Protocols, not platforms
allenbrunson.com
allenbrunson.com
Help me understand one thing about Mastodon. We choose a Mastodon server to create account. What is decentralized about it? Doesn't choosing a server make it effectively centralized? I choose mastodon.social. What is there to stop mastodon.social from a change of ownership that makes it fall in the hands of people who take user-hostile decisions?
I know we can create a new account on a new Mastodon server and move all the followers but that's about it. We can only move the followers. We cannot move our post history. So when I choose mastodon.social or any Mastodon server, am I not putting all my eggs in one basket again?
This is also true of big social networks however those companies usually have access controls that prevent employees from accessing private data. Some random mastodon server isn’t going to have that.
Correct me if @serverholic is wrong here.
If it's the former: Okay, it's great that you don't feel the temptation to spy on your users, but even the most basic understanding of human nature should tell you that this doesn't generalize to all (or even most) people and organizations that would run a messaging server, free or not.
Mastodon is for speaking publicly.
Mastodon should at least have some way of indicating that the server owners can read their messages.
Some narcissistic infantile billionaire could buy out mastodon.social and burn it to the ground, but the rest of the Mastodon network moves on. You'd have to relocate, which is a pain, but you're not relocating at the same time the rest of the world is relocating. Decentralization is resilient, not bulletproof.
The word you are looking for is federated. Different Mastodon servers comprise a so-called federation, so servers belonging to it can exchange data between each other. There are many federated protocols, for example, email and xmpp are federated. Some server owners choose to not be part of federation, or refuse to connect to some specific servers in a federation. That's what happened to Gab a few years ago.
At the level of instances (plural), no one is central. The network is decentralized, containing multiple centers, all (most) of which are connected through federation (the word "affiliation" is not too far off either). And, while yes, any one instance could be considered a "center" and thus maybe considered to be centralized, it really isn't. Decentralization is less about a single specific object or node, and more about how said objects interact and relate.
Side note: I think when it comes to convos around decentralized networks, there really needs to be more investment in how they differ from distributed networks. In that difference is a ton of insight about how systems function, etc, imo. Personally, I'm much more interested in distributed networks.
>Calling a network “decentralized” only defines it by what it is not — it is not dependent on a single set of servers run by one company. What it actually is can look like many different things. Federated and peer-to-peer (p2p) protocols are different approaches to designing networks that structurally empower users.
https://medium.com/decentralized-web/decentralized-social-ne...
At the moment. There's good reasons why not[1] but those can be worked around if people come to consensus[2].
[1] Because it's a push system, you'd have to re-push all those posts from the new account and that's not even necessarily the same set of people they were pushed to in the first place, etc.
[2] e.g the re-pushing can be obviated by having servers rewrite their local copies of statuses to the new account ID on receipt of an "A is now B" message. Obviously you'd need to make this unspoofable, etc., but the theory seems sound.
I find Nostr much more exciting than federated sites, b/c it uses decentralized ids. You never have to worry about losing your social graph due to a federated server admin shutting down their server or banning you.
I think it's important to remind people that Mastodon isn't a "competitor" to proprietary social media, it's an alternative.
No one cares whether you use Mastodon or not-- I mean people do care, they like you and want to interact with you, that's not what I'm getting at. I mean that no one is getting paid or not if you do or don't use Mastodon. In other words, there's no stock ticker for it, there's no investors, no executives, no marketing dept., etc. It's just folks talking to each other, on their own terms, over the Internet.
It's a totally different thing than Twitter. They only superficially resemble each other in some of the UI.
I mean its more like equity than real money they can directly spend.
Also most of their wealth is in companies that are no where near worth their marketcap, such as Tesla which isn't even close to VW in sales, yet somhow is worth more.
So once the hype dies down, or the founder sells enough stocks, the market cap is going to take a nose dive for sure.
And as rich as elon is, we have seen how he is putting Billions into twitter, so they can spend it, just not in normal lifetime stuff.
