Mastodon Is Awesome
blog.djnavarro.net
blog.djnavarro.net
Now everything depends on how much activity remains once the current dust settles.
Will Mastodon overtake Twitter? I still doubt it, but honestly I really can't imagine why I would care about that as long as Mastodon manages to establish, nurture, and retain a healthy userbase. Which is all I would need to keep using it.
There are two main problems needs to be solved.
- Identity ( it shouldn't be tied to a single server ) - Federating with selective servers ( more importantly "not federating" with some servers )
Only solution now is to keep your own server ( and federate with other servers that interests you ) but I don't think it is scalable.
The more I use social media in its various forms, the more I think that for most people this would be feature. As much as people claim to want to be shown diverse viewpoints, what really makes them happy is constant confirmation of their own existing views. So for most (not all) people, this effect will eventually put them into an echo chamber like environment cause that's where they feel most comfortable.
Therefore, platforms that cater to this tendency will be more successful than ones that don't (provided they hit critical mass, which is a pre-requirement, otherwise there is not enough content/interactions one way or another).
It's not so much that it's a problem so much as that it makes it a poor choice for a Twitter replacement. Is Statusnet (a la identi.ca) still a thing?
https://social.network.europa.eu/public
Copied and pasted the first handle I could find. It was cumbersome since it is also a link so long pressing on it initiates link actions, I have to start in a location elsewhere and manually narrow down the selection afterwards.
But oh, this is a server with many users, how do I follow them all? Copy paste all the handles by hand?
These are the kinds of UX use cases that need to be solved at a bare minimum.
I can't help but wonder why people who supposedly want to protect democracy are fleeing Twitter because it was taken over by someone who wants to bring back freedom of speech.
Mastodon seems to make sense for these people though. Breaking up the service into different moderated servers makes it more difficult to regulate with pesky laws like the First Amendment. If one server gets too much freedom, users can easily flee to another warm, fuzzy, safe server where opposing views are censored as "conspiracy theories".
Taken over by someone who wants freedom of his own speech, not yours.
Mastodon isn't as simple as the model he imagines (simple click-boxes to select what kind of messages you want) but it does give you moderation (on your local instance) while still letting you avoid censorship (by moving instances if necessary).
Unfortunately, Mastodon rather than doing that, gives complete control to the server administrator to "moderate" their instance. The result is that you end up having isolated echo-chambers, with each server blocking all other servers that don't agree with their viewpoint.
You can also see censorship as about being able to control what people will be able to say to you. The fediverse is not at all resistant to that.
That is, nobody can stop you from setting up your own instance, or write your own ActivityPub implementation, or find one that tolerates whatever thing you want to say.
But we can band together and prevent you from making us party to your conversations against our will, and we can prevent you from being part of our conversations against our will.
The structure of the fediverse supports that by letting groups pick instances whose moderation fits what they want, and different groups with different moderation requirements or even contradictory moderation requirements can co-exist without all being beholden to the vagaries of policies set by a third party we have no control over.
This is Robber's Cave experiment [1] all over again: A society that does no longer talk with each other and is segregated (e.g. along political lines) will at first become hostile between different factions within it, and eventually break.
Filter bubbles ultimately destroy civil society and democracy.
If anything, having means by which communities can separate partially without needing to fully isolate (e.g. if you don't like Twitter's moderation policies your choice is to cut yourself off from Twitter; if you don't like fediverse instance X's moderation policy, you can pick from several thousand other instances with varying degrees of concordance with or opposition to X's moderation policies, most of which can still federate with X) gives an opportunity to reduce those bubbles.
Talking to someone with another viewpoint, even if that viewpoint is a stupid or hateful one, does not mean endorsing. This is not about "fair and balanced", it is about communication and providing ideas outside of their peer group. Now, if you decide to just block flat earthers individually, or as a group (even for non-flat-earth-related communication), you will just create a filter bubble for them in which they can strengthen their now-unchallenged beliefs in.
