Comment by MichaelZuo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MichaelZuo | Hacker News Reader

It's difficult to see the value in spending time on Mastodon, compared to other services.

For example, just checking joinmastodon.org gives the following top 10 recommended options:

" GENERAL INVITE ONLY

snabelen.no Ein norsk tenar for den desentraliserte sosiale media platformen Mastodon Get on waitlist 1.8K

GENERAL INVITE ONLY

mastodontti.fi Tämä on suomenkielinen Mastodon-instanssi. Julkisten päivitysten tulisi olla suomeksi, mutta käyttäjät voivat olla mistä vain. Oikeakielisyys ei ole tärkeää, joten tuuttaile vapaasti, vaikka olisitkin vasta oppimassa suomea. Get on waitlist 2.8K

GENERAL

mastodon.iriseden.eu Instance Mastodon hébergée en France chez OVH et maintenu par @iriseden Join server 2.4K

GENERAL INVITE ONLY

sociale.network Sociale.network è una iniziativa dell'associazione culturale altrinformazione.net e dell'associazione peacelink.it Get on waitlist 2.4K

GENERAL

pouet.chapril.org Chapril, membre du collectif CHATONS, un projet de l'April. Join server 1.4K

GENERAL INVITE ONLY

mast.dragon-fly.club 这里是属于每一个人与众不同的岛屿，然而每座岛屿间却又紧密相连。来建设专属于你的岛屿吧！在这里找到一个不一样的自己。无论世界多么纷纷扰扰，在这里，总会有你所向往的一片宁静…… Get on waitlist 2.5K

GENERAL INVITE ONLY

mastodon.zaclys.com Bienvenue sur l'instance libre et française de Mastodon ! proposée par Zaclys.com Get on waitlist 16K

GENERAL

mastodon.bida.im Un'istanza mastodon antifascista prevalentemente italofona con base a Bologna Join server 880

GENERAL INVITE ONLY

tooot.im תוות.ים הוא שרת מסטודון הפונה לקהל דוברי העברית. Get on waitlist 3.4K

GENERAL INVITE ONLY

masto.nobigtech.es Instancia de Mastodon principalmente en español/castellano que se aloja en Bilbao, Pais Vasco. Get on waitlist 2.6K

"

Which pretty much sound like a list of Discord or IRC servers except the non-english ones are not filtered out.

So it's a bit weird why it's advertised as a Twitter replacement at all. Clearly competition will balkanize everything into thousands of mostly invite-only niche servers.

Maybe it makes more sense as an IRC or Discord replacement?

Different between Mastodon and the other platforms you linked is that Mastodon facilitates communication between the various instances (if they agree to that). So you can join instance X and still communicate with people on instance Y, and it's easy for the administrators to set that up. It's possible with IRC/Discord as well but it's hacky and requires "bridges" while that functionality is "native" in Mastodon.

Right but the users on discord can chat with eachother just fine, while in case of Mastodon if 2 server admins don't like eachother no dice ? Or I'm understanding how it works wrong ?

It seems counter-intuitive to moderate based on "which server user is from" too.

It makes sense to moderate email based on what server it's from. Alice@spammer.com wants to sell me a mortgage and bob@spammer.com wants to sell me "natural male enhancement". I don't want to hear from anyone @spammer.com because that server permits or exists for the purpose of sending spam.

There are Mastodon servers that exist for things that most people don't want to interact with, such as racist hate speech, as well as servers that are essentially unmoderated. It makes sense for a server with a mainstream audience to block those.

> It seems counter-intuitive to moderate based on “which server user is from” too

it sounds like the exact answer to me.

just like massive chunks of our infrastructure blacklists entire domains because their admins are overly friendly to ddos, spam, illegal porn, etc… mastodon simply makes it easy to do the same thing.

this isn’t new, our entire internet runs on this principle.

the difference between centralized social like twitter/facebook and this is, the choice is ours to make. if we don’t like how a server is run, move or spin up our own. we curate it, not advertisers, not executive boards, not faceless shareholders, etc…

with decentralized, freedom of speech and more importantly, freedom of association is back in our hands again.

As someone with seven Mastodon accounts. I know from experience that it's so easy to choose the wrong node and find out it's not being federated with on other Mastodon nodes. Worst part is even when you run your own Mastodon node, there are some nodes that operate instead in a whitelist mode, so you still lose out.

Federation really does seem more and more to be like a major shortcoming vs. its material benefits.

> So it's a bit weird why it's advertised as a Twitter replacement at all. Clearly competition will balkanize everything into thousands of mostly invite-only niche servers.

