Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server
martinfowler.com
martinfowler.com
I am not sure that a social network full of left-wing activits will be very palatable to the average moderate user.
It's also a good idea not to build a house on a floodplain, or in an area with high risk of fire. People tend to do so anyway until the area floods or burns.
Thanks to Federal insurance programs that were implemented pre-climate crisis, they continue to build there after too, for the most part.
It involves work. Before Musk's takeover Twitter was reliable, predictable and somewhat boring. Now it is none of those things, for better or worse. I think people see federation as a means to avoid a similar outcome in the future.
> Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad.
I mean... yes? No need to examine this through an ideological lens: the simple fact is that the future of Twitter is now very uncertain. Ad revenue is tanking, half the staff has been laid off, features are being modified on the fly. It simply isn't a service you can rely on right now.
You are right about the chaotic way things are added/removed right now, but I personally prefer it to what Twitter was before Musk: Force login on the main page and unfair ideological censorship.
We'll see what happens in the long run.
Why set up this false dichotomy? Elon might burn down his $44b investment in an attempt to run Twitter as a mostly successful business. Running a car company and running a social media company are not the same skill set. It is entirely possible, and seems more likely than it did a week ago, that he has no idea how to actually turn Twitter into a success.
>What exactly are the dangers of using Twitter if it might stop existing say 3 years from now?
Content and followers on Twitter cannot easily and directly be transferred somewhere else. Any personal investment a user makes into Twitter today is at risk of being worthless if Twitter disappears. Whether that matters you or not depends on why you use Twitter. If it is for fun, that isn't a real risk. But plenty of people use Twitter as part of their job and these people really need to start considering if investing in their Twitter account is worth it compared to moving that effort somewhere else.
Elon has successfully run more than just a car business in a wide variety of fields.
There are free apps that let you archive your Twitter feed, and there are free apps that let you find messed it on users from their Twitter account. I'm sure those tools would get even better and easier to use if the writing was on the wall that Twitter is going down.
What you say about personal investment is true, but it is true about literally everything. If you personally invest in Macedon, I messed it on fails, then you have wasted your time and all of your work is worthless.
But that is still a false dichotomy because I don't need to know the right answer to recognize boneheaded management. Any independent observer can see that Musk is going back and forth on certain decisions: saying "comedy is now legal on Twitter" then banning parody accounts for mocking him or laying people off then immediately asking them to come back. These are self inflected mistakes that I recognize as objectively bad management without knowing the specifics of how to properly manage Twitter.
>Elon has successfully run more than just a car business in a wide variety of fields.
And none have been a media company let alone a social media company. Building cars, rocket ships, and tunnels are all relatively similar from a management perspective and are very different from running a social media company. Running a social media company requires a much more complex understanding of people and social systems. It isn't as simple as just building a good product. Twitter's technical product was never the primary issue with the company. The problems Twitter faces are all human problems. Musk hasn't shown an ability to fix those type of issues.
>There are free apps that let you archive your Twitter feed, and there are free apps that let you find messed it on users from their Twitter account. I'm sure those tools would get even better and easier to use if the writing was on the wall that Twitter is going down.
Those apps are generally worthless at the scale we are talking about. Twitter has 450m monthly users. Mastodon has 1m. Retaining 0.2% of your audience when transferring platforms doesn't provide much value.
>What you say about personal investment is true, but it is true about literally everything. If you personally invest in Macedon, I messed it on fails, then you have wasted your time and all of your work is worthless.
Yes, the point it that it didn't seem like Twitter failing was a likely situation a year ago. Today it seems like a realistic possibility.
I just can't understand anyone that lists that as the first gripe or example regarding how he is running things poorly. Elon also lined up at billions of dollars from institutional investors to take Twitter private, and I'm fairly sure they had an understanding of Elon before a week ago. And yet they still gave him billions of dollars.
May I guess that you were an Elon negativist, or a mastodon positivist before there was any mention of Elon buying Twitter?
I'm not saying that Elon is guaranteed to succeed, I'm saying that it isn't clear that he is bound to fail. Most CEOs of social media companies that reach a billion plus dollar valuation don't have any experience running social media companies either. But somehow they do it.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about the likelihood of Twitter failing. Would you like to place a friendly wager on it ? I'd happily bet $1 on whether Twitter is dead on basically anytime frame that you would provide less than 5 years.
