Exploring Mastodon
martinfowler.com
martinfowler.com
With Lemmy communities too. It seems that you can subscribe to a community on a given instance, but there is no such thing as cross-instance communities.
I found this disappointing because it means that for there to be a critical mass of content in a particular community so that it gains in popularity, then that particular community in that particular instance has to become popular on its own, instead of all instances contributing to one big community. Add to this that the default view is "local communities" and you've guaranteed you'll never build something as popular as reddit, sadly. Example, someone from mylemmy.eg cannot post together with someone from hislemmy.com in one big Programming forum. Instead they both have to agree to post in Programming@commonlemmy.net and not Programming@worselemmy.org which, imho, is unlikely to be a successful as there being one centralized place where everyone knows to post. If they'd just remove the domain names and pool everything I think it would have a lot more chance of success.
I haven't used Mastadon but I could see this being a positive if you replace "home instance" with "local community" or "interest group foo".
The truth is that you only need to find a small group of people with similar interests. You don't need access to the entire world.
- Discord's dominant model feels like IRC++ to me. Emphasis largely seems to be on real-time conversations. - Reddit is like a slew of mini-Slashdots, where communities have a discussion prompt like a news story, a question, or something and then commentary. - Mastodon is micro-blogging. You post a status update, commentary or question, and people can react and/or reshare. Y
Discord and Reddit are topic-based. Mastodon is more about following people than topics, though you can organize Mastodon instances by topic / domain / whatever.
Anyway... Mastodon feels more like Twitter, albeit a vision of a better Twitter (for certain values of "better") circa 2017. Longer content, RSS feeds, and federation + the micro blog format.
I'm in a different stage of life so I can't comment on if Discord or Reddit solve that use case. I think Discord comes closest.
The reason being is because individuals have boundaries!
Boundaries are a feature humans demand, not a design flaw.
- Home Timeline: The people you follow
- Local Timeline: The people on your instance
- Fed Timeline: The people on the fediverse
You take your pick. Be as siloed as you want. On the fed timeline, block people and instances, or just let the unfiltered hive mind flow over you.
When you want something quieter, go to the local or home timelines.
The Federated timeline is best described as "all content from other instances by profiles followed by accounts on your own instance".
If you're running, say, a single-user instance, the "Federated" and "Home" timelines will be identical.
If you're on a large instance, the Federated timeline will be fairly comprehensive (and tends to clock along quite quickly). If you're on a smaller instance, the timeline will generally be far smaller. And of course, if your instance restricts (through any of various levels of blocking) remote instances or accounts, the Federated timeline will lack those as well.
Put another way: there's no such thing as a "universal" Fediverse feed, at least not without some very heavy-handed (and widely discourage) automated following.
Are there relay instances / pointers on how that works?
As far as I understand it (and with the caveat I've only recently started digging into the protocols) the general concept is that ActivityPub basically has inboxes you post to, and outboxes containing the public feed, which you can follow (asking them to post you stuff), so a relay just needs an outbox that contains the full public feed of an instance, and a shared inbox that accepts things that doesn't have a single recipients. Now all you need is a message pump that takes things posted to its inbox and passes it on to all the subscribers of the relay.
And yeah, that's ... very roughly ... my understanding.
Though a relay would have multiple instance's feeds, ideally.
One question I have is whether or not larger instances might serve as gating relays for smaller ones. Sort of a hub-and-spoke / leafnode (w/ reference to the Usenet utility intentional) concept.
Reading now ...
And yes, relays do of course serve multiple instances.
I find the "instances wanting to relay subscribe to the service" aspect interesting, and intelligent.
There's the option of doing more with relays, such as ones offered filtered subsets out.
Though relays for tracking hashtags and finding members of smaller instances should be useful.
Note, though, that federation as implemented by the fediverse means that I post content on my instance, and you post content to your instance, and both are "tagged" with a central identifier. It is definitely possible to get all content from all instances in one place.
There are interesting ways towards decentralized moderation: basically, anyone post anything, moderators "pick" what they deem correct, and you as a user "pick" moderators. When you feel a moderator isn't doing a correct job, you switch the set of moderators. But there still is an element of centralization in that moderators decide what is good and what is bad. And if the history of computing taught us one thing, it's that it is impossibly hard to migrate people away from default settings.
