A Twitter Off Ramp: A Tutorial for Getting on Mastodon
patricia.no
patricia.no
A lot of people have done a lot of hard work and free is free. That’s all wonderful and credit is deserved. But that’s not an aegis against criticism. Here’s some of what I experienced in the first hour:
- the app lists a bunch of servers and I tried five before I found one that’s accepting new accounts.
- I get a broken English note about the server not accepting new accounts
- two servers kept timing out when I tried to make an account
- I had to “request desktop site” to see a modal explaining why the “create account” button was redirecting me to a list of servers and not the one I was looking at.
- That list was not searchable. I began googling “popular mastodon servers”
- finally made an account but nothing would load. I couldn’t subscribe to a friend.
- deleted account (made me log in again, then complained that I can’t log in without enabling cookies, which are enabled, then on refresh showed me as logged in)
- made a new account on what I hoped was a better server, creation seemed fine. Email confirm went to spam (haven’t had that in forever, it gave me some nostalgia)
- am not able to see the followers of my friends on different servers, so I guess it does matter to pick a popular one
- posting was easy
- a server admin is the first person to interact with my toot, re-tooting it. That felt cozy and early Web.
- I like that the feed seems to be a literal timeline of everything in my sphere. No junk added in by algorithm.
- I kinda like not having 5000 followers anymore. This is more chill. I plan on keeping it chill.
- I don’t see any American politics being fed to my timeline. Thank the Maker.
I think Mastodon is okay. It suffers from the classic FOSS issue where the first half of dev is fun and technically challenging, but nobody wants to do the second half because it’s tedious and unsexy. Kinda makes me better appreciate why QA and Product are so tedious at the companies I’ve worked at.
I’m patient and motivated and am likely to work through all this just like I do with Ubuntu and QGIS and GIMP, etc. But I no-longer feel I can ever suggest Mastodon to anyone who is non-technical.
If you go to their profile page, you can — it's just your view of them on your server that doesn't show the list of followers. Yes, that's clunky, but at least there's a workaround.
I'm pleasantly surprised so far, although I haven't gone all in yet. The web interface and general experience isn't significantly different from twitter, and the decentralised concept seems really nice once you 'get' it. I'm planning on switching server at some point, to a more 'focussed' one, so that will be the next big test.
You might be able to do the same on mobile by copying their sever address, which you might have to reassemble from their username — all sounds much fiddlier, though!
I have seen several people saying that the experience in the "official" phone client (both the iOS one and the Android one) is not very good. I have also seen someone recommending opening the web site directly in the phone browser and installing it as a PWA, though I haven't tried that yet.
But why does it have to be this way? Isn't the entire point of federation that different servers can interact seamlessly?
disclaimer tho, 99% of my mastodoning hasn’t been on phone app. mostly desktop on the advanced web page.
after finding about 2/3rds of the people i followed on twitter i just rebuilt my lists again—using the advanced web and creating multiple columns from lists i had on twitter it’s pretty close—maybe better considering conversations are happening without all of the confrontational/contradictory weirdos inserting themselves.
It IS important what server you choose, due to the local community / timeline and having to trust the server operator. Normally people link instances.social [0] but there are just so many to choose from. I dislike that this blogpost just skips this entirely and says to join the vivaldi one.
I think we need more of a curated list of servers with open registration that are active, sorted by what community / hobby is being targeted.
"neither GS nor Pleroma itself was born out of malice. It’s just where the people who’ve always been stirring up shit go."
The technology can literally handle 10-100x the amount of traffic on the same hardware; to exclude it based on a few bad actors is absolutely moronic.
And frankly, shit NEEDS to be stirred up; everyone is fleeing to their comfy non-intellectually-challenging non-emotionally-challenging echo-chamber bullshit-echoing hidey-holes, and I don't want a world with people believing 2 completely different realities, because that's exactly where we're currently headed. In my experience, 90% of so-called "shit-stirring" is someone who can't tolerate a slightly different viewpoint that they could probably learn from, if they made the effort.
https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/10/01/how-to-understand-g...
