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Comment by codeflo | Hacker News Reader

I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power.

But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic, but worse, fragments the community and creates (IMO) unacceptable privacy concerns. Self-hosting requires unnecessary hoops, loses some community functionality, and runs into the risk of "defederation", which only exacerbates the problem of servers being overly important. If you do decide to go with one of the existing servers, and hadn't been there early enough to get into one of those run by the foundation, you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar.

Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.

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> But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic

Jack linked to nostr which tries to solve some of these problems: https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768

> The problem with Mastodon and similar programs:

- User identities are attached to domain names controlled by third-parties;

- Server owners can ban you, just like Twitter; Server owners can also block other servers;

- Migration between servers is an afterthought and can only be accomplished if servers cooperate. It doesn't work in an adversarial environment (all followers are lost);

- There are no clear incentives to run servers, therefore they tend to be run by enthusiasts and people who want to have their name attached to a cool domain. Then, users are subject to the despotism of a single person, which is often worse than that of a big company like Twitter, and they can't migrate out;

- Since servers tend to be run amateurishly, they are often abandoned after a while — which is effectively the same as banning everybody;

- It doesn't make sense to have a ton of servers if updates from every server will have to be painfully pushed (and saved!) to a ton of other servers. This point is exacerbated by the fact that servers tend to exist in huge numbers, therefore more data has to be passed to more places more often;

- For the specific example of video sharing, ActivityPub enthusiasts realized it would be completely impossible to transmit video from server to server the way text notes are, so they decided to keep the video hosted only from the single instance where it was posted to, which is similar to the Nostr approach.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#very-short-summary-o...

Previous HN discussions of Nostr:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061 (11 months ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360 (22 days ago)

You can easily achieve the same with ActivityPub relays and a few small tweaks - if this turns out to actually.be useful it'd be easy to provide gatewaying relays for those who care.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

> How do I find people to follow?

> First, you must know them and get their public key somehow

And here lies the main problem of most of these decentralized alternatives: how do you discover new content? One of the biggest innovation of Twitter was to be able to follow a hashtag-- say #SomeEvent2022 and you see all tweets using that hashtag, not only those of people you follow. This tends to be abused by spamers, but it’s a great way to follow what’s going on at large events or find stuff related to some topic.

You can implement search on top of crypto hashes. This is how decentralized P2P file networks like Kad worked.

The discovery doesn't need to be at protocol level. You can have some servers following large number of accounts, analyze the feed, create a "trending" list and publish that under their own account that you follow. Then you can have second level "trending" servers which aggregate over first level ones if you want even more "trendiness"

It makes sense to me to take content discovery out of the protocol. This allows different apps on the same network to create different mechanisms for discovery.

Some may want a pure chronological view of posts from people the follow with no algorithm, some may want pure algos a la TikTok.

It seems like the nostr protocol allows for all of this. Users can decide their experience by downloading different client apps.

If you take content discovery out of the protocol, I would say it then behooves you to put at least an example of content discovery into the reference implementation.

There's a big difference between creating a protocol that's intended for fully-content-agnostic communication over the Internet (eg, HTTP) and creating a protocol that's specifically intended to be used to build a social network. The latter type needs various features that enable the type of behavior we know people on social networks desire from them. It does not, as you say, necessarily need to encode strong opinions about how content discovery should be done into the protocol at a fundamental level, but it at least needs to acknowledge that that is a thing that will be necessary for any social network to succeed.

You can follow hashtags on Mastodon. There are many discovery options but they are all pull rather than pushed into your feed. They are under development. Feditrends.com fedi.directory trunk...

You can follow hashtags on Mastodon, it's been added ~3 weeks ago:

https://nerdschalk.com/how-to-follow-a-hashtag-on-mastodon/

> you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar

I have some friends operating a Mastodon server, with a team of volunteer operators, and I'm pretty sure I've met all of them in person. I've only used Twitter a handful of times and don't really like the medium, but it's really not that hard to run a server. And I don't think there's any fundamental reason this doesn't scale. Every single community center runs a website, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine local, trusted Mastodon-type servers operated by all sorts of organizations. You may already be a member of an organization that has the capability and drive in your area, if you just can find the other people who want it.

There are also paid hosting services, and more are sure to come.

Such as Tumblr

For those downvoting the above poster, this probably wasn't a sarcastic quip - Tumblr really does plan to federate with the rest of the fediverse.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/tumblr-to-add-support-for-...

I'm guessing some might have downvoted because I mentioned paid providers. As in letting you pay them to run a Mastodon instance. While the above poster seems to have read my "and more are sure to come" as more options in general rather than more paid options. But I didn't downvote as I agree, the promise of Tumblr support is a big deal and will be a good option for a lot of people.

