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Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

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646 pointssrvmshr483 comments

If Mastodon takes off because of Musk ill be pretty amused. There is an irony to Mastdon, a more open platform than Twitter, becoming more popular because people thought Musk would make Twitter... more open.

For me it is how one person can suddenly own an entire social network and dictate the rules as he likes or dislikes. Mastodon it self is more open, the server you choose to sign up to might have content policies in place.

Wait, that's literally Zuckerberg? How was it OK when a Saudi Prince bought into Twitter to make sure Saudi Arabia wouldn't be hit by an Arab Spring[1]?

I don't really like Musk, but is every conversation and topic these days just plain hysteria?

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2471759/arab-prince-bu...

Yeah, it is not about a whole social network being controlled by a single person. It is about a whole social network being controlled by a single person you disagree with.

You don't have to disagree with Elon as a person or politically to feel that an open speech platform controlled by one person who is known to micromanage everyone around him is bad.

The tweets about Pelosi should that he is absolutely open to using his power as a prominent figure to control the narrative long outside his area of expertise

We need to reduce harmful information. Only experts on A may speak about it. Experts are decided by trustable media outlets.

Who determines what is a "trustable media"? Who watches the watchdog? Etc.

I present to you a trustable media outlet deciding on an expert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6Y2uQn_wvc

You seem a good example of a victim of propaganda.

I may be mistaken, but I read the comments you're replying to as a sarcastic one.

I hope you're right, people like this really exist.

Tweeting isn't controlling any narrative. If you ban one side and not the other, and suppress stories you don't like, that's more along the lines you're talking.

You have to only care about it now.

That's a pretty dishonest framing.

It's not controlled by a single person, it's controlled by those who coughed up the $44b.

Musk is the only one of them who actively desires the spotlight.

Some of us have already left the Meta ecosystem years ago after finally waking up to that.

Now it is time to do the same for Twitter.

But all the social networks are owned by a few individuals. Even twitter before musk bought it was owned by a select few (with real control), and they already dictated the rules based on their own likes/dislikes... that's what started this whole thing in the first place.

> Even twitter before musk bought it was owned by a select few

Except it wasnt

It's a private company.

I’m old enough to remember when that was an excuse people used for Twitter. Funny, seems like months ago. Now, it’s a private company but the arguments are all different.

a publicly traded company. not exactly the same as its current status.

You’re right. It was worse to use that argument. But now all the people that did have changed their positions.

If I could choulse twitter would be a protocol, but to me the worst case is being owned by an anonymous bureaucracy working exclusively to optimize the platform for add revenue, that changes the 'rules' on the fashions of US local politics. Anything else is an improvement.

Where have you been for the last few years? That was exactly what was happening.

I think "More open Twitter" is a red herring. The bigger issue seems to be that people simply dislike and distrust Musk.

I think that's a vocal minority. The majority doesn't care, and two equally small, vocal minority groups love and hate him, respectively

In hackernews and reddit and my small RL sampling the haters outnumber the lovers about 3 to 1 atm.

And about 1 in 4 or so care.

I'd like to see a poll on hacker news for this

In my friend group there were a handful of specific blunders that significantly changed the tide of opinion against him, all around the 2018 timeframe. "Pedo guy" was the biggest one mostly because of how stupid and unnecessary it was and his unwillingness to back down, but the "taking Tesla private for $420/share" drama was a close second.

The increasingly pubic tawdriness of his love life was a factor too; prior to then he'd done a good job cultivating an image of a family man.

Specifically on Reddit I've never seen anybody support him anywhere near what one could consider "faboyism". They have this funny feedback loop where there's a (usually negative, or only marginally relevant) Musk post on the front page at least once a week, and the comments are all about how they hate Musk and how people need to stop giving him attention. Somehow everybody is completely oblivious to the fact that these posts are the only ones that most people ever see.

For what I see from Twitter, I'd say Twitter is the vocal minority.

I've seen the exact opposite, everyone either doesn't care (specifically non-US citizens don't care) and people in the US are cheering him on. There was tremendous support for him when he reinstated the babylon bee and they haven't even posted anything yet

I can tell you that New Zealand twitter cares a great deal and our main TV news media is covering it

Around one-in-five U.S. adults (23%) say they use Twitter. The share of Americans who use the platform has remained consistent over the past several years and is similar to the share who use Snapchat (25%) and WhatsApp (23%). But a much larger share of U.S. adults use YouTube (81%), Facebook (69%) and Instagram (40%).

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/05/05/10-facts-ab...

Considering all the attention the acquisition received I was surprised to read that more people don't use Twitter. The idea that what gets posted on Twitter automatically becomes what the average Joe talks about is probably overstated.

It's indirect. Many of the people who influence what the average Joe talks about use Twitter, and few of them are self-aware enough to recognize Twitter is a fishbowl at a cafe by the ocean.

I would rephrase it to "political propaganda machine dislikes and distrusts Musk". It is telling that Tesla was not invited to the EV summit or that or was removed from S&P 500 ESG.

Yet the other political propaganda machine love and trusts Musk

Depends which political propaganda machine you are talking about: the one that is outraged at their speakers husband being hit by a hammer or the one flately making stuff up to justify that attack.

P.S. I am not an US citizen so I couldn't care less, but when "my" party over here would defend a guy who breaks into someone's home and hit an old man with an hammer because of — you name it — political propaganda I would pause for a moment and revaluate whether I am still who I think I was.

Why do you feel a need to defend political propaganda? Did you not just try to show that it is instrumental? If anything I guess you agree that there is this top down attack on Musk. Well, he became so influential that shady political interests are in play.

How do you imagine a "top down attack" on the richest man on earth?

If you are the richest man on earth and are attacked by political elites how would you defend yourself? Mind that they control, to some extent, media and institutions. There are things beyond money.

Gonna have to agree with this. Musk may be rich but rich doesn't necessarily mean you have the same access to certain networks as other oligarchs.

If anything we should sit back and let them eat their own. I mean they've been doing it to us for so long that it's a bit refreshing to see them attack each other.

You do not become the richest man on earth if you are not intermingling with political actors and institutions on a grand scale. It might be shock you to hear, but the man does not need your support to defend himself.

It speaks of his PR department that you think he does.

Not top down, but maybe side to side.

Tesla has really helped push EVs over the adoption hump and into the mainstream. Quite a lot of incredibly wealthy people and governments (petro-states) would love to see Tesla (and Musk personally) fail. Upending the global energy order is a big deal and will make you serious enemies.

SpaceX has also almost single handedly taken the entire launch industry. Nowhere near as big as the oil and internal combustion engine industries but it's very wrapped up with large powerful states like Russia. Roscosmos is basically dead now.

The idea that Musk is pro-Russian is kind of dubious for many reasons, and Russia certainly has zero reason to be pro-Musk. He's destroyed their space industry, threatens the fossil fuel basis of their economy, and helped Ukraine.

I am not defending political propaganda, I am observing the area where it transitions into action with worry and thus critizising it.

Living in an area of the world where you are given more than two political choices might make you think a little differently on a lot of stuff. For example you don't have to take sides like in a team sport and cheer on "your" team independent of it's actions. What I am saying here is that the US is an absolute mid-pit in terms of propaganda and this includes Republicans and Democrats alike. Yet by my standards (the standards of someone whose grandfather was an actual Nazi) one of those propaganda machines is more dangerous than the other.

> because of — you name it — political propaganda I would pause for a moment and revaluate whether I am still who I think I was.

We don't know why Pelosi's husband was attacked. The guy who attacked him appears to be left wing (nudist activist, pro lgbt, he made hemp jewelry, and was a member of the green party). Pelosi appears to have said the attacker was his friend on the police call.

We just don't know enough to say it is political.

> We just don't know enough to say it is political.

If you read my comment again you will realize that I did not say whether the attack was political or not.

I said the defense of the attack certainly is exactly that: political.

So it does not matter anymore whether the attack itself was political at this point.

The question now is: Why would anybody defend an supposed "non-political" attack like this one? This is literal "supporting-horror-movie-villain"-territory. Or as I said: If they made me defend that, I would definitely reconsider why I let them manipulate me into this. I am not sure what I would gain from letting them do this to me, other than offsetting the realization that they duped me for yet another day.

On a side note: given what we know this attack was indeed political. If you are consume actual news outlets you might know that the attacker is quoted to have said to the police he wanted to wait for the speaker and "break her kneecaps” to show other members of Congress there were “consequences to actions".

Attacking a public representative for their political actions is as political as it gets. If you don't like what your representatives do in a democracy, you vote them out. What you don't do is this psycho killer bullshit.

>say whether the attack was political or not.

>I said the defense of the attack certainly is exactly that: political.

>So it does not matter anymore whether the attack itself was political at this point.

I misread what you wrote.

>The question now is: Why would anybody defend an supposed "non-political" attack like this one? This is literal "supporting-horror-movie-villain"-territory. Or as I said: If they made me defend that, I would definitely reconsider why I let them manipulate me into this. I am not sure what I would gain from letting them do this to me, other than offsetting the realization that they duped me for yet another day.

I don't think any mainstream person is defending this. There have been comparisons to Rand Paul's attack since various people who were supportive of the attack on Rand (including the Pelosi's daughter) are opposed to this one.

There has also been some lack of sympathy, which is unfortunate.

>On a side note: given what we know this attack was indeed political. If you are consume actual news outlets you might know that the attacker is quoted to have said to the police he wanted to wait for the speaker and "break her kneecaps” to show other members of Congress there were “consequences to actions".

I haven't seen anybody provide evidence to that. I have seen some claims, but nobody involved is quoted as hearing it (as far as I have seen).

Seeing how the media has been lying from the very beginning of this case I will wait until somebody reputable provides evidence to that statement.

The defense lawyer said there has been a lot of misinformation regarding this case, so I think trusting the people spreading the misinformation isn't a wise decision.

>Attacking a public representative for their political actions is as political as it gets.

>If you don't like what your representatives do in a democracy, you vote them out. What you don't do is this psycho killer bullshit.

I agree you shouldn't attack people over politics, but you are assuming this was an attack over political actions...

He appears to be similar politically to the Pelosis.

Some people don’t like elevating leaders who openly flout and degrade our culture’s expectations of how leaders behave. Some of those are silly, of course, but some of them are not. For example, a leader should be knocked down a few notches if they’re calling rescue workers pedophiles for no reason. They should be knocked down a few more for impregnating their employees. They should be knocked down for throwing childish insults at their business associates.

Nothing to do with politics and everything to do with not wanting to live in a world where all of these things become the norm.

How Musk has tumbled so quickly will go down in history books. Now he's spouting conspiracy theories.

I feel the same about Hillary. She shared a conspiracy theory this last week that Paul Pelosi's attacker was a right-wing extremist.

It was found later that the alleged "blog" David created wasn't created long ago and was taken down pretty swiftly after the attack, showing that this was created as a prop for a political stunt before midterms.

The residence for the attacker, David, was found to be a hippie commune with a gay pride marijuana flag in their front yard. Does anyone really think this guy was a far righty? Give me a break.

For readers, AFAICT the evidence that his blogs were created immediately before and deleted immediately after the attack is that the Wayback Machine hadn't indexed them prior to being linked to by major media outlets.

All of my conservative friends live in Berkeley, attend nudist weddings, and live in Communes. Don’t yours?

The attacker is a far right extremist. That's fact. He might have once been fairly left wing but has been on the far right for a while.

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2022/10/29/fea...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/What-we-know-about...

> He published multiple blogs laced with statements about the QAnon mass delusion, whose adherents believe former President Donald Trump stands against an alliance of Satan-worshipping Democratic pedophiles. The blog also included bigoted commentary directed at people of color, women, Jewish people, Muslims, members of the LGBTQ community and immigrants.

I'm afraid it's too late, HN has become an right-wing echo-chamber

Grifting pays big money and gains you attention.

Yes, this! "political propaganda machine dislikes and distrusts Musk"

No. People don’t want Conservatives to have a voice.

I've always been curious about that. Does Twitter forbid discussing lowering taxes? Maybe demanding harsher immigration policies? Higher prison sentences? Bans on abortion? Shutting down the department of education? Reinstating a monarchy? Who is more conservative than The Federalist? Quillette posts "race science" articles, and even the Claremont Institute, which is so reactionary that it balks at the term "conservative," posts articles on Twitter calling for ending democracy. Margarita Simonyan, a chief spokesperson for an ultraconservative authoritarian regime that is currently engaged in one of the deadliest wars in modern history against a budding democracy, has an account with over half a million followers. You want pre-Hellenic conceptions of the world? You got it! So seriously, what specific conservative content does Twitter disallow?

I'm not a big Twitter user but am often bombarded with right wing content on other sites like Reddit and Youtube no matter how often I try to tell the site/train the algorithm that it's not content I'm interested in seeing whatsoever, the idea that conservatives are being silenced when I (a left wing Brit) am constantly seeing their content is frankly ridiculous

That depends the subs you are subscribed, I usually get bombarded with left content and big subs are astroturfed by leftist.

I think it is an algorithm thing:

As a member of NAFO I get bombarded by Pro-Russian views every single time I refresh my timeline it seems, and I never like any of it or follow any of those genocidal maniacs or their cheerleaders :-/

> the idea that conservatives are being silenced when I (a left wing Brit) am constantly seeing their content is frankly ridiculous

It doesn't matter if you're "left wing" or not - The algorithm decided that certain people should be steered toward that content and others away from it. So the content is not reaching people organically or through merit. Rather, you're selected based on a hidden formula that nobody gets to see, and certainly doesn't serve the interests of the viewers or the uploaders. If you don't understand how that is censorship, you're missing the point of the whole show.

> that is currently engaged in one of the most deadly wars in history

? you dont have to use hyperbole to make a point.

I wasn't (although I'll qualify with "modern history"): https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/23/ukraine-wa...

If? Since when do we qualify a war as deadly based on linear projections in the future?

No projections needed. By intensity it's in the top 25% deadliest already.

This statistic is completely irrelevant because we have massive outliers like WW1 and WW2 and then a host of small, proxy conflicts afterwards. You don't make statistics based on mixing apples and oranges together and then making classifications out of it.

