Tech journalism doesn’t know what to do with Mastodon

And I'm convinced that Mastodon does not need to be a Twitter replacement to be a success. That is an important distinction that we should concede. It just needs to be a vibrant network that lots of people like using to succeed.

(And BTW that's really a low bar. A friend of mine was talking the other day about "the pain of switching from Twitter to Mastodon" and I had to stop him. You just click some buttons and type a bit. You don't even have to get out of your chair!? I am always reminded of the Jetsons arguing over who is going to push the button to make dinner. Anyway...)

> If Mastadon (sic) is too complex to attract critical mass of users to achieve a competitive network effect,

I would say it already has attracted critical mass of users, eh?

> it will not replace Twitter.

Question the assumption that it should?

It's a toolkit for building communities. People will join because the communities they want to participate in are there (which eliminates the supposed dilemma of "which instance should I join?" - this is only a problem for people fleeing Twitter and looking for safe harbor, not for people discovering it organically). They'll stay because it's a good toolkit and they want to join more communities.

Or those things won't turn out to be true and it will fade away, nothing is guaranteed, but if you judge it based on whether it is Twitter, you're missing the value proposition.

In my view, having everyone in the same tent is one of the mistakes Twitter made; it doesn't need to be replicated. It created opportunities for messages intended for a certain community at a certain time to be taken out of that context and misinterpreted to fuel flamewars. It made it possible for there to be this spectacle of the "main character" who was ridiculed for day and then tossed aside.

Yes, we could take the time to explain that "the Internet" isn't just the web -- but you'll just lose your original point.

I'd rather accept "Mastodon" as a (maybe temporary) moniker while we bootstrap familiarity.

The worst that happens is people ask if something else is "compatible with Mastodon" which may end being a good baseline anyway if Twitter or another company try an Embrace-and-extend move

Agreed. Onboarding is the main control of the boundary. The boundary (whether in a cell, in a community, in a company, in a fandom, etc) it controls what is "in" and "out", self and non-self.

Onboarding is the cell membrane of community. If you fail to onboard effectively, you are a different creature :)

Additionally, social networks are not things you use just once or twice. I would argue that social media is defined by how it functions as a mature tool much more than the initial experiences. We have not had much in the way of social networks that seem to be designed for long-time users.

We focus too much on new users in a space where people use these tools for years, decades even.

Throwing out federation because of immature onboarding is like tossing the baby with the bathwater.

Arguably, the onboarding process for Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms is not great, but people are given so many opportunities (and quite often: coercion) to join, that they did so.

Google accomplished this for Google+ by hijacking its extant YouTube and Android registration-flow processes to create new G+ profiles. A platform with ~20m frequent users and perhaps 100--300m who'd ever participated in the platform ... boasted over 3 billion profiles. Because every person who registered a new Android device --- a necessary if not frictionless step in the chain of converting a $50 -- $1,000 brick to something remotely useful --- was captured by the network.

(Many of those devices also had pre-installed, non-removeable Facebook and Twitter apps on them.)

Critical mass, market power, and monopoly abuse also play critical roles here.

If you aren't confused, you aren't learning. Get used to confusion or get used to stagnation. Your choice.

You even called it a product, which it's not.

The article above was talking about you. You can't even conceive that it's different.

Exactly, most websites just give you a box to put an email and password in. Whereas here we are trying to get people to understand new concepts with words and ideas that many are not familiar with. And after reading it they still don't necessarily know how to sign up.

> then gives you a list of popular instances to choose from

So I've got this big list, but how do I pick which one? Since I don't know any better, I'll just pick the most popular one. Oh wait, that one isn't accepting sign ups any more.... Should I just pick the next one? Or should I just give up? Does it matter which one I pick, what if I make a wrong choice? Why are the names so random - what do they mean? Do I need to go through and read a bunch before deciding which one to sign up to?

Again, compare this to most websites where you:

- Go to the website

- Are presented with an email/password form, which lets you make an account

This is kind of terrible.

Now instead of just putting in your emails you have to make an impactful choice that won't be terribly easy to reverse. Now you have to check which instances have sane moderation, which instances actually have funding so they won't just die on you, which instances are fast or slow, which instances have blocked which other instances, and all the other inevitable petty drama between them. And again, this is compared to just putting in your email and not thinking about it.

And this isn't even inherent to federation either! Matrix has an officially-endorsed default homeserver for people who just want to create an account (most people). You don't have to understand federation to use Matrix, it's available if you want it, but you could live without understanding any of it. This causes Matrix to have a much better on-boarding experience.

Educating users can work if it is an indispensable service that people need to understand out of necessity. Someone mentioned driving a car as an example. Mastodon is far from indispensable.

Nostr is similar to mastodon, but the servers have no role beyond making posts available to clients. The role of the server has been reduced as much as is easily possible. The question of who pays for these has not been solved, but at least users can switch between servers instantly, and even use many at once, so the choice is not very important.

