Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative
joinmastodon.org
joinmastodon.org
I routinely on Twitter criticize Musk’s bad behavior and lies about the full self driving product, but semi anonymously since Musk and his fans have a history of doxxing and harassing critics: https://www.inverse.com/article/47461-elon-musk-responds-to-... His purchase of the platform makes me worried that my identity and private messages could be misused, so any alternative is much appreciated.
Unfortunately it looks like Mastodon still hasn’t renamed their “toots” to “posts,” which sadly makes it impossible to recommend to others because there’s no way they’ll take it seriously in the US, due to the double meaning.
Maybe we wouldn't have so many reasons to leave twitter if people had taken tweets less seriously in the first place. If everyone knows that artificially short posts with insanely widespread potential reach are all 屁s, that could help fix a lot of what's wrong in our world.
In the case of 屁, that would be this radical, 尸, whose on yomi is shi, and 比 which is hi. The kun yomi are longer and not derived from the shared Japanese heritage with China, who also use this kanji for the word "fart". The Japanese word is "Onara", the chinese word is "Pi" which seems a lot more onomatopoeic.
尸 in this case has a meaning of "corpse" or human remains, and is very close to the kanji for "door", I almost mistook it for just being that. 比 has to do with comparisons, also apparently has something to do with race. So the image I get through this kanji when I connect it to "tooting" on social media, is as follows: "The corpse of someone who could have been somebody opens up the door of its sphincter, and releases a gaseous comparison about race."
according to this PR so yeah
Hasn't it? The PR to rename them was merged just over a year ago, and there have been many releases since then with the new strings.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/v3.5.1/app/javascr...
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/v3.5.1/config/loca...
etc.
I do notice that the documentation still uses "toots": https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/posting/
You could just use Nitter.net and put all handles you wanna follow separated by comma after slash like this https://nitter.net/handle1,handle2,handle3
Another thing I love about it is the small niche little community instances like this photographer [2] community. Themed instances make a huge difference in organizing your social media time - it feels less of a distraction and more of a purposeful exchange. I talk photos, close the browser tab and it feels like I've done what I set out to do, whereas whole purpose of Twitter is to steal your attention for the sake of ad revenue - so you start with a purpose and end up feeling like you've done free work for someone. Like one of those early internet gigs that made you to surf semi-random ads for few pennies.
You need to enable "advanced web interface", search for a hashtag, click the top right icon and then pin it, right? I had no idea I could do that. Thanks!
EDIT: I'm having a hard time adding tags like "#matrix", it insists on me using autocomplete and propose #matrixdotorg.
There are also more literal implementations for this like SocialHome [1] where you can click + on hashtags you like and public post with them appear in your home timeline
Here's a ten-post thread I wrote about my experiences scaling this self-hosted instance: https://noagendasocial.com/@eriner/108115547628441425
AMA I guess
its being beholden to flaky operators who feud with other operators or end their service.
I could form a business entity, open a PO box, create an <insert payment processor here> account, and accept value from those who use the service. People could pay whatever the service is worth to them. Some are in circumstances such that they're unable to pay. Those with means may be able to contribute more - it's whatever the service is worth to them. Value for value.
There are a multitude of Mastodon-compatible ActivityPub implementations[0][1]. Save for bugs, which devs and maintainers tend to be motivated to work out, they should all federate together, meaning you can follow and share between them. All have instances with open registrations and are also straightforward to self-host. 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.
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. The biggest one IMO being the same challenge other federated and P2P communication systems (like Matrix) need to solve: DIDs, which should make users less under authority to their server admins, and server owners less under the authority of ICANN and registrars. The second one (which follows DIDs) being more effective models and tools for moderation and curation.
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[2][3][4].
[1]: https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous/
[2]: https://codeberg.org/fediverse
[3]: #socialcoding-foundations:matrix.org
Mastodon got so much better for me when I left the generalist instances. I now see my instance as a micro community with the ability to connect to a greater community.
Each instance has a local (instance) timeline and a federated timeline in addition to one's own personal timeline. The local timeline only shows posts from accounts on that instance. The federated timeline shows posts from all accounts followed by at least one user on the instance.
