Mastodon’s eternal September begins?
hughrundle.net
hughrundle.net
1) Establish a corporate Mastodon server and deeply embed it into your existing platform. ("We love the Fediverse! We love it so much that we've built native support for it into Google mail. That's right! Starting tomorrow, every @gmail address is also a valid Mastodon user! No need to sign up anywhere, you can just follow and toot and boost right from your Gmail app!")
1a) Think influx of a few 1000s of users is bad? How about a billion? [1]
2) Bombard the community with proprietary extensions and attempt to take control of the technical standards. ("We love ActivityPub too! That's why we're planning to add YouTube integration to it! And Google Calendar invites! And Maps locations and advanced emotes and and and... Developers of servers and third-party clients are encouraged to follow our new ActivityPub Extensions living standard. Feedback is encouraged!")
2a) Non-FAANG server admins or client devs now have the choice between continuously playing catch-up on technical features they have to implement or tolerate that a large part of messages become incomprehensible to non-FAANG users.
3) Pull up the drawbridges. ("While ActivityPub is great, we feel that ultimately it limits the platform's potential and does not meet our standards for privacy and security. Therefore, ActivityPub will be sunset at the end of the year for @gmail.com. Third-party clients and servers are invited to implement our web API instead. Just register your server as an app in the API console and apply for a key...")
I think the Fediverse community would do good to think up strategies how to counter EEE takeovers right now, because if at some point Mastodon becomes big enough that there is money or influence to be made by controlling the platform, then someone will try a takeover, sooner or later.
[1] https://financesonline.com/number-of-active-gmail-users/
Just this week, some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer.
I think the core culture of the fediverse is sufficiently anti-corporation that it will be extremely difficult for someone like Google to corrupt it.
The next person will do this without announcing it, in a way that just looks like a server full of lurkers. When you have a protocol that's all about broadcasting things to anyone who asks to be notified, it's very hard to enforce "no indexing".
I also see Mastodon posts showing up in search results, so it looks to me like indexing is already happening: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22How+I+write+chord+charts%...
> I also see Mastodon posts showing up in search results, so it looks to me like indexing is already happening
Mastodon has a configurable robots.txt. Some instances are fine with search indexing their public timelines.
The big thing is instances can want their public timelines indexed but not their "followers only" timelines.
Well, there goes thinking I can always just host my own instance, I probably wouldn't be active enough for their tastes. And it adds another concern to joining a smaller instance, seems like I have to rely on other users to make it look more legit if I don't want to be so centralized. Or are they looking for very strictly, literally "lurker only" instances?
If your server only has a handful of accounts that obviously correspond to you and your friends, I don't see why anyone would have a problem with that.
On the other hand, if the server has 100s of accounts, each of which follows a large number of people off-server - yet somehow no one follows anyone else on the server and no one ever talks a single word, that would probably raise some suspicion.
Existing Twitter and Facebook connections (names, followers, friends, etc) to create many secret indexer servers made of easily verifiable Google searches of real people with real friends and GPT-like toot generation to fake just enough activity seems like a pretty straightforward route to avoid suspicion.
Arms races suck -- public data is public, period.
On top of that, arguably Mastodon is full of weird people who often don't look all that like real people and find themselves trying to be their weirdest selves (which is also why protecting the privacy courtesies on Mastodon is seen as important). Instances looking too much like Twitter or Facebook data are suspicious in their own ways.
> Arms races suck -- public data is public, period.
There will always be bad actors, but that's not excuse to ignore common courtesy, throw your hands up, and just claim all private data is public. Mastodon isn't Twitter. Mastodon isn't intended to be 100% public. There is data with an expectation of privacy. Just because people can violate that expectation doesn't mean it isn't private data.
A common analogy here is conversation in public restaurants: just because the restaurant itself is open to the public and serves anyone doesn't give you license to eavesdrop on any conversation you want inside of that restaurant. There's generally an expectation of privacy among the other diners. (And in the real world someone trying that might get their ass beat for trying it.)
The particular combo here, though, is "lurker only instance" that also spams follow requests. If you don't spam follow requests and are selective about who you follow (like a human rather than a bot), you have less risk of this specific paranoia. Lurkers are fine to many Mastodon users. Lurkers spamming following requests are a concern.
That's rare, though, right? Since there's often a ton of following going around, especially now?
It's probably also not that hard to make something that easily passes those sorts of quick checks?
> Some instances are fine with search indexing their public timelines.
Which then means anything of yours that gets boosted by someone on a server like that will be indexed.
Not in my experience. I'm on a tiny instance and follows are so rare in general, I can watch them all individually.
There are many users that require follow requests where they verify/vet every single follow.
> It's probably also not that hard to make something that easily passes those sorts of quick checks?
Maybe such that one person doesn't notice, but remember the scale here: if someone is trying to "follow the world" maliciously, they have to make sure that they pass the quick checks of every paranoid person they try to follow. Once a malicious site is "discovered" the #fediblock hash tag moves pretty virally to encourage other paranoid users/instances to (re-)evaluate the bad actor.
> Which then means anything of yours that gets boosted by someone on a server like that will be indexed
(Courteous) Instances don't allow you to boost a Followers Only post to the Public timeline.
Discourteous instances may exist, but when they are found out, they are generally blocked (again, the #fediblock hashtag sometimes moves swiftly and virally here).
Yeah, their culture doesn't sound very... sane from these descriptions. Neurotic about weird stuff, like someone linking to them.
Some instances don't even allow non-logged in users to view public toots, good luck scraping those toots without sendingba follow request (which will be seen by the account and server admin.
A privacy model that depends on "admins would probably notice something fishy" is not a model users should rely on.
This extremely nihilistic view is not productive, and ignores that 99% success in mitigating bad actors is much better than no mitigation.
sure, but it's being loaded up with piles of users who were perfectly happy with corporate bullshit two weeks ago. you're not going to make cultural converts of them before some bright eyed product manager at google spots this opportunity.
in fact, you'll probably _never_ convert them. they'll probably convert the rest of the place. hence "eternal september".
Additionally, expecting Google to have the fortitude of the fediverse when it comes to social media is hilarious
We're coming up on year 6 of the ActivityPub standard, and there are plenty of half decade long fediverse participants like myself. If this were Google I would have been through at least one if not two major platform changes (where you generally lose features & your social graph) or a platform shutdown by now.
Replace Fediverse with email. And it would still stand.
Then realize where email is today. Two-three email providers and hosting your own email server grows less and less plausible each day.
My DNS provider offers a free email account for your domain, but that's the easy way.
I rent a VPS for like $15/yr and run everything myself. Setting up an email server takes like half an afternoon if you follow a good tutorial.
I can't say that Gmail being the biggest provider has had any effect on my email server. I'm not really sure how it would, apart from Google deciding to block private email servers somehow.
Receiving is easy. Sending is much harder than it used to be.
Which is kind of the problem, if you need to be approved by the Big guys, there's not much of a point of calling open and fair
You still can host for sure, but the moment M$/Gmail, blocks you, you've lost contact with half the people
That being said, there are production mail servers on OVH (bad reputation mail wise) that deliver plenty of mail to Microsoft, Google and Apple mail servers every day.