I know that's not what you meant but Tumblr is not free like your friendly neighborhood Mastodon instance or a foundation instance, it's for profit and paid for by advertisers and via paid features.

> I have some friends operating a Mastodon server, with a team of volunteer operators, and I'm pretty sure I've met all of them in person.

But this will never describe a significant portion of Twitter users. It might work for some, but it wont replace Twitter.

You've had the US President tweeting a lot. I'm sure the US government could replace Twitter with a bespoke version of Twitter if they didn't want to use Mastodon. Similarly there are news publications like the NYT which could operate their own bespoke Twitter. Reuters and the Associated Press basically already manage some services which could be described as a bespoke Mastodon instance. Who are the Twitter users who matter who can't afford to operate their own Mastodon server?

I'm not suggesting any individual do so, but this is not rocket science. I feel like maintaining a physical building is probably harder, so any organization with a physical building that has ~100+ members should be able to do this - and enough organizations doing this could replace Twitter.

I am a little younger than the days of decentralized social media, but I caught the tail end of it. To me, Mastodon feels like an “email address” for social media. I think a lot of people are so used to centralized platforms that it seems crazy to have it be decentralized again.

I suspect as Mastodon grows, there will be more servers that become popular and will likely host the bulk of people, in much the same way that gmail pulled in the bulk of email users—but it will still be possible to have other “addresses” too. The idea is starting to grow on me.

Technology Connections put it well

https://hachyderm.io/@TechConnectify@mas.to/1095298448544650...

> "Imagine you signed up for a sort of reverse-email address where your sent emails landed on a public page that anyone who knew your address could read if they wanted to and even follow you for more."

Yes! I think the reason people struggle with Mastodon is they implicitly understand that picking a server is, whether they want it to be or not, a reflection of their online persona, and they don’t know how to find or gauge servers to see if they might “fit”.

I think universities should immediately make official instances for students and faculty. At least in academic twitter circles having an official institutional home would probably help a ton with migration; it would feel like a natural place to be.

> Mastodon feels like an “email address” for social media

And it’s waiting for its AOL and Gmail.

And people who host their own email server complain all the time that Google and Microsoft centralized email and set their own (often opaque) rules on what gets delivered.

Therefore, 'Gmail for Mastodon' would seemingly just swing the pendulum back towards centralization.

> 'Gmail for Mastodon' would seemingly just swing the pendulum back towards centralization

Nobody outside a select few want to host their own server. And nobody wants to research which server to join, before they’ve experienced an ounce of product benefit, nor how to back up their data. This was always going to be centralised to a degree. But Gmail/Outlook with some Proton/Fast is distinctly better than Twitter, Musk or no Musk.

which is why email is a bad analogy.

email adoption was fast because it was a gamechanger compared to faxes and telegraphs. ISPs offered inboxes, as did universities and offices, years before Hotmail arrived.

Additionally, people got email because they wanted to communicate with friends. People get on social media mostly to escape boredom, not intentionally communicate with stranngers.

> fragments the community

I think this is a feature for most communities to be honest. Twitter is great at inter-networking, and a decent soap-box, but communities there are shallow and when your audience is "everyone on the platform" the chilling effect means only certain types of people are participating honestly and in full. There's probably some great communities that happen to be on twitter in spite of there being almost no open functionality that helps with that, but I bet they would all grow and foster better conversations if they added a discord server or something similar. Twitter is about as good as a blog comment section for long-term community building.

I agree that subcommunities are a useful feature. That only proves my point, though. The positive example you give, Discord servers, are a lot more like subreddits than they are like Mastodon servers. You can join multiple of them, the power of the moderator is local and doesn't affect your account as a whole. Discord and Reddit are of course centralized services, but in theory there's nothing preventing a decentralized system from having a similar feature.

You can export your data and move it to another server. If you're banned on Twitter, you're done.

Also, complete failures like banning important stories, banning presidents, banning journalists etc. cannot happen on Mastodon the same way that it has happened countless of times on Twitter and will continue happening.

Mastodon is obviously superior when it comes to the freedom of speech. Elon is afraid, because he knows. Funnily enough, he is the reason why we will get the better version of social media faster.

Note: if the server you're on is banned, you won't be able to move to a different server.

I don't know if I understood you correctly, but I don't think this is true. I have not tried it but as long as you have your data you can always setup your own instance with it. Ideally you have a server backup but if not there is a script that can convert the ordinary Mastodon export (the one you can do as a regular user in the UI of any instance) into a form suitable to import into the database of your instance.