Put your code where your comment is.
I think part of the complaint is that the app should not be showing those servers front and center - or rather, it should be made obvious when an option is not going to work or if unavailable, and functional servers/choices should be front and center in the UI.
It's the kind of polish that does matter for the common non-technical user, and the kind that is typically missing from FOSS apps in many ways because there's just so much of it to do. It's never-ending and there usually isn't enough development resources on an open source project to handle everything.
You mean like this?
Nova at hachyderm.io seems to be doing a great job managing the tsunami of signups, as people flee Twitter.
I do like the social architecture of communities with their local flavor.
imo, many of our systems are hyper-centralized and thus brittle - I guess Id seen adverts increase in Twitter and was going to move at some point.
I dont want to be on a platform that can be killed due to a single entity [ be it rage-quit, selling out to ad revenue, government overreach, conservative religion etc ] I do worry about youtube and reddit for this reason. These things seem like societal infrastructure which should be at least partly 'owned' by the content creators / consumers.
When I go back to poke around Twitter it just seems like a hot mess.. Im glad I left. I do feel some nostalgia towards it, they built a cool thing.
Twitter is dead .. long live the internet.
Mastodon fails because of UX issues, this is not a FOSS issue. I love and support FOSS but Mastodon as a project is trying to provide a bubble as an alternative to another bubble. It does not make the situation better if people still are stressing out over ideologies of other users on the internet.
I guess I'm too tired of social media in general, it's usually fueled by rage-bait, creating ideological bubbles and make people think the end is near just because there are people with different opinions and experiences.
They are moving to Mastodon because of disagreements with the owner of Twitter for the most part. I was on Mastodon before anybody knew what it was and I mostly found out niche communities and it was good for people who liked that sort of thing. But now, the move is based on hate towards the ideologies of certain people (in this case Elon Musk) instead of the incompetency of the software itself.
I do not agree with Elon Musk's many ideas and I'm not much involved in the Twitter drama because I'm not a user either but as far as I can see, Mastodon's current popularity is based on the ability of people to hate Elon Musk, not Twitter.
Some also just leave because they don't like Musk, sure. Personally I'm happy to have an alternative that's somewhat decentralized, where I can pack up and move while keeping my whole network if I don't like how such or such sysadmin behaves.
I'm always happy with alternatives, especially FOSS ones and I like what the community has created too.
It's just that, I'd have been happier if people moved to Mastodon for its ideas on decentralization and tech instead of Elon Musk.
Actually, I have no doubt some are doing that, but from my twitter perspective, most are actually doing it because they expect twitter to end or, otherwise, become unusable or be abandoned by too many others. Many aren't moving to Mastodon so much as creating accounts there just in case — then continuing to use twitter for the moment.
Musk's acquisition is absolutely fuelling this, but the cause for movement is less ideological and more pragmatic, IME.
Does Twitter-the-format add something to the world that must be replicated?
I’m not suggesting Twitter has no value, but I question whether it or something very much like it is the only place that value can be realized.
What does Twitter do so we’ll that we can’t imagine doing without it?
It's a place that media whores love, and they're the ones who make all of the content. That's why we're hearing about it endlessly. One of the biggest media whores bought it, so it should really be considered an internal war that we're just bystanders to.
> I’m not suggesting Twitter has no value, but I question whether it or something very much like it is the only place that value can be realized.
I'm pretty sure that what we wanted was to be able to send public text messages that people could subscribe to, and to be able to subscribe to other people doing the same thing. Putting the right UI over group chats, and making every registered user a mod of a group chat that shares their account name would be Twitter-- i.e. an ideal replacement.
You're an articulate, capable being, maybe focusing your energy and time on becoming better and helping others around you become better would be more rewarding to you and the world.
It is assumed to be the best place to hang out on the internet. This assumption holds so much water that a multi billionaire paid $44B for it.