There really are flat-earthers out there who are easily persuaded by just walking them through an ancient math problem. I've seen it. It's the same way someone who has really bad opinions on marginalized people they've never actually encountered can quickly change their tune by meeting the subject of their ignorance. They're not the ones who collect on the instances that feed off deep, unmovable ignorance.
How would you know, given that those other instances are, you know, blocked?
> who really are curious
Trying to guide the neutral ones into your camp is not a discourse - it's campaigning. In a perfect world we can disagree on topics, and everyone leaves the interaction still disagreeing, but maybe just understand the train of thought of the opposing side.
> with a skim of their timeline.
I've stopped doing that, because all too often, what I find is easily taken out of context and will make people look too "nice", or too "bad". And creating a complete dossier on everyone I interact with online is just too time-intensive.
> They're not the ones who collect on the instances that feed off deep, unmovable ignorance.
Funny how all the blocked ones always seem to be the undesirables, the ignorant, the weird, the stupid, the evil, the ugly, the disease-bearers, isn't it? Of course, wherever we are, the sun shines, everyone is reasonable and happy and friendly to each other. Of course, more often than not, that's not the case. We like to paint the other side as demonic caricatures, because it helps with in-group cohesion.
I don't think guilt by association is a concept that we should keep reviving again and again and again... especially since it appears to me - after having gone through several Mastodon instances - that there are no "normal people instances", that any instance is either radically "free-speech", or it is radically "safe-space".
https://fosstodon.org/about/more#rules
It's also selective about which other servers it will interoperate with and how much:
First he whined about advertisers leaving. Then he threatened to publicly shame them. Then he asked for feedback, got some constructive feedback from some huge ad exec, and promptly blocked him.
He appears to have messed with AOC's account because he didn't like her arguing with him.
He already seems to be reversing on his free speech ideals and is instituting permanent bans that he said he was opposed to.
I don't know what's up with him, but it's hardly a shining example of reputation management that's for sure.
And it's been what, a week?
See my other comment in this thread for my story.
To be fair, Twitter offers essentially the same experience to me. Although you can see a glimpse of reason from time to time in between, because there are some experts on it, it's mostly about vitriol and passive aggressive trolling. I've heard you can adopt it by blocking and subscribing strategically but this never worked for me in the three months I've tried it. I've deactivated my Twitter account, too.
They are generally blocked by most mainstream instances, but enough are open so that you can't still follow a majority of the mainstream content from these instances.
However, when you are on them, the content is very much like how you describe it. That's why I'm curious as to whether you (possibly accidentally) joined the one if those. If you you di, and you're not actively looking for such content, the experience can be quite terrible.
That's the problem with all decentralized and/or forked products.
"Oh, you're using the wrong Linux distro, that one sucks."
"You're on the wrong WoW server, that one sucks."
The problem (at least as far as Mastodon goes) is managing identity between instances. Also, clients still seem to be stuck at the "written by programmers for programmers" state of design, so UX isn't up to par to what a normal user might expect much of the time. The decentralized, federated nature of Mastodon is a big deal to programmers and people who care about censorship resistance/software freedom, etc, but all of that should be completely transparent to the end user. It should be as easy to find, join and leave instances - with a single, common identity - as it is to find and join subreddits.
This sounds like an absolutely horrible experience, I'm so sorry to hear this.
At the same time, aside from the open source programming, which is welcome, I have not ever seen any of the other things you mentioned, but I also took the time to look for a more "quiet", dataviz-oriented server myself. My feed is more people I explicitly follow than local timeline, which makes it a much more curated experience.
Can I ask you what kind of interests you were searching for when deciding on an instance? Because my hunch is that you basically had to deal with a "search engine" kind of problem, but for fediverse instances. I wouldn't be surprised if programming, anime and manga has a ton of "4chan-esque" places that drown out the more quiet "safe spaces" unless you take some time to dig deeper before settling down somewhere.
Seems like a lot of tech savvy folks are checking it out.