You can't migrate your followers that way, can you? Which is (arguably) for many people more important than the content of their posts.

I haven't thought this through thoroughly yet, but I could not come up with a migration scenario where you could keep your followers. Your handle will change and as long as the old instance is banned I guess a redirect from there to the new handle does not work. So, fair point! I'd be curious what others think, maybe there is a way?

Mastodon supports user migrations that keeps your followers. It's pretty new and not supported everywhere yet, but it does work (I've used it) with the caveat that some followers on older software will still follow the old account at the moment.

It works by the old and new server "cooperating", so it won't let you move between two servers which won't federate with each other - in that specific scenario you'll need to go via a third server which both speak to.

The move appears to you as if your followers unfollows your old account and follows the new account, so they're all "redirected" to your new handle. E.g. you can see that here: https://mastodon.social/@vidarh

You indicate to the old server where you want to move to, and then to the new server where you're moving from, and the fact the old server will specify your new handle in your profile is used as proof when informing your followers instances of the new address.

If you do this, you can see mastodon.social returns a "movedTo" attribute for my old account:

    curl -H "Accept: application/activity+json" https://mastodon.social/users/vidarh | jq .movedTo

You don’t own your followers. When you move they get a notification you moved and their following lists are adjusted accordingly.

Not when the instance you are on is banned or otherwise disappears and you use your exported data to "revive" your account on a different instance (with a different handle), which is the scenario I proposed above.

The only way to avoid that is to stand up your own instance. And that is the great thing about decentralized systems. Because you as a user have no visibility into the systems, finances, nor management of any of these platforms.

I still blog on a server I rent but the backup is hosted in a server in my closet. I’m fully aware that rental can go away any time. And that’s been the case for decades.

Maybe it’s a generational thing but it appears people assume these platforms owe them something. The TOS makes it clear they owe them very little. So you can be muted, banned or deleted at any moment.

I’ve watched many social networks disappear and end up in the footnotes of a Wikipedia article. Nothing about the internet is guaranteed nor permanent. Twitter nor Mastodon owe you anything.

I'm on my own Mastodon instance but should it get banned I'd pretty much lose my followers. I think that was the original point. Otherwise agreed, neither Twitter nor Mastodon owe me anything.

If you get banned on Twitter or any other centralized service, you lose all your followers. If you get banned on Mastodon, you lose your followers on the instance(s) that banned you.

But generally it takes a lot to get banned by most fediverse instances. You basically either need to be a nazi or consort with nazis.

There are, of course, instances that would ban you for less than that, but these tend to be much smaller and trying to foster a very specific type of community. If they'd ban you, they probably wouldn't follow you either.

If it disappears, you're right. If it's "banned" (not a thing, assuming you mean defederated) then you can't move to one of the instances which have defederated it. Any followers from an instance which has defederated yours will also be lost, not because you can't move them but because the block on their instance will automatically cause them to unfollow you.

The solution to this is to move to an instance which hasn't defederated from the one you're on. Worst case, setting up your own.

For everyone doing social media (semi-)professionally, followers are pretty much all that matters. That sounds like it gives server operators leverage against journalists and the like that happen to be on their server. They can move server, sure, but they lose their reach, that's ugly especially for smaller publications or individuals who can't easily hire staff to run their own instance.

Why would your server get banned though? It's not going to happen to moderated servers. If you pick some small, weird, or insurrection aligned server, that might be an issue. Otherwise, you're just stressing out about something that won't happen.

There is no "global ban" for servers. You won't be able to move to a server that has defederated the server you're moving to or been defederated by it.

But you can still move to a third party server. If you desperately want to move from A to B and A and B are defederated from each other, you can even do that by moving from A to C and C to A as long as both A and B are willing to talk to C.

What if your server that is run by a hobbyist suddenly shuts down without any notice? If they had an accident for example or they got hacked or whatever

If you're concerned about that, back up regularly, or pick an instance not run by a hobbyist, or run your own, or pay one of the commercial hosters to do it for you.

I love the moving of goalposts that's happening here. "Just pick a server", "you can always migrate" moves to "you can always migrate if you happened to have picked a server not run by a hobbyist". Which, BTW, isn't even a filter criterion on the often linked instances.social.

Also, you can't back up your followers.

You can't back up your followers, but as long as the old instance exits, is not banned and is cooperative you can move your followers from one instance to another. Yes, that's a lot of "ifs" and doesn't help at all if the instance you are on is already defederated, which was the point that started this thread.