I also offered to answer any questions they had.

It's the MBAs (that HN hates) that turn "the internet" into a product that makes money- or that they can convince investors will make money some day.

Mastadon is a DIY app/platform, which constitutes one of any number of implementations of ActivityPub, which is the underlying protocol, and can speak to any of the other implementations without limitation, save those imposed by the protocol and self-imposed by the two implementations currently speaking to each other.

There are multiple types of SMTP/POP/IMAP servers out there, but they all implement the same protocols, which means that my email client can reach your email client no matter what our clients, or the servers we connect to, look like. This is how the internet works; platforms will always be a limited subset of this fundamental reality. It's also how ActivityPub works, you can wrap whatever user interface you want around it, Mastadon or otherwise, but the protocol, not the platform, defines what is and is not an ActivityPub packet.

Platforms, FB, Twitter, Tiktok, Insta, none of these work this way, they are closed platforms that you enter through secure gates and must play according to their rules, and they will always decide who gets amplification and who does not based on what makes them money, and good luck taking anything back out to the open internet with you, even if it's 100% your work. If you put it there, don't expect to get it back easily, and forget about control. It is a fundamentally hostile user relationship that cannot be improved without removing the profit motive. There have been other recent posts on HN about User Hostile software design. It's a thing and it's a bad thing.

Mastadon is... tofu dogs. Mastadon is an attempt to feed healthy, protocol-based internet food to people who have been subsisting on bad, algorithmically-manipulated corporate internet food (the aforementioned user-hostile platforms) in a way that feels familiar to them while they get used to the idea of not consuming the internet equivalent of Twinkies and Pork Rinds and Liquor for the rest of their lives.

It doesn't taste as good as Twitter, sure. Maybe that's not the most important thing.

I think it's hard to say where things are heading though. We had RSS before, and that didn't stand up to American tech giants. I have my doubts this iteration of ActivityPub and the "fediverse" will, but I do think we need a decentral protocol like it if we want an interesting internet going forward. I mean, which of your centralized social media feeds are interesting in 2022? Even HN is becoming a page I visit on a weekly basis rather than on a daily basis, and this is the SoMe I use the most aside from mastodon and LinkedIn. Maybe I'm just the oddball, but at least in my circle of influence things like Facebook are now solely used to arrange things like Blood Bowl tournaments.

I'm guessing that is what OP ment

So all through my Canadian youth I would flip through channels and periodically happen upon a Dr Who episode, or a British sport like Cricket, and wonder at the strangeness of my ancestral line (I'm extremely British, genetically speaking, and my family were both heavy socialists and also kind of cryptically proud of being part of the Empire. But they never admitted that, even to themselves I think...).

It's no surprise that it was hard to key into why Dr Who - for one example of a show I came to love as an adult - is so cool. I would read about it in Starlog, here and there, and the doctor sounded like a real badass on paper, but when I came across Tom Baker for the first time, he was no Han Solo, shall we say. Which is great, cause there are aspects of Star Wars that I kinda hate now (mostly the fans), but maybe not so much when you're 8 years old and have been watching laser blasts and ships exploding and whatnot. Even godawful tripe like Jason Of Star Command was more captivating at the time.

I do miss when it seemed almost everyone you talked to was a hacker in their own way but at the end of the day... you have everyone from kids on tablets to your grandma being able to use it now.

There are endless high-profile examples, such as the time that Stephen Fry, having just recently achieved some major follower milestone (million I think), got very upset about being called out on some faux pas or other - in retrospect, a minor offense and a failed attempt at cancellation, if it was even an attempt - and decided to leave the internet, with this long almost-crying essay about the internet he had gotten onto, which made it sound like some sort of Victorian fairy glade where the air was laden with cocaine and he got to make out with Oscar Wilde, vs the stinky plebian unsubtle and bestial place it had become. It was an overreaction worthy of Chris De Burgh, and one he obviously didn't follow through on in the long run. But even as I was loling at the tone of his rejection letter, I also recognized an emotional stream of my own in it.

I have a somewhat different view of AOL than you. I was firmly middle class, neither monied elite nor genuine nerd, but my family could afford to buy me a C64 and as a young adult I bought myself a 386, strictly for the fun of it. I also started out on BBSes and was a sysop on both 8-bit and 32-bit systems, but I did have an uncle who logged me into the local U's mainframe as a kid, and I found my way to the early, command line internet before the WWW was born, though I mostly just hung out on irc, I was no leet hackz0r.