Totally agree. The whole server focus is not user friendly or intuitive.
As an example I finally found someone to follow and decided to look at the people rhey were following, but it would only show me people from that server.
The complete lack of discoverability is jarring. Really not sure Mastodon is ready for mass market.
It's amazing to see how much trouble they're having... "Do I have to create a log in on every Mastodon?" ("No, and it's pretty much impossible"), "Can I follow someone on another server?" ("Yes, but it's incredibly hard -- try to follow them on whatever server you're on, maybe someone else is following them already in which case you'll be able to, otherwise here are directions that sometimes work") kind of things.
It's just not ready for prime-time, even (IMHO) among nerds, but wow, are normal folks having a hard time.
Similarly, local-to-your-instance links to a specific toot, vs. globally-accessible / canonical toot URLs.
Both can be resolved through the Search dialogue on Mastodon, but it took me a while to work that out myself.
Fully-transparent blocking tends to play to the interests of griefers, abusers, and trolls.
For many instances, blocks are listed on the /about/more page of the instance. Mind that you'd also have to check to see if the remote instance is blocking your own.
But people understand how federation works. They see it happen everyday with e-mail. You just need to tell them it works like that and they'll get it.
The number of people I had to teach about the "@" symbol alone. And then a few years later the pain was gone. Enough people had learned that most people asked their friends and family rather than need tech support.
The tipping point comes quicker than people expect. E.g. many of the discussions on Mastodon on Twitter is already full of neophytes who had never heard about federation a week ago who are now explaining it to others.
I have no illusion this wave here and now will be the watershed for Mastodon, even with 10x-20x as many daily signups as a couple of weeks ago (currently the hourly signups are above the daily signups two weeks ago), but every wave makes the next one easier.
Phone numbers with area codes are still a thing?
@ted@funkychips.com shouldn't be too hard to wrap their head around.
Honestly which instance is hard because instances can be small. Which means that an instance runner can get petty with federation. One instance I looked at clearly had the owner in some sort of drama with the owner of another instance.
Sure while it may be possible to avoid now, imagine that drama had happened after I'd been on the instance for a year. I wouldn't likely know until I suddenly stopped seeing my friends posts in my feed. Or what if my previous one had shut down with no warning instead of giving me months to migrate. Should a normal person have to back up their data weekly from the site in case it's owner does something stupid?
In reality Federation is cool and all but most people are going to end up on Mastadon.social
This is "just" extending that concept to @username@twitter.com, @username@facebook.com, whatever. This user on this site, same as this email address on this domain.
Non-technical users have never understood these things. They browse the web by accident and sending e-mail is incomprehensible magic. Most people don't care at all how such things work, they only care when they don't work.
There are shades of gray between the people who understand the technical definition of federation, and people who, as you put it "browse the web by accident". The people who are looking for an alternative right now understand e-mail well enough (from an end-user perspective) to make the comparison.
If we ever get to the point where enough people use mastodon that the latter category would also be interested in participating in it, it would be so ubiquitous that they would ask someone with a minimum of understanding to et it up for them. Just the way it works now with other things.
Every point of friction you add for a user of a new thing is a reason for them to abandon it. Even if Mastodon isn't trying to necessarily replace Twitter, catering only to the most dedicated users is not a way to grow a healthy community.
Here's a story about an engineering professor lamenting that their first-year students do not understand folder structures, because they have been using Google Docs for a decade, and don't use use anything besides the search bar.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
That's not to say they're obsolete but it's not necessary for whole classes of users to use and understand them.
I would posit that it's easier to understand things like objects, arrays and API endpoints if you have that basic familiarity with folders.
In many cases hierarchies are just ceremony or boilerplate that slow down a user. Say a note taking application. It can store the actual notes in a database that can sync between machines and the web. Using search to find notes, especially if it supports some sort of inline tagging like hashtags, is faster for the user than trying to come up with some folder hierarchy. Hierarchies also are inconvenient when documents straddle multiple categories. Grouping by tags let a note/document exist in multiple categories without reorganizing everything.