Kinda puzzled by this. Who's out there posting to the open Fediverse with no expectation that their posts are going to be seen, indexed, and possibly archived? It's like publishing a web page and expecting that search engines won't index it.
Just like with other services, you should expect that anything you post to the Fediverse will be there forever, tucked away in databases, indexed by search engines, and outlive you. Even more so, since editing or deleting Fediverse posts is more like a polite request than an actual command; some servers ignore such requests even if your home server complied.
That people are getting upset at this idea gives further credence to the idea that these newcomers really have no idea what they're joining up to and are just hoping that "Mastodon" matches the ideal Twitter replacement they have in their heads with little to no understanding of the reality of its workings.
And that is precisely what happened here. Someone started indexing all the posts of a group of largely vulnerable and marginalized folks, without asking for their consent, without trying to understand the community norms, just barging in and doing what they felt like without concern for the consequences to other people's safety.
They got swiftly ejected from the community accordingly.
If you truly believe that it's okay to index things just because "well, I can technically access it" without any further consideration, then to put it bluntly: you are a threat to the safety of marginalized folks, and you are not welcome in those spaces. You should also consider that there are plenty of people who cannot afford to take such a cavalier attitude as you.
> That people are getting upset at this idea gives further credence to the idea that these newcomers really have no idea what they're joining up to and are just hoping that "Mastodon" matches the ideal Twitter replacement they have in their heads with little to no understanding of the reality of its workings.
This is certainly true. The fediverse is not a replacement for Twitter, and it is not meant to be. The toxic Twitter culture is not wanted there. That of course doesn't stop media outlets from completely ignoring that and going for the quickest headline.
This just makes no sense. You can't paint a message on a billboard and then get angry when cars driving by can read it. If a group of people wants to post messages secretly amongst themselves, the Fediverse is the wrong place to do it. Use Telegram or a private Discord server or something, but even then screenshot leaks are bound to happen eventually.
If you are truly concerned about the safety of "vulnerable folks," you should be all for educating them on the true workings of the internet so that they can avoid publishing things they don't want the world to see. You are saying it's fine for them to use a system whose stated purpose is blasting messaged all across the internet to whoever wants to see them and then expecting all the recipients to know about and follow the unwritten rules they are somehow bound to when handling that message. That is not a realistic expectation.
This is what vulnerable folks I follow do to protect themselves, along with their instance admins often blackholing (IP tables dropping & blocking in their instance config) shit holes like https://freespeechextremist.com
I say this as a person banned by https://freespeechextremist.com , apparently my toots on that Pleroma instance should have been racist, and most other speech is unacceptable there.
Look at what happened to jabber/gtalk...
That will entirely work in favour of big companies. If there was a split and only one split is capable of serving 100 million users that split will win.
Sure yeah XMPP is surviving but it's nowhere close to Google chat or FB messenger.
Eternal September
And this time, we're talking about billions of new voices. Forget about core culture: that's gone now.
No. Billions of people are not currently moving from Twitter to Mastodon.
The moment a Google instance comes online, a lot of servers will block it on principle. Then every time they do something new and scummy, more servers will block them. Eventually, enough of the network will have defederated from them that they just don't have any reach outside of their own server.
Not to mention that based on google's history, a mastodon server would last for maybe a year before Google gets bored and kills it.
Sure, google could set up a server with a billion people, but how can that have an effect when nobody outside of that server sees any of it?
If you wanted to force change on the fediverse, it'd probably have to be a massive undercover grassroots campaign. I'm talking spinning up hundreds of instances with a few thousand users each, and don't let anyone know that those instances are owned by Google. Then you play the long game where your users slowly influence other instances.
I just don't see that happening.
Every server in the fediverse is independent, and has its own culture. Thinking Google could cause change to all of those individual cultures is like saying if you put a few billion people in a new country it would change the global culture. Technically, yes, that could work on paper, but it doesn't really work in practice. Not on the sort of timescale any corporation is willing to invest in.
What is more likely is some new company comes around, VC backed with some "ActivityPub-for-the-masses" pitch. This startup first comes with development resources; all the sudden 90% of the devs on Mastodon2 are employed by $startup. Not only that but they begin to build very polished native apps which aren't OSS. Because all the developers are $startup, the development process becomes less democratic. Then the VC dollars create marketing; then all your new users equate ActivityPub with $startup2. All the non-technical users are on $startup. Then they hit some critical mass and pull up the ladder. You find out 70% of the people you follow were on $startup, because for them it was easier to use the polished thing, and that 70% won't go back to ActivityPub, because all the people are now on $startup and maybe you should just ditch your crummy server and get with the times. It happens slowly, then quickly.
All of the sudden mastodon looks like IRC in a world where everyone uses Discord.
The journa.host guy is speed running this just by accident of trying to figure everything out from inside the fire.
Okay. Those servers represent what percentage of overall users after this scenario happens? 0.1%? 0.01%?
Social networks require a critical mass of popularity to attract most users.
will it continue to be?
As it currently stands Mastodon is a very toxic community of people in the sense that they don't care at all about what the average person actually wants or needs in a network like this. Any and all complaints or comments pointing out the problems with usability are met with exactly the sort of hostility you describe here.
Hell, even as a very technical person I can't find anyone to follow on Mastodon other than developers. There was some large index of the most popular mastodon servers so I tried that and the top entry in the health category was an antivaxer spreading misinformation.
Honestly what we need is a twitter replacement, centralized, with search and recommendations. Perhaps run by a non-profit council or something.
This is already happening somewhat. There's at least one server I can think of off the top of my head which is invite only, and purpose focused. Hoping to get an account there eventually, though I won't say the name and drive unneeded attention to it.
The Fediverse was never built nor intended to be a "Twitter replacement".
You might have said the same thing about HTML, once.
Now it's whatever the owner of the browser monopoly says that it is.
I really enjoyed Dmytri Kleiner’s "You can't code away their wealth" talk [2] introducing the concept.
[1] https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediatio...
California has little to do with it. You won’t be nearly as happy with a site run under the laws of a non-US country though.
Imo, that's a W for Mastodon, not a L.
> I think the Fediverse community would do good to think up strategies how to counter EEE takeovers right now, because if at some point Mastodon becomes big enough that there is money or influence to be made by controlling the platform, then someone will try a takeover, sooner or later.
That's exactly what happened with email, but haven't folks at Matrix/Elemental built a nice playbook to tackle this? Mastodon can and should be its own company. Today, it largely remains a work of just one eng, and incredibly so!
Meanwhile we’re building out P2P Matrix to avoid being dependent in servers altogether: arewep2pyet.com
The features you mentioned are not just possible in theory, but have been implemented by more modern clients.
Edit added: email is an example. Pain in the butt to not be on MSFT, GOOG, etc but at least it’s possible.
Anyway, could they trademark the Mastodon name and logo, so that a 3rd party partially incompatible client should be forced to identify itself as something else avoiding confusion? This would bring the next question: can Mastodon (the real one) nodes protect themselves against "compromised" ones?
Yes, you can always defederate from other instances if you want. In fact, a lot of fediverse instances do just that to protect their hugboxes from the rest of us who actually value our ability to communicate with each other. And there are certainly a number of instances that defederate from others on technical grounds rather than social ones.
