Twitter buyout puts Mastodon into spotlight
blog.joinmastodon.org
blog.joinmastodon.org
You can search hashtags, but not everyone uses hashtags. And the results that appear seem to be most recent, and not most liked or most boosted. It requires a lot of "work" to find interesting people and/or friends on the platform. And most people don't have time for that extra "work."
I'd like it more if I could see what's trending, but only if I specifically seek out what's trending.
Also on my Galaxy Tab S7 in portrait mode, a breakpoint is preventing the search field from appearing. I have to shrink Firefox a bit for the search field to appear. Took me a day before I figured that one out.
Outside of those issues, it has potential. I love everyone having a chronological feed.
It also feels fragmented. An account can be on any servers, anywhere, controlled by... someone? Users can move around. Communities can just shutdown or lock people out. Etc.
It's a weird solution to a problem that I agree exists.
I just don't see it growing because of lack of discoverability. I'm betting most new users will hop on, not know who to follow or what to do, and never sign in again.
Good!(?)
More seriously, there is a large niche for smaller communities of like-minded people. I suspect that Mastodon gives an easy tool to form them. They don't want to be discovered too easily, and prefer existing social links pull new members in, instead of chance encounters. Compare this to obscure subreddits.
Opposite to that, Twitter is global and total. It's one colossal room. No wonder that celebrities dominate it: drawing attention and talking to huge audiences is what they do for a living. It's also an obvious place for official broadcasting. Mastodon is not.
No. Perhaps you should give it a try.
Someone who can read your DMs, even.
Just like now.
But: That someone might well be yourself! (shameless plug): https://seppo.app (German vaporware to date. Translate with e.g. deepl.com)
Also you generally join a server oriented around the subject(s) you like so you can check the local toot stream for people to follow.
I'm not sure but who really has lack of random contacts?
Maybe those vibrant meeting places could/should be a click away from my profile. In a walled garden that means in the same garden, behind the same wall. But in a free world it can be somewhere else. And as Ronald Reagan said: tear down this wall!
There's a hidden misunderstanding here. Phrasing Mastodon as "the platform" implies you (probably subconscious) perceive it as a "classic" single, centralized, authoritative service managed by a single (legal) entity.
As you've learned: it's the exact opposite. It's not a service: it's just software.
Mastodon fits in between (self)hosted solutions like Matrix, Postfix, IRC, XMMP/Jabber. It would be the odd one out between Twitter, Slack or Discord.
> The main one being discoverability.
And that's a valid concern to have as a dealbreaker. It's also an advantage that's innate to centralized, authoritative services. Storing millions of users in a single telephone directory vastly lowers the bar for discovery compared to a distributed system of telephone directories.
Then again, it's also a chicken and egg discussion. Centralization is a key driver that prompted hundreds of millions of users to flock together. Aspects such as ease of use, convenience and discovery are key conditions as well...
... but let's not pretend this is a net positive: we also experience the many downsides of having millions of people on a single platform that provides common denominator interfaces and policies for governing interaction.
In a federated environment with many instances, agency over governance is delegated again to the countless of small communities and tribes that generally tend to emerge organically in any social context.
Remember, back in the early days, between BBS'es, Usenet, online fora, IRC communities,... the fragmented nature of online communities in itself wasn't seen as problematic. On the contrary, if anything, the freedom to be able to start your own IRC channel or host your own forum was seen as a boon.
In that regard, I don't think that discovery should be treated as a zero sum game where the only logical conclusion is a silver bullet solution e.g. either a single centralized authority or a distributed ledger that acts as a single source of truth. Discovery is massively complex and relies on innate heuristics people have used since forever to find and interact with others. It's never a "solved problem".
That doesn't mean throwing up arms not investing in discovery tools. But rather acknowledging that discovery isn't necessarily worth a trade off against other key aspects of complex interpersonal relationships such as having agency to build your own community space, and self-reliance to implement your own set of policies allowing for governance
I found some account which creates curated lists for specific interests, but then you have to go through the list one by one to click follow... surreal.
Ideally, moderation policies and enforcement actions can be client-specific to some degree. Ultra woke or righty twitter can implement their own policies without losing out on the network effect of the greater network.