Thirty years ago the only "view" into storage was directories and files. File systems were relatively sparse in terms of metadata support. Directory hierarchies were the only tool for organization. Information Retrieval systems were all about adding an over the top database and document indexing system on shitty sparse file systems.
Today a lot of those Information Retrieval concepts are rolled into online storage systems (Google Docs etc). So hierarchies aren't the primary organization unit since they're not the only mechanism the backing store has for organization.
I can't communicate with anyone whose address I don't already know. There's no real "discoverability." Many people have multiple email addresses, and I don't know whether I'm communicating with the correct one, or even whether more exist that I don't know about. If an email address stops working, it just... stops working. Emails bounce back (if I'm lucky!) with no easy or standard way to say why, or what address to use instead. I could go on.
Email is great for point-to-point communication, modulo some of the issues listed above, but that's a very limited use case, not at all comparable to most social media. It's a poor replacement for Twitter, for example.
Unlike Twitter, ActivityPub sites generally don't beat you over the head with follow recommendations. The goal is not to get you mentally addicted to spending hours a day on Social Media.
A Google search is probably the most common discovery mechanism. Once people start putting their Mastodon addresses on their web pages, it will start getting easier.
The fediverse is young. Don't expect a finished product when there has been so few man-hours and so little funidng put into it.
If you search for Twitter2, the fediverse is not it.
If either of those things exist for mastodon, I'm not seeing them, and half the people on here are saying, "this isn't twitter go away" while the other half is raving about how exciting it is to be the recipient of "#twittermigration"
Which is all very cute, but it does tend to give commenters whiplash, not knowing whether the responses they're going to get are going to be from one side or the other, or both!
Both replies absolutely coexist because of something simple: the fediverse is not Twitter. If you're looking for Twitter2, that's not it. If you're looking to build the fediverse by being a member and contributing to the discussion. You're going in a different universe, learn the rules :)
These all sound like features to me. If I want you to contact me, I will give you my e-mail address. Otherwise, leave me alone.
This isn't very discoverable at all, though. Hitting the follow button is worse and doesn't tell you the easy way.
I think you misunderstood what I wrote. The problem is the Mastodon software is incredibly hard to use, and flaky.
This has nothing to do with "understanding federation"!
In fact, a few people have said, "Someone said it was just like email, but wow, it's not at all like email!".
That explanation does not work for non-nerds. At all. It does not help.
Even Hotmail was able to sign up millions of users with 1996 levels of tech-savviness.
It's only 'like email' if the people you're talking to have set up their own IMAP and POP servers.
The amount of conceptual learning needed to understand the federation model is roughly similar to a complicated strategy game that needs a 15-minute tutorial. A motivated child can work it out; a stressed and distracted thirty-something will try to avoid it, or maybe mock it so as not to normalize its use.
I totally think it's possible to normalize federation since there are tons of conceptually difficult systems in daily life. Some of the burden of that rests on UX and onboarding. But far more of it is a case of, are people desperate enough to bother?
Confused about this. In my experience it's always just been a matter of adding
@personiwannafollow@otherinstance.com
Is this not always so simple?
You definitely can't click that handle and add follow them, I could put https://cooldude.example.com/@cooldude and you could click to their profile on their instance, but there would be no way to follow them directly from there on your mastodon.social (or whatever) account, you have to go to your instance and type/paste in their handle and then click follow.
Edit: There is a remote-follow workflow that involves clicking a link and entering your full handle to get redirected to a page where you can follow them. Maybe slightly better, but still not great.
I mean, I'm not saying that mastodon is super duper easy to use for everyone but in this particular example you seem to be going out of your way to make it more complicated than it is.
If the thing you found on hn was a link to their profile your flow would make sense, but if you have an id@domain the flow is really simple and basically the same as other similar things (ie. put it in your email client).
With email addresses, you have the mailto: link, which works pretty well so you don't have to copy paste. Maybe we need a follow: url scheme that browsers know what to do with.
Which you can, regardless of what instance they're on.
Moving in bulk is also easy, using something like Debirdify
Correction: You can't do it if you are linked to their user page https://mastodon.social/username...that doesn't work if you're not on mastodon.social. And often I seem to find myself at these URLs and can't see if I'm following the person, and have to go through extra steps to follow them.