Plus, that Post article is ridiculous, you would obviously not put conflicts 200 years old like the US-Mexican war next to a conflict with modern weapons which are by nature much more deadly. If we go by this definition then most conflicts these days are in the upper 1% of fatalities compared to the whole of Human history, and that virtually says nothing interesting.

First the problem was that it's hyperbole and now that it's too obvious to be interesting? In any event, that statement was true and the fact remains that it is not only probably the most intense of the ongoing fifty or so armed conflicts -- which very much makes it stand out -- it is also among the most deadly in a long time, so I think pointing that out is pertinent, despite your stylistic reservations. Also, you can reach out to Paul Poast if you want further explanation about the conflict: https://www.paulpoast.com/bio-cv

It's very hard to estimate casulties in Russia's war on Ukraine but I think it's possible for it already to be over 200k soldiers and civilians, definitely over 100k since over 30k civilians died in Mariupol (likely many more some say 100k in Marioupol alone). We probably won't get good numbers till after the war

Twitter suppressed the NY Post's story on Hunter Biden's laptop right before the 2020 presidential election. Calling a surgeon who performed sex reassignment surgery a criminal is what got Jordan Peterson suspended until he'll remove that tweet. Trump was banned despite never telling anybody to go inside the Capitol building and even posting a video telling his supporters to go home. Milo Yiannopoulos was banned for making fun of an actress. Alex Jones was banned for posting a video where he insulted a CNN journalist. Nick Fuentes was banned for repeated violations but Twitter has never made clear what the relevant tweets were. These were just off the top of my head. I also remember tweets calling for mass reeducation of white people or the eradication of whiteness being allowed.

All of these ideas/notions/opinions/stories were very widely disseminated on Twitter to an audience of millions (BTW, the legality of Trump's behaviour, including what exactly he urged his followers to do, is under ongoing investigation). The suppression of the Post's story on Hunter Biden might have been an overreaction, that story itself was all over Twitter (that's how I heard about it). It's possible some tweets "calling for mass reeducation of white people or the eradication of whiteness" were not removed, but neither were tweets with vile racism/misogyny/antisemitism that constantly flood the platform.

I assume a claim could be made (although it would be hard to support) that, on average, more conservatives are suspended than progressives for similar behaviour but that still amounts to zero conservative ideas suppressed. On the other hand, there's also a bias in violent acts between conservatives and progressives. If there's any conservative content banned or suppressed, I've yet to see a single example.

> If there's any conservative content banned or suppressed, no one has yet to find even a single example.

A pretty common conservative opinion is that there are only two genders, but Twitter doesn't allow misgendering

That doesn't limit in any way the expression of the belief that there are only two genders. Feel free to run a Twitter search and confirm that for yourself (I just did). I have to say I am genuinely curious to find a conservative belief that I wouldn't find thousands of (unironic/uncritical) hits for in a matter of seconds.

It does, you can't tell a non-binary person that they're a man or a woman, if your tweet is reported it will be deleted. If you can find any examples of this they simply haven't been reported or reviewed yet.

Intentional misgendering of an individual could be sexual harassment; it is certainly not a form of "conservative speech" regardless of beliefs. However, the belief that there only two genders is not only not banned by Twitter but is, in fact, widely disseminated.

"I assume a claim could be made (although it would be hard to support) that, on average, more conservatives are suspended than progressives for similar behaviour"

Thanks, that pretty much wraps it up.

Exactly. We don't know whether or not that's true; what we do know is that no conservative ideas are suppressed.

Trump encouraged a violent coup attempt. Twitter didn't want to be culpable in any further attempts to violently overthrow a democratic government

Nick Fuentes is a white nationalist. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...

How did he encourage a coup?

That is the subject of an ongoing US DOJ and Congress investigations. In case you missed the public hearings (where, for example, DOJ officials testified they were told by the former President to declare the 2020 election fraudulent even though they informed him it wasn't; this is known as a "self-coup"), the House Select Committee is expected to publish its findings in a final report by the end of this year; criminal indictments, if any (although we don't know yet if Mr Trump will be charged with insurrection), would likely be served within a year.

Multiple people have been locked out for saying that a man cannot get pregnant. Saying that cutting the healthy breasts of a young girl is child abuse, or saying that giving a child puberty blockers is also child abuse. Stop being so obtuse

I don't know the particular circumstances of those sanctions, but all of these opinions have been widely disseminated on Twitter. Exactly none of them have been suppressed, as a quick Twitter search would immediately reveal.

I understand that the feeling that conservative/reactionary ideas are suppressed has been an important myth in conservative circles for at least a century (to varying degrees), and that opinion itself is one of those conservative notions so prevalent on Twitter, but as a statement of fact, it is very easily disproved.

So they're claiming things, that are part of being a supportive parent and are not abuse, are abusive. And possibly encouraging harrasment of supporting parents and doctors?

Also I'm pretty sure vast majority of those getting top surgery are 18 or older.

Those topics aren't on the minds of conservatives lately, and if you think they are, you're either out of touch or making your point in bad faith. Since those ideas don't carry weight at the moment, they aren't a liability and therefore there's no reason to censor at this time.

You mentioned in another comment that the "censorship myth" is "easily disproved". You might want to re-think your logic, or stop spreading such BS, even if it sounded clever to you.

I think you're wrong (e.g. The Federalist, Claremont, and Quillette are pretty much the zeitgeist of the more-extreme-than-mainstream right these days; Claremont pretty much is the pro-Trump/pro-fascist/anti-democratic section of conservative writers), but regardless, could you name a conservative opinion/idea/belief that Twitter does not widely disseminate?

> could you name a conservative opinion/idea/belief that Twitter does not widely disseminate?

I do not necessarily endorse or agree with the viewpoints of those who were banned. But some confirmed examples include: QAnon, vaccines, Hunter Biden laptop, use of gender pronouns. Anything Pro-Putin (there's growing support of Putin among conservatives, but I'm not one of them). Claiming that the 2020 election was stolen (where was Twitter in 2016?). Being a member of Proud Boys.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions#2022

Also, accounts like @JamesOKeefeIII banned arbitrarily in retaliation. https://www.thedailybeast.com/project-veritas-founder-james-...

Meanwhile: https://rdi.org/twitters-dictator-problem/ - Same thing happened in India FYI. You should learn to understand that iron and velvet are two sides of the same coin.

That some accounts were suspended under specific circumstances does not mean that conservative content is suppressed. Potential bias in moderation policies of specific behaviours/events and the matter of suppressing ideas are two separate issues (although the moderation of the Hunter Biden story, as I mentioned earlier, was probably a mistake).

Twitter is flooded with pro-Putin, anti-vaxx, stolen election, and "only two genders" content. The claim that these ideas are suppressed is so easily debunked (with a quick search) as thoroughly false, that I doubt that those making that claim actually believe it.

I don't know if Twitter punishes conservative Twitterers more harshly under similar circumstances, but it is simply and verifiably untrue that conservative content, of any flavour and level of extremism, is not widely disseminated by Twitter. I know that suppression has been a fundamental narrative for the right for some generations now, but like its other incarnations -- "the war on Christmas" and "cancel culture" -- it is just not real.

> That some accounts were suspended under specific circumstances does not mean that conservative content is suppressed.

I never said anything about "Conservative content is being suppressed", which is in and of itself an incredibly vague and arbitrarily defined assertion. The commenter you replied to was the one who said it. Hopefully my points are clearer than that, but there is some overlap.

> Potential bias in moderation policies of specific behaviours/events and the matter of suppressing ideas are two separate issues

A suspended account suppresses content in at least four ways:

1) The specific tweet, and all retweets, are memory-holed.

2) The user is directly prevented from posting additional tweets, different (or equal) in content but always compatible in motive.

3) The suspension serves as a warning to discourage others from doing the same.

4) The suspension is a clear message to discourage others with similar views from investing time and resources to build a following on Twitter.

---

> The claim that these ideas are suppressed is so easily debunked (with a quick search) as thoroughly false

The fact that you've admitted spending little enough time on research to be able to call it a "quick" search, and triumphantly so, doesn't help your argument. Nobody cares about suppressing last year's news, but what about when it was this year's news?

> Vaccines

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/01/twitter-c...

> QAnon and Elections

https://www.npr.org/sections/insurrection-at-the-capitol/202...

And even your own examples:

> The Federalist

https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/23/twitter-is-censoring-fe...

> Quillette

https://archive.ph/CpzM2

> Clairemont

That's a think tank - Old guys in suits. Deep pockets. They're not grassroots-oriented, and don't need Twitter to reach their intended audience. They have the resources to fight back anyway, so it's not a high-value target. Not to mention they can afford to vet and craft their messages carefully to avoid getting blocked. Self-censorship.

---

> I don't know if Twitter punishes conservative Twitterers more harshly under similar circumstances, but it is simply and verifiably untrue that conservative content, of any flavour and level of extremism, is not widely disseminated by Twitter.

You can suppress content and still be overwhelmed by its sheer appeal at the end of the day. It happens all the time. Sometimes the other team wins. That's why we're not living under the flavor of totalitarianism that existed in medieval times.

That has nothing to do with conservatism, though. If a conservative is arrested while spraying "Stop the Steal" on your car, that doesn't mean that the police is suppressing conservatism. Twitter chooses to prevent certain behaviours and certain actions, and also doesn't wish to disseminate misinformation about a pandemic (progressives fell victim to those beliefs, too). Like every enforcement action, it's certainly possible that specific instances are misguided, and it's also possible that there is some bias, although whether there is or isn't is far from certain (it's also possible that conservatives are biased toward rule-infringing behaviour on Twitter just as they are biased toward political violence; more conservatives are also arrested for politically-motivated violence than progressives, while property vandalism might be biased the other way).

The fact remains that every conservative idea, including extreme ones, is widely disseminated on Twitter. Even fringe right wing ideas have far more reach today -- thanks, in part, to Twitter -- than ever before in history. The idea that they're being suppressed is downright ridiculous.

So we're calling it as vandalism, violence, and misinformation now? Think you just lost the argument there.

I wasn't having an argument, merely saying that no one has ever been able to present a conservative idea that Twitter has not widely publicised, let alone banned outright.

The dangerous misinformation about Covid that Twitter didn't want to publish is not a conservative idea at all; both conservatives and progressives fell victim to it and spread it. I think that there were more conservative victims because these days people who more easily believe conspiracy theories are more likely to be conservative, but that correlation is purely accidental and wasn't always the case. Certainly there is no conservative content to stories about chips in vaccines or miracle cures.

As to vandalism and violence, I was pointing out that not every action that's performed concurrently to expressing an opinion is just an expression of a belief (if I mutilate you, that I'm doing so to carve "Biden 2024" on your chest doesn't make my action protected political speech). So the fact that some people were sanctioned while expressing some ideas doesn't mean that the ideas themselves are the sole cause for their punishment, which is why I keep looking for any conservative idea that isn't expressed on Twitter. For example, the opinion that there are only two genders is widely expressed on Twitter without censorship, yet misgendering individuals could be sexual harassment performed in the course of expressing that opinion.

normal conservatives? yes please. weirdo fruit-loop frothing conservatives? no thanks.

They have a voice. What they don’t have any more is the privilege to use it without any consequences.

I wish the Left experienced the same, then. Large, influential accounts calling for white genocide and education camps publicly with no consequences or media backlash is a travesty.

Got any examples of accounts?

Unfortunately I don't really bookmark tweets so I can share them 1-2 years later with folks who won't bother to search for them, themselves.

Sorry, you'll have to take my word for it, and you'll need to have enough interest and curiosity to care. I don't mean to assume you don't, and I want to think you're genuinely interested in knowing, but at the risk of sounding rude, people who usually ask for evidence or examples didn't spend any time looking on their own, and seek only to condemn, deny, or denounce the OP's claims at any cost — or worse, when evidence is shared, twist it into something it's not and make excuses for it.

A quick search got me reprehensible posts generalizing White people, or highlights patently racist behavior towards Whites by people (and news media) that are still allowed to exist quite freely on Twitter, like so:

1. https://twitter.com/realDailyWire/status/1325702297402306561 (AOC calling for White re-education en masse, is patently racist)

2. https://twitter.com/SkyCricket/status/1280809870766284800

3. https://twitter.com/joanwalsh/status/1584926736583913472

4. https://twitter.com/swordsjew/status/1255273666302095368

5. https://web.archive.org/web/20190111211254/https://twitter.c... (this thread was not deleted, the account that posted it has made their profile private — however this thread was allowed to exist for years).

6. https://twitter.com/WilliamCheeks10/status/10693653458220892... (small account, still stands as a reply off a Guardian news post)

7. https://web.archive.org/web/20210108061020/https://twitter.c... (smaller account, but still allowed to stand)

8. https://twitter.com/Brother_Jacob1/status/128084335718345113... (smaller account, but still allowed to stand)

Generally the most likely response at this point is "You're cherrypicking" (and thus invalidates my entire claim), right?

Disclaimer: my snark isn't directed at you by the way. I just find it fun to presume the outcomes of a — 1) share 2) evidence pls 3) shares evidence 4) ??? — interaction.

The fact that you are not witnessing the consequences a lot of people on the left are subjected to is part of the problem. Social media works better when it is able to isolate people into their own bubble, and to see the other as the source of all that is bad in the world. I wish you good luck, getting out of there is difficult.

Here's a video about how it was to feel cancellation of a leftist (from people also on the left!). It's long but you might find it entertaining.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8

Lots of people on the left face moderation. Often even unfair moderation. They just don't whine about it as much.

Chowderhead, Tim Pool, Shapiro, Owens, FoxNews, & and to some extent Rogan. Last I checked all of them have a heavy amount of followers and their accounts have not been banned from Twitter or FB?

Can you give examples where this takes place?

Donald Trump

Project Veritas

James Lindsay

Babylon Bee (locked out for not deleting a tweet.)

Jordan Peterson (locked out for not deleting a tweet.)

Marjorie Taylor Greene's personal account

Steve Bannon

among others

*SOME people.

Musk is banning people who make fun of him... I don't think anyone is under any illusion that Twitter is somehow becoming more open lol

Anyways I think the biggest concern is obviously that blue checkmark tweets will now be prioritized by the algorithm. Making it a pay-to-influence media platform. That's definitely why I quit (or at least unfollowed every single blue checkmark) and that seems to be the biggest concern amongst my friends

> Musk is banning people who make fun of him

No. He's banning accounts which are impersonating others, and such accounts are now required to add "Parody" to their name to avoid confusing users. I welcome this policy change, as well as the democratization of verification marks.