So these two timelines can be dramatically different and they're a big factor in account discoverability and the "feel" of an instance.
Of course you can go out and follow ~anyone from ~anywhere, and that's the Fediverse's killer feature, but the more local content matters too.
Also it is not 100% true that every post bubbles to every instance because instance admins can blacklist other instances.
(but didn't find anything local or interesting...)
Once you see something annoying from someone you on your feed, just unfollow that person and you'll have a very non toxic feed.
[1] https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm/blob/main/LICENS...
Conversely if you don't want to spend time with setting up relays/subscriptions (which can get you the same thing) and want to easily discover things on the local timeline there, the local GUI helps with that.
IMO that Mastodon's timelines work this way by default for non-private instances is unfortunate as it conflates physical infrastructure with social community too much.
Other than that it should all be the same.
Theoretically you should also be able to set up "relay accounts" on foreign servers that can mirror your profile and just mirror/reshare your content there. It's not something I've seen already so you'd probably have to script your own bot for that.
they don't need to do anything that drastic. They literally need to do one straight forward thing. Force Twitter to open up their API and let people build a bridge to ActivityPub.
Hell Elon could do it if he is serious about decentralization.
At the same time at least he is greatly incentivised to get rid of car emissions, which is good enough reason for me to side with him instead of other people.
[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...
Personally I don't understand why, the negativity and the assholes are already there but maybe in lesser numbers.
What are you trying to get out the use of social media? To me, it's conversations with interesting people in a pleasant environment. I'm getting that from the Fediverse.
Unless you're a brand that uses social media for marketing purposes, I don't understand why it's sol important to use the big brand platform.
I kind of suspect the answer is going to be something like "the people I want to follow are on there". But there are equally interesting people on the other platform, it's just that you are not familiar with them because you're not on that platform.
Also, there is no need to switch completely. Follow both and perhaps you'll start paying more attention to the one that is friendly and not driven by engagement.
For example, there are instances which I won't name that are solely made to harass, doxx and stalk other people. There is also a significant amount of political extremism from both the right and the left, and drama is very prevalent just like on Twitter.
You really have to consider that for some, Mastodon is a place to gather if you have been banned from Twitter.
So everybody can have their little space without shitty people.
Especially because city people tend to accumulate in certain instances since they’re not welcomed on eg. mastodon.social
Maybe some non political instances are a shot worth.
The problem there is that everybody has its own definition of “extreme left” and “extreme right”. So it could be that your preferences are just a bit niche or something like that :)
This is akin to saying "e-mail is not friendly at all" because you get a lot of spam and scams. It's in the nature of permissionless communication and the answer is the same as for e-mail (filtering and moderation, by user and/or server). If you want to be conservative you can use an allowlist (rather than blocklist) approach.
That has nothing to do with the "friendliness" of the Mastodon project.
Mastodon is not one place. It is many places, many of which interconnect.
to search for accounts across all instances.
https://ethanzuckerman.com/2017/08/18/mastodon-is-big-in-jap...
And along with them will come a lot of hentai and weird porn. So when you add like 10 AP relays you'll spend several hours just silencing instances based on this. But once you're done you do get a very active federated timeline that will help your local users discover the rest of the fediverse.
I almost ban any misskey instance I see with Japanese characters now, not becasuse they're all bad but because I can't see what the instance is about easily. It requires JS and it has no "About" or "Explore profile directory" section like Mastodon does.
E.g. start with the biggest ones and maybe some that are specific to your interests. Over time you will see people resharing posts and commenting on threads from other instances and you can add those as well.
If you run a server for other users you could have an account set up for your users to ping with servers they want you to add.
I don't need an alternative. If Twitter goes to crap I'll just stop using it and find something better to do with my time.
Though obviously this is still a preferable situation, mastodon's reach is still not good enough. People don't just want to say things, they want to say things and have others engage with them.
But I mean, I would still encourage at least trying it; exploring different instances, finding a home.
Also you can cross post to Twitter. This is what I opted to use.
Just use the reach from Twitter, but the main thing is mastodon
Which is very handy since shitty people tend to accumulate on certain instances.
Blocking because of bad behaviour is the path to sanity.