Is copy/paste also too much to ask of technology's current generation?
There's a big (and only) search bar at the top of the homepage. You can simply search the username and they'll pop up across instances. There's a little follow button next to their name you can click and you're done
Exactly like Venmo or Snapchat or Instagram. It's already in the cultural norms to ask "what's your insta" or "what's your venmo".
What's your mastodon?
for example. if i want to search for @johnnydick@head.com... i do that, and click follow.
thats it. i click follow. like, where are you guys having so much trouble with this?
1. View a user's profile page on another instance.
2. Click "Follow".
3. A "remote follow" window opens with the message "Enter your username@domain you want to act from".
4. ???
How profile pages are displayed changes depending on whether you middle/right click ("open in new tab") or left click on a user's name from your own instance. If you left click, you get the profile page on you own instance. If you get the link by any other means (including e.g. someone sends you a link to their profile), you get the above. It's confused me more than once.
I think it means going to your home instance, searching for @personiwannafollow@otherinstance.com and clicking the follow button that will show up. But maybe you mean something else? Either way it's not easy to find it.
You can just search for "@personiwannafollow" and they'll show up and you can hit a single button to follow.
It's the big, and only, search bar at the top of the home page...
We should stop picking on normal folks. I write software for a living and, honestly, I'm over dealing with BS software. We've swung WAY too far to the "developer productivity" side of engineering and away from "consumer productivity". It's annoying and, frankly, if I have to jump through hoops, I simply choose not to anymore.
The all text, green screen terminals hooked into an AS-400 were far quicker to use than the mess of mouse driven web GUI stuff (often with slow page loads on top of it), and 'discoverability' has not exactly improved a ton in the mean time. It sucks that repetitive task efficiency isn't valued more in so many situations.
(the way to do it is to paste it into the Search box of your mastodon instance)
There should be just a page with a quick checklist/cheat sheet for twitter users.
There's some disconnect between how people who really understand it on a deep level are explaining it to other people who understand other technical things on a similar level and how people with 30 minutes and a publication deadline are explaining it.
Twitter was once considered pretty obtuse compared to facebook, at any rate. Once upon a time people didn't know what a retweet was or how to "at" someone. They didn't learn because twitter was "so easy" they learned because the people they wanted to talk to were there.
Network effects always trump all on these things.
Yeah.
I've taken a look at it a couple of times but never actually jumped on because whenever I try I'm faced with the same sort of creeping dread I face when reading the how-to for reverting a fauly git merge[1], where like... why do I need to understand this much low level plumbing to do this very basic thing. The Feynman diagrams help but it's still insane.
[1] https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/howto/r...
This is incorrect. You click the "Discover Users" from the instance home page, and you can view (public) profiles and as well as posts that they have made. I agree that it would be better to just be able to view the local timeline.
Discord is different enough from other tools that many people are confused by it.
But even then, Mastodon is different enough from Discord--and other tools--that many people are confused by it.
I load Discord, and I see someone's post, and I think to myself, I should message that person. So I click their username, and right there is a text box for me to start typing a direct message to them. Alternatively, there's a "Direct Messages" option in my left toolbar where I can hit "+" to start a conversation with any "Friend."
I load mastodon, and I see someone's post, and I think to myself, I should message that person. So I click their username, and then on their profile page, I click the three dots and choose the "Direct message" option. So that's not quite as direct, but not too bad. Alternatively, there's a "Direct messages" option in my right toolbar where... all I see is "You don't have any direct messages yet. When you send or receive one, it will show up here." No options to start one from here, and no friends list here. Hmm, there's a "Follows and followers" sidebar link which takes me to the expected list of people, and then I guess I can click on their profiles and again navigate to the three dots, and... huh, this person doesn't actually have a "Direct message" option there. Okay, maybe that person doesn't accept DMs, at least from me. Let me try someone who is following me back. I click their name and... their profile doesn't have a three-dots link. Oh, in fact several of these don't.
Well, I guess I don't actually know how to DM most people on mastodon. Let me try something else. If I go to Notifications, and since I have "show every option" enabled, I can see just my "follows," and I can click on those names, and yes, there I have the three dots and can DM people.