That isn't true[1].
>I just can't understand anyone that lists that as the first gripe or example regarding how he is running things poorly. Elon also lined up at billions of dollars from institutional investors to take Twitter private, and I'm fairly sure they had an understanding of Elon before a week ago. And yet they still gave him billions of dollars.
It was listed as the first gripe because it is objective. Musk said one thing then did another. There are levels of debate you can have about most of his other management issues. There is no debate here. This is a situation in which Musk said Twitter would handle a situation in a certain way then they immediately handled it a different way.
>May I guess that you were an Elon negativist, or a mastodon positivist before there was any mention of Elon buying Twitter?
No. You can look into my post history if you need proof. I am a fan of Tesla, I think they make great cars. However, Musk in the last couple of years has seemingly become more and more detached and destructive.
I think Mastodon is doomed to fail (or at least never succeed) because centralization was not Twitter's main problem and the federated nature of Mastodon can actually exacerbate those real issues.
>Most CEOs of social media companies that reach a billion plus dollar valuation don't have any experience running social media companies either. But somehow they do it.
But they at least usually have worked in media or social media before. Dorsey's and Zuckerberg's qualifications to run their billion-dollar companies was that they grew those companies into a billion dollar entities. Agrawal's qualification was that he worked at Twitter for years before becoming CEO of the company. Musk's qualification is that he has billions of dollars.
>I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about the likelihood of Twitter failing. Would you like to place a friendly wager on it ? I'd happily bet $1 on whether Twitter is dead on basically anytime frame that you would provide less than 5 years.
Nothing I said here is a prediction that Twitter will fail, what failure even means for a company like Twitter, or the timeline that failure might play out over. My point is that failure wasn't a real concern a year ago, now it is, and the only reason for that is Musk's management.
[1] - https://www.vulture.com/2022/11/kathy-griffin-twitter-banned...
The rules[0] state:
> What is required under this policy?
> To avoid confusing others about an account’s affiliation, parody, commentary, and fan accounts must distinguish themselves in BOTH their account name and bio
In the screenshots[1], you can see that he said the account is a parody in the bio, but not the name. Only specifying it in the bio means that you would look like a real account when tweet replying.
My point is that failure isn't a more real concern than it was previously, except for, largely, people who already hate Elon, or, perhaps in your case, for people who are misinformed about policy rules and violations.
[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/parody-accoun...
[1] https://twitter.com/connorratliff/status/1589473721030701058...
That page also lists permanent suspension as the third punishment that comes after warnings and a temporary suspension. This round of punishments seemed to mostly go straight to permanent suspensions, but that wasn't consistent. Kathy Griffin and Griffin Newman have received permanent suspensions, but Sarah Silverman didn't. Is there a reason for that? Who knows?
Part of the problem with Musk's management is that it is impossible to know what the current rules are at any given moment. Is that page actually Twitter's current policy or not? Who knows?
And what are you basing that assumption on? Where did he say that for $8 anything goes? If anything he's been very plain that was NOT going to happen, yet people like you still are willing to assume the worse? Again, based on what specifically?
If this wasn't enough, Musk has confirmed the timeline will essentially shadowban non-verified accounts [1].
So anyone can take anyone's else's name as "verified" and the non-verified will not be seen.
Essentially this means if you have the money you can run dozens or thousands of verified accounts that claim to be anyone.
[0] https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1588304086792667136
[1] https://twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1588876465915166721?...
In what ways? And in what ways do you think federated servers that don't agree on what rules to apply and lack any sort of mechanism for global, centralized control will make Mastodon reliable, predictable or even somewhat boring?!?
Twitter's product has been static for years, barring perhaps the introduction of Twitter Spaces, which has barely made a dent in usage (as far as I can see, anyway). I personally regard this as a negative: I think that they should have been innovating more. But if I were a major brand looking at my advertising commitments I'd probably be fine with it.
> And in what ways do you think federated servers that don't agree on what rules to apply and lack any sort of mechanism for global, centralized control will make Mastodon reliable, predictable or even somewhat boring?!?