Ben Thompson has been crusading for this direction and it’s gain traction in free-speech circles
I don’t believe Musk put those billions for the greater good… I won’t be surprised at all if Trump is welcomed sooner than later on Twitter again.
It's mainstream news outlets which amplified his every word.
They'll be doing the same thing if he runs for office again, no matter where he speaks.
They do more than that…they intentionally feed him to keep him in the spotlight . I have seen certain “left leaning” news outlets actually try and prompt commentary out of him on topics he hasn’t really fixated on yet just to try and manufacture news and more controversy.
If you keep saying his name he’ll never go away. Maybe that’s what they want.
You can just ignore what's being said in "free speech circles", those people have no idea what they're talking about. If they were actually trying to solve these problems they wouldn't be pursuing a solution that we already know doesn't work.
The irony here is hilarious. This is the exact point people arguing against social media censorship are pointing out: if you don’t like it and the speech is protected under law, use your little block button and ignore it (rather than asking a social media company to ban it because it hurts your feelings).
Last I checked there are 7+ billion humans.
It’s a town square in Elons hyperbolic narcissistic imagination.
It’s where westerners shit post at each other, not a town square
I doubt, and not really concerned that Twitter will become a den for Nazis. If you look at the actions of the Twitter moderation team, you will find that they don't do all that much and in fact Twitter is pretty much self moderated. You get cancelled by the mob, not Jack Dorsey. It's this fact that should be watched - will Elon enforce free speech by silencing the mob of dissenting opinion?
This is how public squares actually operate. If I begin hollering at the top of my lungs in the middle of a public square either (1) everyone leaves or (2) I'm violently removed. I don't know what free speech haven people are looking for; even 4chan has rules.
Disneyworld not Disneyland or euro Disney. Disneyworld has a corporate vision of family, happiness which is at odds with the way they are run internally.
There never were "public squares" on the internet. Every site has always been someone's private fiefdom. Every social media platform has always been a business, and no matter how big it is, it doesn't automatically become public property.
Also freedom of speech doesn't guarantee the right to a platform.
All this used to be common knowledge until a few years ago.
For a silly example: you may block people who talk about moon landing not happening, but you censor people who suggests we should kill all the <insert group>.
You may be against or in favor of either but they are different things.
If you want the block button to be the way, everyone should start blocked from each other, with no option to start seeing each other's posts without both paying $100 to the platform, per relationship.
Discovery is the company's speech, and unrelated to the posters' protections. If you want one that doesn't have a company's speech involved, get the government to build a social media system, or just the one they already have: the post office
I fail to see why. If you get your way, and all the "free speech" people get blocked because everyone else finds them insufferable, then that's exactly what you asked for. It's also incredibly bad taste and rude to suggest that blocking happens because things "hurt your feelings", please never utter that phrase in this context again. That's an extremely trollish way to approach conversation and you need to stop. Disagreement happens for other reasons besides "hurt feelings".
I think you do actually understand though that "just block it" is a bad strategy because this is fundamentally not how humans interact in a large group. Every person can't go through the trouble of vetting every single thing that's being said all the time. At some point you have to trust someone to tell you if someone else is being a jerk or not a jerk. And that's why it's weak to somehow try to turn this into an issue of "social media censorship". If blocking isn't censorship then this isn't censorship either.
No actually. The problem with the pro-censorship people is that they don't just try to block people. Instead they try to get them kicked off of platforms.
The "free speech" circles just want to have the ability to be on the same platform, and talk to other people within that circle. If you don't want to listen to them, thats fine. They just want the ability to be on the same platform, and talk to the people who don't block them.
> Every person can't go through the trouble
That is why someone suggested allowing voluntary, 3rd parties tools. That way, everyone can get what they want. You can choose to use 3rd parties tools. And those who don't like those tools are free to not do so.
> At some point you have to trust someone
It is fine for you to personally trust someone to handling blocking for you. The issue is when you try to force everyone else to accept that same 3rd party.
If you can choose to use that censor, but other people can be on the same platform and choose to not do so, then everyone gets what they want.