There's also a lot to be said about shaming public officials/organizations (courtesy of the trending feature) into action.
I was able to discover about multiple topics I got interested in, got to read about a lot more technical stuff that otherwise I wouldn't ever heard of it but it's interesting (and even useful to my job!).
And I also found 2 jobs through twitter, that's two more jobs than through linkedin!
Fwiw I haven’t really noticed anything I follow on Twitter changing much other than various cracked out hysterics from time to time.
Background: I've worked on open source for almost a decade. Prior to that startups and a stint at Google. For the past 7 years it's been mostly remote and solo with a period of VC backed efforts to commercialise the open source project.
Why the background? To get an idea of who the admin of the server is. I'm looking to attract devs like me who are remote, have their hands in open source, etc and want to find a community of their own.
Whether the processes in charge of actually deleting them will still be running in thirty days, or whether anything from Twitter will still be running in thirty days, is anybody's guess.
(yes, 11: main, locked, horny art, daily draw from my Tarot deck, and various side projects.)
But I’ve been wondering: why is everyone leaving? Is everyone leaving? What has changed other than the verification thing?
Sections of the site don’t work reliably, searches spin loading, had the site not load at all multiple times, more spam, etc.
Seems the site is just coasting and issues are slowly building up.
Besides that, I think it’s just a loss of faith in Elon to run the place well. There’s already been so many unforced errors[1], and it’s only been a few weeks. People are trying to migrate their networks off now, because if they wait until the site is broken it may be too late.
[1] laying people off and then asking them to come back, rolling out verification and then pausing it, forcing people back to the office and then locking them out of the office, losing the confidence of advertisers and blaming it on a woke mob, etc.
Nothing. People describing what has changed since Musk took over offer vaguer symptom lists than Morgellons sufferers. If anything, right-wingers who fell for the huge anti-Musk media campaign are getting upset because nothing at all seems to have changed other than the unfunny Babylon Bee getting their account back.
It's not left vs right, it's a shitty platform getting worse after just a few days with Musk.
Nope, saw that.
> servers are now dog slow,
Missed that.
> 2FA stopped working
That's bad, but remember how they just got sued for using as an excuse to harvest phone numbers? I feel like we were upset about that back in the old days two months ago.
> scamming is at all time high.
Missed that, too.
> It's not left vs right
It's not, it's oligarch vs. oligarch, and I don't care who wins other than the people who had it were poor stewards so I'm pro-change.
> it's a shitty platform getting worse
Infinitesimally worse, within the first few weeks of a hostile transition.
> after just a few days with Musk.
Maybe give him a few more days then. Your tweets won't get cold.
The whole Twitter furore is so obviously at its base a political one that I have to take issue with your comment.
From my observations the 'sky is falling', butt-hurt, desperate for Twitter to now fail group are very firmly on one end of the cultural-political spectrum. They're angry and affronted that "their guys" have lost control of it, because it's a very important thing to be in control of.
We should stop dancing around it and acknowledge that there's a political aspect to this whole thing.
I haven't noticed anything get worse yet. As usual, I get about one spam DM per week. As usual, the app freezes or crashes about three times a week. As usual, the app takes seconds to load what I click on about 5% of clicks.
I'm worried it's not sustainable, though. At this point the vast majority of employees have quit. Musk's attempts to retain them suggest he doesn't understand his employees' thinking, suggesting he'll continue to have problems.
So I'm continuing to use Twitter while actively looking for alternatives.
When I tried mastodon it completely failed to provide the basis functionality I expect. I think that's because it's technically decentralized, but they've then built a centralized service through social coordination on top of that. And that's the worst of both worlds.
Can you describe that? Mastodon is Federated, much like any other decentralized service you have the right to reject or block content from certain users or sites. That's your privilege as a paying administrator of a Mastodon instance. If you disagree with the way a particular server is being run, you can find others who agree with you or host you own instance for less than the price of Twitter Blue.