That doesn't _really_ matter, though; Mastodon sites largely interconnect. I'm on mastodon.social because I am very lazy; most of the people I follow are on other, more specialised sites.

> That doesn't _really_ matter, though; Mastodon sites largely interconnect. I'm on mastodon.social because I am very lazy

Mastodon is a mess. Pawoo.net is the LARGEST userbase Mastodon node, professionally ran by a company and is one of the few that can scale appropriately to demand. You'll find that mastodon.social has limited its federation abilities with it.

Your choice of Mastodon nodes matter.

So it's not even decentralized but centralized into multiple competing blocs?

That just sounds like the worst of both worlds.

From my personal experience in using Mastodon, the node operators basically have different ideas about what is acceptable or not and black/white list different nodes based on these ideas rather than leaving it up to the user to decide who they want to see posts from.

Unfortunately, a lot of this is really unclear when you're first trying to dip your toes into the fediverse and it gets really confusing in some threads when you're missing some of the messages.

I think the worst part is that they've previously advertised you have control of your data. But I can tell you that if you accidentally post something on Twitter and want to delete it, it's trivial, it's gone. On Mastodon, tough, it's been federated and now your deleted message lives on across multiple nodes and you can't delete it -- not out of maliciousness, but because of oversight in the federation protocol design.

The reason I bring the above up is, again, you can miss a lot of bits of conversations entirely dependent on which node you are because some messages are now deleted on the origin node, but not the nodes that has other people replying on.

"Let the instances choose their own moderation" that people think is a great feature seems to have serious downsides like you're describing. Before on Twitter you knew, generally speaking, what was allowed on Twitter and what wasn't. Now you have not just a whole panoply of different moderation standards, but instances making decisions on if what other people's moderation policies are acceptable to them, which ads a whole level of indirection an opaqueness to users. And forget about any ability to try to appeal...

Folks on pawoo.net regularly post lolicon, so, yeah. Depending on your interpretation of your local laws, you might pretty much be obligated to defederate from that sort of thing.

I think focusing on what has the biggest userbase or can give you the most reach is kind of missing the point with regard to the Fediverse. Without investors or stock prices or the need to sell ads, a lot of the motivation behind that sort of thinking evaporates. If you're looking at Mastodon and thinking "this is worthless, I can't build my brand with this," good, you're right, it's built that way on purpose.

> Folks on pawoo.net regularly post lolicon

Which isn't that obvious that there is a problem as a new user. People are posting all kinds of trash on Twitter equally, you don't expect to find the entire node is blocked because some users are posting things some others disagree with.

> Depending on your interpretation of your local laws, you might pretty much be obligated to defederate from that sort of thing.

Not that I'm defending this, but because you mentioned it; I looked it up. Mastodon.social isn't obliged because it's located in Germany and so is Eugen; so this reasoning doesn't apply. Block the problem users, not the entire instance.

> I think focusing on what has the biggest userbase or can give you the most reach is kind of missing the point with regard to the Fediverse.

I looked for which node was ran with reliability and scaling built in, because I didn't want to be on a node that is ran by some hobbyist that is just going to give up one day, I also don't want to be on a server that falls over because scaling problems. Pawoo was top of the list.

This was further validated when my second account on another node disappeared one day because the owner decided they didn't want to continue running their node anymore. And further validated on other nodes where the server became so slow it was practically unusable, the server owner didn't really have any idea how to deal with the userbase.

I tried running Mastodon myself, but quickly found it awful to keep updated; at the time (I don't know if it still does), it wasn't very clean to update and was fairly manual. I eventually switched to GNU Social with the Qwitter addon because it was easier to maintain and update, only for Mastodon to decide to drop support for the federating protocol it was using one day.

You're absolutely right though, I don't get the key point of the fediverse currently.

> Without investors or stock prices or the need to sell ads, a lot of the motivation behind that sort of thinking evaporates.

If we take your logic to its ultimate conclusion, you're saying that without investors or stock prices or the need to sell ads, the motivation behind making a good and sane experience evaporates, considering the state it's been in for years. I honestly wouldn't try to disparage open source community projects like that to be honest.

> If you're looking at Mastodon and thinking "this is worthless, I can't build my brand with this," good, you're right, it's built that way on purpose.

I don't care about stock, brands. I'm looking at Mastodon and thinking that it's got serious communication, usability, data and privacy issues. It has so many basic things fundamentally broken. On Twitter, if you delete a post, it's gone. On Mastodon, delete a post, well, it's deleted on your node. But the rest of the fediverse has replicated it and it's not deleted. The other nodes aren't even keeping your data maliciously, it's just poorly designed and the fact it still won't tell you that "deleting" messages doesn't really "delete" them is plain vindinctive at this point after it has been raised as an issue repeatedly.