- The very first instance I joined within a few weeks of launch stopped existing within a year
- Maintainers of instances got into weird internet fights and started banning entire instances
- DMs can be read by practically anyone
- in 2022, still zero discovery
- in 2022, fairly poor UX on a variety of web UIs, terrible UX on mobile clients
Mastodon really isn't worth your time unless you prioritize true decentralization. Unfortunately that appears to work against the concept of "community" and good software design.
Also, joining tech focused instances means the content you are reading is almost exclusively about tech. Twitter has mechanisms to filter the content you want, but it feels totally different and a little forced.
For example, my sidebar has entertainment news articles on Twitter. I don't want to see that crap on my page.
One: https://joinmastodon.org/communities
Another: https://instances.social
Mastodon is a ways away from that currently though.
It seems like Mastadon or a 3rd party would have to come up with a novel, effective solution to the issue of content discover that no one else has found yet. It's not just about providing search results, but in general showing users what they might be interested. Right now that can be done via lists and directories that are still relatively small enough to browse a lot of it and get a general sense of a lot of what is there to choose from.
But maybe it doesn't have to solve that problem better than others have to avoid their pitfalls. The second link up in this thread is at least an open source search engine so the algorithm can be scrutinized. Even if they converge on similar content discovery solutions, as long as the search engines that pop up are open source then people can at least know how the results are weighted.
No ty!
Very happy with my home timeline and 'local' timeline, don't need anyone trying to get me addicted to something else.
While I certainly see the utility in truly global search / discovery systems (they're great!), all the big ones turn deeply abusive and manipulative in time, because they are all ranking systems of some kind, which can be gamed[1]. Nothing has ever fixed that issue, and I'm not sure it's possible to. Small communities can more reasonably deal with it by hand when necessary, so they can get closer to what they meant rather than what they said, which is what I think most people want/need.
[1]: "Closest text match" ranks in favor of both precise words and phrases, and commonly used ones (you can game it by being predictably-niche or by using the most used things). "Most recent" ranks heavily on frequency (game it by doing things a million times per day). "Page rank" is literally just a popularity contest, easily swayed by money and connections like all popularity. It doesn't matter what you're doing, you're promoting something and thus providing a way to control your promotion to determined parties.
You only have to make a login on one, and you can still talk to people on the others. It’s like email.
You don't have nor would be able to create an email address in all public email servers. (Without mentioning private/non-public email servers or personal/family ones of others)
You don't. You join one - or host your own - and your mastodon instance is connected to the others. You can follow users on any other public mastodon instance.
That's their mastodon instances, not anyone else's, it's up to them to do what they want
If Mastodon ever takes off for real, I expect that professionally run servers will be pretty popular.
That's like saying you don't need search engines to view websites — your friends could just email you links to good ones. Technically true, sure.
Like, what you are saying is so nonsensical as to be not even wrong.
I /think/ you are trying to say something about discoverability, but like, it's not really that hard. You can just watch the local or federated tabs, and if you see anything interesting check it out. If someone seems alright you might even reply to something they post. Pretty soon you are having conversations, and the people you follow are boosting other nice, interesting people onto your home tab. Next thing you know, you are part of a community. It's great!
And all of this happens without the need for some weird corporate overlord to try and mediate the experience by way of manipulating you in order to keep you online longer so they can steal your data and shove ads down your optic nerves.
And where would the database live?
On the flip side, Micro.blog has a very different culture than Mastodon seems to[1], makes some very opinionated choices that many people might not agree with (e.g., there's not only nothing like retweets, but likes and even followers aren't public information), and of course, the easiest way to use it costs money.
[1]: Yes, I know there are lots of instances with different cultures, but there really is a kind of left-wing anarchist vibe across a lot of Mastodon; it's hard to explain if you haven't experienced it. Micro.blog comes across as generally more gentle, very conversational, and more Gen-X than millennial, if that makes any sense. (If it doesn't, sorry. Again, hard to explain if you haven't experienced it.)
Well, you used to be able to. They eventually closed it off, of course.