I'm sure there's a nicer way of saying that. I've worried that I would end up in an echo chamber of my own on there, but saying things like "hugbox" are unnecessarily rude to people who have tended to prefer isolation because of the effect the world has on them. We can't choose how others react to content, but we shouldn't chastise them for wanting to protect themselves from harm, even if we don't agree with the definition of harm.
In any case, instances full of trolls, spammers and nazis also tend to get blocked by others who prefer to communicate normally. Blocking serves a useful function. If FAANG servers show up, I'm sure some would block them out of principle. Others once they start breaking the protocol.
It isn't. "Hugbox" is used pejoratively specifically to attack people with perceived left wing beliefs and associations. The idea is that people who aren't interested in seeing a ton of transphobic content or whatever are too "soft" to expose themselves to "real conversation."
"Echo chamber" is more neutral in orientation, though still carries a negative connotation. "Hugbox" is specifically slanted.
Naturally, that would be a proprietary service. Or a service lifted off github and extended - the patches never streaming back upstream.
The OP lost me here. You posted your opinion to the public internet. Whether or not you didn't think your audience would reshare using the platform, they could have shared it in a myriad of ways, including posting it to sites like this one. It's even harder to moderate how your opinion gets spread around on the fediverse than on Twitter, where blocking and takedowns are possible. That's sort of the point of the fediverse.
He locked his account AFTER he posted the post.
So yes this rant makes no sense at all.
Mastodon DMs aren't visible in any feeds but those of the the persons @ mentioned. It is sent straight to their personal "inbox". The Mastodon clients often interleave that in that user's "Home" timeline, but they are the only person that sees that and it comes from a different "inbox feed" than normal public post "pulls".
There's a bunch of recent drama about "instance admins can see DMs" because they are stored in plaintext in the database, but there is absolutely no admin tool to read those in normal casese and any admins reading DMs are doing so directly out of the instance database (and no different from Twitter contractors who have access to Twitter's DBs and thus Twitter DMs). (The one tool that will push a DM to an instance admin's direct in-app visibility is the spam/harassment reporting tool, when a user has requested their admin take a look at something.)
The other recent DM drama on Mastodon is that most clients including all the official ones and the Mastodon web client itself intentionally confuse DM recipients and @-mentions to simplify the UI. Which also means that you can't "blindly" @-mention a third party in a DM without (often accidentally) sending the DM to their inbox.
"Followers Only" posts are similar technically: they get posted directly to followers' "inboxes" and do not show up on any public feeds. Again, most clients "merge the streams" on the "Home" timeline and make it appear like a single source timeline, because most of the time that is a better/more preferred user experience. but there's still a technical difference in ActivityPub between toots your instance has pulled from a public feed and toots your account (actor, in ActivityPub parlance) has directly received in its inbox.
ActivityPub covers both parts: RSS-like microblog syndication and Email-like inboxes/outboxes.
(ETA: The easiest place to read up on it yourself is possibly the ActivityPub spec itself. It is dense, but well written and reasonably easy enough to follow. Darius Kazemi's notes on the ActivityPub spec may help depending on your familiarity with other W3C specs, including and such as JSON-LD.)
>> All content © Hugh Rundle except as noted in Acknowledgements. Text licensed CC-BY 4.0.
>> Please ensure any redistribution adheres to the Creative Commons Best Practices for Attribution.
(I agree with them in not liking screenshot-sharing culture)
While they started with a small discussion with people informed about the differences and server stress became instead a tornado of a much larger discussion while also dumping more stress on the servers, as well as emotional stress of having to deal with all the incoming attention.
So. They are overwhelmed, and everything seems like it needs to be solved with the highest priority, but they aren't set up with enough help desk/sub-admin people to filter/protect themselves.
Basically all mastodon server admins have a need, at least temporarily, for some business style structure. They need a Janine Melnitz (Ghostbusters Secretary) to prioritize server is burning down messages, organize non-server is burning down contact requests, and direct help/press requests to appropriate people. And perhaps someone else available to work on social onboarding.
All personal blog/toot/tweets posted by said overwhelmed server admins should also be taken with a grain (or more) of salt. They may feel differently when things are calmer, or might be able to be more diplomatic in general.
Overall though, it was good to hear about how the Author is feeling, and how self-aware they are about how it was similar to when their cohort joined and had to adapt and how the previous fediverse admins might have dealt with similar things.
"..there are names for the sort of person who makes lists of people so others can monitor their communications. They’re not nice names.”
It does not appear to be true for the https://ausglam.space/@hugh Mastodon account. Copying the Mastodon posts and sharing them on Twitter without permission is a copyright violation, and generally rude.
> without permission is a copyright violation
It has nothing to do with a copyright, especially if the quoting (in any way) was done with attribution.
> and generally rude
If it was taken out from a non-public medium (I'm not even sure if Mastodon has this functionality[0]) then sure, but as I understand this is not what happened here.
Note: I checked that M. instance[1] and there is no signage about content ownership or anything like that.
[0] looks like it doesn't? https://ausglam.space/@hugh/109321247180285447
You're mistaking the technical implementation of the Fediverse with the social contract that maintains its existence. The Fediverse is built on the idea of consent, where interacting with you happens because you consent to that interaction happening, and you can withdraw that consent at any time by e.g. deleting your original post. (That's also why the "quote tweet" feature from Twitter is absent on the Fediverse.)
When people and instances don't follow that contract, they simply get defederated.
Just because it's technically possible, that doesn't make it "good" or even "sought".
People are unpredictable. If there are "correct" ways of using the Fediverse, they need to be implemented into the code. Otherwise people can and will use it in whatever ways the code allows.
At any rate, there are many people, myself included, who don't really care if my posts get screenshotted or reposted outside of my server or circle of friends. How is someone supposed to determine to whom to apply this "social contract?"
Again, the default mode of thinking when posting anything to the internet should be "everyone, everywhere, forever into the future, will be able to see this." The Fedi is not immune from this rule.
> (That's also why the "quote tweet" feature from Twitter is absent on the Fediverse.)
It's absent from Mastodon. Other front ends support it. Not sure why Mastodon is holding out.
The internet norms I'm used to have public posts as available for that sort of response: if you shared it to the general world and it has a URL that anyone can load then it's fine to link to and discuss. If Mastodon has a different norm here then (a) that's going to be a hard lift because it is so different from the rest of the internet and (b) I wish people would make it clearer what the norm they're going for is!
I understand being unhappy about screenshot sharing, but my read is that even if only the link sharing piece had happened they would still be upset?
It really is a pity that the general public doesn't understand the difference today (or know what a URL is).
Mastodon allows companies to own those relationships on their server.
For example, I can have the BBC Mastodon server, and all the accounts are @bbc. If the employee leaves, they lose the account. The BBC can do their own moderation, but still be connected. Smaller organisations can do to the same for customer support. They can own the advertising and the UI. And if Mastodon goes weird, they can take their URL with them. They can add their own plugins rather than being dependent on the API.
I think this is a big reason why Mastodon is getting attention, rather than simply being an alternative place for cool kids to hang out.
Of course, this model is possible in the fediverse as well, just as it's possible with email. (And note that many people prefer a gmail address to one that they'll lose when they get fired.)