But once the winsock era ramped up and that "invasion" of AOL kiddies happened, I have to say, I had a very good few years in alt.music.ween as well as some groups centred on my local community. a.m.ween had quite a few great contributors from AOL, actually, so for that group, it was a net benefit. The band also pioneered direct interaction by participating in the group, at one point doing an all-request livestream (this is maybe 2000 I'm talking about, very early, and it was awesome) which newsgroup members voted on. Deaner, the guitarist, was especially active in internet fan engagement, and would phone in from on tour using AOL as an easy onramp. Nothing salesy or memey, he'd just do your typical "tour diary" letters like any band of the time might have done for a fan club, which we more or less were.

Perhaps places with too wide a net, such as rec.pets.cats, took the brunt of it in ways that niche bands or interests didn't have to. I recall a great war between them and alt.tasteless, many casualties.

I was also put in a room once, this would be in the late 90s, to see if I could in any way help a woman who had complained some time previously to local media about porn on early usenet, and it ended with a newsgroup created by trolls called alt.sex.herlastname; mostly I had to reassure her, after looking at the content of the group, that there was no troll army keeping tabs on her movements, it was a totally dead group that someone probably created in a moment of f-you energy and never looked at again, but the internet never forgets.

Not that I could have done more than that anyways, other than maybe send emails to every usenet admin I could find begging them to blacklist the group. But that incident, which I could definitely dig up some receipts about but I don't want to revive that part of her life for her, there are some undeniable resonances with Gamergate, are there not? The truth is, this place is exactly the same place it always was, just bigger and more dangerous, and that was inevitable when people came.

That being said, I would say that there was definitely a pre-capitalist Internet, which had a certain culture and - say it with me - netiquette. I don't know, and could not begin to speculate, where the line is between the pre-capitalist internet and now. If I was going to put forward a candidate for when Capitalism "arrived" here, I think one good candidate would be, whatever day it was that Joshua Quittner handed over mcdonalds.com to the McDonalds corporation.

Remember, most people care about friends, family, work and things that come up relevant to those, and they mostly don’t care about work.

> And administrators must comply with not only their local laws, but laws that exist anywhere their server is accessible.

This is bullshit and they have to know it's bullshit. Why? Because their servers are accessible in Thailand, but nobody pretends they have to abide the lèse-majesté laws Thailand enforces. Ditto the various laws in force in other countries Ars doesn't care about.

Plus, they don't look into why Twitter complies with the GDPR: Twitter has assets in Europe that the EU could seize. A local Mastodon instance operator doesn't, so they don't have to care. Vice-versa in the converse, of course: A small European Mastodon instance operator doesn't have to care about any laws in North or South America.

Its a radical paradigm shift: from adtech to modtech. Building platforms not geared towards user addiction and "engagement" but towards effective moderation and healthy communities.

I said that the fediverse is still immature precisely because standards and tools around moderation are still missing. E.g. the celebrated activitypub protocol, while a key enabler in other ways, knows nothing about it.

Its not a wild goose chase. Frictions and strife and trying to control others are core to the human existence and so are the antidotes. We just need to make sure that our social networks are no worse than the rest of society 8-)

People also got the concept of emails quite easily way before gmail existed or hotmail was popular. I don't think having a lot of providers was much of an issue. A lot of people still use providers which are not as big as google or hotmail, at least where I live.

So I wonder if centralization was really something that helped people that much or it was more of a business strategy that was efficient for quick growth and that is the reason we are in this situation.

How different is this from explaining switching from AOL to GMail?

Maybe do a bit of research and don't sign up at shitty instances? The only reason I have seen for blocking instances if they're alt-right, racist, transphobic or harassing people

Yeah, I have explained to my dad many times that he can check the same email account from his tablet and his PC but he just doesn't get it. To him, his gmail is only on his tablet and his Comcast email is only on his PC and that's that.

Hell I explained this to my elderly mother and she got the idea straight away. So no I don't see how the confusion is obvious.

All social media have two options for their future, and it all comes down to control of their content:

1: Relatively laissez-faire. This is the more "free speech" oriented options. Inevitably, these sites gain reputation for bad behavior and poor conduct in some of their sub-communities. (Racism, sexism, antisemitism, some attempt at illegal activities like piracy, etc, etc) Radical individuals flock to these places. This lack of strong control over what appears on their site leads to wary advertisers and a lack of investors.

A site with no advertisers and investors will not grow, period. Hardware costs money. Software costs money. Everything costs money. If lucky, some of these sites manage to stick around - but they are always very niche. Donations don't support a site with 100+ million users and lots of advanced features.

2: Strongly control content. This leads to a very "sanitized" site. Because it's a safe place to do so, investors and advertisers will flock to it if it hits a critical mass. More and more growth is desired, so the site needs to gain mass-market appeal. Over time, it becomes more and more accessible and generic, which erodes whatever original character the site had. Because of the nature of the "average" person when you have such a low gate of entry, the site quickly becomes just another facebook/twitter/reddit. The massive size also leads to enormous amounts of bots, spam, propaganda, etc. You cannot fight these - they are inevitable.