I think your concern is highly valid. Mastodon is a protocol-based network, much as SMTP email, NNTP Usenet, HTML+HTTP Web, IRC-based chat, and others are and have been. It's susceptible to the same types of challenges which have either centralised or killed off those platforms.
You mention sheer size. That's only one option.
There's the old Triple-E: Extend, Embrace, Extinguish. Applied successfully by Microsoft to DOS, the Office Suite, and Web browsers. By Google to Web Search and Web Browsers, to email, and increasingly to Web design and hosting. By Slack to Web Messaging. By Facebook to social media.
There's the risk of small instances fading away (happened to me with Mastodon.cafe) or large ones being bought (Mastodon.cloud). There's the prospect of admins going rogue (witches.town). Or, from the Diaspora* world, of admins dying with no succession plan in place (pluspora.com).
There are the Four Horsement of the Infopocalypse: drug-dealers, money-launderers, terrorists, and pedophiles. That's largely what killed off Usenet: the inability to defend against either malicious use of networks or those who made hay of that use to advocate for the shutting down of those networks. (This was combined with the lack of a compelling business argument for keeping them operating.)
There may simply be the staling of the protocol and paradigm. Mastodon is fun and interesting, yes, but lacks robust search, filtering, and privacy-management tools (e.g., auto-expiring posts), as well as obvious issues in scaling. If, say, a manageable instance size is 10,000 users, and Mastodon is to scale to serve an appreciable fraction of the roughly 10 billion people worldwide --- each instance administrator needs to at least consider 10^(10-5) or 10^6 other server relationships. It's one thing to keep track of reputations of a few thousand other servers, it's another to deal with millions, absent some robust tools for management, reputation, appeal, and similar factors. (My suspicion is that some degree of hierarchy with intermediate "hub" servers would emerge at some point.)
That said: Mastodon has proved robust and resilient beyond the predictions of numerous early critics. Not without flaws and issues, but those have to date been surmounted.
Curious to see if this holds or if there's a deficit of ~30,000 in three months time...
Sadly, it will enjoy a bump for a few weeks...and then float back into obscurity. In my eyes this is DOA in its current state.
If you want to selfhost, cloudron and yunohost have 1-click apps. Could not get any simpler with either of them.
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
This is correct. Communities grow around "something". Create an utility, a game, or anything, and you have a community form around it. It's impossible to replace facebook with a new facebook because people are already in facebook.
Mastodon , Matrix etc are missing this key feature: Make it dead-simple to integrate with an existing community. Let every wordpress site easily integrate their users with mastodon or matrix, and you will see adoption. As it stands right now, people don't have a real incentive to run a server, maintain a community, and possibly be legally liable for that community. So only the typical ideologues of OSS will run instances, and they will be extra cautious because for them it is only a hobby.
That is dumb. Not because racism is cool, but actively policing is a looooooot of work to pledge.
How many instances are not listed here? Many? I m considering to make a directory
Has anyone done this? Does linking to other servers work OK? Any upsides/downsides?
If you want to be well federated even with the smaller instances, you need to hang around for a while; build connections within the larger communities; then ask to federate with any smaller instances you want to connect directly with.
Conservatives looked at mastodon. Mastodon was worse than twitter, conservatives never made it to mastodon. Mastodon was hostile toward conservatives and this was an unfortunate large mistake.
Conservatives built alternatives like parler or gab. But they failed because they were echo chambers.
>We’ve been steadily working towards the ultimate goal of providing a viable alternative to Twitter since 2016, and have proven the scalability and resilience of the platform through organic growth over the years.
Ironically many of these alternatives like gab stole Mastodon code to operate. Which is very interesting because why couldn't conservatives simply join the mastodon network? As an up and comer you would not only be best suited to invite anyone to your platform.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/07/statement-on-gabs-fork...
White supremacists?
>listing only such servers that commit to standing up against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.
Mastodon will never be in the spotlight because they have fallen into the same echo chamber problems. Gab supports free speech? That must make them racist transphobes!
I too wish it wasn't the case. They were uniquely capable of taking the position that Elon is now taking. They could have become a top player and decentralized social media. It could have been fantastic. How unfortunate that Mastodon was so hostile and basically eliminated their chance of being a top contender.