I don't personally think Mastodon is the answer so I'm probably not well positioned to answer this. But if my organization sets up its own Mastodon instance I'm free to ignore what the larger Mastodon ecosystem is doing, if I want to. It is under my control and can't be bought out by a memelord playing a prank gone wrong.
You have the same tools to block on Twitter. There is literally no difference.
And all you can do on Mastodon is moderate your server - they can still be out there in the greater Mastodon community and there is even less you can do about that than you have recourse with Twitter.
All this sudden pearl clutching sure is amusing.
It was none of those things and was widely regarded to be the worst-run company in tech not named Theranos or WeWork, including on this very website. It's fine to dislike Musk and it's fine to dislike the moves he's made but this revisionist history has to stop.
[0]https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-twitter-employee...
[1]https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
[2]https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/25/22248903/twitter-birdwatc...
[3]https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/21/twitter-to-expand-into-lon...
[4]https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/twitter-pre-musk-data...
For instance :
IFTTT forced to remove Twitter triggers to comply with new API policies :
You are right, I, like many people, believe Elon is going to ruin Twitter, possibly bankrupting it. Therefore it is worth looking at alternatives. The ruining of Twitter makes alternatives more attractive.
However, given the debt he's saddled it with as part of the buy-out, their situation is a lot worse than it was before. I don't see how it's salvageable.
If Musk is so much of a shrewd, evil business shark it's been portrayed as in the last months, you can imagine he'll find some nasty underhanded way to attach Twitter to an IV with Starlink on the other end, and flood it with money until the blue bird is back on its feet.
Because it's hard to write any other way when people are losing their minds over a storm in a teacup. Literally nothing meaningful has changed about Twitter in the last few months. This is an entirely self-induced panic, based on a couple cases of someone maliciously misinterpreting a tweet here and there and everyone else amplifying it, and fueled by irrational fear and hatred towards Musk. It would be funny to watch, if it were not saturating the media channels 24/7.
Twitter's future wasn't in any way more certain before, nor was the platform any more stable. Adding or removing random features, and screwing third parties over API T&C changes, were pretty much the trademark of Twitter already.
Twitter now has a burden of $1 billion in interest payments per year, which it did not several months ago. That's pretty meaningful. Completely apart from anything about Elon, it would be entirely reasonable to expect this additional burden to make the product worse, as debt obligations often do.
But things probably will change meaningfully in the near future. You’d have to ignore everything the new CEO is saying, in order to believe otherwise.
People trade futures options all the time.
Thing is, he isn't saying that much. Most of what people are reacting to are people's interpretation of what Musk said, and then further interpretation of those interpretations, etc. That's what strikes me as completely bonkers.
> a proven history of public manipulation.
It's better when people say that they don't like Musk, than pretending there's some sort of higher political principle here. People don't have trouble believing that objectors don't like Musk, and disagree with him politically.
The trouble is in the appeal to principles that never come up in their discussions of e.g. the WaPo, which most of the objectors will defend to their last breath, along with Bezos. Like here, when the one of the wealthiest people in the world, owner of the largest retailer, that controls a massive part of internet infrastructure, also owns the second most influential paper, becomes 100x less important than Twitter changing ownership.
I'm just saying that Musk owning Twitter is that times 100(a made up number, obviously) because:
1. Twitter somehow became the place where most "journalists" get their news from.
2. Politicians spread their propaganda at
3. Musk has no scruples about public manipulation and abusing his power. He is set on whatever made up vision he has, and he'll do whatever it takes to get there.
Why won't he use his control of where journos and politicos create the public discourse? How is that not just expected? His company, his rules, no?
BTW you turning me calling out Musk as somehow diminishing Bezos damage is hardly in good faith. Same as your godlike mind reading , that I just hate musk and turning to principles is me hiding that fact.
Try to assume I'm speaking in good faith, it leads to much better discussions.
Sure, the site itself looks the same, the logo is the same, but there's a ton of turmoil for the people behind the scenes. Not everything is run by computers, there are a lot of humans in the loop for the day-to-day operations of the site. The core product of "post tweet" and everything else which is all automated, sure, but there's tons of stuff that isn't, because it can't be. All that backend stuff has changed, even if you don't see it.