Tweeter is the poster child of personal branding. A near totality of the high-visibility posts are transactional in nature. The posts are either crafted by PR people, meaning someone got literally paid to tweet, or are done personally with the aim of increasing personal branding or as part of a contract.
Which is why some folks, including me, keep their account at a purposefully low follower count by tweeting dry unengaging stuff as well.
And avoiding all topics, such as political discussions, where there are incentives to virtue signal.
Sweeping generalisation. Some people care about some individuals more than the organisation to which they belong. Think Trump funs who would vote for Trump whichever party he stood for, or Tucker Carlson fans who would watch him on any network, or Tom Brady fans who would follow him whichever team he played for.
But for every Trump, Carlson or Brady, there's a 1000 Liz Trusses or Huw Edwards, in whom most interest is solely because of the organisation to which they belong.
And there's no reason an individual can't have both an organisation account and a personal one. Even aggregate accounts which pull everything together. Mastodon offers a lot of opportunities to do things differently.
The Mastodon software actually allows moving an account between instances fairly easily, though it requires cooperation from both the source and the dest instance. When you move an account, you keep all your followers and everyone you follow. But your old posts stay on your old server.
I do agree that it probably makes sense for big organizations to have official instances, however.
Does the federated model deal with that? I understood that the owner of an instance can moderate any posts that come from that instance, whereas the only moderation you can do of external instances is to ignore the whole thing. That would mean a BBC journalist could neither hear legitimate criticism from positive participants, nor harassment from negative participants. And anyone on that second host would continue to see the harassment, and it might simply have its chilling effect on the next generation.
I think the interest of journalism companies in having their own instance would only be met if they could moderate replies and mentions no matter where they're from. In such a world, perhaps the user could say, "Please ignore moderation from these instances" - so that you could continue to see a post on a third-party instance excluded by the BBC if you didn't trust their moderation.
Alternatively, they would only want to have two-way federation with trusted third parties, who they could trust to moderate extensively. It would end up the way some people say today, "You can't run your own email server" because Google and Microsoft tend to look askance at any email not sent from the servers of one of them. (If the trusted third party instances allow federation, it might be much more interactive than email is.)
A final possibility would be that the BBC and other major content producers would treat Mastodon as "write-only", in much the same way that Reddit links to content and people discuss it, but generally the major media companies ignore it.
Mastodon has a lot of tools for muting and ignoring, both at the account and at the instance level. Here are the admin-level tools: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/
Right now, it looks like admins can "suspend" or "silence" external instances as a whole, but not individual users. "Silence" is interesting, because it's essentially a "soft ban": Users from that server will only appear to local users who follow them, if understand correctly. It's essentially, "Mostly we don't want to hear from @wretchedhiveofscumandvillany.example.com, but some of our users want to follow specific people from there, and that's cool."
> Alternatively, they would only want to have two-way federation with trusted third parties, who they could trust to moderate extensively.
This is already true to a certain extent. It appears that instances that won't moderate especially abusive users may gradually be defederated from other servers (or at least silenced). And of course, individual users can also ignore entire instances.
Seriously, what is the value of Twitter for them? It isn't the same as for the masses who need somebody else to build and maintain all that infrastructure. For entities capable of running their own networks, Twitter and TikTok and all the other "social media" serve a different function. Indeed, when you are not only capable of running your own datacenters but actually do run them and operate your own media network, but still include Instagram as a core component of your business strategy, it is because it provides a value you aren't realizing from everything within your own datacenter.
That's certainly one issue, but there are many others. Owning your own Mastodon server should make it easier to find a solution compared to having to use Twitter's tools.
> It would end up the way some people say today, "You can't run your own email server" because Google and Microsoft
There are more trusted email servers than just those two. Fastmail, Apple, Yahoo all come to mind. Albeit that's not the perfectly distributed model, I would rather an oligopoly like that than just Twitter.
Highlighting ways in which Mastodon is not utopia isn't a valid reason to stick with what we've got.
> There are more trusted email servers than just those two. Fastmail, Apple, Yahoo all come to mind.
My comment completely survives this pedantry. In fact, I can hardly think of any way whatsoever that such pedantry weakens my argument in any degree, or could be thought to speak to any of my concerns.
They certainly don't want the responsibility of moderating themselves. That's why comment sections disappeared, probably. There's a nice theory about that in: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...
"We Need To Have A National Conversation About Why We Can No Longer Have A National Conversation"
> It’s the story of everyone who’s tried to host a space for political discussion on the Internet. Take the New York Times, in particular their article 'Why No Comments? It’s A Matter Of Resources'. Translated from corporate-speak, it basically says that unmoderated comment sections had too many “trolls”, so they decided to switch to moderated comment sections only, but they don’t have enough resources to moderate any controversial articles, so commenting on controversial articles is banned.
> And it’s not just the New York Times. In the past five years, CNN, NPR, The Atlantic, Vice, Bloomberg, Motherboard, and almost every other major news source has closed their comments – usually accompanied by weird corporate-speak about how “because we really value conversations, we are closing our comment section forever effective immediately”.
> This confused me until I had my own experience with the Culture War thread.
> The fact is, it’s very easy to moderate comment sections. It’s very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse. I do it single-handedly on this blog’s 2000+ weekly comments. r/slatestarcodex’s volunteer team of six moderators did it every day on the CW Thread, and you can scroll through week after week of multiple-thousand-post culture war thread and see how thorough a job they did.
> But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.
> Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country. Some people think transwomen are a tool of the patriarchy trying to appropriate female spaces. Some people think Charles Murray and The Bell Curve were right about everything. Some people think Islam represents an existential threat to the West. Some people think women are biologically less likely to be good at or interested in technology. Some people think men are biologically more violent and dangerous to children. Some people just really worry a lot about the Freemasons.
> Each of these views has adherents who are, no offense, smarter than you are. Each of these views has, at times, won over entire cultures so completely that disagreeing with them then was as unthinkable as agreeing with them is today. I disagree with most of them but don’t want to be too harsh on any of them. Reasoning correctly about these things is excruciatingly hard, trusting consensus opinion would have led you horrifyingly wrong throughout most of the past, and other options, if they exist, are obscure and full of pitfalls.
> I tend to go with philosophers from Voltaire to Mill to Popper who say the only solution is to let everybody have their say and then try to figure it out in the marketplace of ideas. But none of those luminaries had to deal with online comment sections.
> The thing about an online comment section is that the guy who really likes pedophilia is going to start posting on every thread about sexual minorities “I’m glad those sexual minorities have their rights! Now it’s time to start arguing for pedophile rights!” followed by a ten thousand word manifesto. This person won’t use any racial slurs, won’t be a bot, and can probably reach the same standards of politeness and reasonable-soundingness as anyone else. Any fair moderation policy won’t provide the moderator with any excuse to delete him. But it will be very embarrassing for to New York Times to have anybody who visits their website see pro-pedophilia manifestos a bunch of the time.
> “So they should deal with it! That’s the bargain they made when deciding to host the national conversation!”
> No, you don’t understand. It’s not just the predictable and natural reputational consequences of having some embarrassing material in a branded space. It’s enemy action.