I think Mastodon is a tiny bit better than Twitter in that, at least you have a chance to move as long as things are good. If that makes a practical difference, I don 't know...

I have moved instances, so it made a practical difference to me. I also follow a lot of people who have moved instances and in all cases I only noticed because they posted about it (and hence there are probably more who have moved that I didn't notice).

It needs improvements, such as the ability to move in spite of the old server (the ability to get at your private key so you or the new server can sign an assertion about the move with the old accounts key would be one option which would at least give people the choice of being prepared), and moving over the old posts (there are some stupid concerns about "faking timelines" which you can trivially do anyway, so I think this is a question of time to resolve that - it's not technically hard), but it already does offer significantly more freedom than Twitter.

> I love the moving of goalposts that's happening here. "Just pick a server", "you can always migrate" moves to "you can always migrate if you happened to have picked a server not run by a hobbyist".

There's no moving on goalposts here. I have not replied to you suggesting anything less than this previously, so there were no goalposts for me to move.

> Which, BTW, isn't even a filter criterion on the often linked instances.social.

So don't rely on instances.social if that is a consideration for you. If this matters to you, do your research. Joinmastodon.org does have a filter for "legal structure", but if you care about that you really should read the about page of your prospective server. Or run or pay for your own.

I simply provided you with a list of options if this is a consideration for you. It's your choice whether or not any of those options works for you.

> Also, you can't back up your followers.

Yes you can, though not from the default Mastodon UI. In fact anyone can download your followers list as JSON. What you can't do without support from the original server is to cause your followers to refollow you on the new account, and that is indeed a legitimate flaw that I'd like to see fixed (and it's doable - there are key-pairs associated with the accounts which would allow for signing an assertion about the account moving, and while the server need to have a copy of the main private key there's no reason for users not to be able to get a copy of it). It probably will be - the entire account move functionality is quite new and needs iteration.

you dont need to pick a small server like that man. that's what he's saying.

All servers can communicate. You're not locked into servers. This isnt an MMO... infosec.exchange, the one I use, isnt an exclusive thing. It basically just shows my name as: unloco@infosec.exchange.

I can see and talk to mastodon.social. I can use hashtags and people from other servers will see it just like twitter.

The server you pick is just a name and a local server. If you pick a server that's dying, just move to the next one. You keep everything, it just changes from:

unloco@infosec.exhange to unloco@mastodon.social. You wont lose the friends, just the host name changes.

If you have exported you data from the instance you should be able to set up your own instance with that data.

Well that sucks. But commercially businesses fail all the time. Sometimes you get a heads up and can plan accordingly. And other times it’s like FTX and the site is down the next day, after a major scandal.

The only thing you can do is own your data, running on servers you own, at a domain you own.

The internet owes you nothing.

> The only thing you can do is own your data, running on servers you own, at a domain you own.

No, that’s a failure of the specific protocol. Your identity could simply be a public key. This way it’s:

1) Tamperproof

2) Not dependant on any specific server

If your identity is "simply" a public key, then...how does anyone actually refer to you? By a handle? That's not part of a public key. An avatar? I guess you could generate one à la Gravatar from a public key, but those aren't going to be very memorable.

A public key is a way to securely and uniquely say "this is me". It says nothing about who you are, anything about you, what you like or do, your links to other people, or anything like that.

All that information has to be stored somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko's_triangle

Most instances follow the Mastodon Covenant, whose promises include giving users three months warning before a shutdown.

https://joinmastodon.org/covenant

I just downloaded the app for a second time and tried to create an account. I failed.

I thought I'd try mastodon.social but couldn't find it on any of the lists so chose the search option. Found it but it wouldn't let me register an account. Go go site, there's a register button but rather than taking me to a signup form I just get a big wall of text about how I can't be a sexist or a transphobe. Fine, I won't. But why can't I register?

So you pre-decided to sign up for a specific instance which was closed to signups and is then surprised you can't sign up.

Go to joinmastodon.org or instances.social, not directly to a specific instance.

>So you pre-decided to sign up for a specific instance which was closed to signups and is then surprised you can't sign up.

I saw that elonjet had found a new home there so assumed I wouldn't have any trouble signing up. The "Create Account" button on mastodon.social seemed promising too.

Just take your time and get familiar. I wemt through some teething troubles but have found it to be worth it.

The "Create Account" button does indeed let you create a Mastodon account. Just not on mastodon.social. I can't seem to reconcile your description with what happens when you press that button, though.

The official app has a significantly shittier UX than the webui. Third party apps provide a better experience, but randos who haven't already been on mastodon for years don't know that. This is where I've found a lot of the friction lives.