This is the case with IRC, Matrix, I2P, even Bittorrent. None of these protocols are living in "the worst of both worlds", they're merely taking their architecture seriously and deliberately choosing not to build their software like a product. If you take issue with the social coordination layer of Mastodon... maybe social media isn't for you?
The effect is similar to if a centralized service randomly chose which of a few tens of moderation policies to apply every time they get a report. That's a big disadvantage. You lose because you see content that pushes past what your chosen moderator would prefer, and you don't see content that your chosen moderator would allow.
If Mastodon provided something nice in return I'd consider it, but they consider that disadvantage as their main advantage.
What do you mean by this? I think you may misunderstand the architecture if I'm interpreting you correctly. Mastodon is decentralized and there's no centralized service on top of it. You can just pick any instance you want and don't have to federate with any others (and in some cases can't due to blocking.)
What's centralized on Mastodon? It's just a bunch of autonomous server instances whose users can contact users on other servers.
I have noticed that, on mobile web, the notification thingy about new thingies while you are scrolling has become persistent.
It's newsworthy. It's a leading social network which a billionaire was forced to purchase after trying to weasel himself out of the deal which he got into for dubious reasons, and now said billionaire is doing a corporate anihialation speedrun that threatens to evaporate 45 billion dollars.
Not to mention the impact on other notorious companies such as Tesla and SpaceX.
You require a massively disingenuous take on current events to come up to the conclusion that news coverage of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter can only be explained in terms of irrational hate.
If you say Twitter and Elon you're going to get more clicks than if you were to say YCombinator and Paul Graham even though the later two are vastly more important and educational for me.
I moved to Mastodon about a week ago mostly because the developers I was following did the same. No clue if everyone's leaving, I doubt it.
As for what's actually changed:
- Twitter Blue Verified was basically a satirists' wet dream and Musk wants to try it again
- A number of high profile Twitter CxOs jumped ship, including their information security officer
- Elon had every SWE in the company print out their code(?!) and physically deliver it to Musk, including an explanation of how much they wrote (presumably to try the old manager trick of rating projects on SLoC written)
- Elon publicly blasted his own developers on Twitter for the performance of the Android app. When the head developer replied and explained what was actually wrong and how to fix it, he was fired by tweet.
- Elon Musk issued a "Twitter 2.0" ultimatum to the remaining Twitter staff which were rejected by 75% of the company immediately resigning.
I can boil these down further into two reasons why any software should jump ship immediately:
1. Data security & stability. Twitter is basically running on autopilot now since a large amount of people left or were fired. Expect basically all of your data on Twitter to get breached.
2. Solidarity. The Twitter 2.0 ultimatum is basically a demand for constant crunch time. This is very harmful to both Twitter and it's employees. Even if you don't work at Twitter and don't give a shit about the word "solidarity", you should still make an example out of the company anyway purely so that other boneheaded PHBs don't try the same trick.
"Running on autopilot" is probably an even better analogy than you intended. There have been incidents of pilot incapacitation in aircraft, in which the aircraft continues flying for a long time following its programmed autopilot targets, until the fuel gets exhausted and it crashes. See for instance the 1999 South Dakota Learjet crash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_cras...), the 2000 Australia Beechcraft King Air crash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Australia_Beechcraft_King...), and a few others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontrolled_decompression#Gra...).
I can only speak for myself, obviously, but I’ve left. I was definitely over using Twitter before.
> everyone seems to complain that Mastodon is hard to use
I’ve had really no trouble at all with it? There’s an upfront decision about which server to use, but, that’s a social decision, not really a technical one. After that decision I’ve had no trouble at all
I don’t understand why people think Mastodon is difficult. It seems pretty straightforward, and the separate servers are no biggie. I’m enjoying this fresh start here, like moving to a new apartment!
The calls for advertiser boycotts started as soon as the takeover was announced, well before it actually went through. I think users threatening to leave and calling for other users to leave also started at the same time.