So maybe I can only DM people who follow me? Or who have showed up in my notifications? No, there, if I am looking in my timeline view, then I can get to the three dots for anybody.
Anyway, perhaps it seems like I'm making this too complicated, but I assure you that I won't be the only one wondering why "Direct messages" doesn't let me send direct messages, or why sometimes I can see contact options and sometimes I can't!
Mastodon is just a whole other world of complexity and confusion.
The funny thing is: If there was a service called dwitter and had exact the same features that twitter had, people might be willing to give it a try.
At this point a twitter alternative doesn't need to be different. It only needs to have a different owner.
As someone who’s been on Mastodon for a few years, the front-ends and apps aren’t very good, with the UI/UX being particularly bad.
One of the few apps I would recommend for iPhone users is Metatex, which is the best mobile app I’ve seen—by far [1].
I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus.
I’m putting my hopes on blue sky/AT which appears to solve the above pain points: https://blueskyweb.org/
Picking an email provider is quite critical - if you change your email address, you can be only reached if everyone knows your new address, lets not even get started about where the email is used to identify you with other serviced.
I think your choice of a a mastodon server falls in the middle ground between those examples, at minimum, there needs to be a bit more education of users to overcome (perceived?) hurdles there. I can confirm that while I noticed mastodon before, earlier attempts to use it stopped at the question on how to select the proper node and what consequences that has. That might be a perceived problem, but one that needs to be overcome if mastodon should be a popular Twitter alternative.
im not at all sure why people are panicked about this.
Okay, so if you don't already have a friend on Mastodon, then what? Have you actually looked at the list on https://joinmastodon.org/servers recently?
Half the comments here say it doesn't matter what server you choose, and half are saying to be sure to choose the one that aligns with your interests, which... see the list above for why that's an issue.
Panic? No. It's just an example of mastodon needlessly limiting itself in terms of usability right at the starting gate.
why is this a key statement? my point is that being on a friends server hasn't altered the experience at all.
i migrated to my friends server a couple days ago from mastodon.social--i literally haven't noticed any difference at all, the experience from everything i can tell has been identical as it was prior. the server im on made literally no difference.
i still follow the same people.
i still have the exact same followers.
my timeline is identical.
i still see all of tehir posts.
they still see mine.
i still see posts they repost.
again, i have noticed absolutely nothing meaningfully different. other than maybe the address i type into the address bar to reach the site, but i dont think thats "meaningful" in any meaningful ;) way.
The phrase is key because it reflects a familiarity which new users do not have. Have you never in your life been introduced to an environment you didn't understand and felt put off by everybody using words you didn't know, or words you did know in ways you didn't understand? Never, in any situation?
Because that's exactly how it feels for many, many, many new users of mastodon now.
what im trying to say, again, is that their panicking is entirely unfounded.
whether you create your account at mastodon.social, fosstodon.org, mastodon.online, vis.social, toot.cat, or your friends totallyraddomainname.com--its not a life or death decision.
particularly because you can simply migrate to another server if you're picky about some minutia that most people don't care about. it feels like overblown fearmongering.
sure, maybe they're experience analysis paralysis, which is definitely a problem sometimes for those who are terrified of technology, but at the end of the day it is over analyzing. one of the reasons mastodon so drastically overtook other federated attempts is because it made it possible to migrate without losing your followers, you just move and poof, you're done. it removes the importance to which server you choose.
As it happens, I picked a server earlier today, more or less at random (one that didn't manually review applications), so I'm set. But the experience was very negative, and fraught with apparent peril.
If the choice of server matters so little, perhaps this site could be improved: https://joinmastodon.org/servers
how so? its just a protocol, just like email. which concerns do you have that it is not as portable as email?
I go to https://mastodon.social/ because that's where people say things are happening, and I click "Create Account." I'm told I can't sign up here, but I can "Find another server"
You've already lost a huge percentage of potential users, but let's say I press on. I click through to https://joinmastodon.org/servers and see things like glasgow.social and metalhead.club. I'm neither Glaswegian nor a metalhead, so what do I choose? On what basis do I make this choice? It's immediately overwhelming, with a very real fear of picking the "wrong" server and somehow missing out on, well, I don't know, because how would I?