If users are confused by this process, then maybe the explanation of the process is the problem, not the users.

There are certainly improvements to be made, but people seem to largely figure it out.

I'll note that if you click "Create Account" on mastodon.social at the moment on desktop, it shows a modal that explains that you can interact no matter which Mastodon server you sign up on, then shows a "On this server" explaining mastodon.social is currently closed for signups, reminds people that they don't need an account on mastodon.social to use mastodon, then a "On a different server" header that explains that you can create an account on a different server, with a big blue "Find another server" button taking you to joinmastodon.org/server.

I'm sure this still confuses some people (and more confusingly, if you narrow the window enough the "create account" button takes you straight to the link above without explanation; that doesn't seem like great UX), and I'd love to see tweaks to make it better, but the above seemed odd to me, not least because it doesn't seem like they've tried the regular registration flow, so I have no clue what it is they actually did. It seems maybe they've clicked the "Learn more" link, given the description about a "wall of text" about what they can't do?

That server is swamped with registrations and had to pause them. Pick another.

This kind of friction at even getting started doesn’t bode well for Mastodon’s success - forcing people to pick a server: how do they choose?

Go with the one everyone talks about? Closed to new signups. Pick some other one, run the risk that it closes (the owner gets bored, it becomes too much work, they find keeping it up and stable too hard). Or else that it gets “defederated”, and hence you get effectively banned, because someone else disagrees with moderation decisions of the owner which are nothing to do with you personally. And even if none of that happens, and the server you pick turns out to be a good one - then your friend asks you how to join Mastodon, you direct them to the server you use, but it is closed to sign-ups due to popularity, so they have the same issue.

I can’t be bothered. I’m sure I’m hardly the only one.

> This kind of friction at even getting started doesn’t bode well for Mastodon’s success - forcing people to pick a server: how do they choose?

This is exactly the same thing as creating an email address, and as far as I know no-one is complaining because they have to choose a server/domain to use.

Most people get given an email by their workplace, school or ISP. Or there are big corporations like Google and Microsoft offering them (for free and paid). None of that is true for Mastodon now, which makes it not “exactly the same thing” at all

People used to have problems with this ca. 25 years ago (I ran an ISP back then, and it was difficult for people). It took a couple of years and then enough knowledge had diffused to enough people that anyone who struggled just asked a friend and got walked through it.

If Mastodon is successful the same thing will happen again.

> This kind of friction at even getting started doesn’t bode well for Mastodon’s success - forcing people to pick a server: how do they choose?

How do you choose anything? On joinmastodon.org/servers you're presented with filter options and descriptions. You look at the descriptions and pick one you think you'll like. If you don't, you can do an account move. Plenty of people will be happy to help.

Personally I'm perfectly fine with making people think twice if they're not willing to invest the time to find a server. It's ok - they can pick something else if that works better for them.

> Or else that it gets “defederated”, and hence you get effectively banned, because someone else disagrees with moderation decisions of the owner which are nothing to do with you personally.

This is a highly exaggerated risk unless you go out of your way to find a server full of racists or other people that should instantly make it clear to you it's likely you'll face blocks. Some people will insist this or that mainstream server is banned everywhere (e.g. some say that about mastodon.social), and in reality unless the server is obviously bad it often turns out to be a few inconsequentially tiny instances which block them. Look at the list of banned instances on a handful of servers and you'll see that most places it's not very long and most of it is made up of a core set of common culprits. None of which are listed on joinmastodon.org/servers - it takes effort or really bad luck to end up on a server where this is a big issue.

> then your friend asks you how to join Mastodon, you direct them to the server you use, but it is closed to sign-ups due to popularity, so they have the same issue.

It's an issue particularly now because signups are 10x-20x normal because of Musk. It's a scaling issue which will go away, as the number of new instances is also rapidly going up and people are addressing it. Additionally, if you e.g. go to mastodon.social and press "Create Account" you're offered an explanation and linked to joinmastodon.org/servers to pick another one.

> I can’t be bothered. I’m sure I’m hardly the only one.

That's of course your choice.