Well, OK, assuming this all pans out to be true[0], that's one hell of a botched firing, which apparently (see [0]) Musk/Twitter is trying to back-track on... but that happened in the last few days. The Internet drama about Musk and Twitter started months ago, and reached its peak before the sale ultimately went through - which means it can't be attributed to this.
Or, in a hypothetical world in which the wellness team still got sacked, but the content moderation didn't, do you imagine the Internet getting any less hysteric? Do you imagine headlines saying, "In a surprising change of face, Musk did not fire Twitter's content moderators", or rather headlines trying to find nefarious reasons for why the team would've been retained?
I'm not denying the turmoil that's happening in Twitter, and the hard times that befell on its employees (and ex-employees). I'm denying the hysteria is in any way correlated with anything Musk actually does. It has its own life now.
----
[0] - AFAIK we're still at the level of reporting of "sources familiar with the matter quoting two high-level people involved in the matter" - which ordinarily means journalists quoting random Twitter posts without attribution, but in this case, I don't know how to read that.
> Or, in a hypothetical world ... do you imagine the Internet getting any less hysteric? Do you imagine headlines saying...
Less hysterical? No. As far as headlines, I can totally see both; headlines saying it's a surprise, along with a different newspaper framing it negatively. (I think I heard the shadowban group survived unscathed.)
> I'm denying the hysteria is in any way correlated with anything Musk actually does.
I'd say it's quite correlated as it's all based off of things Musk has done (eg suspending users impersonating him) or said/tweeted (proclaimed that free speech will reign supreme). Normally I'd say saying things and doing this are two separate matters (talk is, after all, cheap), except that this is a social media site, who's entire purpose is for saying things. For Tesla it's easy to point at the number of Model 3's produced/wk or Autopilot's shortcomings and set aside things Musk has said for what he's done or not done. Twitter, on the other hand, is a place for talk, so when Musk says he's a free speech absolutist, and then proceeds to buy Twitter, people take notice, especially at junctures where it turns out he's not.
There is a lot of stuff about Mastodon flying around, which isn't really related to Musk's speech/actions, and supports your "life of its own" part though.
All your other point are good but this one surprises me. I think at this point people can have very rational fear and hatred of this guy. He's a 50 year old man with literally the world view of and politics a 14 year old edgelord on Fortnite but with enough money and following to do real damage with that. The biggest fears people seem to have is that he actually succeeds at his stated intentions for the platform.
I'll tell you where it comes from. I used to like Musk in early SpaceX / first Falcon landing / Tesla Model S era. Then I disconnected from the news a bit, for a couple of years, and started to pay more attention recently (~last year). I saw constant hatred of Musk on-line. I tried to investigate what he did to make people so upset, and besides a name calling here and there, I found literally nothing.
On the contrary, what I found is smart people who I used to respect retweeting or posting trivially disprovable soundbites like the whole apartheid money thing. I haven't seen an argument that wasn't overblown to ridiculous proportions.
This is not to say Musk didn't turn into villain. I'm not convinced either way, and I'm definitely not trying to claim he's pristine and good. I may have missed some important stories in ~2018-2021. What I am convinced about, though, is the whole anti-Musk crowd literally went high on their own bullshit, and is a perfect illustration how it ends when you have a feedback loop of people one-upping increasingly exaggerated claims.
> it were not saturating the media channels 24/7.
You're accidentally making the Cultural Studies mistake of seeing the choices of a very small number of individuals at massive corporations that are broadcast to the general public as an expression of the general public themselves. It's not a self-induced panic, it's a media-induced panic that requires a media trust (in the antitrust sense) to sustain.
For most people using social media outside of the context of a professional organization, it also means trusting whoever operates the instance, most of which will probably be less reliable and potentially trustworthy than Twitter was or currently is under Musk ownership.
Is there something bad about that? People are free to choose where they discuss things, and whom they give their money. He is tearing down moderation, crapping on verification, and injecting itself on electoral politics. Any CEO of Social Media that peddles on weird conspiracies of Pelosi's husband, and then just today announce that vote for Republicans...
What did you expect? That people will take it as "That's just Elon"...
Only sad aspect of this is that BlueSky project that supposedly allowed to move followers between servers was not ready, and he might not be particularly interested on allowing it anymore, as everyone would just flee with their followers.