> Every Twitter influencer who wants to profit off of outrage culture is going to be posting 24-7 about how the New York Times endorses pedophilia. Breitbart or some other group that doesn’t like the Times for some reason will publish article after article on New York Times‘ secret pro-pedophile agenda. Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you, people who hate everybody and will take whatever targets of opportunity present themselves, and a thousand self-appointed moral crusaders and protectors of the public virtue. It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section. Finally, it will make up 100% of what people associate with you and your brand. The Chinese Robber Fallacy is a harsh master; all you need is a tiny number of cringeworthy comments, and your political enemies, power-hungry opportunists, and 4channers just in it for the lulz can convince everyone that your entire brand is about being pro-pedophile, catering to the pedophilia demographic, and providing a platform for pedophile supporters. And if you ban the pedophiles, they’ll do the same thing for the next-most-offensive opinion in your comments, and then the next-most-offensive, until you’ve censored everything except “Our benevolent leadership really is doing a great job today, aren’t they?” and the comment section becomes a mockery of its original goal.
> Still, people correctly determined that I was probably the weakest link, and chose me as the target.)
> People settled on a narrative. The Culture War thread was made up entirely of homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazis. I freely admit there were people who were against homosexuality in the thread (according to my survey, 13%), people who opposed using trans people’s preferred pronouns (according to my survey, 9%), people who identified as alt-right (7%), and a single person who identified as a neo-Nazi (who as far as I know never posted about it). Less outrageous ideas were proportionally more popular: people who were mostly feminists but thought there were differences between male and female brains, people who supported the fight against racial discrimination but thought could be genetic differences between races. All these people definitely existed, some of them in droves. All of them had the right to speak; sometimes I sympathized with some of their points. If this had been the complaint, I would have admitted to it right away. If the New York Times can’t avoid attracting these people to its comment section, no way r/ssc is going to manage it.
> But instead it was always that the the thread was “dominated by” or “only had” or “was an echo chamber for” homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the subreddit was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the SSC community was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that I personally was a homophobic etc neo-Nazi of them all.
> I am a pro-gay Jew who has dated trans people and votes pretty much straight Democrat. I lost distant family in the Holocaust. You can imagine how much fun this was for me.
> People would message me on Twitter to shame me for my Nazism. People who linked my blog on social media would get replies from people “educating” them that they were supporting Nazism, or asking them to justify why they thought it was appropriate to share Nazi sites. I wrote a silly blog post about mathematics and corn-eating. It reached the front page of a math subreddit and got a lot of upvotes. Somebody found it, asked if people knew that the blog post about corn was from a pro-alt-right neo-Nazi site that tolerated racists and sexists.
> There was a big argument in the comments about whether it should ever be acceptable to link to or read my website. Any further conversation about math and corn was abandoned. This kept happening, to the point where I wouldn’t even read Reddit discussions of my work anymore. The New York Times already has a reputation, but for some people this was all they’d heard about me.
> Some people started an article about me on a left-wing wiki that listed the most offensive things I have ever said, and the most offensive things that have ever been said by anyone on the SSC subreddit and CW thread over its three years of activity, all presented in the most damning context possible; it started steadily rising in the Google search results for my name. A subreddit devoted to insulting and mocking me personally and Culture War thread participants in general got started; it now has over 2,000 readers. People started threatening to use my bad reputation to discredit the communities I was in and the causes I cared about most.
> Some people found my real name and started posting it on Twitter. Some people made entire accounts devoted to doxxing me in Twitter discussions whenever an opportunity came up. A few people just messaged me letting me know they knew my real name and reminding me that they could do this if they wanted to.
> Some people started messaging my real-life friends, telling them to stop being friends with me because I supported racists and sexists and Nazis. Somebody posted a monetary reward for information that could be used to discredit me.
> One person called the clinic where I worked, pretended to be a patient, and tried to get me fired.
> I don’t want to claim martyrdom. None of these things actually hurt me in real life. My blog continues to be popular, my friends stuck by me, and my clinic didn’t let me go. I am not going to be able to set up a classy new FiredForTruth.com website like James Damore did. What actually happened was much more prosaic: I had a nervous breakdown.
> It wasn’t even that bad a nervous breakdown. I was able to keep working through it. I just sort of broke off all human contact for a couple of weeks and stayed in my room freaking out instead. This is similar enough to my usual behavior that nobody noticed, which suited me fine. And I learned a lot (for example, did you know that sceletium has a combination of SSRI-like compounds and PDE2 inhibitors that make it really good at treating nervous breakdowns? True!). And it wasn’t like the attacks were objectively intolerable or that everybody would have had a nervous breakdown in my shoes: I’m a naturally obsessive person, I take criticism especially badly, and I had some other things going on too.
That's what we are seeing, people are choosing one thing not a federation of things.
There needs to be some reason and big benefit that people get for choosing federation. The only thing I can see would be if there's some kind of major and controversial moderation defederation event (e.g. a cancel culture controversy) but very soon before people get entrenched in their patterns and can see why federations are useful.
Possibly then, having instances run by media organisations might actually show the difference in moderations in the fediverse.
For what it's worth, moderation is the best thing about fediverse. So many communities that have grown up there over the years couldn't have done it without decentralized moderation.
And it's not like there hasn't been a "some kind of major and controversial moderation defederation event" - there have been several. There are several collections of instances that are fairly closed off from the wider network. And honestly, that's fine. If some people get tired of others shit, they should be able to close themselves off from them.
The simple fact that a single administrator can moderate an instance of about 100 active people in their free time is what allows the moderation in fediverse to scale. Adding more people makes it a job, and from what I've read from professional moderators of social networks, that job is not a nice one.
One swallow does not make the summer though, as we say in our country, so we'll se if there will be more.
Edit: there is also on for the German Federal Government. https://social.bund.de/about
From one toot in the timeline:
> Our Director and Head of Translation Department paid a visit to @EMSA_EU@twitter.com
...wait a minute, which instance is that? :)
But seriously, it's amazing to see institutions and official account getting on the Fediverse!
I am more than just my job (or hobby, or location) - say I am a worker and have my @work, and I am deep into digital art so I am also on @mastodon.art.
I should really only talk with my work hat on @work and my art hat on @mastodon.art - should these be able to be optionally linked. Should the follwers of me @work also see my @hobby etc without having to follow me all over the federated universe?
Movie star X on twitter will promote their new movie, talk about their kids, pump and dump crypto, slag off a politician, rip the latest death etc. All one the same 'instance' or server.
If the BBC are giving you a megaphone, it's useful that they can take away that megaphone when you leave. You can always choose to speak without the megaphone.
But when it comes to social networks, part of the idea at least seems to be broadcasting and merging of identities. Back in the day / still barely in existence - keybase cross verified your identity on multiple platforms, and I suspect that in a federated world this function becomes more important and probably needs to exist even more than before.
The real reason why people are "migrating" to Mastodon right now (and can't seem to stop talking about it on Twitter) is one and one only: to signal their tribal affiliation. Twitter used to be controlled by the blue tribe and now it was bought by a member of the red tribe. That is all that is happening. Nothing more, nothing less.
I don't know if Elon Musk will destroy Twitter or if it won't matter in the long term. I suspect the latter, but I'm close to 50/50 on that. What I am sure is that the average Twitter user will not actually stay and use Mastodon right now. Most people are on Twitter for the audience and/or to follow those with large audiences, and Mastodon does not have that not will it in the near future (which makes it sound like a really nice place to hang out now that I mention it :)
I would also point out that, in my experience, internet communities are great until they get noticed by the mainstream. Once they become mainstream, they attract huge masses of users that want to fight for their political tribe with high hostility / low creativity content, and the eye of Sauron (politicians in general) falls upon it, and opinion piece writers start fanning the flames of moral panics, and the good times are over.