Like their tag line is: A social network that champions free speech, etc etc.
Your complaint isn't that they don't support free speech but rather the echo chamber and toxicity that entails.
That's the real fear of what Elon is about to do. By allowing conversations to happen it will break the echo chambers of twitter and the left fears that greatly.
Geeks like us hate it, but mainstream users love the benefits it brings them.
Federated services are confusing and create a lot of UX friction, and the average user doesn't understand what the benefits are.
I used to think that setting up matrix-synapse was unfriendly to users, but it's way friendlier than either of these.
Of course all kind of automated tools or services that helps to keep an instance clean would be very useful. Imagine "Fediverse Cleanup Service" where you can subscribe to "NSFW", "CP", "Right", "Left", "Spam", "Whatever" block lists.
Also big social networks could share their blacklists (as a service?) - selling ads and cleanup services will give them a good position in a world of decentralized platforms.
Does exist already a YC startup that does all this work?
I can not decide which alternative to use because there are so many differences and I lost interest in researching all the details, so it would be great if somebody with knowledge would like to write about that and provide an overview.
As a user I would like to see a tool without censorship, but where I can ignore posters I do not like, where I still can find everybody, but also have private encrypted conversations with my peer groups and nobody is trying to profile me based on my interests. Ads would be ok, but no tracking (use tags for targeting, not user data).
Also see punctuational period and menstrual period. I haven’t heard of any native speakers confusing that given context.
I'm active on Minds and have a niche following there, but it's still very insular on there
Email has "instances" that act as gatekeepers. Gmail is one, Outlook is another, Fastmail is...
They are both federated systems and on these systems (email, fediverse, matrix, xmpp...) end users have accounts on servers that then connect between themselves to create the whole network.
The only difference is the underlying protocol and/or the main purpose.
I think we need to treat social networking as part of messaging
Some mail providers require you to contact them to get on an allowlist to even be able to deliver email at all. Others do not formally require that, but you may have to enroll in a postmaster programme in order to track your deliverability. Yet others there's no hope at all, except running after the most recent fad in spam fighting (like DKIM/DMARC/SPF etc.), only to find that even fully and correctly configured DKIM (which I don't like on my private email for many reasons) is by far no guarantee for not getting your email marked as spam (and thus, on some providers, hidden by default), even from IPs and domains which have had no spam emitted from them for many years.
So... Yeah. It's not heard of in the public media because those affected most by this don't have any leverage. The big mail service providers (MSPs) presumably have their agreements among one another to protect their business, but if you're just doing friends&family, good luck getting anything except an autoresponder when you run into troubles.
(To offset some of the criticism here, I have had very positive experiences with contacting postmasters of some large German email providers when issues happened, so there's that.)
I love open source software as much as the next HN reader, but there's something so unappealing about not just Mastodon, but Matrix, and all the other social software out there today.
I thought Twitter was unappealing and pointless when it started. I guess I'm still not sure why it actually hit mainstream.
Meanwhile, celebrities used Twitter because they read on the news of other celebrities using it.
And so the cycle continues.
People want to see “username”, “email”, “password”, “create account”
Yes. Related, what "makes people cool".
then, they are not content agnostic. my email , even gmail, won't deny delivery of messages because of its politics. Mastodon and matrix people seem to be going down the same dark path of blocking each other. that is not just unfortunate, it is a red flag to stay away
I dont use Twitter- quit 6-7 years ago due to the toxicity-- but I never understood the charm of "federated"-- I now have to join 22 different Mastadons, each with their own logins and rules, just to keep up with people, many of whom arent even on Mastadon?
How many users does Mastodon have in total? I don't want to sound dismissive, but based on that number it seems like they probably have like a million or so, which is kind of disappointing compared to the size of Twitter…
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-signal-users/signal-sees-...
> Signal was downloaded by 17.8 million users over the past seven days, a 62-fold rise from the prior week, according to data from Sensor Tower. WhatsApp was downloaded by 10.6 million users during the same period, a 17% decline. (January 13, 2021)
(the irony is not lost on me that @elonmusk contributed to the above frenzy: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1347165127036977153 ["Use Signal"])
Granted I did a little bit of work to convince them, but "you can use it on your computer and do video calls with your phone number" was good enough, even if vaguely inaccurate. It's much more functional than SMS.