Sorry for the rant, my previous instance went read only, and I had to go find a new one. I know what i want and not being bale to search for it except by rough approximations was incredibly annoying.
I've been looking for a small project to work on and this is perfect.
I think the biggest questions I'd have are: - How do I know an instance is trustworthy and the mods behave professionally? - How do I know an instance isn't going to go down and lose my account?
It seems like there's this "local community" idea where when you join a server, it's like a mini-twitter in its own right. It's a cool idea, but then it seems like part of the decision of which instance to join should be whether you feel like that local community is a good fit for you?
Of course, on the fediverse, no one cares about adoption numbers. :-)
Just because email exists as a federated thing doesn’t mean existing users could use it if they had to sign up for it again.
I wonder if a statement exactly like the above one was said about alternative email providers being coinsidered by many AOL.com account holder so many years ago?
> ...I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus...
I suppoose it depends on how "benefit" is defined. But, also, Mastodon might be considered a platform, but (thankfully!) it only represents a single slice of the greater fediverse.
Ultimately, if people chose NOT to migrate over to the fediverse, or choose NOT to use the mastodon stack, or do NOT join an instance, etc..., that's still ok, and not considered a "fail". The fediverse is not an industry, nor a competitive landscape in the same fashion that twitter, facebook and other commercial platforms might operate. In fact, the fediverse is not even a platform at all; its a federated network.
the people who do care about otehr things can go to the more specialized servers. everyone wins.
getting back to a norm where people have choice seems ideal from my perspective.
What you might say is 'I don't think Mastodon is going to replace Twitter', but I don't think you can argue that Mastodon won't benefit from the Twitter exodus because it has already gained a million users.
Looking at the charts on https://the-federation.info/mastodon you can see that in May there was an influx of about 500 thousand new users after Musk's acquisition of twitter was announced. About 100 thousand of those stuck around. This time the number of new users is 1.1 million and still rising. So proportionally, the Twitter exodus will probably bring Mastodon at least 220 thousand new permanent users. My actual guess would be that a higher proportion will stick around this time, because of network effects.
Where this one falls for Mastodon remains to be seen. It's more AOLish than Academic, in the sense that it's the result of a capricious event on a large outside-the-destination-system network (Twitter, in this case) rather than a regular seasonal influx (as with uni students discovering Usenet). It isn't however a wholesale dumping of an entire community onto another though as was the case for AOL in 1993.
Mastodon's adoption for at least the past six years has tended to be driven by failures and frustrations with other platforms, and Twitter in particular. Those seem to be occurring in increasing waves. There's some grumbling and adjustment with each, but so far, knock wood, Mastodon's assimilated the influx fairly well.
At the time of the September that Never Ended, Usenet was ~1m total users (based on data from John Quarterman's The Matrix (1990) citing DEC researcher Brian Reid, which I've referenced in earlier HN comments). I believe AOL at the time was at least of an equivalent magnitude, if not several times this.
But it's clear with the planned changes that they're turning paid blue check accounts into the equivalent of the ads you see at the top of your Google search, placed above 'organic' results.
What I see though is that there are dozens of servers, none of which I know anything about. So it's more like if you had to select an e-mail provider from a list of domains you've never heard of before. Not impossible, but not as easy as signing up on twitter.com.
...but agreed that ultimately being strongly tied to an instance run by someone else is not ideal. I'm glad there are people working on it!
- While, twitter (& other commercial socials) promise excessive/massive reach...The Fediverse might offer less, but richer interactions.
- While, twitter (& other commercial socials) promise users as cattle/"eyeballs" to ad buyers...The Fediverse offers none of that. (Though, individual instancves have every right and possibility if they so choose to create their own ecosystem of ads to pay for their operations, and their people would need to know that of course)
- While, twitter (& other commercial socials) promise a platform for creators to publish their content to a wide audience...The Fediverse offers the same publishing (or better) capabilities and tools, but to a smaller audience...and, at least the existing creators on the Fedi are quite cool with that; most prefer it that way!
To me, living on the Fedi, is like people purposefully, willfully, happily (and not accidentally nor due to duress) moving to the rural country away from the big city...and not caring that others feel like "hey, the big city living is where everything is awesome" ;-)
For marketers, politicians and others that use Twitter as a megaphone for their personal brand.
