Twitter features Mastodon is better for not having
scott.mn
scott.mn
Eliminating classes of problematic behavior and incentives by way of avoiding or altering technical features is always going to be a game of whack-a-mole. When you get above some threshold—maybe it's some sort of 'relationship distance', or maybe just a raw number of people—then people will always find a way to game the system. I don't think it's a bug or misfeature in the system, though the system can certainly contribute to where the threshold lies. It's a bug in collective human behavior.
So far, the most likely solution to the problem of a mass point-to-point communication system is to not have a mass point-to-point communication system. Shard it down until people are able to behave reasonably well, even if that means you can't communicate with just anybody. That completely breaks some use cases, but it turns out that anything that allows those use cases turns into a cesspool. Maybe somebody can invent something someday, but I'm doubtful that technical measures or UX can ever compete with our rage and other base urges.
If you actually have Mastodon grow to include any significant portion of Twitter's userbase then you're going to get much of those same behaviors.
Like, on the "dunking" example: people will just use screenshots. Memorably, Twitter didn't have even retweets well into its life, but the users created a de facto system for doing it. This "pave the cowpaths" feature growth was once a defining aspect of Twitter.
Many of the people who like Twitter like to dunk, they like to read dunks, and they'll do it wherever they go.
Yes, that is one of the main points of the Fediverse. There are people from all sorts of viewpoints there, all the way from Gab to LGBT instances, but my home instance is my "window into the Fediverse", both via instance filtering/silencing/blocking and via organic reach (content that people on your server never interact with won't reach your server), which creates this organic sharding.
In essence, I interact with "a corner of the Fediverse", with a fuzzy/organic boundary, and I don't expect to be able to communicate universally.
Related article: https://wordsmith.social/elilla/a-futuristic-mastodon-introd...
QUOTE FROM ARTICLE (sorry, not sure how to properly quote on HN):
Note how this is all emergent behaviour. It’s not based on blocks, though blocks are important to weed off bad parts of the subgraph. But independently from that, each instance’s view of the fediverse is unique, and without anybody doing anything, it naturally converges towards a community that makes sense to the instance’s members.
In practice this results in a feeling of social cohesion and intimacy that I haven’t felt online since early Livejournal days.
Isn’t that a bubble? How do you avoid an echo chamber?
You can follow people with contrasting values if you want, nothing’s stopping you and you don’t need admin permission to do that. But why would you want to write to people who don’t want to read what you write? It’s no more a bubble than your circle of friends.
(MY NOTE: Also, you can create multiple accounts if you want multiple "windows into the fediverse". Or create your own server. Or join one of the "free speech" ones.)
I get a lot more interaction from a lot more of a diverse crowd here than I did on twitter, because a single shared space like twitter ends up creating a superstar vs. mere mortals dichotomy, and as a mere mortal not posting discourse bait, I never had anybody read my stuff in the first place. Here there’s a small group of people who always interact with my stuff, and I know everybody by name, and I love them all.
But how do I promote my toots to a large audience in a system like this?
That's the neat part, you don’t.
How do I make everything easily discoverable by a large audience?
You don’t.
edit: I think what trips me up is that "features" is used here as a noun but because of it's placement in the sentence I want to read it like a verb
In this case I only needed to read it once. I often feel like "that" and "and" words are dropped in headlines. I suppose it saves some precious bytes. /s
top 10 features from Twitter that you wouldn't believe Mastodon doesnt have
4 Twitter features Mastodon is better for not having
That "4" at the beginning makes all the difference!
Twitter desperately needs a public downvote button with a mechanic similar to HN. Flame bait should be pushed to the bottom of everyone’s feed, not the top.
So, which Slavic country has a majority of antisemites, today? The horrors of WW2 have taught all of us better, one would think (idiots such as yourself being the exception, not the norm; clarification: yes, you have to be an idiot to be antisemitic or racist or any other similar description).
Could you clarify whom you hope that a message should be able to be read by?
- the intended recipient(s)
- parties involved in the intermediate storage system
- middleboxes / parties in the transmission path
- unintended recipients that the intended recipients forwarded the message to accidentally
- unintended recipients that the intended recipients forwarded the message to maliciously
1 is obvious and I think it is bad faith that you are asking.
You can still high-horse Mastodon: just tell them they shouldn't have private messaging at all. That seems like a reasonable take.
I’ve seen “thoughtful” conversation platforms succeed but they tend to be fairly niche and/or heavily moderated. I’m sure the suggestions here would make Twitter something different. But I’m not sure it would be “better”.
If their tweets were “this is a good article on why X is good [link]” that would be a much worse UX for content aggregation.
I have zero interest in discourse (and most people I followed don’t engage in any, nor do I).
Also, last time I tried mastodon (many years ago) there was a lot of focus on the distributed/federated thing. I found it hard to emulate the global timeline of posts from just people I follow. Maybe it was just me not understanding the UI, but I failed to create a Twitter feed like experience back then.