That said, I have no interest in using Twitter now. But I want something that is basically Twitter, except without Elon Musk running it.
Anecdotally, most folks I know in the market for electric vehicles are avoiding Tesla so they don't have to think about a _specific_ billionaire each time they get into their car. Elon's especially visible right now, but generally, folks want their stuff to be theirs, not defined by someone else.
FWIW most of the people I'm thinking of skew technical and progressive.
Are we really going to act like Elon built Twitter now?
They don't seem like good answers, just happen-stance ones.
The idea of decentralising isn't bad IMO, maybe that'll be the next main topic.
If it is the case, I don't see how Musk takeover could possibly affect their personal experience with the platform, since if they think some tweets should be censored, surely they won't follow the people writing those tweets or re-tweeting them in the first place?
If this is the case the only possible reason for leaving twitter is that they don't want to use a platform that enables people they disapprove of to communicate between them. But isn't it exactly what Mastodon does?
Conservatives weren't satisfied with Parler, Truth Social, Gab or Gettr and now also own Twitter. It seems fairly obvious that people would seek alternatives because they're not interested in participating in a right-wing platform with no moderation.
However, in general, just because something didn’t take off initially doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. Often it just goes to show that inertia is an extremely powerful force. People are often willing to continue with a substandard solution if it’s the one they’re used to or have been using for a while.
And so often a newer, superior, competitor requires the incumbent to make a misstep before they stand a chance at shining.
In my vision of the future internet, when you upgrade your phone, your old phone gets plugged into a power socket and USB drive in the corner and becomes your new selfhosting server. You have apps for Mastodon, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Plex, calendars, whatever.
The key pieces missing are simple tunneling services (think ngrok with a GUI designed for selfhosters), easier domain name management, and porting apps to run on phones. The most difficult is the last one but I'm hopeful that virtualization will take care of that in the near future[0], and maybe things like Wasm in the long run.
EDIT: PS - If you're interested in making this world a reality, join us over at https://forum.indiebits.io/
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ybq4ih/pixel_7_has...
* I install the app
* App requests access to your domain so it can set up appname.yourdomain.com
* I grant permission and we're live.
Otherwise , mastodon hosters will become sneaky corporate spies, ad injectors and data resellers
Companies like name.com, godaddy and whatnot should offer that kind of option. Or even AWS should have a "managed mastodon" server maybe. At the end of the day, most companies nowadays have their infrastructure in one of the 4-6 main cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCS, Oracle, ...).
Personally I would prefer to see registrars limit themselves to providing domain names. But for that to work seamlessly they all need to support an open DNS protocol that makes it easy for users to delegate subdomains to 3rd-party apps and services. Something like DomainConnect[0] but with better support for selfhosting[1].
Install pleroma. Or mastodon. Or pixelfed (for images). Or peertube (for videos). Or plume (for blogging). Clicks in a UI.
But I do wish selfhosting was just easy. It shouldn't be this hard.
There very well may be exceptional cases (famous people regularly going viral), but they wouldn't want to be hosting from a home location anyway.
It's not about the average user, but when said average user gets their 15 minutes.
The "famous people" care about getting their posts to fans. If you're able to convince and migrate hundreds of millions of teenagers to this self-hosted dream, sure. However, that's just not going to happen.
Lololol. Good lord. Tell me you don't work in product without saying you don't work in product.
She gives zero fucks about Five 9's. Maybe her tech team gives like 1/8 of a fuck, but no more beyond that. She only cares about the number of people she reaches with one tweet/toot/whatever, and simply being faster/self-hosted/data owned/reliable/federated has nothing to do with that.
r/suspiciouslyspecific
Try explaining to the influencer celeb why they should self-host. In fact, just try explaining to them they need to pick a mastodon instance, any instance. "it's so easy." No it's not.
You need to take a step back, and look at what the average Joe is actually using. Don't assume that because your programmer friends use these obscure protocols for everyday communication that everyone is.
I don't know where you got that snake oil but it doesn't reflect the pulse that's been there for years.
Try explaining that with an emoji and a fun tagline.
This is a *BAD THING* and it's not surprising people here on HN don't see that.
It would be way more natural to have interests as channels for a person's account. People could subscribe to only particular interests instead consuming the full stream of the person's posts. I'm not sure if Mastodon supports this, but it's sorely lacking in Twitter.