Mastodon has moderation facilities and is famous for instances having CoCs, refusing federation with instances with conflicting views, &c.

This. Mastodon is a federation in name only. If the protocol is not the policy then you really don't have a federation at all, rhetoric notwithstanding. I note that this is not a problem particular to Mastodon/The Fediverse, though, as its the exact problem that led to people forking their own networks off of FidoNet.

You can run your own and federate with whomever. It’s unlikely that this scenario will be common. It’s more likely that the large instances switch to whitelisting eventually.

Maybe self-hosting could be made more common through selling a (cheap) appliance with self-hosted services pre-installed. It is not clear how to solve the chicken-and-egg problem with such a setup. Also, someone will need to maintain the tunnels these things will need to be accessible. That entity can again be pressured into moderation.

It’s not at all clear if effective freedom of speech is attainable at scale.

> It’s not at all clear if effective freedom of speech is attainable at scale.

It runs into basically the same problem as torrenting: How do you punish people who try to leech? It more or less requires the majority of participants to apply the same policy consistently so that defectors are punished for their defection.

Ultimately, the solution is more or less the same as it was for FidoNet: Defederate and form your own network with stringent requirements so that jackasses that want to ignore the rules when it suits them will be shown the door. Networks then grow to encompass precisely the number of people who can be trusted to keep to the policy and no further. Thus, you wind up with a patchwork of disconnected networks. I for one am fine with this sort of future since it worked just fine before. The only people who'd really not like it are those who prefer centralization in order to easily engage in influence operations... and of course their opinions don't count.

>Maybe self-hosting could be made more common through selling a (cheap) appliance with self-hosted services pre-installed.

Mastondon-as-a-service exists eg https://masto.host/.

one-click-install mastodon exists too -eg https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/04/mastodon-now-available...

> You can run your own and federate with whomever.

One big problem IIRC (haven't touched it for a year or two):

I'm all in favor of being able to block users or instances.

But many Mastodon instances have a policy of blocking other instances if they don't block certain other instances.

When I realized this it was one of a number of reasons why I just gave it up.

I'm currently hoping that nostr and element/matrix takes off, but in the meanwhile I agree with whoever commented somewhere onnthe Internet the other day that Telegram is a DIY social network.

I think a number of other people have tried and it turns out mastodon isn't a very good piece of software. Gab was based off mastodon for along time and what they found was it's just not set up to scale, and they were constantly removing features during peak use to keep the servers from crashing. Pleroma is written in elixir scales a lot better (which is why all the biggest instances like poa.st use it) but fundamentally you're still dealing with a lot of overhead sending and receiving messages from other servers. I think something would have to fundamentally change with the API if it wanted to grow past a few hundred thousand active users.

> If Mastodon takes off because of Musk ill be pretty amused.

Iirc, Elon Musk said social networking should not be centralized but distributed. Perhaps he bought Twitter just to shut it down so that ActivityPub would become more popular?

You've only got to look at the inconvenience of setting up a matrix home server and soon think "centralised it is".

Mastodon is even worse.

I can't see it taking off.

As someone that recently set up a Matrix server, I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Which server?

Synapse needs dual core with 8GB ram. You don't call that inconvenient?

Even then you might have timeouts joining some rooms.

Most will not meet that spec and won't be able to join popular rooms.

God help you should you not replace the standard sqlite dB.

„recently“ being the key word here. For the first few weeks/months, my Matrix server worked great too, but it’s becoming increasingly brittle as time goes on.

Synapse is not the only implementation

It's the only full featured implementation.

The alternatives like dendrite are significantly more work.

And good luck getting any federation working at all unless if you replace sqlite.

“More open” as owned by a billionaire extremist that promised to destroy moderation efforts that weren’t even good to begin with. People in the US have a weird notion of what “open” means.

It won't though, this isn't going to be like the Digg exodus.

Digg and Reddit were basically like-for-like, the friction in moving over was non-existent, because the focal point of both sites was the interesting links that people would post and discuss in the comments.

Twitter is different because the 2010s social networks did everything to kill external links, and turn the focus on the 'personalities' on the platform.

Also trying to go from Twitter to Mastodon is going to be like what beginners experience trying to set up a crypto wallet. Terrible UX, especially with dialog prompts with inscrutable messages about 'instances' that are meaningless to people coming from a walled garden.

The only people interested in Musk's disingenuous theory of "open" are the right wing industrial-scale disinformation peddlers and those enabled by them.

QElon's amplification of deranged right wing conspiracy theory wasn't mere trolling or stupidity; it was a declaration of intent.

Never forget he was partners with Peter Thiel, and the two of them together have minted a fascist-friendly grift into literal kleptocracy pipeline for themselves. You don't have to do more than peel back the sticker to learn Musk hasn't invented any of the companies he's associated with; and his success with them hinges on dishonesty and card tricks.

Another new tool in this vein is Fedifinder. It works by scanning Twitter bios of accounts you follow for strings that look like Mastodon addresses: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/

5 years ago there was a neat tool called Mastodon Bridge that did what Twitodon says it does but much better, I think because it didn't require everyone opt in. It stopped working because of some change Twitter made to their API terms of use. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-bridge

There's also Moa Party, but it's so complicated I have never used it. https://moa.party/

Why does Moa need so many permissions? I don't want to give it +RW on both my accounts.

It’s a cross-poster. It quite literally needs +rw to post to both accounts.

Oh, duh. "bridge" makes sense now.

Is there a way to find the Mastodon instance you yourself signed up on? I am pretty sure I already made a Mastodon account, but not on mastodon.social and based on the list of instances, nothing rings a bell. :-/

Edit: it was mastodon.social, the password reset email just took 15 minutes to arrive… Good tip in the comments though, thanks!

Search your emails for "Welcome to Mastodon".

>> "Edit: it was mastodon.social, the password reset email just took 15 minutes to arrive…"

They're waiting on a new database server to handle the load.

https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109262705755044079

What we really need is for selfhosting to be as easy and secure as installing an app on your phone.

Somewhat related: there should be a way to have a Mastodon ID based on a domain you control, regardless of what instance it's hosted on.

Webfinger technically supports that sort of delegation today in its spec: you can drop a /.well-known/webfinger JSON file on the domain's web server (or a cgi-bin app of some sort if you need to support more than one user because the protocol uses GET request parameters to differentiate) and tell ActivityPub servers "if you are looking for user anexample@thisdomain.com please forward to the inbox or check the outbox for anexample@mastodon.social". That works today for things like @ mentions or DMs of an account sending the right notifications. Unfortunately, this isn't yet the best experience because in many places including follows/follow requests Mastodon users will always see the forwarded address everywhere "anexample@mastodon.social" instead of the delegating address and so far as I'm aware there's no easy way to send messages addressed as the delegating address.

It would be nice to see this improved.

Heresy: Why do we need a replacement for Twitter?

There was a world and a life before Twitter, and there is one without Twitter as well.

I deleted my Twitter account about a year ago and have not missed anything. People and topics I am interested in I can updated on by many different means.

I don't think Mastodon is meant to be a replacement for Twitter, or will ever be that. It would be a mistake to treat it that way.

It's more like this place than Twitter, in a way.

Or, it's kind of similar to how Usenet was in the early 90s.

It's a simple linear feed of who've subscribed to, or what the people you've subscribed to have "boosted". So you find the interest groups you're into and join a node that matches that, then find the people you like on various nodes, and follow them. There's no recommendations really. There's hashtags, but few ways to "discover" them and they don't seem to get heavily used right now.

It's maybe like Twitter when it first launched. Certainly not what it became (which I never personally participated in).

It certainly doesn't have the level of "action" or "engagement" you'd find on Twitter. And that's probably a good thing.

Networking.

I follow various scientists, authors and so forth and I like to read their thoughts or see their recommended reading. And as silly as it sounds, it's wild to see eg William Gibson and Gerry Conway, two guys responsible for some of my formative adolescent reading, interact with one another at random.

For academics, why not read peer reviewed work?

For authors, other communities exist as well.

Peer reviewed work has a much higher bar for people to say stuff. If you want to know what academics think, as opposed to what they are motivated to write and get past a reviewer, you need something like twitter. Plus, some academics are interesting people and say stuff of interest away from the specialism.

> Heresy: Why do we need a replacement for Twitter? There was a world and a life before Twitter, and there is one without Twitter as well.

Yes, and it was much harder to shill newsletters, courses, conspiracies and cryptocoins back then on the back of minor internet blogger fame.

There is significant money to be made in all of the above, which is why a replacement for Twitter (holding people in a dopamine cage) is inevitable, whether we need it or not.

I wonder if there's something like Twitter but a feed (RSS or otherwise) of interesting people's blog, YouTube, podcast or creative work?

I feel the value of Twitter would be a feed of interesting people. But 280 characters is just knee jerk thoughts.

Something to easily discover people, like Twitter, whist showing their content, seems more valuable.

Right now, the discovery part sucks. It's possible to find interesting people and sub to the RSS, but not everyone has that (like my blog). Not to mention how spread out content is, someone might release a podcast, or interesting YouTube vid, instead of just blog articles. It's just too much work.

Isn't that what the Twitter founder is making with Blue Sky?

An RSS feed, but for social media.

You may be interested in Fraidycat.

Per the description:

> Fraidycat is a desktop app or browser extension for Firefox or Chrome. I use it to follow people (hundreds) on whatever platform they choose - Twitter, a blog, YouTube, even on a public TiddlyWiki.

This doesn't solve the problem of discoverability, but it solves half of what you described.

https://fraidyc.at/

People can add ActivityPub to their websites/blogs, and it will be a part of the fediverse. WordPress has a plugin for this, and you can add your own implementation as well.

I wish there was a way to integrate ActivityPub into static sites. As far as I know, you can't just add ActivityPub to your site hosted on GitHub Pages, for example.

We need to decouple discovery and distribution of content. Discovery is much easier to manage with centralized platforms. Distribution is better decentralized. And since we have URLs there's no reason for them to be tied together.

I use Twitter to follow fellow engineers and honestly all the politics (regardless of the new guy in charge) was getting annoying. I might as well use this opportunity to become more active on mastadon.

Can anyone recommend a good android client? Preferably from f-droid?

> all the politics was getting annoying

Dumb question but why would this be any different on Mastodon?

It’s not, I followed a prominent Clojure dev on there and it was mostly politics. Politics I mostly agreed with but it was too much to keep following. That’s not the only example, but it’s the one I think of every time I think of going back. I don’t think twitter needs a replacement, just quitting was good enough for me and that was long before mastodon came around.

That depends on the instance owner and the moderator team they have.

I can recommend Tusky or the official Mastodon app. Both are available in F-Droid.

Fedilab has been pretty nice to use

Not only politics but non-related topics you follow, I wonder if in-tags of tweets would solve this.

I think Tusky is the most polished android client.

Looking for Mastodon users progress, scanned 366 of 366 users you follow on Twitter. Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon who have previously linked their Twitter and Mastodon accounts by logging into Twitodon.

Given that there are (rounded to the nearest meaningful number) 0 users on Mastodon at the moment the scan is not going to take very long to find 0!

Was a bit surprised that it found 5 matches (out of 1659 people I'm following). A bit inconvenient that I can't just see these matches though, but have to download a CSV file first.

What happens if/when Mastodon gets mainstream and gets plagued by all the same problems as twitter? It being the distributed platform there's a very little options to fight fake news, hate speech, bots, etc. on Internet-wide level. Is there any option other than users gravitating to servers hosted by like-minded people, creating a clear separation into social bubbles?

AFAIK you can block individual users, entire servers, and servers can also block other bad rep servers. I think a federation of servers with open source software is better equipped to fight fake news and bots not in spite of but because of decentralized protocols and how solutions must involve democratic values by definition.

Admins share lists of extremist instances and block them. This strategy helps to not viralize hateful/illegal content.

I think social bubbles is sort of built-in to the fediverse concept. There's some hope that a decentralized moderation problem will be more tractable than a centralized-for-profit-company moderation problem.

Good moderation is labor (and likely forever will be) and Mastodon by its very nature has a lot higher moderators per consuming users ratio than Twitter ever had (even on messages originating on and "not leaving" Mastodon's biggest instances). (Just like if you are evaluating school districts you want a higher teachers per students ratio.)

Often mastodon servers either intentionally or naturally have a "theme", which is really helpful for discovering interesting content and users.

it's also easier to start socializing as you can hop into the local timeline and instantly find relatable topics.

I was skeptical on Mastodon. But I'm actually realling enjoying it. It's having a surge in popularity the last few days. When I checked it out a couple years ago it didn't click with me. But now I'm liking it, and I think there's potential there.

It won't "replace" Twitter. But a good crowd of people has collected around there, and there's quite a bit of enjoyable content coming through.

Is there a non-niche general Mastodon instance that's really popular? That would be the easiest way for me personally to embrace it. I checked a few instances and it's all very niche and very empty.

(To clarify, I don't mind niche instances, just at this stage there isn't enough discussion or interesting profiles to follow.)

mastodon.social is by far the largest, but the recommendation is generally to find the one that has interests & people on it you find interesting to start. you'll get content from people on mastodon.social anyways.

This looks great, definitely more active and offers a good variety of topics/profiles.

I went with indieweb.social. I think some people from hackernews might find a vibe they like generally there.

mastodon.social is silenced (no federated timelines) on quite a few instances, simply because there's a lot of volume that's not very high quality.

You can be a part of a large or small instance and your consumption/conversation is not limited to users on that instance. You can follow people from other instances as well as scroll through a timeline that is posts/toots from across the fediverse (not just your local instance)

Got it. Does it make any difference where I register first? E.g. if that instance disappears overnight, will I be able to recover my account or not? I understand that I can access posts from all instances in the instance I use, but not sure how account handling/ownership works.

There are migration tools to move your followers and your followings between nodes. But no way to move your posts. And so, yes, your identity partially/kind-of doesn't move. But mostly sort of does?