I rather suspect that this is due to Musk being from a different pillar[1].
(It's all gotten turned up to 11 now that he's actually in charge and seems to be showing off his :tableflip: skills, but it was already started before that happened.)
You're casually glancing over Elon Musk's reiterated announcements that he would eliminate Twitter's moderation, and you're completely ignoring marketing execs stating publicly and in no uncertain terms that Elon Musk's decision and actions were a liability in terms of "brand safety/suitability".
AFAIK he's still banning trolls. Like for example that exchange regarding Alex Jones that got re-shared.
.
So, unless that meeting didn't match what's public, why would less political censorship be a "brand safety/suitability" issue?
You're disingenuously glancing over the fact that Elon Musk repeatedly said and did different things. As the Twitter thread I linked early clearly shows, Elon Musk was repeatedly giving assurances to marketing execs behind closed doors that he would continue moderating hate speech and extremist content on Twitter just as before.
The marketing industry is not manned by fools, and once Elon Musk fired basically all content moderators then the industry called Elon Musk out on his bullshit and promptly yanked ad spending on Twitter, explaining quite clearly that cutting moderation was a major liability.
It's amusing how people like you prefer to resort to puerile convoluted conspiracy theories to explain why ad companies stopped paying for ads on Twitter when the people who made that decision already stated in no uncertain terms how Elon Musk's actions turned Twitter into a liability.
Dude. I am agreeing with this. They do not want to be seen with content from a different pillar.
I'm leaving Twitter is the new I'm moving to Canada.
Twitter used to be owned by the blue tribe.
Now it's owned by a member of the red tribe.
That's all there is to it.
I've been on Twitter off and on since fall 2007. In the early 'fail whale' days they had a live stream that didn't move ridiculously fast(when it wasn't broken) of all tweets.
It became a huge 'surveillance capitalism' data mining product that has had some issues around free speech and political bias meddling by the company and obviously the big media companies. The platform is plagued by bots and trolls, automated attack agents that are presumably programmed to append derogatory comments to tweets by unknown actors.
Now the mysterious Musk is reorging the platform, maybe to emulate the 'WeChat' 'everything app' Chinese approach. Who knows...if it's free you are the product...
Wow. The people on your list are nuts. Musk hasn’t even changed anything yet. The product is identical to what it was a month (or year) ago.
As well, there have been moderation changes that I disagree with.
It’s just not factually correct to say the product is identical to what it was a year ago. It’s not.
What has changed with either, as it impacts a user? I've looked hard but found zero change whatsoever.
When I come across those statements previously, if it says George Bush with a blue check, I just trusted that George Bush made that statement. Now, I don’t. So, what used to be a fairly reliable way to get to a pretty solid primary source for plenty of statements has become unreliable. I’m not really worried about over the top parody, that’s easy to spot, but more subtle impersonations really concern me.
If, say, the Defense Minister of a foreign country posts something provocative, it’s much harder for me to know if they really posted that or not.
It doesn’t impact me as a user who posts things, but it has a serious impact on me as a user who wants to validate that X person really did say Y.
My experience has been that there have been a TON of impersonators over the past 5 years, and the largest number I've come across have been impersonating Elon Musk and Vitalik Buterin.
Trusting all blue checks a year ago would have been a very, very foolish strategy. From what I've seen, the verification hasn't gotten at all worse in the last week.
Trust is a spectrum, and the old system wasn’t perfect, but it was vastly vastly better. I wouldn’t have absolute trust that an account was who it purported to be before, but I had much higher confidence that I did before.
> From what I've seen, the verification hasn't gotten at all worse in the last week.
Then we’ve had vastly different experiences. Did you miss the part where he sold verification for $8, but stopped doing the verification as part of that?
It seems preposterous to claim nothing changed in this regard, while they literally introduced a new feature that entirely changed this aspect of the product.