All of their content could be self-hosted: videos, music, ebooks, etc. It’s a rails server, so in theory all of that stuff could be baked in.
Why would you do that in the first place? They can self-host if they want.
Hey, did you hear about this amazing product @insertYourNameHere?
1. DMs can be restricted to followed profiles.
2. Abuse can be reported and admins will likely act. Such a spam would be a once-and-done affair.
3. I'd need to check the spec / code, but suspect there's an upper bound on the number of profiles which can be mentioned in a single toot.
I'm not saying there's no opportunity for abuse. But on the whole, and on a cost-benefit assessment for the spammer, there are probably more viable options for spreading a message.
True, it is hilarious to consider that $8 will disincentive spammers.
(MeFi's fee is $5, not $8.)
sometime in ~2018, Mastodon (IIRC -- it might have been a specific instance) implemented inter-user messaging over ActivityPub, showing users only messages addressed to them -- since it wasn't actually part of the spec, the rest of the Fediverse saw them as regular feed messages.
Mastodon users assumed DMs were private and got burned, other instance operators were all of a sudden flooded with non-post messages, and everything was generally pretty suck-y until everyone got their shit together.
this sort of thing happens periodically (see: Gab's federation flooding the network in a similar way), it's a consequence of different entities trying to develop individual features over a unifying protocol.
Like sure, slack / teams can see all your data, but if you have a trivial problem such as being in the EU, you suddenly now have a compliance problem if specific data gets put on the service.
Run mattermost on your own server and many of the problems go away.
Mastodon is a bit different because it's federated, but I assume since it's more akin to a social network, it's similar to running a community support website compliance wise.
But if there is an official CNN Mastodon instance, it’s suddenly real easy to see if someone claiming to be a CNN reporter is real or not.
Are they @john.smith@cnn.news? If not they’re a fake.
It would also work for official Microsoft accounts or Colgate-Palmolive or the government.
Seems like a good idea to me. And if you like federation it sounds better than a semi-official instance everyone uses that verifies things, sort of recreating a mini-Twitter “super” instance that is “more equal” than the others.
I can put an @microsoft.come email in my profile, but it’s meaningless because it’s not verified.
But if MS has their own instance, then your handle(?) proves you have an account on that instance. And presumably only employees and company accounts would be allowed to have such user accounts.
Note, however, that Mastodon has a sort-of identity-ish verification system, in that a website link in your profile will be shown with a green check if the website links back to your profile with a `rel=me` attribute.
check your company intranet. chances are probably great you can find your own 'twitter' clone struggling in an overcommitted vmware instance or chugging along on a second generation Intel pizza box somewhere in a forgotten closet. These things never got patched because the implementation came from the vendor (along with free merch), so theres no local knowledge on how to fix them if they ever break. If you look hard enough, you might even find the add-on "blogging" platform your company got sold when they complained discount twitter for the office wasnt engaging anyone.
At Facebook we used a facebook-esque product called Workplace for this sort of thing. I believe it harmed the culture because people would chase clout and visibility on the social network instead of doing real work. Social networks encourage that kind of behavior.
I think slack, discord, or similarly un-networked products are a better fit for company communication. Anything that shows "follower counts" is probably not good for companies.
https://til.simonwillison.net/mastodon/custom-domain-mastodo...
<https://joinfediverse.wiki/How_to_host_your_own_Fediverse_in...>
1. How much does it cost?
2. Who does it benefit?
3. Who takes the ownership of the deployment?
4. If something needs to be fixed with the deployment, who does that?
5. Why should I prefer this over say slack/teams, where I get support bundled in my contract?
6. What happens if someone puts up something nasty on the internal mastodon network? The legal department hates this one weird trick.
7. Does it create a headache for the HR department if people start violating their corporate code of conduct on the mastodon network?
Maybe I am pessimistic, but OP is probably being quite dreamy here.
Mastodon has no nazis, it does have that going for them.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/783akg/mastodon-is-like-twit...
(I know you've included a link, but it's such a long op-ed with no summary and it doesn't immediately mention decision making, so I don't feel like there's a guarantee of a pay off from reading it.)
I tried to keep less specific because it doesn't matter to a great deal. We both lack a tardis and cannot change the past.
