversity in software implementations. While I like Mastodon, I don't like to see the Fediverse heavily weighted towards being the "Mastoverse". As much as I myself cheer Mastodon on, people should also be cheering on all the other component projects that make up the network.
But to say "Very few people outside of open source tech and a couple fandoms" when refering to a group of between 3 to 5 million people makes me laugh a bit. If you want to find a good circle of followers and those following you to interact and have a good time with, then that is surely enough of a basis to choose from.
On your personal timeline you'd have at most a couple a hundred persons you follow, and with a couple hundred who followed you out of interest there'll be a good social vibe going on the topics of your interest. You will find that those people are more responsive than similar numbers on Twitter would be. For influencers however, who crave millions of followers, the fediverse is less interesting.
https://twitter.com/atomicpoet/status/1512202694391345188
edit: Chris has been expounding on this engagement thing, this goes into more detail:
https://blog.peerverse.space/my-pixelfed-instance-is-a-bigge...
That's a pretty low bar.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android
this joins the previously released iOS client (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-ios)
I have no personal affiliation with the Mastodon project, I just like what they're doing to liberate social networking (and there are other Fediverse platforms to pay attention to, too!)
Is this still the case? If so, breaking Twitter up into hundreds or thousands of individual instances does nothing to fix any of the problems if they each have their own rules and can ban/remove your content whenever they want.
That is the whole point of federation, doesn't matter where you sign in your data should still be there and can migrate between instances freely. Without this, Mastodon does nothing to solve free speech or replace Twitter.
It also doesn't mean you can sign in wherever. You can't use your email login from live.com to log into the google account, those are two independent credentials.
Data also can't migrate freely, it is exchanged freely but not migrated. When I request your account's data, my server requests it from your server. If that server is not available, it can possibly get there via other ways (pushed from other servers along with events, like someone liking the toot).
What you might be thinking of is a fully decentralized network, where data is kept like on IPFS. But that's not mastodon.
Mastodon offers you a takeout in case you don't trust your instances backups or admin. You can bring that along to a new instance. It does solve the free speech problems of Twitter in that way; if an instance wants to silence you, you're not forced to interact with them, nor can they enforce their moderation rules on you if you don't want to (since you can always move to an instance that agrees with your view on things).
> The omission is intentional and I do not intend to add these types of timelines into the app. They might have made sense for early Mastodon in November 2016 when there were less than 20k people total and all from a homogenous demographic but nowadays the signal to noise ratio makes them a liability in almost every aspect.
> [...]
> The local and federated timelines are not going away from other apps or the web app, to be clear. I’m simply not adding them to this app, and if that bothers you, simply don’t install the app.
This will continue to limit its opportunity for wide adoption. Maybe if Elon actually buys twitter they will see a boost.
I don't see this having any practical effect. Unlike other services, you aren't locked into one app. There are others, and perhaps more importantly, they were here first.
This might change when Mastodon attracts more non-techy folk, but even they seem to become more weary of centralized and algorithmicly directed social media.