Firstly, they spend the _vast_ majority of their time with enablers, fluffers and sycophants fulfilling their every whim, constantly telling them how great they are and how brilliant all their ideas are etc. It's bad for anyone's ego to have only that sort of feedback. Someone once told me that because people are scared of giving powerful people bad news his theory of the organisation was a tree of monkeys. When you look up all you see is assholes and when you look down all you see is smiling faces. Well billionaires are at the top of most trees and so all they hear is good news and all they see is smiling faces. That means they become disconnected from reality to the point of seeming unhinged to the regular mass of people.
Secondly, the billionaires I have met hang out a lot with other billionaires or similar ultra-rich folks. They are envious of people even more rich and successful than them until you get to the very top and there they are paranoid about losing their status to others on the rise. This makes the first phenomenon more acute and they radicalise each other. You can see this in the DMs that were published between members of Elon's circle leading up to the twitter acquisition. All sorts of people were telling him how brilliant a job he was going to do at twitter and how his idea of taking an axe to the org chart etc was the a surefire recipe for success.[1]
[1] Check this out and you'll probably cringe like I did https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-...
Homer: Mr. Burns, you're the richest man I know.
Mr. Burns: Ah yes, but I'd trade it all... for a little more.
- - - -
> people are scared of giving powerful people bad news
Robert Anton Wilson called it the "Information Disease": people lie to those that have the power to hurt them, so hierarchical systems are controlled by elements that perforce have bad information.
What about Mastodon is more difficult to use? Isn't it just choosing a server, typing its URL, signing up for a new account and then you are ready to post?
The UX does not look any more difficult than Twitter either. Both support search, hashtags, following people, creating lists, retweets (called boost in Mastodon), commenting. The UX looks and behaves similarly too. So why do people say that Mastodon is more difficult to use?
With Facebook and Twitter there is no question where to go sign up. That’s less clear with Mastodon. Simply knowing one has a choice of servers will turn some away.
Arguably, it is even easier than Twitter because what really happens on Twitter these days is you sign up for an account, follow a few people, make a few posts and then suddenly find yourself to be blocked due to suspicious behavior. Mastodon is free of this nonsense so arguably Mastodon is easier to use?
That's presumably a setting configured on my particular instance, but it's just weird.
An email address is a user name @ server Activitypub is the same.
this is a price i am more than willing to pay, for the first-ever social media phenomenon i feel good about participating in.
Can you be more specific? What rigmarole did you have to do ?
For me, I just hit the follow button on anyone I like and it just works, even if they are on different instance than mine. Their posts now show up on the page my instance serves me. Same for commenting or boosting posts of other people on other instances. I just hit the boost button and it just works. Commenting also just works. What did you have to do to follow someone on a different instance?
> but if you are using a web browser, then that's where all the rigmarole comes from.
Requesting again. Can you be more specific? What rigmarole do you have to do? Does hitting the "follow" button of a user on another instance from your instance not work for you? Do you get an error? Some other issue? Details please!
Wait! You do know you can see the users and posts of any server (even if it is not the server you are on) on the server you have account with, right?
Like https://mastodon.social/@fosstodon@fosstodon.org shows you a fosstodon.org user on your mastodon.social instance and all you need to do is hit the follow button!
Here is the opposite. https://fosstodon.org/@Gargron@mastodon.social where you see a Mastodon.social user on fosstodon.org instance. Again you need to just hit the follow button to follow that user from fosstodon.org. As simple as that! You don't really need to find a way to log into the other server. You don't have to do any rigmarole or ugly stuff. That's how federation works!
yes. but that is not convenient, and definitely not how i have used a web browser, up to this point.
- the contents of a thread differ depending on which instance you are viewing it from. replies from users that your instance is not subscribed to are not shown, so you need to view the thread on its origin instance in order to see the full thread context. on my instance lots of federated posts appear to have no replies, while on their origin instance the posts have dozens or hundreds of replies.
- - side note: this is why i don't recommend asking a tech support question if you're on a large mastodon server, you'll get flooded with identical replies for days from helpful people who think no one else has answered your question.
- search results also differ depending on which instance you're using. hashtag search only applies to the federated timeline, so if I tell you to check out #coolthing we may have completely different results, or you may not even see any results.
- poll results, post favourite/boost counts aren't replicated in real-time between instances, so they vary between servers. when a poll ends you'll get a notification from the origin server with the final results but until then you'll just see votes that come from your instance.