That's an assertion. I've moved because I genuinely want to own my network and not get suddenly blocked, losing access to everything. And I've moved because I want to encourage others to move. If everybody else moves, then it becomes easier for me to remain moved, and thus promoting it on Twitter is entirely consistent with that goal.
But that's not to say that my reasoning is to signal tribal affiliation.
I haven't moved before because I didn't know anyone on Mastodon. I now know quite a few, so moving is more valuable. It could be the network effect happening in reverse, and that's interesting for the media to report on.
Fediverse is in the best sense of the word, weird. You have to embrace the weirdness to understand it. Not everyone can, or will. It would take a lot of time for that weirdness to be ironed out so that most people would be comfortable using it, but I don't think many in the community developing it are interested in that.
And like, from people I follow, most of the more interesting ones aren't even using Mastodon, but rather Pleroma, Miskkey, or some forks of those. It's a diverse network, not only in types of people, but also in types of software. I would suggest you explore it more after a month or so, after this twitter wave blows over and dies off once again, as there's certainly some very nice communities out there.
This is so reductionist. Elon advocating for team red is one thing, him introducing a rootkit into Twitter (blue/verification without any actual validation of identity) and laying off half the employees to defray Twitter's leveraged buyout fees incurred by the buyout is yet another.
People are leaving because they're losing confidence he has a plan that isn't lighting the place on fire. In fact, DMs between Jack and Elon indicate that was entirely the plan - to promote Jack's BlueSky venture.
That's not the impression I got from those texts.
Having a Twitter account is largely also about this. There is a "Twitter Tribe", and people feel it deeply as part of their identity. This is why there is so much emotion around the Musk acquisition.
I want to ask them: what do you want? If you run your own Mastodon server you have a large degree of control over how that is run and federates, so can customise your experience. To continue the analogy, you can stop people invading your house party.
Then there is the cultural lamentation and the "no-one asked if I wanted that" line, which is wild because cross-posting has been around for as long as there have been platforms. It just happens.
As for cross posting - re posting and re-mixing other people's content has been pretty much the basis of the internet since forever. Again, if this is something you're not happy with you should better create private forums for just your friends, that's a totally fine thing to do. Much like if you want an intimate house party you only invite your friends and eject any gatecrashers who try to sneak in.
Perhaps the clue is in the 'anarchism' bit - in anarchist circles when you have a smallish and relatively close group you can manage a very positive and supportive atmosphere without rules and protocols. But as things grow you lose that, inevitably, as having more people means needing more formalized ways of handling issues. I can see how it feels like losing something but on the other hand you have to question the wisdom of an approach that is basically guaranteed to fall apart as soon as it becomes a bit popular.
This is eloquently explained in The Tyranny of Structurelessness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...
I've been thinking of metaphors to try to understand why I've found it so upsetting. This is supposed to be what we wanted, right? Yet it feels like something else. Like when you're sitting in a quiet carriage softly chatting with a couple of friends and then an entire platform of football fans get on at Jolimont Station after their team lost.
*They* don't usually catch trains and don't know the protocol. They assume everyone on the train was at the game or at least follows football. They crowd the doors and complain about the seat configuration. It's not entirely the Twitter people's fault. They've been taught to behave in certain ways.
I/We/Gaia would like those gross football fans to not exist on their planet. There is only I/We/Gaia. Not asking what Gaia wants is bad. There is only I/We/Gaia. (https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Gaia)
I struggled to understand what I was feeling, or the word to describe it. I finally realised on Monday that the word I was looking for was "traumatic".
Suddenly having hundreds of people asking (or not) to join those conversations without having acclimatised themselves to the social norms felt like a violation, an assault. I know I'm not the only one who felt like this. The tools, protocols and culture of the fediverse were built by trans and queer feminists. Those people had already started to feel sidelined from their own project when people like me started turning up a few year ago.
there’s a range between “something i posted to my public newsletter/blog” and “encrypted signal chat message”. for most people, crossposting is OK in the former, but a clear norms violation in the latter. ultimately, this can only be enforced culturally — and yet most of us still expect that as viable: “it just happens” is the thinking of a selfish CEO who does something blatantly unethical and defends himself by claiming “but i didn’t technically break the law!”
Mastodon is somewhere on this scale — and quite likely at least slightly closer to the chat end of that scale than twitter is, taken in whole. it also has features to signal what is appropriate (e.g. it’s more of a violation to cross-post something with a lock icon next to it than with an unlock icon than with a globe icon). but new users aren’t likely to have a strong understanding of this visibility setting, so it’s even more the case that a norm violation might be obvious to one section of the userbase while the (unacquainted) norm violator is completely unaware.
yeah, defederating is a solution. in a similar sense that getting a restraining order is a solution to IRL disagreements. it’s more pleasant for everyone if you can reach shared norms and only deploy the stronger tools against those who actually mean you harm.
Even for public posts? Which show up in the federated timeline for thousands of people you don't know, are visible to anyone who loads your profile, and can be shared by URL? To me that sounds very close to a blog post (no need to ask for permission to share) and not much like a direct message (definitely ask first).
- a blog post is something i put out there for a wide audience to read, take something away from, and bring back to disparate communities. it's a prompt to start many discussions, with no expectation that i'm in or even aware of those discussions.
- a public fediverse post is me opening a conversation directly with the readers. i'm dropping some idea in front of the other people at the bar, particularly the guy next to me with whom i've already exchanged pleasantries (my followers), but bonus if people near us overhear and want to join the conversation (maybe i'll make some new connections).
it's this difference in distance between me and the recipient (both spatially and temporally). if a reader screenshots my words -- name attached -- and brings that elsewhere, that risks a faux pas: that's more likely to be them talking about me behind my back (why take the conversation elsewhere when i'm right here in this moment speaking with you? and why do so in a way which attributes me while artificially raising the barrier to obtaining context?)
there's nuance here, for sure. someone with 50 followers might expect the bar-like experience, whereas someone with 5000 followers might accept that they're seen more as a spokesperson. screenshot-sharing (author's complaint) is different from posting the URL to an aggregator is different than sharing the URL in a group chat. most people i know out here are more interested in growing a dunbar-level number of connections than in becoming a spokesman. if you're crossposting i think that's the judgement you'd want to make first.
The author wasn't just objecting to screenshotting though, but to linking ("some people had cross-posted my Mastodon post into Twitter"). Which seems basically the same as boosting, which is (I think?) normal no-consent-needed Mastodon behavior?
(I wrote more as a post: https://www.jefftk.com/p/mastodon-linking-norms)
More broadly though, I thought the main USP of Mastodon was that, if you don't like the toxic behaviour of a group of users, you don't have to endure it? Why then would this influx be an issue for anyone?
The post also seems very dramatic, bordering on hysterical, in the way it describes how "upsetting" it is that other people are joining Mastodon and the "grief" that has apparently struck the extant community there. Which, ironically, strikes me as very "Twitter" behaviour.