Edit: to clarify, I don’t think it’s preposterous to claim that your experience is better or unchanged in the new system. What seems preposterous to me is the claim that it’s unchanged from a month ago, when this specific area has undergone a drastic functional change.
If anything, the number of fake Vitaliks and fake Elons with blue checks running scams (usually starting with an offer to give away crypto) I've stumbled across has been lower than it was early in the year.
Perhaps there will be large changes over time due to the more open verification process recently announced, but they would take time to ripple out and have any impact on us more normal users.
the experience is absolutely not the same as it was a month or a year ago.
here's a screenshot attempting to load twitter.com/home just 3 minutes ago [7]. these intermittent failures to load have been increasingly happening for me on multiple computers on multiple different networks. if you have been digging into this as much as you imply, you've surely seen the many, many other people discussing this.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-two-factor-sms-problems/
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/twitter-chaos-end...
[2] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/11/failures-in-t...
[3] https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/159261861552149299...
[4] https://www.techradar.com/news/live/live-blog-twitter-chaos-...
[5] https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/twitter-two-factor-authenticati...
[6] https://www.androidauthority.com/twitter-sms-2fa-3234698/
That's a dishonest characterization. I haven't been digging into it at all. I've just been using the site as normal and haven't seen any issues, which is why I'm asking more motivated people (such as yourself) who have been digging, for specifics.
I have zero interest in the maelstrom of negative US media coverage, but seeing an actual broken part of the app would have been interesting if you'd been able to provide a link.
> What has changed with either, as it impacts a user? I've looked hard but found zero change whatsoever.
...i mistook that to mean you had been looking hard. sorry bout that.
In the course of tweeting, reading tweets, etc, I've kept an eye open for any kind of breakages / downtime but haven't seen any.
Have you personally been locked out of your account due to a 2FA problem or was that just something you read about?
i have personally experienced an increase in spam.
i have personally experienced a drastic increase in trolls.
i have personally seen a _dramatic_ increase of outright abusive accounts.
unlike the vast majority of twitter's users, our organization uses physical hardware devices for our 2fa, but after we started seeing the reports, we didn't log out at all--at the time it wasn't clear exactly what was causing the failure, and obviously we didn't want to lose access.
i am genuinely glad that you haven't noticed any of the sites problems tho. i truly do hope they can get it back to the sanity it was pre-october. im pretty skeptical on this tho, i tend to think he's set on turning it into some kind of "be shitty to each other" site, and that will obviously turn it into a ghost-town when compared to what it once was.
ok, thanks... it's a useful data point even if I haven't encountered the issues.
But Twitter was specifically bad and hard to use because the content, such as it was, was so diluted by ads and recommendations.
Musk lighting the place on fire was the final straw to get me to delete my account, but I never would have considered myself a twitter user.
Mastadon seems better already. Although it's hard to tell, looks like they still for some reason have threads that are hard to read.
This is a recent change though, wasn't the case, for me, a year ago.
If you follow lots of people, use hashtags, and the like; you'll get engagement but not virality - which is, IMO, a good thing.
I'm watching this with mild amusement, knowing that they will all be back, and they will all pay for the checkmark
I don't win if you're unfulfilled in friends and content, you don't lose if I have the most followers. Journalism broadcasting and sourcing is a model that might not work in mastodon, but mastodon doesn't have to be a 1-1 mapping of the existing social uses of Twitter
They would love to turn it into the new Twitter and it is both hilarious and intensely stressful to see the fights over whether this will happen.
I think this was... Tuesday? The past month, and especially the past week has felt like about six hundred years.
I encourage everyone to try joining some mastodon server, usually the only cost is your time. But it is a very different social network and people should set their expectations accordingly.
Till then i will be watching the inevitable Mastodon drama from twitter i guess
Open source will do just fine whether you know it's there or not. It's been a "mainstream thing" for decades. The war you imagine was won, long ago.
I, for one, would love a sexy Linux desktop experience. Elementary OS is getting better but it is no match to macOS.