> This is a highly exaggerated risk unless you go out of your way to find a server full of racists or other people that should instantly make it clear to you it's likely you'll face blogs. Some people will insist this or that mainstream server is banned everywhere (e.g. some say that about mastodon.social), and in reality unless the server is obviously bad it often turns out to be a few inconsequentially tiny instances which block them. Look at the list of banned instances on a handful of servers and you'll see that most places it's not very long and most of it is made up of a core set of common culprits

Look at how many controversies there have been about whether Twitter should or shouldn’t ban some controversial figure (everyone from Donald Trump to J K Rowling). What happens if Mastodon gets similar controversies, and then big Mastodon server operators disagree among themselves about how to respond, and then block each other’s servers out of that disagreement? Nobody can say it can’t happen, I can’t see any guardrails to prevent such splits. If anything, Mastodon’s community seems to be full of people who think that Twitter (whether pre or post Musk) is insufficiently moderated and not banning enough people, which seems to make such a development only more likely

Nobody can say it can't happen, but the reality is that the operators of the big instances so far at least have understood that there's an inherent damaging effect to defederating instances that has a sizeable proportion of genuine users that means it's generally treated as a last resort except for "purebred" abusive instances.

What happens if it should come to pass is that users will need to decide whether they like it like that, or move to a third party instance that doesn't block either one or only block the one they want blocked.

And the prospect of a user exodus (for a decision either way) is an incentive for admins to pay attention to what their users actually wants. To me that's just fine (though I'd like improvements to the user migration functionality to make this process even easier).

I could worry about this, or I can worry about Musk's whims. On Mastodon I can move elsewhere (and did; where I started was fine, but I'm now on my own instance because I like having more control). On Twitter, there's no recourse. As such I'll take those future hypotheticals over what's happening to Twitter any day.

> I can’t be bothered. I’m sure I’m hardly the only one.

I'm beginning to see this as a feature. The best social network may indeed be one that requires effort.

> This kind of friction at even getting started doesn’t bode well for Mastodon’s success - forcing people to pick a server: how do they choose?

It's important to know that moving between servers is fairly well implemented; a few clicks and your followers will automatially migrate over to the new one. Your first pick doesn't have to be final.

> Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.

I don't want to be too glib, because your technical concerns are legitimate and well-argued. But... have you actually tried using it?

It works fine! It doesn't work as well as Twitter and has rough edges, but at this point it's well past the "will it work?" stage. There are real people there posting real content and engaging in real ways. If Twitter were to disappear tomorrow, people could all just move over and... it would be fine.

So it's OK to criticize, but the idea that it's somehow fatally flawed seems weird to me. It works fine.

I think I'm in the same demographic as you, but I don't see it as negatively. Most of the issues you mentioned don't bother me as much or could be fixed.

The only thing that concerns me is the risk of defederation. Why would anyone want to run an instance if they (and their users) are at the risk of being excluded on the whim of a small and intransparent group of people?

I mean so far moderation on Mastodon seems to work, but it still does not sit right with me that we basically replaced a dictatorship with the (benevolt) oligoply of the group of most popular server's owners.

In the end it's all a matter of trust and it would be good if more organizantions ran their own instances so that we would have bigger plurality of large instances.

> I mean so far moderation on Mastodon seems to work, but it still does not sit right with me that we basically replaced a dictatorship with the (benevolt) oligoply of the group of most popular server's owners.

Elon Musk has made some dumb moderation calls, but he seems open to changing some of them in response to popular feedback and media pressure. I don’t know if the same is true of those people. If new Twitter bans whoever, odds are high everybody will hear about it, and if they shouldn’t be banned, odds are decent it will be reversed. I’m not sure the same is true for this “oligopoly” for whom few know who they are. Seems even worse than Twitter as far as transparency and accountability goes

Has he really though? Apparently now he's banning journalists asking him for comments on stories. It seems to be getting worse and more arbitrary on his end.

https://taylorlorenz.substack.com/p/elon-musk-banned-me-from...

Ariadna Jacobs says that Taylor Lorenz doxxed her, by asking her for her home address for “fact-checking” purposes, promising that it was not for publication, and then publishing it anyway - https://mobile.twitter.com/littlemissjacob/status/1603575149...

Jacobs has been calling on Musk to ban Lorenz for doxxing her. Maybe he (or his staff) have listened. I’m sure Lorenz knows about this, so when she claims she “doesn’t know” why she was suspended, and implies that it was for asking Musk questions or criticising him, I think people should take that claim with a grain of salt

That seems like a fairly big stretch for something, however bad, allegedly happening in 2020 off Twitter at all.

Besides, isn't any legal content fair game on the new Twitter?

> That seems like a fairly big stretch for something, however bad, allegedly happening in 2020 off Twitter at all.

Jacobs argues it did happen on Twitter, because Lorenz and others used Twitter to promote the NYT article in which she doxxed her.

> Besides, isn't any legal content fair game on the new Twitter?

I think when Musk said that, he really meant “ideas” not mere “information”. It might be legal for me to post your home address, but I don’t think that is what he had in mind. I think what he meant was that people with unpopular social/political/etc views should be free to express them if they are legal. Someone’s home address isn’t a social/political/etc view.