But that's also in the US, I think other apps are more popular plenty of places which are just as much better than SMS anyway. Signal I think has good adoption in the US because the competitor was so terrible.
> The most common apps chosen as alternatives were Telegram and Signal, mostly because of their privacy and security features. However, almost a third of the participants that tried to switch chose to move to either Facebook Messenger or Instagram.
> 25.97% of participants wanted to switch to other apps but only 0.5% uninstalled WhatsApp ... If we translated this result to the entire population of WhatsApp users (approx. 2 billion), we’d be talking about 500 million users trying to flee from WhatsApp, and only 10k uninstalling it.
In this researcher's own words: "It looks like WhatsApp is the place to chat with anybody, making it particularly hard to leave."
[0] https://medium.com/@carlagriggio/the-great-messaging-app-mig...
For instance I switched to signal and use it regularly, but keep whatsapp on my phone for a few contacts I might need a few times per year. Whether it is uninstalled seems like the wrong metric and does not say anything about signal usage.
Still no match for the 217 Million+ Twitter daily active users I'm afraid after 6 years of existing.
It is not "early days" and anything compared to being 'A viable Twitter alternative' other than Facebook and Instagram has only shown themselves to be a complete failure. Just like how Gab (another alternative) with roughly the same number of active and registered users as Mastodon also failed to be a viable Twitter alternative since that has instead turned into another echo chamber but including the undesirables putting off many users on Twitter from moving.
Mastodon as far positioning itself as being 'A viable Twitter alternative' after 6 years of existence has failed to gain any significant amount of former Twitter users or traction. After 6 years, it isn't early days.
My first impression of mastodon is that it's a lot like the early days of twitter. I kind of miss that era of twitter and am looking forward to moving over to mastodon.
[0]: https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/matrix_p2p_pinecone/
It’d be a hilarious art project if they weren’t scamming people who doing know any better.
The protocol guide: https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/
That question is better asked of PradeetPatel, the person who wants to figure out how to stop people from using a decentralized system.
If you don't like how your particular instance is handling that, you can choose a different one.
As long as no one company, person, or government owns and operates the internet, it will always be "fractured".
Networking, telecoms, and the Internet all tend to erase space and topology. Relatonships of federation, following, muting, and blocking re-impose a topology. It's not necessarily geographic, but it exists and it profoundly affects information flows through the network.
Put another way, on both Mastodon and Twitter, there is the ability to block or mute other profiles. This creates interesting dynamics about where information does and does not flow, and who has control over that.
In the case of Mastodon, there's additional refinement to that control in that individual instances can set several levels of resistance or friction between other peer instances. Posts might simply be muted on the public timeline, or an instance might be entirely blocked. What levels of moderation are enacted and which instances are affected varies by instance. One consequence is that an instance administrator bears consequences of their own actions regarding moderation and permitted / tolerated behaviour, as other instances may determine their own interactions on account of such behaviour.
In practice, what I've noticed across several social networks, having a blocking mechanism, is that the old saw holds true: friends come and go, blocks accumulate.
In the case of Google+, a network I both participated in and studied reasonably extensively, one of the greatest predictors for whether or not an account was closed or banned was how active it was. The higher the level of activity, to a large extent, the greater the odds of it later not existing. This was based on a few snapshots I'd made and/or explorations of high-profile accounts. I suspect mechanism tended both to be burnout by some high-profile users and tendency for such usage to violate site norms (spam, abuse). It was interesting to see though.
if you don't want to see them, they can be mass-ignored at the stroke of a menu, by your moderation team or yourself as a user. if you don't want them to organize their own spaces, you'll have to do something more than use software.
after that, it's important to remember anyone anywhere may still see any content you post publicly.
it's worth noting there is no accepted approach to this for corporate social media, either, and it can't be resolved given the current legal and political landscape. but at least in a federated space, you get to choose your moderators, they are generally more accountable to you in a personal sense, and your instance should remain small enough that nobody will care whose speech you suppress.