I'm not a gab user, I got an awesome username but it's a shitty echo chamber worse than anywhere else. Fundamentally "Gab" forked mastodon because masotodon banned them off the fediverse. But more importantly mastodon made it clear they do not represent free speech and have the ability to remove political opponents.
There's tons of speech on GAB and what percentage is 'hate speech'? can you even define hate speech really? It's not all speech on the platform. The correct way to read the blog is they banned their political opponents because they have free speech policies. This was a huge mistake for mastodon. Something they can basically never recover from.
One of the persistent issues in political polarization has been labelling your political opponents. Republicans are all nazis?
Well, it finally happened in a undisputable, greatest possible example kinda way, and now everyone is scrambling to adjust.
It's even worse on the Fediverse, which is flooded with both Mastodon- and Twitter-related discussion.
No, it's about a whole beehive of drama queens who thought Twitter is their domain, who saw their hated rich man prove them wrong by literally buying it from under them.
Mastodon has gotten a boost, potentially orders of magnitude, in recent weeks as people evaluate their utility with Twitter.
As a new fediverse explorer, it is fun in a way MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter were at first.
One enormous consequence of how social media globalization works is that the attention span of the whole world becomes centralised. We can only talk about one thing or a few things at a time. Those become the hyper focus of the whole internet. In every forum those topics seep in. Trying to resist "the current thing" becomes very exhausting. It's very hard to even talk about local issues when there are a few big issues that draws everyone's attention. I feel like this is one of the most dramatic changes for the last two decennia.
I know people made fun of “tweet” but it was a logical and neutral word.
in the end communities with maximum participation will always be where creators are incentivized to be.
until the average user becomes willing to pay for X, ad based revenue models will always win. relatedly, paying for X is easier than setting up your own mastodon server.
Since Mastodon is federated, running your own instance is largely transparent to most Mastodon and Fediverse users. You're simply another profile on another instance. Content will federate.
What operating your own server does provide is:
1. Control over your own services. Notably, over what other instances can federate to it --- Adam Davidson (ex of New Yorker, NYT, NPR, etc.) discovered this yesterday: <https://journa.host/@adamdavidson/109297137123981377>. But also moderation and content policies as well as operational and provisioning decisions.
2. An additional indicia of who you really are. BigCo@FlippantMastodonInstance.Whatevs might or might not indicate strong branding. BigCo@BigCo.TLD (especially where BigCo.TLD is already strongly established) is stronger branding.
3. For those not yet using Mastodon, the self-hosted server will be a single point at which content can be viewed. Note that this is marked distinction from the practice of the past decade or so of relying on social media services which were effectively walled gardens: Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and the like.
4. DMs are visible to an instance's admin. Self-hosting means that the organisation would control that particular exposure as well.
Much as BigCo would be expected to operate or present its own website or blog, and frequently its own email server (or at least domains pointed at hosted services), so too with self-hosted Mastodon.
I was recently brainstorming some ideas with a friend who has a 1-person business where it would make sense for clients to be able to connect with each other. The thought of Mastodon briefly crossed my mind, but it seemed too ambitious.
While I do not align with these people politically, I applaud their desires and encourage them to continue taking action to own smaller spaces instead of us all trying to fight over the monolithic centralized large spaces. As I've said several times on HN now, I am not particularly convinced in the long term that massive centralized communities are practical because the intersection of all community social norms is essentially the null set, or at the very least, much smaller than anyone wants to be confined to. The fact that all of the major sites sourced from a particular geographical location with particular dominant political beliefs was a historical anomaly that won't be replicated.
Perhaps, philosophically speaking of course, this is not such a bad thing? Maybe societal change should be slow and deliberate.
> The fact that all of the major sites sourced from a particular geographical location with particular dominant political beliefs was a historical anomaly that won't be replicated.
This is a good point that I have not yet considered directly, just through one-off rantings about how everything tech for the longest time was Valley-centered. I can't help but think that a shift away is a good thing long term.
Narratives?
Twitter and Instagram are “free”. Running servers costs money, made more expensive by the choice in the Mastodon design to not support virtual hosting on a per-domain basis. You have to run (and admin) a complete new instance of Mastodon for each domain you wish to support.