So I don’t think banning people for doxxing is really contrary to what he meant when he said that. Now, he actually has gone backward on what he meant - re-banning Kanye for extremely antisemitic posts, implying that extreme antisemitism is not going to be allowed even if legal - but surely it is good he went back on that?

(The problem with banning “non-extreme” antisemitism, is few can agree on where to draw the line - some pro-Israel people claim that anyone who criticises Israel “too much” is being antisemitic, effectively implying that almost all pro-Palestinian activism is antisemitic - but surely we shouldn’t just ban everyone who is pro-Palestinian. On the other hand, few would deny that sometimes, some pro-Palestinian activists do get “carried away” and veer into more clearly antisemitic territory. But how far is too far? Reasonable people can disagree. This is why I think it is okay to ban clearcut cases of extreme antisemitism, like Ye, but trying to ban every possible instance of it is not sensible.)

I agree with some of what you wrote, especially regarding selfhosting. I personally would like to see the ability to follow and post to local timelines, to ensure that you're able to be part of communities in a decentralised way.

However.

> you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar.

Is this worse than trusting Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok? Those companies are actively looking to exploit you for profit. Whereas strawman kitty avatar can't do anything. Especially are there are no private messages on Mastodon.

> Is this worse than trusting Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok?

Yes for the first two, no for the third. US-based companies are large targets for potential lawsuits, and consequently have processes in place to prevent random employees from accessing your DMs without cause. I obviously wouldn't trust those companies completely -- we're really arguing about probabilities here -- but there's at least some measure of accountability that makes them unlikely to do something trivially stupid.

> there are no private messages on Mastodon

It does have a DM feature -- that they aren't private is exactly the point.

It's not about them being read, it's about them being used against me. Being scraped and weaponised to train some algorithm to exploit me. That's the issue I have.

In terms of local timeline inclusion that kind-of already muddies things, but WebFinger does provide for aliases and supports forwarding, so maybe the ability to have accounts on multiple instances but have them all forward to the same "follows"/"following" lists might work (likely not without changes, and there are many potential pitfalls there, though).

lack of algorithmic feed (and the whole anti-algo slant) and lack of openly viewable likes on people's profiles are actually gonna backfire. mastodon is gonna get lonely and boring, because it's kinda hard to do content discovery, particularly the kind where you get recommendations based on people you follow or interested in, so that those recs would be in closer proximity to you, rather than just getting random posts from trending. for how much algo stuff (like topics, suggested tweets, etc.) and particularly algo feed gets talked shit about, it's vital to discovery of new posts and new people.

without those things, it's easier to just run out of stuff and people to see, and end up in a place where you're caught up with things, and new people aren't entering your circle, and the activity just stops. well, it is also unlikely, because people just do stuff and mix other people in, but it's easier to end up in that static state, when you don't get suggestions in other ways.

at least there are reblogs. but there's also no option to filter those out right in someone's profile. so it's gonna get real annoying if those are gonna be the only way for someone to push content from somebody else.

When you follow someone, you can mute just boosts from them if you like.

Other than that, all of these things are things people can build using the API. I agree they're needed, and I think enough others do that things will get built.

I certainly want to build my own algorithmic feed, because reverse chronology is already a nuisance to me.

huh. ability to mute someone's reposts in your own timeline won't do much for purposes of browsing through that particular person's tweets though. it's not about 'how someone's tweets appear in your timeline', but 'browsing someone's tweets'. to be fair, twitter doesn't let you just filter out reblogs from someone's profile timeline either (though one could just do a search like 'from:username'), but with visible likes, this sort of 'personal curation' separates itself into 'profile tweets' and 'likes', with retweets getting used more sparingly.

I also don't like that difference in separation w/less visible likes/favourites.

Other than that I think what you're describing might well be a good feature for one of the frontends to support. Incidentally, since all of the profile info is available without auth, it's also possible to build an entirely separate profile browser that could offer that filtering for any profile.

EDIT: Mastodon in fact includes a profile browser for remote profiles; it's just that when logged out it will redirect to the remote profile instead of show the "local view" of it. So if someone wants to build a profile browser like that, all the necessary code for a good starting point is there in Mastodon already. Thought it might well be easier just to do it from scratch.

Personally, I think we should have this stuff regulated. We have power, mail, phones, internet, etc but most of the internet just isn't. Which seems really odd considering that for most people their Outlook/Google email is far more important to them than their postal mail but can be taken away from them because they emailed a photo to a doctor. Your revenue generating Twitter account can be suspended because you tweeted something some random person just didn't like with no real recourse. YouTube is probably the worse for kneecapping people's livilhoods over dodgy claims.