At first this bugged me, but then it was pointed out that if you could just move your posts you could also potentially violate the moderation rules of the host you were moving to. So it makes some sense.

Thanks. I am more worried about the identity than the posts. If my identity belongs to the host, then in that sense this is no better than a centralized Twitter. Just theoretically speaking (I have not been banned from anything ever), if a mastodon.art user is banned from mastodon.art - everyone who followed them will have to find them on another instance and subscribe again? If exporting data is a process that depends on the host instance, when they ban you - that's it, your identity is not recoverable.

The migration tool automatically moves your followers. It's a bit janky, it took an hour or two for it do its thing for me (there must be some batch component, I dunno). I don't know how it works between banned instances, or what your options are for when a server goes down fully.

But all the of the follower/following data is available via CSV export any time, too. And there's obviously an open API as well.

And honestly, you could also just run your own server if you're that concerned.

How are permissions managed so that you can change your followers configuration to point at your new account if you move, but otherwise not allow anybody else to pull that same stunt against your wishes?

On your old account you have to start the process.

> if a mastodon.art user is banned from mastodon.art - everyone who followed them will have to find them on another instance and subscribe again?

To be fair, that's an improvement over, say, Twitter, where they'd just be gone.

I agree. The idealist in me wants all of these aspects to be completely independent from the host I choose to use. But realistically I am not that worried about losing data, the social graph is far more valuable. Even if I have 100 followers, I would still really want to preserve their connection to me if I am banned.

I understand that I can do this by hosting my own instance - that's a good enough solution (for me).

IMO the bigger issue isn't getting banned, it seems the more likely scenario is having the operator of the server decide for whatever reason to shut it down. This isn't likely to happen with Twitter.

It's perhaps less likely for Twitter than any one given Fediverse server/Mastodon instance. But the impact on the whole ecosystem is very different too. A single Fediverse instance shutting down could be annoying/sad, but it would only affect a subset of users, and those users could still, if need be, create a new account on another instance. Twitter shutting down closes everything for everyone.

Relatedly, Twitter isn't going to throw a bake sale to try to stop from shutting down, it will get devoured as quickly as it files Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 and debt holders descend like vultures.

Most Mastodon instances are community run, and when they hit some rough straits in paying for their hosting some of them will have a (metaphorical) bake sale encouraging users to contribute to the hosting fund Patreon or will ask around if someone wants to take over the admin hot seat for a while.

For those concerned about the longevity of specific instances that's generally the answer: ask the community how the admin pays for things, look for their Patreon, consider chipping in what you can each month.

you may be interested in something like nostr, nomadnet, iris, or ssb. these all have decentralized identities baked in.

> At first this bugged me, but then it was pointed out that if you could just move your posts you could also potentially violate the moderation rules of the host you were moving to. So it makes some sense.

So moderate it the same as if you reposted everything? I don't understand.

To start, you should choose an instance that had been around for a while and isn't too small. Instances do shutdown occasionally but the admin(s) will give you plenty of time to migrate to a new instance. Mastodon has built-in tools to migrate your whole account (and content) to another instance if needed. I'm currently having to do that because a large well-established instance (mastodon.technology) is shutting down the end of the year.

> but the admin(s) will give you plenty of time to migrate to a new instance

that seems like a big assumption - if I'm running an instance, what's to stop me pulling the plug with zero notice?

This seems like a big weak point. I went to check it out just now and it's like "pick a server" and... I don't know, which one is best? Can I change later? Seems confusing, pass for now.

It's federated. Much like email. You can follow people on other servers and it pulls their feed. If you want to switch servers, you just make a new account (and just like email you'll need to tell your followers where you are going)

> It's federated. Much like email.

How feasible is it to have a username at a custom domain? In case the server you sign up on goes out of service. Do you have to set up your own instance in order to do that? Is there a barrier from setting up a new instance and then participating immediately in the wider federated network?

I was just investigating this. You can run your own Mastodon instance on your custom domain (e.g. masto.host), but due to how Mastodon federation works, your instance will 1. host all your content 2. handle a ton of requests when people interact with you or your content: follow, favorite, boost, etc.

Also every time a user follows you from an instance not federated with your instance it's a whole complicated process because federation has to be established between your instance and their instance (and, I think, every instance that they follow users from).

So if I understand your question correctly: there is no way to separate your identity from your content. If you want to own your identity you will need to self-host.

I am realizing now that the solution to these concerns is likely going to emerge from matrix.org, not Mastodon.

Seems like there must be some sort of possibility for someone to create some sort of "lightweight hosting" option here. Where you get your own bespoke "host" where you own all the data and identity, etc. but it is actually physically managed on someone else's infra (something higher level than a vhost). Pay a small fee, get a subdomain, get your own masto node, get your own data, all encrypted, but someone else handles all the legwork of setting it up, federating it, etc.

> "host" where you own all the data and identity, etc. but it is actually physically managed on someone else's infra (something higher level than a vhost)

Isn’t this just a normal Mastadon instance but with custom domain support just like email providers?

Yes, you are describing a hosted instance. Masto.host looks good, and the cheapest option is only $6/month. The problem with this federated approach is that the actual federation features can become pretty expensive. Hosting is cheap but if you have thousands of followers from different instances federation processes will become very expensive.

As far as I know, this is all cached at an instance level. So only the first person to pull something from your instance actually hits your instance's resources. I can still see posts and users from dead instances because it's all cached on my instance. There's a rake task to wipe it, but people are advised not to since those caches have been what saved at least one instance whose name I can't remember.

Feasible, but I don't think everyone having their own individual server was the intent of the design. Yes to question 2. I'm not sure about question 3, if there is a barrier, it isn't large.

Because you can move between different domains without losing your subscriptions and subscribers, there is no real need to use your custom domain. But because it's not possible to move your old content (I assume because moving files is difficult), I still am self-hosting so I can own my own content.

Another way of doing it is if you're already posting your notes, pictures, etc. on your own website, you can make it ActivityPub aware and use your website instead of Mastodon.

> Another way of doing it is if you're already posting your notes, pictures, etc. on your own website, you can make it ActivityPub aware and use your website instead of Mastodon.

I quite like the sound of this, do you have any references you can suggest?

I found this announcement by write.as (check out the video): https://write.as/new/blog/federated

Seems like it's possible to implement just enough of ActivityPub functionality that Mastodon users will be able to follow you.

As an example https://aaronparecki.com/ does it, but when it comes to documentation entry page https://activitypub.rocks/ and otherwise https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

Ok, but which one is hotmail and which one is gmail?

It's different because feature-wise all Mastodon instances are quite similar (some might have bigger character limit etc.)

Generally it's best to choose a niche instance so you inherit a community of people with common interests instantly which makes onboarding much easier. For example, I'm on fosstodon.org for free software and photog.social for photography.

photog.social is an example of where it being independent is both good and bad. Good, because independent. Bad, because it's just someone else's expensive computer.

https://photog.social/@ambassador/109080532230127913

When you settle on an instance, make sure to contribute to its upkeep if you can.

>Does it make any difference where I register first?

Yes; Each instance has its own posting rules and an instance may suspend (block) another instance for different reasons. Mastodon.social has suspended quite a few instances, for example. Always read the about page of the instance before registering.

https://mastodon.social/about

It’s also pretty easy to have alts. Most good clients can log onto and track several accounts. You can then flip between various communities; post about work stuff on one, alt for your hobbies or shitposting.

I wrote about the differences and advantages of both networks here after using them for several years. Will probably be useful for people considering Mastodon.

https://boilingsteam.com/mastodon-vs-twitter/

A nifty tool that I came across to find Twitter peers registered with Mastodon federated servers. Requires authentication though

Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized platform over a federated platform?

The centralized platform made it very easy to find people. Now people who are moving to a federated platform miss the value of centralization, so they are writing a tool that will leverage that value and import it into the federated platform.

Maybe if Mastodon was a centralized Twitter-style platform it would be more usable, and more popular.

Not really, no. Imagine the reversed situation: Everyone is on Mastodon, and now this cool new thing called "Twitter" comes along and some people are switching to it. "find everyones Twitter account and follow it" would still be a useful thing to have, over manually checking for every single person you follow if they have an account, if they maybe have an account with a different username, ... and following those you find.

But we all know this hypothetical isn't the case. Centralisation is more convenient in almost ALL cases, even in email (nobody except people on HN host their own email)

It proves the value of centralized search and discovery, but it says nothing about centralized hosting in moderation. There is probably quite a bit of value in a system where decentralized instances can volunteer to submit their own discovery database to a central search platform, and where individual users could opt in to being part of that database.

This is commonplace for decentralized protocols. Torrents are probably the most obvious example.

Email remains decentralized.

Doesn't matter when we are talking about Mastodon.

People don't use email as social network or instant form of social communication.

I may be mistaken, but it looks like you brought up email in the first place.

>Centralisation is more convenient in almost ALL cases, even in email (nobody except people on HN host their own email)

Okay? My point still stands and users don't want to host their own email or Mastodon instance and prefer centralised solutions when it comes to a social networking.

People do, however use multiple email providers, sometimes small ones like the small business they work for or their local/regional ISP. If federated social sharing becomes popular, the story will likely be similar: a few big providers have most of the users, but a limited ability to dictate how the system works.

That hypothetical was the case: back in 2007/2008 people of the blogosphere slowly stopped blogging and started tweeting. And if you had a good but suddenly more empty feedreader you’d then had to follow the great migration and re-find those people on Twitter.

this means that centralisation works better?

It depends on the thing at hand. Some things have value because others use them. Chat apps tend towards monopolies because of this.

Email's just so damned old everyone uses the standard and it kind of dodges the issue.

Email's also structurally a bit different - it's a set of one-way sends to select recipients, with chats you moreso go to a place and read the place's signboard.

You could in principle just use mailing lists under the hood instead if the UI wasn't garbage.

This whole comment chain has been an interesting discussion for me, I just checked out of curiosity: Blogspot vs Twitter popularity on google trends 2004-today

https://trends.google.de/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=bl...

Decentralization doesn't mean hosting your own instance. It's about open protocols. There are hundreds or thousands of email providers that you can use and still send an email to a Gmail user without hosting your own instance.

Yet gmail is the biggest and email isn't a social network, choice is the problem.

People cannot find their friends on Mastodon because:

+ They can't search all instances across Mastodon.

+ There is almost little to no one on Mastodon to talk to.

So they just go back to a centralised service like Twitter and they definitely not use email as a social network.

> + There is almost little to no one on Mastodon to talk to.

I have found that this is an accurate description of the first impression one gets; this is not true, but we're all so used to recommendation algorithms easing discovery that the impression is equivalent.

What kind of friend do you have that you can't just say, "Hey, what's your handle?"?

The one that can't be bothered to say "Hey what's your Mastodon handle" to like 500+ of my friend group on Twitter where is the main Mastodon instance is closed.

Twitter is just fine and everyone knows it.

Email is decentralized. It's mature enough that there's a bunch of trusted providers out there and you can use it without caring about the technical details, it's basically a perfect example of a successful mature decentralized service.

many people don't care that it is decentralised, hence gmail, an open protocol is irrelevant. In mastodon's case decentralisation is a hindrance since they want centralisation back.

email isn't a social network and lots people outside of HN don't self host them as such.

I think you’re quite confused about email users. Very few of the companies I worked for outside of startups used google for email hosting.

Business email is very dependent on the fact that it’s an open protocol.

Likewise, gmail would be totally useless if it was actually centralized and you couldn't email non gmail users.

But they can’t necessarily email you, given Google’s procedures regarding “spam”, i.e. anything from a small email server.

This is true. My last company used fastmail, but one guy insisted on using Gmail. Sometimes fastmail didn’t arrive at Gmail. We (tech team) said, this is a problem with gmail. C-suite said this is a problem with fastmail.

And so the word comes down, we have to move to Gmail. It’s believable decision making, but that’s how it works.

Though that's basically Google (and other large hosts) breaking the decentralized nature of email in their "effort" to combat spam.

Google isn’t as bad as Microsoft or AT&T in my experience. My personal server now is working fine with those now too.

Yeah, that's my experience too. Google doesn't like new domains, but at least accepts mail and delivers to spam (or to the inbox once the domain is old enough). Microsoft just refuses all mail if you host on a VPS whenever someone else on the block (NOT the same IP) misbehaves (or is accused of misbehaving, not sure).

Yet my bank(s), linkedin, netflix, microsoft and a bunch of mailers all had message arrive in my inbox this morning.

Companies like hosting their own email. Users don't because because they don't have an IT department whose job it is to filter spam etc.

I'd argue the trend is that most companies don't. They host it with a custom domain on Google Workspace or M365.

I work for a 100-year-old company with 30k employees. Last year we moved from self-hosted Exchange to GSuite, because it's just easier to spend money on that than to spend money on an increasingly complex and hard-to-staff-properly internal service.

The issue is not self hosted versus GSuite. It rarely makes sense for any company to self host their own email. I think the parent poster was saying few use Gmail versus hosted outlook

My 40 year old company with about 12k users switched from self-hosted Exchange to Azure-hosted Office 365. I'm assuming part of the reason for this is to ease complexity, and it's working quite well for us.

Gmail isn't a protocol, nor is it open.

People don't self host email because 1) the protocol doesn't make it easy to deal with incoming spam on a small scale, and 2) giants like gmail tend to automatically flag unique email domains as suspicious. Which is a valid criticism of the federated model, or rather the people using it.

If more people found value in decentralization, in theory they would also be more critical of their node management, opting to reject anti-competitive behavior in a democratic way. Unfortunately, for democracy to work, citizens have to be educated and fight for it. If they don't, it's easy to have centralized, ostensibly totalitarian walled gardens.

We just need to make sure fediverse accounts are easily transferable between nodes in a standardized way, something I don't think mastodon does well, and email doesn't do at all.

Gmail is especially bad because they'll spamblock your domain for no reason, but Google customers are allowed to violate ToS and spam everyone.

Email isn't truly decentralized anymore. Think I'm kidding? OK, try this: Try sending something to Gmail. Roll 3d6 and consult the oracle bones to see whether or not it magically gets caught up in the spam filters for no discernable reason.

Seriously: Transforming spam filtering into a black box service has decommoditized email and everyone knows it.