Everybody else just wants to see funny memes, cat pictures and occasionally have the small topic conversations that make Twitter occasionally worth it.
I think a lot of the complexity of it could be hidden away so that the average user has a similar experience to a Twitter signup, but idk how much friction it would cause to make something like this appear centralized.
this is incredibly incredibly hyperbolic if ive ever seen hyperbole.
i just migrated my account the other day (i wanted to move onto a friends server) and it was absolutely not "woefully complex"
How does AT solve this specific pain point?
I think there's value in Mastodon, but it's not a drop-in twitter replacement. Perhaps a valuable thing would be helping set it up as a POSSE tool: https://indieweb.org/POSSE - post to your Mastodon and it automatically posts to Twitter for you.
I'm still using it because Windows requires accounts now and screw that, but man, Linux has tried hard to get me to go do something else.
I do not understand how these projects are just so consistently bad at UX. It takes effort, but UX should be priority number one, even over new functionality.
Of course trying to install drivers for a 56k modem while not having internet access was a different experience 25 years ago.
Where they fall off the rails is when you try to do something you're "not supposed to do" (like removing python) - then you're often better off with the weird distros like Gentoo or Mint; at least someone likely broke it the same way before.
for better or worse its probably one of the larger reasons our projects are so locked into corporate influence.
But I didn't try it out because of Twitter's recent news, I tried it out because I haven't enjoyed Twitter for a long while.
Mastodon is providing for many people what they haven't seen in Twitter for quite some time. A social site that seems to have a soul. Also, many of the people I've found on Mastodon still use Twitter.
The two serve different purposes. Just like you don't talk about "Instagram OR Twitter," it's not about "Twitter OR Mastodon."
We have choices now. And Mastodon is more on the radar now than ever. Happy that new people are hearing about it and finding value there.
I think my #1 issue with it is it's fundamental feature - that spaces/servers/communities/domains (whatever the name is) are self-hosted by anyone. That means if they get disinterested, or the power goes out, or they get frustrated, the plug is pulled. They also set the rules, which are too often on two extremes - extremely nit-picky (like cursing or off-topic toots aren't allowed) or a free-for-all.
This is addressed in the fedi.tips FAQ,
https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-basi...
Ah yes, because that's totally going to be legally enforced or something.
I stopped reading here. Most people who aren't tech savvy (much less professionally famous engineers) aren't going to want to learn this nonsense, much less see cased words like this that reek of geekdom. Everything about Mastodon (and the Fediverse) seems like it's catered to people who are already are (or who think they are) mentally all in on the concept.
I dunno, maybe things will change given enough time, money and new users, but right now Mastodon seems like something that people just post to with very little comments and interaction.
the "main" mastodon.social server is mostly unreachable, that would be at: https://mastodon.social/public
It's up to the instance to expose the "Explore", "Local", and "Federated" feeds. Fosstodon only exposes the local one to unauthenticated users.
I'm sure you can appreciate that every one of these issues impacts the uptake of mastodon, of course.
despite all this, a lot of prominent people have joined (to be clear, left leaning journalists, attorneys and economists, but Paul Krugman did win a nobel prize)
Most people who read Fowler's blog or HN are able to understand the difference between what users need to know and how a system is implemented.
then the should just stay on twitter. The entire differentiator between Mastodon and Twitter is choice. It's akin to complaining about the fact that there's 50 states in the US and you have multiple elections to take part in and decide where you wanna live. It's all very complicated.
Any technology that empowers people by definition makes it so they need to make their own choices. If these decentralized systems are to have any purpose it needs to stay that way. If that means you lose 90% of users, fine so be it honestly.
There's that OSS elitism we all know and love so much.
Crazy world we're in where recognizing the potential for, and asking people to take control of their own actions is considered to be a symptom of elitism
Looking at my home page right now, Elon is at the top saying that "Twitter needs to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world. That’s our mission." Followed by an advert from a company I didn't subscribe to, and then a bunch of meaningless personal tweets from people I don't know and I didn't subscribe to. One news item on the whole page.