In the case of a static list of activities that won't work.
In my opinion it's a mistake to keep functionality like this, and there is a bug report on their tracker about it but I don't think it gathered enough interest from the devs to make it better.
Kindergarden-style namecalling in the first paragraph. Can we some-when grow out of this?
Of course Age is about your temporal identity and the intersection of it with social structures of discrimination and oppression. This important fact is not yet well-known, but worry not, soon we'll have a field of study and several journals dedicated to it.
People can accrue all sorts of physical changes at different rates (that still fall within a tight distribution). Some people mentally mature faster than others due to experience, biochemical differences, etc. Some people biologically age faster due to genes, stress, injury, illness, or disease. The volume of UV exposure one receives changes your appearance.
Age happens to closely correlate with so many societal concepts we care about: schooling, maturity and behavioral expectations, dating and marriage, career, having children, getting cancer, dying, etc. Age is universally useful and interesting to us.
> So for you Hindus were wrong
Hindus were also right -- in their local context where the word "gender" is defined that particular way. There is no globally right or wrong way to define the word "gender", because "gender" is just a word whose definition is decided by local common consensus, just like any other word in a language.
Different societies have different words for common greetings with slightly different implications on meaning. None of them are right or wrong because these words are simply containers that can hold whatever we want them to hold. And it's up to common consensus to put stuff into those containers.
If the ideology was reversed, say replace Nazi with Antifa, it would be flagged before it got half way down the new posts page.
So in some ways, everything is working as intended. This is what people want to read.
Anyway, people who use a lot of racial slurs and have nazi symbols in their avatars seemed really happy about Musk "restoring free speech". It's a legitimate concern that Twitter will turn into a place that's much more friendly to these people - and thus also much more hostile to anyone to their left.
What's cheap and dishonest about this?
I'm glad you aren't in charge anywhere.
Twitter is(was?) popular because it was not healthy at first place, it was just that it used to be a "safe space" for a certain category of people.
I quote the blogpost:
> Now that a narcissistic billionaire bought Twitter and will likely make it Nazi-friendly (or otherwise ruin it)
These (also narcissistic) people aren't interested in healthy design, they want an exclusive megaphone, while denying their ideological opponent the same thing. They aren't interested in Mastodon or they would have moved to Mastodon a long time ago, when the people they denied the megaphone moved to alternative social media.
I don't think Mastodon servers will become popular if these are the type of characters that populate them.
Since every server can pick which servers they want to federate with certain groups will not connect with each other. This however doesn't prevent you from having two accounts.
That whole argument seems like a badly disguised call for total surveillance.
Well, the line of cancelling someone until they literally cannot attain food has not been crossed... yet. But if say the Nazis were selling organic food to fund their activities, plenty of people would say it's wrong to sell seeds to the Nazis.
I'm not saying that I support this, just that this is what I see the "duty to cancel" arguments implying under these circumstances.
On the original point - it seems to me that the whole cancel culture is just an attempt by a vocal minority to bypass democratic system. Centuries of lawmaking have made some things legal and others not, walking very thin lines between good and bad decisions in order to maintain the balance between totalitarism and lawlessness - and suddenly a mob of random internet dwellers think they can get their way by throwing tantrums and bend the rules as they wish.
I'm annoyed at the very efficiency with which mob manages to cancel whoever does anything remotely "unacceptable" by their unwritten, "come on dude we all know that", rules... It seems like the futute is likely to be lead by loud demagogues skilled at tapping into the mob rage of the society and cleverly weaponizing it against their political enemies. Like always.
If you went to high school in the US, you probably read “The Scarlet Letter”. That’s about someone getting canceled, too.
Shame for behaviors frowned upon by your community has been with us forever. Even chimps throw bad actors out of the group.
If you choose an instance with rules that you agree to follow, you're not likely to be blocked in the first place. But if your Mastodon account is blocked on an instance, it's easy to make a new one on a different instance. There are many other instances to choose from and you can regain your social graph by following everyone again.
This is absolutely the argument.
It seems that for some people, the ability to control your own environment is not enough - they want the authority to control everyone else's environment, to make it impossible for people they disagree with to exist.
Of course, it always starts with Nazis, because Nazis are universally hated and not arguing against Nazis will get you labeled as one very quick. But in order to be able to make it impossible for one group of people to exist, you must have the ability to make it impossible for any group of people to exist. And that's power I would not trust anyone with.
Technically, this is federation working as intended, but it's not as diverse and inclusive as it advertises - on the contrary, it's more like a HOA that has a right to ban condo owners from talking to each other.
It's a nice place to be when you're not into politicking, but then so is Twitter, so it's not that big of a win. A more compelling argument for Mastodon is that it's community-funded, so it's not out to sell your eyeballs.
Instantly lost credibility for me