I would call the GMail situation pseudo-centralization. As it has more actual competitors who aren't just hosting but also actively developing their own platform it'd go back to decentralization.

Of course people use a variety of email providers, what are you talking about?

In that scenario is Mastodon not centralized?

No, it's still federated. But my account of alice@foo.com follows bob@bar.com

Bob registers his new Twitter handle so I, Alice, can find it on the central service of Twitter.

A mapping of users to users can be across any service, including centralized to centralized (ie Twitter to Facebook) or decentalized to decentralized (IE Diaspora to Mastadon). It is just saying this string registered somewhere else as that string.

Ah I see, thanks for the explanation.

No, that scenario is assuming a federated Mastodon (and other Fediverse software) as today.

For only username based have a look at Fedifinder: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/

that seems like a substantially more useful way of building such a thing

Once imported, what would be the benefit of the centralized system? This just sounds like overcoming the barrier that the centralized system put up.

Or maybe if a distributed platform embraces some additional centralization (it already does some), it becomes more like the decentralized platform everybody wants, and keeps the best aspects of the federated approach for those who mainly want those...

It's not so important to force any dichotomous perspectives on the whole here, as the situation has a lot of nuance to it in the details.

Honestly the fact that more tools are needed to make Mastodon usable shows that federation technology is "not there yet." I hope we are able to improve stuff to the point where it is usable.

Something I'm keeping an eye on is the @ protocol that is being designed specifically for the creation of federated social media applications -- it allows for portable identity and your social graph is portable, these things are not tethered to an instance of something. Hopefully that will be an upgrade so there will be less "jury-rigging" like this required to make federated applications usable

If anything, they just shows they were late to the party.

To find someone on Mastodon, I would either enter their nickname in the search bar (no need for the domain, it will search on all instances) – or simply click on their profile on a post I like. Just like a centralized network. This tool just exists to do this automatically and in bulk.

It seems to me that finding someone on a federation is as easy as on centralized systems. Do you have a use case in mind where centralization makes it easier to find someone?

it will not search "all instances".

It will search a subset of instances.

How do we know this to be true?

a) there is no central listing of all mastodon instances, or even all public ones.

b) it would take FREAKING AGES TO COME BACK because there are so damn many, you can only make so many parallel requests at a time, and you have to process the results from all of them.

Can you expand on b)? I'm not sure I understand why this would be difficult. If you already had a list of instances, as it seems like asynchronous clients could probably handle the scale of instances (source below list about 4k, which isn't out of scope for simultaneous async tasks), and processing the results is probably fairly simple. Especially if you were to cache that list and just do an updated request every few minutes (so not a new full-network request set every query) it seems like this wouldn't be too crazy complicated. Have I missed something?

[1] https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon/

> To find someone on Mastodon, I would either enter their nickname in the search bar (no need for the domain, it will search on all instances)

Nope, It will only show accounts followed by local accounts.

Mastodon doesn't do any kind of per server search, And your "federated feed" is basically accounts on other instances followed by local accounts.

This makes hosting a private Mastodon server, for personal or family use, incredibly hard as discovery is basically impossible.

This can be fixed by using Activity pub relays, but guess what? Mastodon's official servers don't use them, which are the servers that really matter.

Its a big part of why I'm hesitant to use Activitypub, as I believe discovery is a big part of modern social media, and Mastodon absolutely sucks at it.

This is coming from someone hosting his own Matrix server.

> Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized platform over a federated platform?

Not at all. These types of centralized platforms won because they raised capital to grow fast and meet market needs before anything else. Email is still king, but if it were to be designed today, it would have been designed as some proprietary centralized system.

Distributed systems are hard.

In any case, I don't think federation goes far enough to save us from the problems we're seeing. I want a peer-to-peer social feed / social news app that doesn't depend on federation or servers at all.

Takedowns (DeCSS), takeovers (Twitter, FreeNode), shutdowns (Google+, Orkut, Digg, mastodon.technology), censorship (everywhere; should be an individual choice), maintainer-imposed spying (Apple CSAM), and maintainer-imposed changes or limits (Digg, modern Reddit, Twitter API) seem an order of magnitude harder to pull off if we have full control at the protocol and node level.

Federation would be nice for anonymity and aggregation of interest graph metadata, but at the core we should just have a swarm of content to sample and consume. It's fine if the content is naturally ephemeral as a consequence. We can use a constellation of opt-in 3rd party distributed (federated) services to provide durability, ranking, recommendation, filtering, etc. where desired.

Bittorrent, but for Twitter/Reddit/HN.

Briar and Manyverse (based on ssb) come to mind

Agreed - the fediverse is already run by little gatekeepers who want to decide who you can and cannot communicate with (if you are on their instance). That should simply not be possible on the protocol level, meaning your account must be fully separated from any kind of "instance" except your own client.

Or an opt-in for submitting a piece of private information like a phone, an email, a public key, etc. so you can prove who you are to your friends.

Who am I kidding, these people are looking for an audience, not their friends.

I wonder how email as private information would be different to the mastodon username, aren't both practically identical with the exception of one additional @?

The way I see it your mail is not publicly displayed on mastodon, only used to confirm/identify. Does @handle on mastodon has the email associated to my friend Peter ? If so it's a match.

Of course it's a whole other can of worms, reminds me of Linkedin/Fb that would spam me because they had access to my friend's rolodex..

I've said before the answer is just Better Twitter. One with clear moderation rules that aren't reactionary or flexible based on popularity. Non-profit Twitter would be ideal. Keep ad revenue just ahead of operating costs. Publish all the financials. Open source the code.

[fill in here with an insightful texts on distinction between identity and content distribution being centralized] - I don't want to sort out which one of {prefix}username{suffix}{duplicate identifier}.{domain}.tld is the person I had been talking with just 5 minutes ago, nor he would appreciate such a situation, but I do not care who serves the content for me so long it's valid within contexts i.e. if it comes from amazonaws.com or onmicrosoft.com.

Imagine you could find me as @numpad0 anywhere, and you can validate shadydomain.shadywebsite.tld/uuid.htm with my pubkey to hold me accountable for weird things I'd say, and that /uuid.htm URL may be ephemeral, or could be more permanent for more respectable posts at non-shady venues, and either ways I wouldn't have to be perfect wrt handling of privkey, yet somehow usernames matches someone anywhere would be verifyably that someone. That would be ideal.

But I believe social media operators recognize the exploitable value in conflating both; this has to be why no one use cross-OAuth between social medias and web apps anymore, and rather focuses on own ID systems and federated signups. Consistent set of identities is a value, media is a means to monopolize on it.

even if this were true, which i'm not sure it is, it isn't a reason to make the whole platform centralized.

you could argue that there's benefit to centralized friend-finder tools, but there's no reason that has to be tied to a centralized platform. a decentralized and open-access platform allows for choice and competition amongst friend-finder tools

Also wouldn't it make sense to have different friend finder tools with different content/parts of the fediverse?

I'm thinking if I'm a Nazi I mostly care about other Nazis and would not go to the normie mastodon friend finder tool but the one which finds all my friends on our Nazi mastodon instances and vice versa.

I think it has more to do with the way Mastodon decentralised and I imagine the people who figure out to do e-mail as a platform first, will be the next twitter.

The big issue with Mastodon is that your "twitter handle" depends on the server you join, which makes it hard to find you. If it was just your e-mail address, however, then everyone would be able to find you, and keep finding you even if you decided to change servers.

Ironically, Mastodon addresses work just like email addresses.

until you need a new server.

Just like email.

Your e-mail address isn't tied to a server. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. I've had many e-mail services without changing my e-mail address.

I can use g-suite, fastmail, outlook for business and a range of other things, and the people sending me mails won't notice. I can't swap my Mastodon server.

Some hosts/domains even mirror Mastodon addresses and email addresses. There is nothing stopping an address from being both, especially if you control your own domain.

So instead of Mastodons @user@server.tld we would use user@server.tld and that would help how?

You would be able to change servers and keep your username. Mastodon isn't really decentralised, it's just twitter with more twitter companies.

SoMe should be email based, and servers should just be relays. That way you could also create private SoMes for things that you'd do in Facebook group by simply setting up a relay on something cheap.

This is in part due to Mastodon's weird style of federation which almost comes off as a second thought compared to using it as a centralized service, since to federate with others you have to either know who to follow already or need to use a relay.

This, I feel is especially notable for Western nodes since they don't really seem to bother with relays (which I think largely defeats the point of federation by creating incentives to stick to large nodes). A lot of the relay lists are either super sanitized/focused on uninteresting topics or are dead.

In comparison, in the Japanese community there are several fairly active open relays (with some moderation to prevent abuse) and thus it's pretty easy to setup a custom node and have it populated with some basic content to build off of. As a result of which, ~75% of the traffic to my node comes from Japan, ~20% from the US and ~5% from Europe.

This tool would look the same if you were moving from a centralized platform to another centralized platform.

Obligatory reminder that Mastodon is a user interface for a defederated network commonly called the Fediverse, and that referring to the Fediverse as "Mastodon" is like referring to the web as Chrome.

Spitting into the wind at this point, I know, but it still bothers me.

How do posts from other Fediverse networks work on Mastodon?

Think of Fediverse as akin to the email system, where there are thousands if not millions of different servers out there hosting email and exchanging them to each other.

Now consider Mastodon as an email client which is hosted on a web site, like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail. That web site gives you an interface with which to interact with the network of email servers, but people using other servers with other interfaces can still see messages from each other; someone using Yahoo! Mail can send and receive messages with someone using Gmail.

The difference is that Mastodon is open source, so that anyone can download the code and run their own Mastodon instance (whereas nobody can download and run their own Gmail instance), but that instance can still exchange messages with instances running any of the several other Fediverse interfaces there are out there, such as Pleroma, Misskey, Soapbox, etc. (Unless an instance at either end has "defederated" the other; that is, the administrators have configured it to not exchange messages with the other server.)

E-mail, although it has different clients, is still fundamentally the same thing — you send a message with a subject, body and attachments. However, it seems that social networks built on ActivityPub are fundamentally different — Mastodon is an imitation of Twitter, with short low-effort posts, Friendica is an imitation of Facebook, then there are ways to link blogs… So what I don't understand is, how does this all work together when the formats are completely different?

I don't have an answer for that since I'm not an expert with the protocol and I've really only used the microblogging/"Twitter-like" aspect of it. But at least in terms of that, the front ends are compatible with each other when it comes to sending and receiving messages.

Is that true? I thought that e.g. PeerTube was part of the Fediverse, but Mastodon doesn't work as an interface to PeerTube.

I'm not an expert on the details of the protocol, so I can't give you a good answer to that. I believe it's just a matter of Mastodon not accepting messages that it knows it won't be able to display correctly. But other "microblog"-oriented Fediverse instances can exchange messages with Mastodon instances just fine.

For example, you can view posts on a Pleroma server with a Mastodon client.

For anyone considering which instance to join, the section "Tell me more about this magical community-building feature you love" in this post [1] and the section after that "What should I look for in an instance to join?" have pretty useful information that explains the subtleties beyond "federation works like email". It explained a lot of things about content visibility that confused me for a long time.

There's also a tool [2] that lets you preview what the Local (within-instance) and Federated ("all" instances, though not really, as the mentioned post explains) timelines look from each instance. Keep in mind that you can always filter out users or whole instance domains, so the presence/visibility of interesting posts is more important to look for than the absence of a few spammy/non-your-language accounts.

[1] https://wordsmith.social/elilla/a-futuristic-mastodon-introd... [2] http://www.unmung.com/mastoview?url=qoto.org&view=local

Surely there has to be another way to do this besides logging in with Twitter. Heck, they could just have you post a verification tween on your Twitter account.

You can't view an account's followers/following without being logged in. And if you try to back a service using a single bot account, you're going to get instantly banned b/c of suspicious traffic.

Keybase somehow manages to do verification through a twitter post, surely there could be a similar method for Mastodon?

You can see a person's latest tweets without a login. Just play around in incognito and you can see: https://twitter.com/elonmusk

Maybe they can create a specific pattern people can enter in their Twitter bio, then build a crawler

This maybe a noob question - does Mastodon allow replies? The few profiles referenced in this thread that I visited look like announcement boards, with no way to comment or start a discussion.

I am interested in electronic music and followed several links from fedi.directory. E.g. https://mastodon.art/@merle, https://mastodon.cc/@Sevish, https://sonomu.club/@luka. Is that normal that there are no discussions? Also one of the links led to https://v.basspistol.org/a/setto/video-channels, which looks completely different, like a personal page from the 90s, not a Twitter-like app.

I thought Mastodon was a Twitter replacement, but was surprised by how uninviting and empty the entire recommended directory for electronic music is.

It certainly does. From your example accounts: https://mastodon.art/@merle/105821287332308089

I think there are just fewer people active on these platforms, which isn't great for interaction.

As for v.basspistol.org, that's not a Mastodon instance but a Peertube (derived) instance. Both are part of the so-called Fediverse, but Mastodon (and similar) intent to replace/extend Twitter/Facebook whereas Peertube intends to replace/extend Youtube.

Edit: perhaps worth mentioning is that both types of social media share a protocol called ActivityPub. This is how several social media systems (Twitter replacements, Reddit replacements, Youtube replacements, etc.) can all communicate with each other. NextCloud, for instance, also has an ActivityPub system integrated, which means your toots and the shared files/comments may end up in the same system, all with some manner of interoperability.

Interesting. Wonder if it could be clearer if they were still showing a comment field or a reply button to non-logged in users. Just to surface the feature.

Thanks for the info on Peertube, I heard the name before but didn't realize it's a federated app.

Reply to the edit: thanks for the pointer! Reading about ActivityPub made me feel pretty excited both about the technology and about Mastodon.

The reply button is always there: it's the left-pointing double arrow icon on the far left under each toot. (With the "sharrow" Boost icon next to that and the star icon for Like/Favorite beside that.) It even shows a count of replies sometimes (though sometimes it's things like "1+" because it isn't sure due to federation [1] or it is focused on a subset).

You can even click it when not logged in and it will give you a Federated Login popup, which is a bit confusing but even allows you to reply on a different instance from the you are looking at the public feeds of.

To see replies rather than to make a new reply you generally need to click into specific toots, in the common web UI that's by clicking the Date in the top right corner.