> People are posting all kinds of trash on Twitter equally, you don't expect to find the entire node is blocked because some users are posting things some others disagree with.

No, but I do expect the owner of the site to moderate its content. Pawoo doesn't care to; as a result, many people care not to federate with them. That's fine. You can still use Pawoo if you want to, or a server that federates with it, or set up your own and federate with them.

> Block the problem users, not the entire instance.

If it's a recurring problem that the owners of the instance won't do anything about, it's a lot less work to just block the entire instance.

> I looked for which node was ran with reliability and scaling built in, because I didn't want to be on a node that is ran by some hobbyist that is just going to give up one day, I also don't want to be on a server that falls over because scaling problems.

You're thinking like you're a customer, but on the Fediverse you're generally more like a houseguest.

> I tried running Mastodon myself, but quickly found it awful to keep updated

You've got a fair point there; I'm not sure why they can't distribute a container image with the assets pre-built instead of making you build your own. It's been trouble-free for me since I got it up and running, for what it's worth.

Lots of other things speak ActivityPub, though. If you're looking for something as simple as possible, you might like https://microblog.pub/

> I eventually switched to GNU Social with the Qwitter addon because it was easier to maintain and update, only for Mastodon to decide to drop support for the federating protocol it was using one day.

I haven't used it, but for what it's worth, the documentation for GNU Social seems to indicate that it supports ActivityPub these days. OStatus never made it past the draft stage, and GNU Social seems to be the last project hanging on to it.

> If we take your logic to its ultimate conclusion, you're saying that without investors or stock prices or the need to sell ads, the motivation behind making a good and sane experience evaporates, considering the state it's been in for years.

People mostly run instances for free, for fun, for their friends. The motivation is to have fun hanging out with friends on the internet. For this purpose, it seems to be pretty good at its job to me, and gets better at it with every version. The lack of financial incentive does mean there's no drive to capture more eyeballs, though, which means there's no drive to cater to folks that would rather have something exactly like Twitter.

> I honestly wouldn't try to disparage open source community projects like that to be honest.

I'm not sure what words you're trying to put in my mouth here, but that sentence certainly doesn't give me impression that you're trying to have a good-faith discussion.

> It has so many basic things fundamentally broken. On Twitter, if you delete a post, it's gone. On Mastodon, delete a post, well, it's deleted on your node. But the rest of the fediverse has replicated it and it's not deleted.

Yes, email works this way as well. It is an unavoidable consequence of federation. ActivityPub does have a "Delete" activity, but other servers are under no obligation to honor it. Regardless of what protocol is in use, once you've sent data to someone else's server, you're not going to be able to delete it without that server's cooperation.

This is very confusing. Why do they largely interconnect? (Why do they connect at all / why don't they always connect?) What's the point of multiple sites if they connect to each other?

Think of it like email servers. My emails go through mine, and yours go through yours, but if I know your address I can still send you a message.

It doesn't matter that I'm on Gmail and you're on Protonmail. Just like it doesn't matter that I'm on ruby.social and you're on mastodon.online.

It's email servers for social posts.

What about ones that don't interconnect? Is that a thing? Do users know where they should go in order to be connected to everyone?

With a mobile app that picks a 'server' for you without interaction, no problem.

With a browser where you see an address and it's not what you expect - like 'twitter.com' is what people expect - how does a user know if they're going the right way?

There are a few that don't interconnect at all (I think Parler or Gab or one of those is an unfederated Mastodon service, all alone in the world), but it would be more common for some of them to block others.

The operators can choose who to work with and can ban other servers as well as just other users. Many do this because the other server is too right wing, too left wing, content illegal in some jurisdictions (the above mentioned pawoo is a Japanese server involved in the Japanese anime scene and therefore has lolicon on it), etc.

Think of it like Twitter if the use of shared blocklists was standard rather than niche behaviour.

You're forgetting that Mastodon runs on ActivityPub, which means that the point is to divide users into different servers. For example, when everyone joined mastodon.social, the balance tipped and a lot of users lost access. Concentrating users into a single instance is not what's supposed to happen.

Ideally, you wouldn't want to go through joinmastodon.org and join the highest ranking server since that would centralize the whole protocol. It's favorable for everyone using the service that you join invite-only niche servers or self host.

So if it serves a different use case then Twitter, why is it even advertised, or talked about, as a replacement?

Because it’s a microblogging platform.

Does a platform of mostly invite only communities count as microblogging?

Is Facebook a microblogging platform too?

I would describe Facebook's core post/newsfeed feature as a microblogging platform.