When I hear the word "trauma", I'm thinking of veterans, people that lost loved ones, victims of violence.
On Mastodon, trauma refers to getting too many follow requests.
It's because of them the Internet has become a sanitised, soulless, for-profit space. If Mastodon succeeds, companies will open their profiles on there, and watch how Mastodon will start to wither and die.
Just wait for the first "<big multinational company> has opened their own Mastodon instance" post in the near future.
The EU have had a Mastodon instance[0] before it was cool! (Although, it isn't open to the public and only has a few EU agencies as members.)
¿Por qué no los dos?
It takes two to tango.
Supply- versus demand-side problems.
Yes it will become like email where you can't really run your own server unless you want to spend the rest of your time fighting to get off corporate blacklists.
I do see other dangers though. Here are a couple bad scenarios I don't think there are adequate safeguards to handle gracefully:
Spammers, trolls, Nazis, etc... buy domains and spin up servers in an automated manner for the sole purpose of abuse. We saw that with email and while most of us get fairly little spam now it still isn't solved. To make matters worse, it's hard for anyone with a new email server to deliver to the existing big ones.
A VC-backed startup and/or existing big tech company decides to embrace, extend, and extinguish the protocol.
The September That Never Ended was the best thing that ever happened to The Internet.
Yeah, it brought all those obnoxious tourists, with their Hawai'ian shirts, straw hats, loud voices, and trash.
But they also brought money. Lots of money.
That's when this whole "make lots of money in tech" thing started.
Should be an interesting story.
I do miss the internet of the 1990s, but we can never go back there. What we can do, though, is fight for more open platforms.
We live in an environment where most users don't leave the safety of facebook/twitter/instgram/reddit. Advanced users are running darkweb sites and doing a number of things the average person isn't.
The world hasn't changed much. Are you seeking out and supporting the unusual or are you waiting for it to come to facebook/instagram first to tell you about it?
Can't forget this https://spacehey.com/
It’s kind of like, in the Nineteenth Century, large parts of the world were still unexplored, so authors like H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle, could write books like King Solomon’s Mines, or The Lost World, and people could sort of believe “it could happen.”
These days, we know our world much better. We can call up satellite views of Base Camp, on Mt. Everest.
But we are now looking much farther for “it could happen.”
“You’re using it differently than I like to use it!”
Oh, and they aren't a toddler, they're adults.
Oh, and they aren't your kids, either. Not related to you at all.
Now your analogy is much more useful.
This just makes the toddler's position that much more stupid. As the owner of the toys, he's free to set the rules for how they can be played with. But not if he's giving them away.
We are currently in the in-between phase where a swarm of kids have shown up to play with the neat toys, are ignoring the rules, and are about to be kicked out to go play with their own toys, unless they can learn the rules.
Mastodon might not be the next twitter, but maybe it has already succeeded as a refuge for people not wanting to be on twitter. The bigger problem mastodon has is that its servers are running full to take on new people.
We have been running a few instances of mastodon which now have more space for new users. Link in my bio if anyone wants to use them, but might run out anytime.
I see strong parallels between this and blender when I was active in the community around a decade ago.
Everyone nowadays takes blender seriously as a contender in that market now so keep the faith, peeps.
Just say what you have to say, indeed.
I think you lost me there.
Best part was on the end: „All content © Hugh Rundle except as noted in Acknowledgements. Text licensed CC-BY 4.0.“
That made me laugh.
even late pre-Musk twitter was far more tolerant than mastadon. for example, any instance hosting the harry potter lady would get defederated from by 90% of the network, I guarantee you that.
As a user of the network in general though, this doesn't have to matter to you. You can sign up on an instance that defederates according to whichever rules you like (or on an instance that defederates nobody at all). You can still talk to the rest of the network just fine, in addition to talking to anybody other instances want to defederate. There's no silo, you don't have to pick a side.
You can even self-host your own single-user instance (or rent one, from e.g. https://masto.host/, although they've closed signups due to demand right now) and control federation directly. With that, the only people you won't be able to talk to are people & instances that decide to block you _personally_.
If you are getting defederated by 90% of the network, isn't that maybe a strong indication that 90% don't want to hear what you have to say?
Freedom of speech is a protection against the government censoring you. It doesn't mean you get to spread hate and toxicity freely without consequence.
If that is true, it means Mastodon misaligns with probably some 90% of the political spectrum that would absolutely not want to take away her speech, regardless of whether people agree with her.
Which means...Mastodon is a far-left echo chamber. Which doesn't have to be bad, everybody deserves to have their place. I'm just saying it's not suitable for mainstream usage.
I expect clients that combine timelines from alt accounts using different servers to become the norm. Users get all the benefits, with more ability to opt out. If I've got Jim@alt.net on banning-instance, and Mike@tim.com on the banned instance, and their timelines are combined client-side, it's the best of both worlds.
That sounds crazy. If my instance did that, I would immediately consider moving to another, more politically tolerant instance or just run my own to traverse the censorship issue entirely.
And the good thing about the fediverse is that a user has those options and isn’t at mercy of other peoples limited tolerance for freedom of speech.
In his first letter to staff he said they need to focus on "banning trolls". Oof ow.
95% of those I follow are tech and prob about 10 are on mastodon and Twitter and no ones really talking about it.
The average user who is following a bunch of celebrities isn’t going to move because 1 celebrity moved. They prob won’t even notice the celeb moved.
Mastodon doesn't need to follow the "rules" of big tech, or corporations. Mastodon is a success the moment two people can successfully communicate with it. Or six million. Nothing else matters. There's no difference.
There are no shareholders that want to see increasing MAUs. There are no investors that want to exit and therefore insist on ballooning the numbers. There are no employees that will loose their jobs when growth lags, nor advertisers that want to get ever more eyeballs else they leave for [other corp].
It really doesn't matter what any of those fictional "average users" does: whether they follow, stay, go back, whatever: as long as the people using mastodon now have a good time, and get value today, its a huge success. There honestly isn't anything else needed.
Even if not, we will have to see how the dynamics of Twitter evolve. Yes, if Twitter can survive on people following celebrities, then it might survive anyway. But currently, Twitter is seen as a reputable place to be for all kind of organizations. Media, the government, sports teams. Everyone is on Twitter. I am trying not to judge Elons ideas at the current state of things, but trust is difficult to obtain, but easy to lose.
Currently, we do see quite a trend for "tech" people to at least also use Mastodon if not outright to migrate. This is quite an important user group. We will see, how many others might follow.
Twitter gives people the means to express the attitude they already have. "Influencer Culture" didn't start or end on Twitter.
I've been on Mastadon for about a year now, on a small instance that's not accepting new users, and my experience has been great and hasn't changed. If you want to be inclusive and accepting of new users that's great, but that also means accepting their ideas and who they are.
I think that’s just a human thing.
A lot of what is described here just seems like human behavior, and I do not understand the authors description of it as “a violation, an assault”.
There’s a weird glorification of the current participants of the fediverse in that article and yet outright rejection of anyone new, and by the description of the article no interest in welcoming them.
Anyone who thinks Mastodon has any hope of being the next Twitter is delusional. It is the next Parler/Rumble.
I mean seriously, what if twitter turned out to be a bad idea?