Some clients have nice "subway diagram" maps of reply threading rather than the straight line that the main Mastodon web client presents them as.

[1] The only instance guaranteed to see every reply is the originating instance, other instances only see a subset of replies due to vagaries in federation and who those servers follow. Sometimes even with a client that is better at threading replies it is still useful to follow toot "permalinks" to their originating instance to see deeper reply threads, especially when reading on smaller instances.

On the topic of Twiter, Mastodon, and the Fediverse, why do federated FOSS alternatives to popular platforms not offer a read-only version of said platform as one of its instances to augment its lack of content?

In the example of Twitter, Nitter already exists as an alternative front-end. Now what if there's a Mastodon instance that uses Nitter to wrap official Twitter content and serve it as if it where the twitter.com mastodon instance? Again it would need to be a read-only version as Twitter is not Mastodon but it would help fill the content gap for sure.

Now Mastodon might not have a content issue but PeerTube for example very well has and in that case masquerading YouTube as a PeerTube instance would become very interesting.

There is a lot of Twitter content out there. Too much for a single instance to proxy. I believe there are projects to mirror specific Twitter accounts to a (personal) Mastodon server so you can switch apps without needing two apps. I'm not sure what the implication would be for privacy/data usage regulations if you open those messages to the public, though; blindly reposting everything may actually violate data privacy laws (yes, even if that information is publicly available).

Engagement with the audience also is a significant factor for making social media enjoyable. A read-only mirror of Twitter would be very boring, because you can respond/tag/whatever you want for all eternity, but the Twitter authors would never notice.

Such a system would work for people primarily using Mastodon that cross-post to Twitter; you could add Twitter replies to the Mastodon replies and get a mixed content stream (that Twitter users might miss half of when discussions respond to as-of-yet unproxied messages).

None of this addresses the question:

Nitter exists and it is open source. Why not add a mastodon API to it?

The existence of such a thing in no way has anything to do with existing mastodon instances TOS / acceptable use relationship with twitter (if such a relationship even exists).0

Interestingly I started using Twitter as a write only medium, which means I didn't have any interactions there with anyone. This led to the subscribers stagnating, everyone who already was subscribed stayed subscribed but no new people would subscribe for years.

BirdsiteLIVE does this

Source code: https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive Official instance: https://beta.birdsite.live/

Twitter is the only platform I know where you can search for people who share your interests and then connect with them. The whole #buildinpublic community is just insanely great. Everybody is building something. Everybody is having similar issues to talk about. You can make so many great connections and help each other out.

But I feel that with Twitter becoming a private company owned by a single controversial person, Twitter lost a lot of its appeal.

It could be very unfortunate (if Twitter just goes down the drain without a replacement) or it could be the start of something new, if a new way to interact comes up.

If the community moves to another form of communication, I hope it will be something decentralized that can not be taken away from us again.

That is the reason why I am not enthusiastic about Mastodon. Mastodon is not decentralized. Unless you run your own instance, you do not own your social graph.

Wait and see what happens.

The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have not changed. It is a free service that needs to convert user engagement into advertising dollars. Unless Twitter moves to a paid model, that will always be true no matter who owns it. And if Twitter fails, any potential replacement will need to deal with the same incentives and solve the same problems Twitter did.

A replacement could be just a protocol.

If you signed your message with "This is a reply to msg 33398198 by Timja. Signed: twblalock", then nobody could take this converstion away from us again. I could copy it and put it on any server. Owned by myself or run by some service provider. And it would always be clear to everybody that this conversation really took place between the two of us.

Yeah but who would use a system like that outside of a small hardcore contingent of techies?

The interface could be just like Twitter or Hacker News.

In fact, users could use any service they like.

It would not matter what client you use to reply to me. Your reply would appear on Hacker News, because HN would follow the protocol and accept properly signed comments relayed to it.

It already exists: newsgroups.

The messages would still need to be stored somewhere, right? Is SMTP a decentralized protocol in this sense? You can send a message from any client... however most people still use centralized solutions, not their own mail servers.

In your example HN would still need to retrieve and store billions of messages, handle user authentication, discovery, aggregation, additional data handling (e.g. you want to attach a video, or go live). They will need to monetize _something_. So we are back to square one, just with a much more inconvenient client setup process (like we do right now setting up pop3/smtp/imap).

What incentive would Twitter or Hacker News have to support the protocol?

> The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have not changed.

Have they not changed? This is a genuine question.

How much control does Elon actually have? Can he decide to take the company in a direction that don't match the business incentives?

Can he tell an employee: "Do this or your fired" because it may make him feel better? Or because he misunderstood the situation and couldn't be told otherwise until he sees the results? Or both?

Does he have certain responsibilities that he is supposed to honor? What happens if he doesn't?

He could make bad decisions that make the company fail, although frankly the previous leadership was on that path already.

It’s clear from his recent announcements that he understands how much Twitter depends on advertisers.

>>The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have not changed.

>Have they not changed? This is a genuine question.

If Musk pays back the bank loans, there shouldn't be anybody who could force him to continue the ad business and he could offer Twitter for free.

A billion users, with 10 tweets per day, that's 4T tweets per year. At 250 bytes per tweet, that's 1P data. At $20 per terabyte, that's $20,000 per year. With the same amount for transfer and servers, Musk should be able to run Twitter for $100,000 plus employees.

With those costs, Twitter could be financed by offering image and video tweets as a paid feature for $1 per year.

In contrast, most fediverse communities are run on donations or by the private funds of an individual. There aren't perverse financial incentives in the same way. This is one advantage of having many, smaller servers.

I don't know I started reusing twitter 2 months ago after years of not really using it.

My main gripe is it looks like it locked me up in a bubble full of accounts with similar interests and ideas. I don't really feel challenged and I am almost totally excluded from other subjects that could theorically interest me.

You might just be relying on the algorithm too much. Search for hashtags, follow people that show up in your feed from retweets or look at your contacts' own list of follows.

If you wait for the algorithm to feed you the content you like you will find the limits of AI.

It isn't like it was a non-profit before run by a board trying to make Twitter awesome for users or some form of cooperative that was owned democratically by its community... it was a "public" company that, by construction, could only blindly optimize for profit of its shareholders--and, even worse: almost always relatively short-term profits, which is why you see a lot of these companies right now trying to squeeze a few extra dollars out of everyone instead of just holding out for a year on cash reserves, as otherwise people will (rightfully) sell their stock and wait to re-purchase it if things ever look up again--at the almost explicit expense of its users (who frankly should have bailed as soon as the company went public, as that's the moment you knew the company no longer was even allowed to care about their interests).

I don't twitter or mastodon. But isn't "people who share your interests and then connect with them" exactly what the different mastodon instances are for? You're kinda supposed to find a server that aligns with your interest.

twitter has a social dynamic where opposing interests feed off of each other so you need in-group + out-group. there are psychosocial elements which mastodon does not have as it's more reddit like IMHO. edit: for clarity

No, federation works great in practice. I personally chose an instance I trusted to stay up and available, not one with any fancy domain or topic.

You can usually browse an instance without having an account, for example: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/explore (user directory) https://mastodon.gamedev.place/public (stream)

And once your instance federates with it (happens automatically, just needs any user to follow any user on the other one), you can search for hashtags.

> That is the reason why I am not enthusiastic about Mastodon. Mastodon is not decentralized. Unless you run your own instance, you do not own your social graph.

That's needed for practical reasons though. Actually decentralised alternatives like for example Scuttlebutt have this common issue: "This “inital syncing” process can take up to an hour and use a fair amount of data." (https://scuttlebutt.nz/get-started/) You don't get popularity with non-tech people that way.

With mastodon, the profiles can be migrated. So effectively you can start with some main hub, move to a more interesting instance if you want to in the future, and move to your own instance if that is what you want.

You would want to think very carefully about giving Twitodon these rights to your Twitter account:

Things this App can view...

People who follow you and people who you follow.

All the Tweets you can view, including Tweets from protected accounts.

Any account you can view, including protected accounts.

How do you expect it to work without that data? :P

Also, I'm _pretty_ sure you can point the twitter API at any user you want to scan followers and following. I did it on some twitter accounts I'm interested in when I started out to find some accounts to follow.

Even protected accounts?

As far as I'm aware, the default state of a protected account is that its tweets can only be viewed by followers, but anyone is free to follow it.

It's also possible to prevent people from following your account without your approval.

Twitter just handed that and more to a plutocrat.

I'm not seeing why anyone should assume an internet rando is less trustworthy.

Oligarch might be a good term to describe Musk and his ilk, too

I've been wanting decentralized social networks for a long time. Unfortunately, Mastodon and other federated networks are really awful and I hope people learn that sooner than later.

Wait, why are they really awful?

Someone should build an app like this that is integrated with all the social networks. Give it a sexy UI, and a catchy feature or two to keep people checking in. Eventually, it could serve as a federated contacts hub that links people between networks. A vital piece of infrastructure to support mandated interoperability.

We had Trillian back in the day, but then the messaging services locked down their protocols. I don't expect such an app would survive the cat&mouse with major players for long.

I'm not sure about your standard social media, but for direct messaging, several Matrix-based companies have popped up that allow for service interoperability.

The European Union is also working on breaking open the messenger space, forcing tech companies to either leave the EU or work on an interoperable standard. I believe an IEEE working group is already developing a protocol to serve this purpose, even with encryption available if I recall correctly.

Is there any information on this working group? I had hopes for the IETF standard XMPP, since the largest IM provider WhatsApp uses it internally.

Apologies; it turns out I was mistaken in believing the IEEE was working on a standard, it's actually the IETF. Abbreviations are hard :(

I believe this is the relevant draft: https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-mahy-mimi-identity-01.html

Edit: I should add that as far as I know, the working group hasn't done much as of yet. I heard about this on Matrix because some of the Matrix folks are trying to get (parts of) the federated Matrix protocol into the standard, or probably at least parts of it.

The draft doesn't mention Matrix, but it's nice to see that they consider standardization even if the use case for their protocol is probably already covered by the existing XMPP standard.

It doesn't, but that's what the person I heard mention this effort is trying to change.

The messaging services never opened their protocols. Trillian (& pidgin etc) has always played catch-up. It was just more difficult for the "major players" of the time because for a protocol update, you needed to release a new version of your software, and somehow have all your users seamlessly migrate to it before releasing breaking changes.

MSN/WLM, AIM, YIM, ICQ, Gadu-Gadu, Skype… all of them were reverse-engineered. The only open protocols it supported were IRC and Jabber.

AIM had the open TOC protocol, but it never got all the features of the OSCAR protocol the official client used.

Unfortunately, I’m sure this is probably against the ToS of every social media service, even those that might still provide a client API. :( Otherwise someone would have done this. OTOH, I think there are services that companies use to manage and post to all their social media accounts.

I'm oretty sure Twitter still allows this, but the API is crippled and this reflects the poor experience in custom clients. I used to use Twidere extensively, but it's been very limited for the last ~8 years or so.

You could make it use private APIs by copying OAuth client id|secret from an official application. This would enable some features (notifications and polls, and higher rate limits). Later Twitter fixed that and also sent a DMCA, so Twidere had to remove the code that worked with said APIs.

I'd imagine part of mandated interoperability would be regulation forbidding such ToS.

That's actually a part of the EU's planned Digital Markets Act!

I can see the headling now - Developer builds the ULTIMATE stalking tool

With this tool I only found 15 accounts on Mastodon.

With this one I found 98: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/

I never cared much about twitter. But I’d be very happy to get a couple of good tech profiles on Mastodon recommended. :)

FediFollows (@FediFollows@mastodon.online) recommends interesting accounts to follow on Mastodon. Many of these accounts are tech and FOSS-related.

https://mastodon.online/@FediFollows

They've also listed all of their recommendations in a directory:

https://fedi.directory

Thanks that seems like a great starting point!

You can also hashtag search the tech you're interested in, and find people that way.

How reasonable an idea is it to run your own mastodon instance for solo purposes? (eg. as one would run their own email server, or at least point a host's mx to their own domain)

How much would this cost, and is it possible to reliably secure an instance to run as a one-person federated instance easily?

Run a wordpress instead and put the ActivityPub plugin on it. There are many places you can host PHP/MySQL very effectively and it is much lighter in weight than Mastodon's stack.

"Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon" :'(

You know, I think Reddit is actually the best positioned Twitter alternative. You can use your real name, or anonymous account. You go there to follow particular subreddits, but there no reason why I shouldn't also be able to follow people and see their non-topic (ie, not part of any subreddit) microblogs interweaved with posts from subreddits. They deal with spam and trolls reasonably well.

They have all the pieces, they just have to put them together tastefully.

Feels like Reddit is closer to Mastodon than to Twitter. Each Mastodon server is like a subreddit with its own rules, moderation, user base, etc.

Not really. There's a centralized committee that will blacklist or even dump your subreddit down the memory hole if it doesn't meet its standards of moderation.

Reddit's censorship is even worse than Twitter's, so I would expect Reddit to be next on the list of places to liberate on the Internet.

"Censorship" has always been a dog whistle for "not letting propaganda and incitement run rampant".

Comrade, don't forget about the satirical news by the Babylon Bee. They are a danger after all, because if a subject thinks you are funny, you cannot control them.

Reddit banned r/TumblrInAction, a subreddit whose purpose was pointing out hateful content on other social networks.

"propaganda" has always been a dog whistle for suppressing inconvenient talking points

I find it pretty depressing that Telegram links are banned across Reddit because it makes moderators' jobs easier. There's no nuance just an enormous hammer. That's an example of censorship without sufficient cause.

cool idea except that would require using reddit. twitter is full of retards, but reddit is full of insufferable retards who think they're very intellectual and will let you know it. it's an entire site full of IFL Science type bozos.

also didn't reddit proudly make a blogpost earlier this year that they now censor more speech than the bird site and calling on it to do the same?

(oh and i've been linked normal, SFW stuff where reddit now tries to make me create an account to see it because it's "18+". no, i am not "becoming a redditor" especially not to view one link. if they kill old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com it will be literally unusable.)

The login/ create an account/ nsfw bs has increased dramatically over the lastfew days . Nsfw? It's a war channel im following....

> Reddit is actually the best positioned Twitter alternative

If they do, Elon can buy Reddit for about $44.00.

> Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon

Maybe you were the first one of your network, now the others will get to find you.

Mine found the 2 people I'd already followed on Mastodon. Maybe one day more people will be on it, but if not, it's not that big of a deal.

Why isn’t there a no login moweb version of this ? Would love to check out before downloading the app

You can check any instance's public feed but there is no way to aggregate multiple feeds or build your own from specific users and hashtags without creating an account somewhere.

For example: https://social.linux.pizza/public

Does Mastodon the software support ads?

I always see the platform more akin to Reddit or Discord than Twitter tbh. Say I want to make an instance and want to host it. According to some 3rd party services [0] a 2000 user instance will cost me ~$90+taxes/month. That’s a lot if you compare it to a reddit sub or Discord server which are free and where I’d say a similar sized sub/server are quite small (not all 2000 users are active all the time ofc)

It’s really hard to make people pay. Is there a plan to support ads or anything else besides begging for donations?

0, https://masto.host/pricing/

No, the open source software Mastodon does not have any ad mechanism, but obviously you could change that.

A model where Ad agencies work with content creators seems like it would work better, like how podcast ads can target users by picking shows - no tracking required.

Side note, it blows my mind that Reddit shits the bed so hard at this. So many niche sub's would be the perfect venue for niche advertisers.

I am glad it doesn't.

Ads are unethical

Mastodon doesn’t support ads, but since it’s FOSS, you could add it yourself.

However, if people find value in your instance, they will donate. For example, see Fosstodon (which even has an excess amount of funds):

https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/

Interesting tool. This reminds me of the initial steps in the vampire attack idea.

https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2022/04/16/vampi...

I find this whole situation to be incredibly depressing, especially with Musk tweeting out a fact free insinuation about Paul Pelosi (since deleted without apology.) The proverbial shit is going to hit the fan on Twitter on election night Nov 8 in America and I don't think Musk is prepared to handle it. I'd love to live in a country where we could have nice things, but apparently America is not it.

It also isn't as if Elon was just thumbing his nose at naysayers. A day earlier he pledged to advertisers Twitter would not become a "free for all hellscape."

Now that's the new tagline.

It will be easy to switch to another platform and there will be tools to help as this post indicates. 4chan users are having fun saying the N word on Twitter and Le Bron James is complaining about it. And this is only day 2. I certainly think people should be able to exercise free speech, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to it. I can go somewhere else if Twitter gets too depressing.

> I certainly think people should be able to exercise free speech, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to it.

Would that be different on Mastodon? I've never used it, but as a decentralized service, I assume it won't have a central authority banning users?

The difference is that each node has its own set of moderators.

So jerks will get moderated there. And when they do that, they'll probably jump servers. And so get cordoned off into wherever federated node that they isolate themselves into.

Note that each server decides which other servers it will federate and share content with.

So eventually nodes that collect jerks will just get cut from most of the rest of the federation.

It's certainly vulnerable to abuse. But it also leaves more room for community response.

And it also doesn't have a recommendation "algorithm". You see the content you explicitly subscribe to. In chronological order. So dark patterns that arise out of feeding people rage tweets and engagement hacking and amplifying "controversial" crap for engagement... doesn't happen. So the platform isn't going to give an outsized "recommended" audience for crap just because it has high "likes" -- that's not how the platform works.

That seems likely to result in a split. Not a few isolated servers with jerks, but one big federation with free speech types like Elon Musk, and a different federation with heavy moderation.

But returning to a chronological feed would be nice.

It's already heavily federated so it wouldn't be a binary split like you describe.

Like, it wouldn't be "one federation with Musk types" vs "another with heavy moderation" but actually already a whole bunch of nodes with different types of moderation choosing to isolate away the Musk node. Or not. It would be up to each node.

Note that "Gab" and "Truth Social" are both built on Mastodon. But they're isolated from the rest of the federated nodes.

How does "it would be up to each node" work?

Suppose there are three servers (A, B, C), and A is federated with both, but B isn't federated with C, and there's conversation between people on A and B.

Do people on C only see the A side of the conversation?

I am not fully clear on how threads are handled, but, yes, in principle visibility of users and posts is based on who they choose to federate with. So C would not see any content that originated out of B. Which AFAIK includes replies, etc.

I'm a Mastodon newb and not an expert, I'm sure someone else more informed could give a better explanation of the subtleties.

No.

Server A also sends messages coming from servers it federates with, so those on server C can see server B's messages, but C'ers just can't reply to them and expect B'ers to actually receive those messages.

> C'ers just can't reply to them and expect B'ers to actually receive those messages.

Wouldn't A also forward those replies to B?

IIRC both Gab and TS disabled federation, so that isn't a good indicator either way.

It is, IMO a good indicator that neither actually care about free speech, since they are basically "censoring" the rest of the fediverse.

This more or less has already happened, though there are more than two "groups" depending on how you define such things. Broadly speaking, there are free speech instances which allow edgelord teens to come in and N-word their hearts out (as well as do more mundane things like question the mainstream narrative on elections, the pandemic, and, yes, this Pelosi story) so long as they don't do anything actually illegal, and there are more regulated instances where "hate speech" is explicitly forbidden. As the instances in the latter group don't like the practices of the former group, the former insulates from the latter by defederating those instances, meaning that insances in both the former and the latter can generally only federate with each other. (Then there are the pro-MAP/CP/lolicon instances, which are generally defederated by both of the previous groups and also can largely only federate with each other.)

Whether you think this is a good thing is up to you, but it does seem that both groups of people on either side of the Great Divide get what they want from the system, so I don't really see the harm in it.

> So eventually nodes that collect jerks will just get cut from most of the rest of the federation.

Why do you assume the "jerks" wouldn't decide to federate among themselves. What's stopping them from creating a Splinternet (Splinterdon?) where they're free to say what they want?

> So the platform isn't going to give an outsized "recommended" audience for crap just because it has high "likes" -- that's not how the platform works.

You can't get rid of recommendations. Someone can easily build an easy to use page-ranked search engine for Mastodon servers, even if unofficial, and the engagement race will reinvent itself.

Nothing would stop them. That's already happened -- that's effectively what Truth Social is, for example.

And it wouldn't matter. Because the majority would be elsewhere. Or not. The point is that there's no centralized authority making this decision. And if I didn't like how the node I was on handled the moderation, and who it chose to federate with, I'd be free to move my account elsewhere.

I personally would just choose to hang out on whatever Mastodon node that had cut itself off the the Musk/Trump-ish node.

The shit hitting the fan on election night will not be limited to Twitter. Expect chaos in meatspace, exacerbated in part by Twitter.

Right.

There are some people who may decide to not vote due to what they’re seeing on Twitter in places where it may matter.

>The proverbial shit is going to hit the fan on Twitter on election night Nov 8 in America and I don't think Musk is prepared to handle it.

What exactly is he supposed to do? I don't see how Nov 8 is megacorp's business.

> What exactly is he supposed to do?

When Twitter is flooded with threats of violence and calls to form mobs will he just do nothing? Is that what you are suggesting? He can take the site dark if he wants and he may have to.

Isn't it the job of the police/FBI to do something in that situation? Why are we expecting corporations to be a private police force, judge, jury, and executioner?

Not policing content would destroy Twitter.

If you owned Twitter and the site was suddenly flooded with calls to attack election officials and raid election offices what would you do? You'd probably meet with your lawyers and find out what kind of liability you had, then you'd field calls from advertisers saying they are all leaving unless you stop it. You'd also field calls from all your friends telling you that you need to stop it. Then you'd go for a walk and contemplate how you feel about people using your site to facilitate armed rebellion. Then you'd figure out how much money you were willing to lose over doing it your way. The most sensible thing to do at the point is pull the plug for a few weeks for "technical issues related to the purchase' and go home and get a good nights sleep.

I'd do exactly what I would do if I saw someone threatening someone in real life, call the police and give them all the information I had. Twitter has dates and IP's, in a lot of cases that's as good as an address.

Pulling the plug would be the easy way out, and would stop people incriminating themselves. Worse case scenario it drives people stupid enough to use a public un-encrypted network to plan a crime onto a secure encrypted network.

Twitter has dates and IP's, in a lot of cases that's as good as an address.

At this point, I can’t put anything past Elon.

The way the texts between Secret Service personnel went missing, even after congressional requests to preserve documents and data, if Twitter becomes the headquarters for seditionists, disinformation and threats of violence that impacts the outcome of which party controls Congress, don’t be surprised if tweets go missing…

Because they could.

When you see someone getting robbed on the street, you can chose to do nothing.

But a lot of people would think you're morally deficient for doing nothing.

And a lot of people would do something in that situation.

Expecting something like Twitter to moderate it's content doesn't mean we expect corporations to be a police force, judge, jury and executioner.

Yes - they can clamp down on channels that are used to incite violence.

I'd be reassured just knowing that he won't use his megacorp megaphone to amplify obvious misinformation about the results of the election, but given the last 24 hours, even that appears to be too much to hope for.

Well you can just not follow him - I don't.

You don’t even have to be on Twitter to be impacted if the people who are likely to believe and act on misinformation do follow him.

How about closing Twitter for three days, starting two days before the election. Twiliday for the staff!

I think it’s depressing that droves of people are leaving Twitter because they believe that they might tone down all the censorship.

I get what you're saying but I don't think it's that depressing or surprising, but that's a big discussion better had in other places.

Does Mastodon have the same moderation that the twitter users are used to?

Server admins each moderate as they see fit. Users can block users as well as blocking whole servers if they disagree with that servers moderation.

Embrace the fragmentation.

The economic situation seems to be getting worse, there's tons of people without jobs that could get lots of exposure and experience working in tech related field by moderating all these small federated instances.

Plenty of networking opportunities as well.

There are going to be a lot more niche and diverse internet communities, and with things being spread out among the various instances it'll be a lot harder for trolls to summon concentrated attacks.

Communities will be smaller and higher quality while still being able to co-mingle via federation.

Unfortunately that stuff may also apply to more nefarious communities online and they may benefit by hiding amongst all of the other federated instances.

> Enter your Mastodon host's web address:

What?

Do you not have a Mastodon account?

Nope

If you're not trying to log in, what's the problem?

As someone that is now no longer using Twitter, I'm open to alternatives, but was turned off by this up-front complexity.

You can't log in before you sign up. I think bringing up complexity of the sign-up is fair, but I don't understand how you can be "turned off" by the second step before you looked into the first step.

Anything similar for Facebook?

In a "ok, maybe I'll look at this..."

Grab a client, launch it... it has a login and create account. Ok, create an account. It takes me to https://joinmastodon.org - find a server... and I see a list of foreign language, LGBT+, activism, technology, and furry. Looking at the technology ones... they seem to be aligned with the foreign language, LGBT+, and activism themes.

The ones that look slightly interesting / "I just want generic news" have a waitlist.

I scroll down this post and see mastodon.social being mentioned... I try that, and it is closed to new sign ups. indieweb.social has a wait list... I look at what its feed looks like... https://indieweb.social/public and its linked in posts (that I avoid going to linked in to see).

In the category of "low friction, something to say 'here is where I chat'", mastodon is rather high friction and at this time looks to be more self promotion than topics of conversation.

I realize there's a general "everyone off twitter" feeling going on, but for someone who isn't active on twitter in the first place, mastodon looks to be decidedly worse in terms of signing up and the content.

I do acknowledge that this may be just my "spend a few minutes looking at it" but for the casual reader, this doesn't appear to be something I'll be sinking any time into and will more likely shrug my shoulders if twitter falls into disrepair rather than seeking out a replacement for it.

Almost like people with the will and knowledge to build distributed platforms like mastadon are out of touch with the average user of modern social media.

> I realize there's a general "everyone off twitter" feeling going on

Is there?

I guess it kind of depends on what bubble you are in.

I try to get myself into a wide range. Seems like where they are losing some, they are picking up some, and people who have come to depend on it (journos, researchers, political heads) aren't going anywhere.

Mastodon has been averaging about 1000 new users an hour for the last 3 or 4 days. Compared to a few dozen a month ago.

It's not mainstream, and never will be, but it's in the process of becoming quite vibrant, TBH.

I don't really get your linkedin reference. I'm on indieweb and that's not my experience of the place.

FWIW I moved from mastodon.social to indieweb, just put myself on the signup list and was on in a few hours. It didn't take long.

And you could have just joined mastodon.social if you wanted the low friction quick signup.

Though it is apparently under heavy load right now due to twitter exodus.

When I looked at the public feed, what I see is https://imgur.com/a/Cib6vvS

From the "just looking in the store windows" perspective, it looks to be a place that people are self promoting their content that is hosted elsewhere.

For the purpose of article discovery, Hacker News or /r/programming or /r/java has a closer alignment to that. The times I do go to twitter, I'm after engaging with content there.

Yeah that's just one user, they seem to have spammed things a bit. Not really typical of the node.

TBH indieweb rose to the top for me simply because "web3 is going just great" is publishing off there :-)

> And you could have just joined mastodon.social if you wanted the low friction quick signup.

Not sure how OP could have done it as it’s closed for new registrations.

Twitter's appeal is outrage and controversy. Their users are addicted to it, even if they don't care to admit it.

That's why no significant migration to Mastodon will take place. Even if you do manage to lift and shift your bubble (you won't), you'll then find yourself in a calm and slow place where nothing happens.

For a bubble to exist and thrive, it needs a common enemy. With the enemy removed, it collapses. Everybody inside couldn't care if they never heard from you ever again. They were never a friend, just people who agreed.

If you want a group of like-minded people sharing stuff, there's a million options. Go to Discord, start a Whatsapp group, a subreddit, whichever. But that's clearly not the point. Hardcore Twitter users want their hot take to be heard in public, with "enemies" listening in.

That was how twitter was and that was how I liked twitter.

> That's why no significant migration to Mastodon will take place.

This sounds great. If we can leave 99% behind and get all substantive people, like John Carlos Baez, into Mastodon, its the best possible world.

People think that all partitions are between people with different opinions, but that's not always the case. Sometimes people with substance from every corner flock into the same arena. For a little time everything is good, then eternal September once again.

Google had that. I don't even remember it's name now...plus maybe?

Seemed a lot of tech people wrote there. Very peaceful, no outrage. It died. I think OP is right.