Those are your two options. Social media that cannot grow and remains niche, and social media that's filled with generic, low effort garbage content, spam, bots, etc.

It looks like Mastodon has aimed for total decentralization like email, rather than the kind of decentralization that IRC does that still keeps identities centrally managed with nick servers (e.g., how irc.libera.chat works).

Presumably, managing identity verification would be much cheaper than managing the content, so Mastodon or something like it should be able to scalably do it centrally, while still federating separate instances for the content.

Twitter deliberately requires too much effort and knowledge to keep your info private. They do that because they know most people either can't or won't go through with it. The privacy-focused software world understands how problematic that is.

Mastodon, because it was created as a tech-first solution without deliberately building user paths for non-technical users, requires to much effort and knowledge to sign up for and use at all. For some reason, pointing out that most people either can't or won't go through with it is sacrilege. It gets met with minimizing statements about how simple it all really is, and stories about tech-naive people they've explained it to, or dismiss it by saying that it doesn't have to be for non-technical people while ignoring the larger discussion about what the FOSS world thinks they can replace with it.

The only people who misunderstand mastodon are the people who misunderstand regular users capacity for complexity in social media, or the complexity of actually using it like users want to use it... A centralized asynchronous way to easily contect with everyone else that uses it. If it doesn't do what end users want in the most straightforward way possible, it will never be what end users use.

> provided it's open for new users

This in itself is a massive point of confusion for most users. I've had all my friends and family ask me about this very point and I didn't know what to say. Especially when Elon fired everyone, literally none of the instances on the Mastodon page were accepting anyone. It's much better now but this alone confuses people into thinking they're locked into their instance. Why would my father, a retired mechanical engineer, join an infosec instance? Or my friends join a French instance when none of us are remotely French?

The official Mastodon website provides a list of instances, but most of them seem to be aligned to particular interests, and it's difficult to make an informed decision about which server to join.

And then I just close it again

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34008165

(in short: an implicit part of the process is that no one wants to end up in an instance that closes down in a couple of years because, after all, lots of them have a bus factor of 1)

The common response of "just pick an instance" is hiding quite the important decision of choosing a reliable and future-proof (within reason, i.e. that it will be still alive at least for the next 5 to 10 years) one.

The choice of technology and poor optimization of the reference Mastodon implementation, doesn't help at all the case of self-hosting, either.

I thought I had to weigh:

1. Will this instance be blocked and become useless 2. Will this instance go away because it's the altruistic hobby of someone who will be overwhelmed by users/traffic or graduate in the next year. 3. Is my content acceptable for a topical mastodon? (I'm on mathstodon, is it ok to post about cooking?)

All of these can probably be hand-waved away with "you can just...", but they were a concern to me as an onboarding user.

Signing up for mastodon is a series of hurdles with some extra steps in between. Conceptually it's pretty far from what people are familiar with.

It's a classic trap of tech nerds being way, way off base thinking that others would enjoy jumping through obscure hoops just like they do. Most people really don't.

(This is coming from someone who grew up on dialup / bbs / sweaty underground diskette auctions)

Not because I'm not interested in the technology.

But because the technology isn't the point.

People use twitter because it's NOT inherently segregated. It is a place to find things organically. Aside from Facebook, which had an initial purpose of networking your friends and family, social networks that do this are largely more successful than the ones which federate themselves because users aren't having to explicitly search for conversations that interest them.

Mastodon is just a modern interpretation of Usenet with more moderation.

Clicked on Hank Green's link from his Twitter profile. This is the only way you'll ever get me to sign up, by linking me to content, I'm not going to be googling to sign up for mastodon just because. So wherever I land better have an easy way to sign up.

There's a create account form right there, super easy stuff. I was ready to agree with you. After creating the account I didn't appear to be logged in. Checked my email for a verification link, nothing there.

At this point both the Log In and Create Account button don't do anything. They just refresh the page with no error. An hour later I tried again on, same issue. Realized I should check the spam folder, and that's where the verification link is, with a big red scary UI. The email is from "trumpet" which I don't recognize myself.

I click it, and that makes it so the log in button actually logs me in.

This wasn't worth it to find out if I want to have a mastodon account. Simple fix though, the UI should tell me to check my spam folder instead of making the login and create account buttons do nothing except refresh the page.

edit: There's more. I try to go back to it to check it out again and end up at mast.to which directs me to some foreign website, takes me a while to figure out it was mas.to that I signed up on. I decide using the browser maybe ain't it for this, so I install the iOS app instead. It wants to know which server I signed up on, which luckily is the thing I just worked out. I type mas.to to find my server in the iOS app, frankly a concept I shouldn't ever have to care about if you want me as a user, but OK. And all I get is a pop up that says HTTP 200 OK.

I'm stuck again with zero indication of the error or how to progress. This is bullshit.