Decenteralized just seems like it'll be a pain for me to find stuff. And instead of being held hostage by a big company with policies and processes and money to sue them. You're being held hostage by some random guy who may decide he doesn't like being connected to a certain network and all of sudden you've got to create a new account somewhere else.

> I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power. But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronisticm.

I don't understand what decentralized internet service you would prefer then? The ability for anyone to host their own decentralized instance is exactly what a return to the protocols of old would look like. They may not have had anime avatars, but you were just as susceptible to the whims of your IRC admin. Either you trust in the faceless centralized conglomerate or in your smaller devop. What third option is there?

Peer to peer networks, with servers being purely optional for convenience (for convenient access from mobile, for example). Nothing about the social experience -- including your identity -- being tied to the "server" you're using to access the network. Technology has advanced since the invention of IRC.

Yet nobody really showed how to solve p2p in a way that supports: moderation, not downloading massive amount of data, account recovery, safe protocol upgrades. For example scuttlebutt exists and the initial connection involves "This “inital syncing” process can take up to an hour and use a fair amount of data.", you can't lose your keys, and unless something changed, moderation is still just wishful thinking "Presently, there is a "flag" feature, which is an extremely strong negative signal. If somebody is behaving poorly, feel free to flag them."

I acknowledge that Mastodon is not perfect, but raising that as "badly designed and engineered" seems weird, when it's the most decentralised, actually working solution we've got.

Yeah so instead of worrying about all the stuff you are worrying about, I've just been using Mastodon and its been fine. I see the toots from the people I follow, I find the people I want to follow. Its been fine.

Mastodon looks workable to me.

Choosing a Mastodon instance is like signing up for an email provider. Email is decentralized and seems to be doing alright.

I picked an instance that was good-sized at 9,000 users with a focus I liked: indieweb.social. That gives me a Local feed of interesting indieweb-related content in addition to my Home feed of people I follow. I didn't have to trust my privacy to an anonymous activist. I know who is running the instance and support it via Patreon.

I dont think it feels threatened. Most migrated Mastodon users dislike Musk and they deliberately rub him the wrong way.

Every one of your complaints about individual servers apply to Twitter as it is already, and some of them I see as features. For instance, not completely losing your community because Twitter or Discord or whatever parent company decides one day you don't belong there.

You can move accounts to a different server if you stop liking where you're at, which is a feature nobody has elsewhere it seems.

I view Mastodon as if Twitter, a Microblogging platform, and IRC had a child.

Let's take the reverse tack though, and agree with your opinion that it's a clusterfuck. Twitter should be threatened by Mastodon because they're losing users to it in spite of all those "problems".

I have build https://sendie.com as an alternative. Twitter doesn't seem to care about me and my 100 users :D

Any article tangentially related to Mastodon inevitably has a comment like yours voted to the top, even when it's off-topic and adds little to the conversation. I'm reminded of the immortal slashdot comment about another "inferior" disruptor: No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame

> Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.

Perhaps because Twitter has metrics on how many times the Mastodon links are posted and followed, and you don't?

I think mastodon will be ok. The lesson learned from comparing twitter to Reddit, hacker news, and Facebook is that creating a successful social network is a moderation problem not a technology problem. BYO moderation strategies like those in use by mastodon, Reddit, twitch and discord can scale (while those of hackernews, fb, twitter cannot).

Mastodon, regardless of your server, can see and connect to everyone in the federation. The servers are just for how your name appears, local and moderation rules.

infosec.exchange can talk to and see content in mastodon.social

I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, but I’ve switched off my Twitter and I’m going to really try and make Mastodon work because I think all issues except the network effect are surmountable here

It's interesting that now, when it would be most relevant, discussion about a social media platform running on blockchain has all but disappeared.

If not now, then when?

Because blockchains are definitely not built for that..?

Assuming you mean an actual blockchain and aren't just using it, as some people seem to do, as a catch-all term for cryptographic signatures, it's expensive overkill. Social media really doesn't need to pay the brutal computational costs to solve the Byzantine generals problem. You don't need to establish an immutable record under adversarial conditions because there's no "double spend" problem. A simple synchronization mechanism for cryptographically signed posts (to prove authorship) is enough.

I trust an anarchist admin with my DMs more than any corporation, billionaire, intelligence agencies, and their data miners, but you do you.

I just setup a new instance in less than 30 minutes. There are many ways it can be done.. Hoops are optional.

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