- pinned posts for users from other instances don't always federate, so again you need to view user profiles on their source instance to be sure that you're seeing pinned posts.
- mastodon 4.0 introduced post editing, but replication lag across fedi can range from hours to days. it's not uncommon for someone to edit a post and get confusing replies because the edit hasn't been propagated to other instances.
- if you get linked to a mastodon post in the wild, you need to copy-paste it into your instance's search bar to interact with it.
- post deletion takes a while to propagate, and certain server implementations ignore deletion requests. this can be confusing when both you and a person on another server are discussing someone's profile.
imo mastodon makes more sense if you see it as a distributed system that achieves eventual consistency with an SLA of a few days. that is understandably confusing for most people.
That's exactly why capitalism must be regulated.
We actually had chat interoperability between all the major social networks/email providers via XMPP and that ended about when the iPhone came out.
No we didn't - XMPP is a federated protocol & none of the major networks ever supported federation. The XMPP protocol came with a lot of decently implemented open source packages that helped those companies get their chat systems off the ground & to a point where they could lock them in. Supporting federation from the beginning would've made that lock in much more difficult, so it wasn't in their interest. i.e. a capitalist disincentive.
Capitalism is the problem, you're just doing your best to find excuses for it elsewhere.
Google Talk did. It was the only one, though, so GP's assertion that multiple major networks did is indeed incorrect.
But we came closer to federation between big players than you're implying. One more would have done it.
For what it's worth, for a time Google Chat federated other XMPP services and it worked just fine. They eventually shut that down for $GOOGLE_REASONS.
Companies aggressively going after open source 3rd party clients caused interoperability to suffer greatly. Mandating open standards can help mitigate the most user-unfriendly parts, which often turns out to be the "business model".
(edit: whoops, democracy, not capitalism)
I'm not saying that we need a completely different system. We need more regulation. Stronger FTC in the US, more anti-monopolistic policies everywhere. Prevent big corporations from locking in their customers/users and creating walled gardens. Use open technologies in state administration[1]. Release publicly-funded code as open-source[2]
Basically implement everything Electronic Frontier Foundation[3] and Free Software Foundation Europe[4] have been advocating for since forever.
That would be a radical change, yes, but not a revolution and cOmMuNiSm.
[1] https://element.io/blog/bundesmessenger-is-a-milestone-in-ge... [2] https://publiccode.eu/ [3] https://www.eff.org/ [4] https://fsfe.org/
It is regulated, pretty heavily, and we still get shrinkflation. I'm not even sure what sort of regulation you could propose that would protect against that - you don't seriously believe that this doesn't happen in communist economies as well, do you?
Oh my hyperbole, what would we do without you?!
>Then came the exodus from Twitter, due to the tyrannical new owner. Many of the voices that I have come to appreciate the most are leaving. In particular, the ones with the highest morals were the first to jump ship. As well they should! If you stay on Twitter, the way it is now, and continue to contribute your content to it, then you are saying that you approve of the tyrant-in-chief banning reporters for writing about things that make him look bad.
Oh my hyperbole! It's interesting to see the dichotomy between people who think Twitter was a safe haven and people who think it was a hellhole.
And you can both support that Elon Musk shouldn't have been so trigger happy banning reporters without a clear policy in place AND that doxxing should earn you an instantaneous and permanent ban.
in one respect, elon musk and i agree: the twitter bots that follow airplanes around are egregious and in poor taste. i would be fine with twitter having a policy saying that they are off-limits.
... but that's not at all what he did. his approach was erratic, scatter-shot, and full of post-hoc rationalizations. it's that sort of gaslighting and lying that is the real problem, not being against plane-tracking bots.
Especially grating when you consider the previous owners were far more tyrannical for a much longer period of time.
- Opaque moderation (at least more opaque than the current one)
- Banning and shadowbanning users despite admitting the administration admitting they didn't violate company's ToS
- Soft banning users regularly so they could build a case to outright ban them once and for all
- Collusion with some three-letters agencies (see Twitter Files) to censor speech, bury newsworthy stories, etc
- Journalists were treated as a separate class above regular users.