I get regular email notifications updating me on the latest paranoid rants from various right wing 'rebel' groups (that I definitely didn't subscribe to), and I cannot find any way to stop them because they only show up in my emails, not in my feed. There's no way I can see to block them. That's not seamless nor easy.
The email notifications I do want cut off important headlines half way through the sentence, forcing me to log into the platform just to read what might have happened. No way to configure that either. Certainly not seamless nor easy.
As for Mastodon itself, yeah, it would be nice if it got better about its terminology and “marketing” to people who aren’t nerds, although one can argue this is endemic to open source culture at this point (cue unceasing arguments about Calibre’s wacky UI choices, The Gimp’s arguably offensive name, and so on). Those are trivially solvable problems, though.
If Mastodon is “something that people just post to with very little comments and interaction,” I would suggest that it’s long been a network effect issue; it’s very hard to get any new system that depends on user-constructed social graphs off the ground, until or unless that graph exceeds some hard-to-define node count level for a sufficient number of users. Anecdotally, I have seen a lot more activity on Mastodon over the last week; whether enough will stick to push it over that magic number remains to be seen.
And personally whole thing feels like a weird combination of reddit and Discord where you choose your sub/server then Twitter tbh
It's arguably not ready for full mainstream adoption right now, but hopefully that'll continue to change as the tech crowd uptake increases and the contributions to the core/protocol/apps goes up as well.
I like the community feel of the somewhat smaller instance that I moved my presenec over to (from mastodon.technology, which is shutting down), and there's a frisson of the original excitement I felt when exploring early communications services on the interwebs like IRC.
Good luck with that Mastodon. I too would like a Twitter+, but in aiming for the + you're actually losing a ton of base features that users in fact care about, like antispam and "one big universe" with good signal to noise.
I've already ended up dumped on a page with a long list of servers, and it's not clear whether this choice matters or not. Half the comments here say it does, half say it doesn't!
But let's see my choices today: ruby.social, todon.eu, hostux.social, Glasgow.social, metalhead.net, socel.net, machteburch.social, activism.openworlds.info, eldritch.cafe, toot.wales, tooting.ch, sfba.social, indieweb.social, tech.lgbt, lor.sh "Yet another server," tilde.zone, ieji.de, is.nota.live, libretooth.gr, mastodonapp.uk, ravenation.club, climatejustice.social, noc.social, maly.io, mastodon.nz, qoto.org, mastodon.ie, and I'm tired of pasting, but literally NONE OF THE ABOVE seem to be for me!
And again, I don't know how much this matters, but it feels overwhelming. Also, a startlingly high percentage of socialist and otherwise left-leaning servers in that initial list, which might be intended, or might just be coincidentally arrayed to drive away people who are offended by such things.
The worst part about this is, I'm pretty sure I signed up with mastodon back when it was first launched, but I can't remember the server, so...
Thanks for this! I now have a go-to example of why mastodon is not a viable replacement for twitter, one literally everybody should understand.
anyone finding faults with Masto should take the AP protocol and write their own implementation. The monoculture of the Mastoverse is less than ideal and the space is much more interesting when you figure out the secret sauce (ActivityPub)
First, take private messaging - on Mastodon, if @alice and @dave talk about @mallory, @mallory will be pulled into the conversation. With Fidonet, in it's simplest terms, private messaging was private.
Second, if there is a forum / discussion board for / called Java on ProgrammerWoes.fiction and a forum / discussion board for / called Java on ProgrammerSuccess.fiction then with the existing solutions a person comes along and they are unsure which is better, and one eventually dies, or a third springs up, etc.
With Fidonet, there was one forum per topic - the contents of which was federated, so you didn't end up with two Java forums.
Yes, we have hundreds of programming forums - but there's a reason people flock to Twitter or more specifically Reddit to discuss a topic that goes beyond simply signal to noise - it's that they aren't flooded with a confusing choice.
It's amazing how the little silos of content can be so isolating.
I don’t think it is as much of a barrier to entry as people expect.
After looking at what Jack built; it seems he's actually created a Fediverse.
This is why ad-based social networks are inherently problematic unless/until they switch to an ad-free model, which means paywalled, but I would pay $2/month for a Twitter-like service that wasn't ad-based.