There is even a feature which enables you to say “this is my old account, over there is my new one”
Since the architecture doesn't prevent take-overs, and requires instances to be continually maintained and upheld by their owners, you might have to do this several times over the years (take-overs, instances shutting down), leaving behind a trail of dead accounts. I presume most users will just end up sticking to a single major instance due to network effects and the desire to avoid these migrations.
More concerning is that all of the private data (including direct messages) on the old instance is now in the hands of its new owner, who may have a different idea of what to do with it.
Also, if any HN community member would take it on themselves to create an HN instance (yes, some of us on HN like Twitter), would love to join that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixiv
[4] http://www.russel.co.jp/newsrelease/newsrelease_pawoo.pdf
I'm not sure CP is a good advert for Mastodon.
This is one area I think Musk will have trouble with if he honestly does go in the "free speech" direction. There will immediately be speech that's so toxic it will drive off the majority of other users.
Drawings, animations, and written works that depict fictional children in sexual situations may be quite icky to me, but to claim that they are the same as something depicting an actual living child is to deeply miss the point.
> I'm not sure CP is a good advert for Mastodon.
-
> I don't think I did claim they were the same thing.
Are you contradicting yourself?
i installed on a vps some time ago, we are only 3 users as of now but its a big upgrade from being public like in twitter/facebook
Not sure what that says about either the onboarding/ui or perhaps it's just me :-)
EDIT: aha, so i see this is not possible (yet): "[FEATURE] Follow public local timelines from other instances" https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/6942
Each instance can federate with any other instance, meaning posts from the other instance will show up in your local instance's federated timeline.
On top of that they can add AP relays that will further add posts to your federated timeline.
I run a very small instance focused on geographically local users and the federation is so rapid that I have to scale up my background workers just to process all the URLs people post from across the world.
I'm trying to populate my own server's timeline with stuff that won't scare off people, really.
But beware that once you start adding relays you'll get a flood of messages in the federated timeline and much of it will be Japanese or other asian languages. Which might scare potential users away. So just silence them one by one, refuse media files from them. People can still follow users on these instances but they won't clutter your federated timeline.
>This is where the magic of federation comes in...
It's painted as being this great decentralised, liberated alternative to Twitter et al "If you don't like the instance you're on, just go elsewhere..."
The reality is; you can't take your data elsewhere. There's no way to download your post history from one instance and upload it to another. There's no way to download your post history from one instance and upload it to your own server, if you decide to self-host.
The so-called Fediverse is vastly over-hyped. It would be better named the Fragmentiverse.
Libertarian Tech folks are actually a small minority in the grand scheme of things, and any I know are definitely in favor of Mastadon. But non-tech folks have a much harder time understanding and building out the platform.
Gab runs on a Mastodon fork: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/07/statement-on-gabs-fork...
Idea here is good, but I cringe at the main selling point being able to censor topics you don't like.
Aside from the obvious terrible shit the list itself looks kinda passive aggressive in tone
The more conservative demographic also has other more...professional(?) options in the form of Truth Social and Gab. At one point Gab was federated but got blocked into oblivion to the point where they decided to go standalone https://reclaimthenet.org/mastodon-blocks-gab/
I absolutely see the value of blocking and there are things I am happy to block, but I have never seen the need to block anyone based on who they don't block.
It is kind of the outrage over Elon Musk buying Twitter: people are outraged not because they are blocked or prohibited from blocking others but because someone else might not be blocked by default.
Last time I looked into this fediverse stuff, the biggest 'Mastodon' instance by number of users was affiliated to gab.com. But good luck finding that, if you check out any of the directories of instances, as they [the rest of the fediverse] pretty much all decided to blacklist the Gab instance and block users on those Gab instances from being able to interact with any of the other instances. I think, in the end Gab went off, forked Mastodon and rolled their own version.
BTW --I'm not a right-winger or supporter of Gab in any way. I have no interest whatsoever in US politics. But I did note the irony that; the first thing the kind of people who protest most loudly that we need open alternatives to Twitter et al did, when they got their hands on the control levers of their own tiny Twitter clones, was to start banning people and silencing viewpoints they disapproved of.