It would be really really nice if it was easier for small organizations. For big organizations they're already in the business of running their own websites and this isn't anything new.
I count "administering VMs allocated on someone else's hardware" here, since it counts for running mastodon - the real giants probably almost all run some of their own hardware, but that probably drops off much faster.
2000 active users for $89 per month[1]. That's probably less than you would spend on toilet paper for 2000 employees. I don't think money would be the biggest reason why an organization or company wouldn't commit to the Fediverse.
Mastodon is also a DigitalOcean 1-click app[2] if you're willing to spend more time.
Oh interesting! Let me check out their instance that they linked to: "Find us at https://toot.thoughtworks.com"
> This is a Mastodon instance solely for employees of Thoughtworks.
Whoops!
In general, I don't see how this helps a company at all to reach the millions of users that they could through Facebook or Twitter. On those platforms, it's automatic and immediate. On Mastodon, it seems like you have to actively court users one at a time? Because ThoughtWorks wasn't even able to reach me, and I read their entire article. I went directly to their instance and learned nothing.
EDIT:
Aha! It turns out that the landing page is a red herring, and you can still click through to the "See What's Happening" page. I don't see how a non-technical user would figure this out and not get immediately discouraged. Linking to the /public page would have made a lot more sense.
On a blog post about running your own instance to reach millions of users, why does it turn out that their instance is totally locked down and actually not accessible to anyone?
"I have a mastodon account. Why can't I view their mastodon posts? Mastodon is broken".
End of story. Platform is done. The fact that people are trying to say this is good enough absolutely infuriates me, and is makes me wonder if people actually know the technical level of the average user, not the programmers they work with.
As a nontechnical user, I am immediately confused and closed the page without learning anything. The idea that a company could "reach millions of users" with Mastodon is ridiculous.
I understand the federated social web has a technobabble aspect to it. I am sorry you aren't with it but that's honestly not my problem.
Yes everyone (especially those taking public money) should build AP into their existing web infra like their content management systems.
it's a complete failure of policy that all of these public status communications are made into centralized services with hostile ownership. for this, I mean your local police department and fire department, library and mayor and all of those groups.
If you want to see the actual activity on the instance, click through the "See What's Happening" link which takes you to the public view:
<https://toot.thoughtworks.com/public>
Note that a specific profile's public URL page will be, e.g.,
https://toot.thoughtworks.com/@mfowler
<https://toot.thoughtworks.com/@mfowler>
Yes, there are a few concepts to understand. Some six millions of profiles worth of people seem to have worked it out to date.
This is a world in which people are familiar with webmail (email access through an HTTP gateway), and of both Web- and App-based interfaces to services such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, SnapChat, and Reddit.
I'm reasonably comfortable in the thought that whether or not the Great Unwashed Masses think in terms of "HTTP Gateway" or Browser vs. App, they'll work through this particular Sysiphian obstacle without a great deal of effort.
What I'm getting at is that Mastodon has a serious UX and communication problem, because they're not able to pitch the platform in a way that laypeople would care. Regular people don't care about the merits of decentralization. What matters is the experience, and Mastodon seems to be trying really hard to look as much like Twitter as possible. But that's a death sentence: Twitter is always going to be the best at being Twitter.
I'm not saying that Mastodon doesn't have significant UI/UX issues. I've written on several of these at length on Mastodon. I've addressed at least one in this thread. But its multi-instance aspect really doesn't strike me as a weakness. Anything but.
You clearly feel strongly and differently. I doubt we'll progress on this point here and now.
The compelling reasons presently are being provided by Twitter and its present owner, Elon Musk. Nothing's changed in Mastodon's offerings over the past several weeks, but much has changed regarding its attractiveness. Social networks are notoriously tippy, and what matters far more than specific featuresets of either the origin or destination systems. If major users transition, many others will follow. If and when that does occur, this can happen with stunning swiftness.
UI/UX are not at present a blocking feature, though as we've both noted, opportunities for improvement exist.
I've seen instances with > 3x increase in traffic as noted in this thread:
<https://freeradical.zone/@tek/109309036456312761>
That's based on available evidence, not hypothetical arguments.
God, please, fuck no.
I'm just pointing out how ridiculous it is to think every organization should be running their own Mastodon server!