Servers bring invite only is like when Hey was invite only. It doesn’t mean you can only talk to other Hey users it just means being hosted by them is exclusive. The only thing you miss out on is the feed of what people on your server are posting -- maybe that's not a problem or maybe that's the raison d'être.

You can use a service; not all of them are invite only, or you can setup your own blog software. Federation is pretty close to RSS. Yes it's trying to be microblogging.

It's not very different. The hardest thing to grasp is the decentralization.

According to another user it's not even decentralized, but centralized into competing blocs.

How so? Every instance is not independent, they all communicate with each other. In practice, it's like everyone (Misskey, Pleroma, Mastodon) is on the same platform, except that some users have an address after their handle.

There's apparently a few very popular instances that are not federated at all with any of the other popular instances.

It's not "advertised" as a replacement for Twitter; the word "Twitter" does not appear on the Mastodon homepage. It's talked about because at the moment there aren't many similar alternatives.

Mastodon looks like Twitter, functions like Twitter, apes Twitter's features such as using @username, and even calls its posts "Toots." You really can't honestly argue that Mastodon isn't trying to be Twitter.

Look, I get it - it's not Twitter therefore it's a failure. And some people are ok with that, I really don't get why the need to campaign against Fediverse, it isn't killing anybody's dog.

I never said Mastodon was a failure because its not Twitter. I'm somewhat skeptical but I think the jury is still out on Mastodon. There is a lot of potential there. Part of me thinks the Fediverse is a great idea but it causes more problems than the value you get from it.

using pieces that work well and that users enjoy doesn’t preclude you from also doing other things differently.

just because hacker news has usernames, comments, and voting, that doesn’t mean it’s “trying to be reddit”

there are countless little things one can change that make it an entirely different experience even if some features are similar.

just like hackernews to reddit, the experience i’ve had on mastodon has been a noticeable improvement over twitter. yes, there are comments and voting in hackernews, but the experience is noticeably different—and better—than reddit.

This isn't "shares some features", this is directly copies the look and functionality of Twitter. It may have some differences, but so much is the same you can't argue that isn't what they were going for.

it’s not “advertised” as a twitter _clone_, it’s just being talked about as an alternative.

whether or not it fits what people are looking for, it’s being compared to twitter because it’s been pretty clear for a few years, even prior to the elon mess, twitter users really want to move somewhere else, they just haven’t settled yet on where.

this is all reminiscent of discussions around facebook a few years ago, it was clear at the time it was on its way out, people just hadn’t settled on where to go at the time. most just shifted their time to twitter or insta and the kids all just went to tiktok.

twitter will be the same way. if i had to guess it will be similar to facebooks boomerish crowd, twitter will have its user base who refuses to move on—they’ll be shaking their fists at the “cancel culture virtue signal woke woke” sky and the rest of the internet will just continue on somewhere else.

I'd be interested to see what might happen if quality daily/weekly news publications, science journals, academic institutions, professional bodies (representing educators, medics, dentists, climate scientists, mathematicians etc) were to set up and run Mastodon instances. Seems like a possible way to encourage a return to the old-school newsgroup discussion communities; to bring focus and avoid the chaff clogging up the centralised megaplatforms.

As for one example, a fairly well known body has set up an official Mastodon server half a year ago:

https://social.network.europa.eu

"EU Voice is the official ActivityPub microblogging platform of the EU institutions, bodies and agencies (EUIs). Together with EU Video, it is part of an alternative social media pilot program proposed, and provided by the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS). The pilot program contributes to the European Union’s strategy for data and digital sovereignty that aims to foster Europe’s independence in the digital world.

EU Voice provides EUIs with privacy-friendly microblogging accounts that they typically use for the purposes of press and public relations activities."

A list of the official accounts present there: https://social.network.europa.eu/explore

A stream of recent activity from all the accounts on the instance: https://social.network.europa.eu/public

my guess is this will absolutely happen over time.

whatever forms will be similar to libera being the logical irc network for open source projects channels. if you’re a science org, you’ll just naturally join $science_instance.

it’s still early in the process but i’m stoked to watch it all unfold. it really feels like we’re watching in real time what people mean when they explain how the internet was prior to everything being centralized behind walled gardens and google.

Just a note -- your URL is wrong and redirects to a site blocked (entirely) by my adblocker.

The right domain is dot ORG, not COM:

joinmastodon.org

Thanks, updated it.

Who is advertising it as a twitter replacement? Maybe some twitter users are desperate for that, but that's not how I have seen it proposed in the past. It's a microblogging social network, yes. But explicitly federated.

In any case, there's no single "Mastodon" entity that does any advertising.

It's just the WWW.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com