We haven't had "the next 8 track" or "the next Zoetrope" or "the next cutlass" -We do other things instead.
Maybe a hyperfocal single issue social construct, is what trainspotters actually WANT?
> I mean seriously, what if twitter turned out to be a bad idea?
Twitter fills a void where there is no real alternative. How can it be a bad idea? If you are morally opposed to it or something don't use it.
It's bad because of its 2nd order effects. On mental health. On conspiracy theory. On attacks on the integrity of the polity, on social cohesion. Freedom to communicate in the wide, semi-pseudonomously turns out to be something exploitable to undermine the fabric of society at times. I don't think we can put that genie back in the bottle, but "the revolution will not be televised" maybe turns out to be .. wrong?
(Anybody who thought 2008 twitter would become what it is now would also have been called delusional)
If an actor wants to hyper centralize its users, bets are other platforms won't federate with it
The interesting thing about Mastodon is that it has the potential to host countless single topic communities, similar to Reddit.
I mainly used Twitter to see what was going on in tech & open-source and discuss development topics, and comfortably 50% of the tech people I followed on Twitter have now set up on Mastodon, either additionally (cross-posting to both) or in quite a few cases as a full replacement. I post the same thing to both and I get far more responses & engagement on Mastodon now. For me personally it _has_ replaced Twitter.
Depends which circles you move in and what you use Twitter for (it's certainly not useful in the politics & journalism scene yet, for starters) but there's already significant movement here in some areas.
If you want the masses you need a "classic" setup: big commercial company, lots of money and a centralized infrastructure.
Why do people only consider Mastodon (or many Open Source Software) a success when Joe Average wants to use it?
There is also the tendency for the mainstream successes to suck all the life out of niches. It’s not inevitable, and becoming a mainstream success can itself remove what was valuable to you in the niche.
But if I want to use Mastodon, I’d rather all the people I want to follow are on there.
This is the single greatest barrier to entry that's not going to go away without compromising the ideals of federation.
Start up a hosted mastodon instance, make a bit of fuzz and PR around it, and then over time invest some resources into making it more awesome. All for relatively little effort, compared to starting a new social network from scratch. The largest effort would likely go into moderation on that instance.
Who else could do that? Maybe New York Times? Apple? It needs to be someone with an established brand, and the engineering skills to run it at scale.
(Disclaimer: not my own idea, heard it somewhere else -- maybe on risky.biz?)
* If there are security vulnerabilities in Mastodon and Google is hosting an instance then Google would be blamed, which means they would need to do a very thorough security review before hosting one.
* If they announced it and lots of people wanted to join it would probably have far more members than the biggest Mastodon instances do today, so they would want to make sure they had something that could scale horizontally. I don't think the current codebase can do that?
* There are various places where the current design of Mastodon doesn't match user expectations around privacy and control over their content. For example, if you delete something it looks to you like it's deleted but that delete may not fully propagate. By hosting a server Google would be taking responsibility for this, and would have people mad at them (likely with lawsuits) when it didn't do what they expected.
This isn't to say that Google would never get into the federated social network space, but it would be after building their own activity pub implementation.
(Disclosure: I used to work at Google)
Google had Google Wave. Shut it down
Google had Google Plus. Shut it down.
...
If Google unveiled a Mastodon instance tomorrow, why would people believe that Google had any interest in developing and maintaining a social network
If the desired of different people are too incompatible, then some servers may wind up blocking other servers. So be it.
Holy Lord this kind of stuff is so obnoxious. This is a problem that is fixable with a single button. Make your account private, done. And yet here we are with this absolute yarn about how it's a moral issue that people are using a social network to socially network.
I predict a temporary influx of new users, which will leave once they realise that Mastodon is full of shrill geeks. In the interim the shrill geeks will moan that their beloved platform has become overrun with "normies".
I don't use either so have no skin in this game, happy to be proven wrong. Sitting back with a very small bag of popcorn until all the noise blows over.
You "toot".
toot
Now that I got me some Seagram's gin Everybody's got their cup but they ain't chipped in Now this types of shit happens all the time You gotta get yours before I gotta get mine
It doesn't scale. A influx of some tens of thousands of users already breaks half the fediverse. Absorbing this relatively small growth means an instance owner has to reach deeply into their pocket to pay for extra hardware capacity. And sees their manual moderation workload explode. In between this scaling, the system will simply be dysfunctional or locked down. It all runs on donations and volunteer work.
This is much different from Twitter where as a user you're never confronted with scaling or funding problems. Nor would you easily face the situation that all your content is wiped out because the instance owner retired. Or because a mod doesn't like you. Because moderation is completely arbitrary, Reddit-style. An instance owner may also decide to not federate with specific other servers that you liked, destroying your cross-instance posting and following.
You could scale by making lots of instances, but people need to actually fund and run them. And it makes all of the above issues even worse.
The culture clash is perhaps most interesting to see, as the author correctly lays out. The author uses the word "traumatic" when confronted with an abundance of follow requests.
That sentence succinctly summarizes the typical culture. The fact that it's a request, requiring permission. And a type of extreme fragility that is opposite to Twitter's culture.
Although policies vary between instances, most are designed for safety to the point that conversation becomes dysfunctional. One large instance stated to not post food, insects, and a whole list of highly generic items without a content warning (CW). Because apparently, somebody might be triggered by those. A user questioning this policy was soon circled and explained that it only takes seconds to do, whilst the "trauma" lasts for days.
Extreme safety leading to unsafety in expressing the simplest of sentences. It's a clash of two extremes. Extreme toxicity and extreme fragility.
The other limiting factor is the rejection of America's culture war. Don't be political or overly political, and especially not regarding the topics dominating US politics. Here the mismatch cannot be larger. Twitter basically IS the US culture war as of 2016 when Trumpism brought Twitter back from a coma. Twitter users have been exposed to this extreme polarization for 6 years, they've internalized and normalized it. And now they're asked to shut up about it and to not cause any stirs.
The result, a perfectly happy and peaceful place is disturbingly unsatisfactory, I care to admit. Nothing happens. There's no enemy to bash, no drama, nothing to be outraged about. It's like watching the news where the reporter says: all is good today, carry on. Or watching a movie where nothing happens to any character.
How many online "friendships" and communities survive without a common enemy? And if it survives, why use Mastodon, when you might as well open a Reddit community or Discord server?
I’ve just subscribed to Twitter Blue and aside from the extra features, I have a lot of confidence that if others do this, we’ll have a more robust and civil platform.
If you and your non-paying friends are commenting on each other's tweets, I don't know how oppressed you would be by blue checks floating to the top of threads. Are there tons of blue checks in your threads now?
In case somebody needs an existence proof, I'd prefer blue checks rising to the top. It would cut down on 99% of abuse if 20x<firstname><bunchofnumbers> couldn't get anywhere near the top of the thread. If blue checks also got the ability to prioritize the the people they follow (or a separate priority reply list, rather than using their follows), we might see some civilized discussion without all the brownshirt disruption.
This would absolutely panic the administration, and the intelligence and military communities, though (and probably a lot of PR agencies) so I don't see it happening.
But then, his enemies also flip their position all the time, synchronized to always be against what he's doing lol.
Ofc _somehow_ moderating "hate speech" and so on is still not enough. Unclear why.