"For a little time everything is good..."

I hear what you're saying. There used to be a time and place where perhaps you could join some niche, a "non-political" one if you will.

That barely holds up these days. People do not separate their politics from the niche topic, it's all intersectional and performative. Absurd examples are the "knitting wars" and "noodle lady".

Besides constant outrage, many topics are engagement-farmed.

I've said it before: Twitter rewards exactly the wrong thing. Reasonable and good faith people keep losing. And yet when I come back to my original point, in case they do make things fair and more calm, a major appeal is lost.

>Twitter's appeal is outrage and controversy

I feel like this is what a lot of people miss. I try very hard to avoid it but it eventually finds its way into my feed. People want to be angry.

Just look at political accounts of similar stature but of opposite parties. The replies are rarely people supporting, rather people complaining.

This is why I don't even look at my Twitter feed. I have Feedbin grab the tweets of a few users I follow and show them in with my RSS feeds. If I want to reply, yeah, then I go to Twitter...and still avoid the feed.

You can tame it but it takes some effort. I've managed to do so by just blocking any account that shows up in my algo feed with outrage or politics. After a week or two of doing this I broke through to another layer of Twitter that was very wholesome and got a lot out of it.

That said, I'd still rather go in on a protocol like ActivityPub or SSB so I'm now posting to both Twitter and AP and see what comes of it

Yes, it's all about the dopamine hit from getting engagement. I'm guilty of it--sitting there thinking of a sharp reply to get people riled up. You'd think positive engagement would give the biggest boost, but it's actually the more hateful, negative replies that are the most satisfying. It's so toxic.

ugh. this has a killer flaw

> Looking for Mastodon users progress, scanned 867 of 867 users you follow on Twitter. Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon who have previously linked their Twitter and Mastodon accounts by logging into Twitodon.

WHO HAVE PREVIOUSLY LINKED ACCOUNTS... BY LOGGING IN TO TWITODON

the odds of that having happened for any notable subset are so low as to make this useless.

It would be much more useful to search using the “people you follow” filter.

Instead of creating a new service, it would be better if this read from https://keybase.io since those mappings already exist.

It seems that this tool is fairly equivalent to everyone posting their mastodon and twitter handles to this thread.

I mean, that's something you can say about any tool or social network at its beginning. Imagine downdetector with 5 users being considered useless forever.

When are Mastodon stans going to figure out that the reason people like Twitter is that it's (nominally) flat and you can interact with anyone unless they've blocked you for some reason? It's easy to build silos, which is what most instances are. Mastodon just reinvented single sign-on.

It's not a terrible thing to build, but whenever you make a product that's just imitating someone else (Twitter has 'tweets' but Mastodon has 'toots' because the logo is an elephant!) then it needs to be way better, not just a slight improvement. Longer messages are a good thing on Mastodon, though Facebook already does that. But what else does it offer that offsets the confusion of finding target instances, or conversely not being easily findable by people you don't want to converse with?

99.9% of users do not care about federation as a principle, it's just another level of technical gabble that they don't wish to be distracted by. Virtually every decentralized service struggles with this issue. Decentralization is primarily of interest to nerds, and for online services that requires you to be a bit of a computer and a bit of a politics nerd, shrinking your already small target pool.

Twitter's original win was that it was staggeringly simple, just asking new users to post about 'what they're doing right now' and offering simple controls to reply, repeat, or express approval. They realized that people felt more connected to a scrolling ticker of headline-style status updates than a newspaper.

> (Twitter has 'tweets' but Mastodon has 'toots' because the logo is an elephant!)

It's a mastodon, not an elephant!!

Oh noes I invalidated my whole argument ToT

edit: y'all are taking this exchange much too seriously.

Even worse when Mastodons are extinct creatures. Probably tells us about the platform itself being used by little to no one, other than just techies that won't admit that they still lurk on Twitter.

To add to that, toots sound like farts.

The different connotations for birds and mastodons suggest that the platforms will reach entirely different user groups. If Musk doesn't push video and other technologies then Twitter has already reached its full potential market share. This leaves many opportunities to Mastodon. If the social climate gets colder, mastodons are better equipped than most birds. In a world of gene technology, extinction is only temporary.

:-)

Ok but Mastodons were not arctic/northern animals like Mammoths. They were a temperate (& subtropical? i think) climate creature.

Apart from their bones another piece of evidence of their existence is the way many of the plants in the eastern Nort American forest adapted to have spikes/thorns that seem ineffective against deer & moose etc but would be deadly against browsing with a trunk. Black locust is like this.

I would have loved to have met one.

Now, for silly analogies, I dunno, it's likely that the ancestors of today's native Americans hunted them to extinction. (They were probably delicious). Can someone build an analogy from that? :-)

I actively dislike the federation that Mastodon is using. If they would let me use somebody@gnail.com or somebody@hotmail.com, fine. Or somebody@mastodon.master-name-server. Instead, you have somebody@mastodon.technology.

Guess what? mastodon.technology is closing down. Any connections using that address are going to be lost.

It's really too bad that the idea of where you connect became conflated with what your name is.

PS: thanks to the person who was running mastodon.technology and found that it was too much to do with what else was going on in their life.

> Guess what? mastodon.technology is closing down. Any connections using that address are going to be lost.

If you want a globally unique identifier, pay for it. I hate to be "that guy" but nobody owes you DNS namespace. If you are caught on the unfortunate end of this, Mastodon explicitly offers account migration tools to mitigate the pain. That will redirect your old account to your new one, so at least confused users will be able to find you in the interim.

On the flip side, letting you use "somebody@gmail.com" as your ID just gives Google control over your identity, which I would consider a downgrade.

Free services was the best and worst thing to happen on the internet. Everyone is connected and information is free, but all information is free including yours and there’s no way to get people to make a change to something non free.

I'm not sure if, by "the federation that Mastadon is using", you mean the concept of federation (in which case, I agree) or Mastadon's specific flavor of it; but, if you mean the latter, I want to say that's just a fundamental property of the concept of federated systems (as opposed to distributed ones): e-mail is also federated, and "where you connect" is the hostname on your e-mail server... if Gmail shuts down, so to will all of the connected links of people who decided to use Gmail as their host instead of running their own. I use saurik@saurik.com for my e-mail address, and (if I were to use Mastadon) would presumably also set up my own Mastadon setup, so I wouldn't be reliant on a large Mastadon host.

(Not said enough, though, is that DNS is itself federated: .com could one day decide to shut down, or simply take away saurik.com from me for whatever reason. Given the tradeoffs involved, I feel like that's the best place for me to stake my claim--particularly as custom TLDs didn't even exist back in the late 90s, but even now with them there are too many dangerous-seeming restrictions and the cost is too high that I'd still go with a .com--and yet it means that I'm not in some ways fundamentally different than the people who attach their identities to Google, even if I would claim Google isn't trustworthy, as that's just my opinion. I will say that gmail.com is also reliant on .com, and so there is an argument of my solution being strictly better, and yet I can make counter-arguments involving Google's political influence and the such.)

The issue, though--and maybe this is what you are focusing on?--is that, as far as I've ever been able to tell (just from perusing these random conversations: I do not myself use Mastadon currently), there seem to be features of Mastadon that simply work better if you are using a large shared host (which, to me, is kind of a fundamental design trajectory of federated systems: to obtain better discoverability, security, and ease-of-use, people slowly centralize onto a handful of larger players and over time the protocol becomes corrupted or limited by these large players who want to collude "for the good of the user" rather than remaining limited by the shared protocol).

Is this not the same as email? If you ran your own you could use your own domain. If gmail ran an instance you could use @gmail.com . Otherwise you're at the whims of your host shutting down, like when google nearly pulled free google apps, or when microsoft used to reclaim accounts that didn't use the web UI often enough.

I guess what's needed here is an ecosystem of "point your DNS at us and use your own domain with your hosted service" ala fastmail and other providers for email.

I do run firstname@lastname.org I would love to be able to use that with Mastodon as my one and only identity, regardless of which server I happened to be logging into.

I like the idea of different servers as being Special Interest Groups. I use lists a lot on Twitter. But people who I put on a Mac list also talk about baseball, the war in Ukraine, etc. Google+ wanted to have each person separate out their posts by topic and that isn't the way most people seem to want to operate. For selling something, like Craigslist, OK, I'll put it in a specific category. But just things I want to write about? Unless there's a House of Dragons server, a Houston Astros server, a Rust server, etc. it's not going to happen.

There are both good sides and bad sides to that. In the same vein one could argue that the truly Verified identity should have their own domain. Why use Musks platform when they can have Bill@microsoft.com or Elon@tesla.com?

stupid question but I guess having a central ID would go against the whole idea of Mastodon? I like the idea of "self hosted discord servers" but it seems weird to have a different identity for each "server" at that point. Is there any difference between Mastodon and forums at that point? Consistent UX?

Consistent UX I guess is part of it (tho not necessarily), but I think the bigger thing is that they're all federated by protocol, so activity from one is viewable by the others (assuming they're federated) it's a bit like FidoNet or even UUCP of old.

Is there a hosted Mastodon solution, where you can bring your own domain name and they do the rest, like how I can bring my domain name to any number of email providers?

You can definitely set up your own Mastodon server. I don't know how hard it is to get other servers to federate with you because I don't want to take on the overhead of running a server.

Discussions of running your own mail server make it sound like it's difficult because you have to get Microsoft and Google to accept your mail and they tend to let it go into the spam folder and not respond to you.

Will mastodon.social federate with HellsMaddy.social? Maybe. Can you use me@hellsmaddy.com? No.

> 99.9% of users do not care about federation as a principle

Decentralization as a principle is currently responsible for at least some part of the enormous market capitalization of cryptocurrencies.

Nowadays everything is politics and identity politics. Especially on twitter which is the favorite hangout spot for the crypto crowd, journalists and political junkies....I mean twitter for sure is not the social media for pushing commerce and e-commerce, that ship has sailed long ago. They only have politics.

Given the preponderance of politics on twitter, Musk is the worst owner for the platform as he's alienating all left wing people in the US (and potentially abroad) and also right wing people who don't fall for cults and are still against subsidies.

This is a digression, but in reply to:

> Twitter's original win was that it was staggeringly simple, just asking new users to post about 'what they're doing right now' and offering simple controls to reply, repeat, or express approval

Twitter originally was even simpler than that! Replies were just new tweets prefixed with “@user” and retweets were just copies of the source tweet prefixed with “RT: “. As these conventions arose Twitter eventually turned them into first class features. Also it was originally named “Twttr”, though that didn’t last too long.

Edit: and you mainly searched on hash tags (#tags) since full-text search wasn't very far along. Amusingly their search index on hash tags worked a bit like hash tables! Though I assume that’s entirely a coincidence.

> When are Mastodon stans going to figure out that the reason people like Twitter is that it's (nominally) flat and you can interact with anyone unless they've blocked you for some reason

this is largely the same for the public instances. Mastodon/Pleroma/etc servers default to open/automatic federation when you install them. unless you're joining a community with a very specific theme -- say freespeechextremist -- you're likely to be able to @ >95% of other users who signed up to a public server. if you joined a public server that's been blacklisted by a significant portion of the network, you'll find out about that soon enough that ditching that instance and registering at a more "neutral" site isn't any cost. Poast is maybe the most edge-case to this, where a new user might be attracted to the internal meme-driven aspects, and not notice until a couple days of use the relatively smaller patterns of harassment which would lead other (large) instances to de-federate with them.

hmm, that's the example that made it click for me: my identity has little or nothing to do with my topic, in email, twitter, blogging - having an identity that's related to a themed server doesn't feel like the right layer at all.

The advantage of federation is that it will allow Mastodon to outlive Twitter.

If Elon would migrate Twitter onto Mastodon, with the post history and all, now that would be a change for the history books. It would change social networks forever.

Ars Technica ran a "how to download your twitter account" article on Friday. Surely, there is a way to upload it you your own mastodon instance, right?

Without some way to capture value it would also be one of the biggest acts of capital destruction in recent tech history.

Banks would hate him! They might even sue him.

Why would he do that. What about anything he's ever done makes you think that is even a remote possibility

He did make Tesla's patens available for anyone to use for free.

Also, with its weight, Twitter would become the first popular open social network, a beacon among them. It would still be a very valuable brand.

He was sued into buying it for way more than it was worth. The first changed announced so far (in addition to printed code reviews by senior Tesla engineers) is to charge a subscription fee for verification.

how is he supposed to pay off a huge LBO by making it harder to monetize?

The iMessage model? Somehow make having a Twitter brand Twitter account into a status symbol. Turn the screws on monetization while giving the product away for free to VIPs. Banish the poors and undesirables to the fediverse, where they can green tweet as long as they like.

the imessage model works because its a "status symbol" that actually isn't: the majority of people in America have the blue bubble (and way more among demographics that care). this in turn enables building cool extra features because it's a "status symbol" but actually common enough for them to work, even though both parties have to have an iphone. this produces a network effect, almost like a social media platform..... oh wait

Fuck it, I'm going back to usenet.

@haunter wrote:

>According to some 3rd party services [0] a 2000 user instance will cost me ~$90+taxes/month

How efficient is the usenet protocol? I would expect that it would require far less resources.

What's the technical reason for not using the usenet protocol for a federated social network?

I'm not an expert, but by default

-no way to moderate content. you may see this as good or bad, but spam can be annoying. it'd probably be a lot worse us it became more mainstream.

-costs due to bandwidth if you are part of the infrastructure are driven by people posting binary data, far larger in bytes vs actual text. this is apparently why there are so many paid services.

-no way to authenticate identity

I'm probably missing a couple of items. There are ways to cope with these things, people use this every day, but it's not perfect.

I saw someone familiar walking around my neighborhood. The view from my window is partially obscured by the garden. So as I turn my gaze, I see a man wearing a hat loosely. The hat was positioned far back on his head, exposing a protruding forehead whose silhouette was amplified by a receding hairline. As the man walked by, it looked like a bald mounds pubis floating along the balcony. The things one can see from their home, right? Who the fuck needs social media when looking for a good laugh?

Gonna repost my standard question on Mastodon articles: cool, how do I get into it?

Go to a server and sign up. Http://fediverse.party

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