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Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

I thought you were giving reasons for "ordinary software users" to go out and use Mastodon in its current form. I was hoping that perhaps their shitshow onboarding UX got updated to accommodate the influx of users over the past few weeks. Nope-- they just changed the "Create Account" link to "Apply for Account" in their hall of instances. :(

But regarding Mastodon as a potential alternative to the the current centralized social networks-- fair enough. I even saw recently that Ted Unangst even made a stripped-down Mastodon server in Go which I'd like to check out when I get a chance.

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Yes: there are reasons ordinary users might prefer Mastodon to Twitter; as I said:

* You can write full posts in Mastodon

* You can own your own data, run your own service, or select from a variety of hosted options

* The ecosystem encourages good third-party clients and tooling

The tooling isn't there, but then, I don't think anybody expected the events of the last few months, so I'm inclined to give it a quarter or two. As a casual user, there are ways in which Mastodon is superior to Twitter already, and most of my problems are with the clients; Tapbots can't keep up with the beta demand for Ivory, and there's 2-3 other promising clients, so I'm optimistic.

I wrote Mastodon off for years, but: it's pretty good? I miss the blogosphere, and Mastodon is a step back towards it.

What about the inherent bubble-y nature of Mastodon?

Do you see it as beneficial to have a series of large groups of balkanized servers optionally interconnected rather than a general public network everyone contributes to. I hate the label of "public square", because Twitter should already be opt-in in terms of which content you see based on who you follow, even though it's one big network (ignoring the @jack era AI-feeds which fought this idea).

A key difference in Twitter vs Mastodon UX is that users would have to make different accounts for each "Balkan country" server they join. If one server blacklists or is blacklisted they won't be able to participate in others. And this has implications well beyond US polarized politics once it reaches global scale.

I perceive this to be the biggest critique people have of Mastodon and I simply don't care about it at all; it just passes directly over my head. My guess is that it's a consequence of people mostly "belonging" to community servers, with defined (and evolving) community norms. Blog hosts didn't have those, and I don't think Mastodon/ActivityPub servers will for long either. It's going to get easier to run your own server, and there are going to be hosting providers that do that work for you; ultimately, "Mastodon instances" (or some pin-compatible equivalent) are going to be commodities, like Blogger blogs.

I'm on a server (infosec.exchange) that I like just fine for now, but I'd expect to be publishing on my own server within a month or so. At that point, what's the "bubble"? It seems like exactly the same situation as RSS, except I'm not depending on Google to keep Reader going.

I'm not bullish on "the fediverse" as a federation of communities with some global norms (like religiously posting alt tags on images) and lots of local norms (like never posting AI art, or things like that). But having actually used it now, I think the underlying technology is a lot smarter than I gave it credit for, and I think it stands a decent chance of being important.

> and there are going to be hosting providers that do that work for you

There are hosting providers doing that work for you, though several of them are overwhelmed too at the moment. There'll be more.

I run my own, and it's not hard but it's certainly still too much hassle for casual users, so I think there's definitely space for more hosting services.

> I'm not bullish on "the fediverse" as a federation of communities with some global norms

Yeah, a lot of these norms will collapse in the face of a broader user base that want Twitter 2.0, and don't care about a lot of the ideological stuff going on with Mastodon and other current Fediverse software.

> But having actually used it now, I think the underlying technology is a lot smarter than I gave it credit for, and I think it stands a decent chance of being important.

Treating ActivityPub w/WebFinger as a globallly addressable signed pubsub queuing system in itself is very interesting. You can build so much more on top of that than "just" "Twitter 2.0" or Mastodon. Of course there are some examples of that, like Pixelfed, but I think we're just scratching the surface of reimagining services on top of a layer like that.

Right, "bubble" is probably a loaded word to use here.

I personally would prefer going back to the "old" internet where we had niche forums. Mastodon provides that while letting forums connect with a wider set of communities.

I guess my only critique is that it's not often pitched this way. But it will become apparent to most people later on.

The "connected communities" thing doesn't resonate with me. To me, the promise of Mastodon is just integrated publishing and RSS-style aggregation, plus a set of conventions that captures most of what people did with Twitter. I think it's a weird quirk of the evolution of Mastodon/ActivityPub that I'm on someone else's server right now; it's a little bit like being on someone's huge group blog. Group blogs make sense, but not at the scale Mastodon communities operate at.

I think that if Mastodon sustains the growth they've seen over the last few months, then a year from now, it's going to be less common for people to primarily publish on communities like journa.host and FediScience, and more common for them to publish from huge Blogger-style community services --- with very few weird norms, much more comparable to 2021-era Twitter than to Mastodon.social --- or their "own" instances, just like everyone does with blogs.

> Group blogs make sense, but not at the scale Mastodon communities operate at.

That's interesting. Like I said, this bit will become more apparent to users as it grows, since in the current form that's all it really is (a few sets of big networks). I think you just sold me on the general idea of Mastodon.

Back to your earlier point, it might really come down to the UX issues around communicating on Mastodon itself, if it's going to pull this off. But that doesn't mean there won't be another service that can in the future. Otherwise that's the big thing that scared me away, since I'm a hyper-critical of UIs.

Human interaction is inherently bubble-y.

Nobody wants to get shouted at by people preaching stuff they don't like or feel harassed by all day long, so we seek together in social groups that by and large are united at least along some axes of interests, and avoid too much talk of the topics we know are controversial within those the groups.

Some of us then sometimes seek broader forums to try to spread our groups ideas. But a lot of people actively avoid those kind of situations. Many others use different identities in different groups because they don't mesh well.

"Balkanized" servers are only balkanized to the extent people wants them to be (yes, admins can ride roughshod over users, but users can vote with their feed and migrate their accounts and follows elsewhere). Most people want to be widely federated. Some want forums where they can say things nobody else wants to listen to or wants to self-isolate (e.g. Truth Social, Counter Social and Gab all run - or at least ran, not kept up - Mastodon, but either don't federate at all and/or are widely blocked)

> A key difference in Twitter vs Mastodon UX is that users would have to make different accounts for each "Balkan country" server they join. If one server blacklists or is blacklisted they won't be able to participate in others. And this has implications well beyond US polarized politics once it reaches global scale.

If you want to participate in things so offensive to so many people that they're mutually blocking each other, then yes you either have to do that or find an instance that haven't defederated either. Or host/rent your own and not block anything other than what you, yourself choose.

With Mastodon you have that choice. With Twitter you risk getting outright banned site-wide.

> (yes, admins can ride roughshod over users, but users can vote with their feed and migrate their accounts and follows elsewhere)

This is true when you think it's about HN users as the prototypical user. But I'm just imagining having to explain to my mom why she can't participate in [X, Y, Z] set of Mastodon communities, doesn't she already have a Mastodon account? Why does she need accounts for each? Why are her old "tweets", followers, DMs, etc not available on the new server?

This is a much larger barrier than advanced users can appreciate... maybe not right now but it will increasingly be in the future.

Ultimately it's very possible groups of interconnected communities is a superior concept to centralized social networks. But this should be more of an obvious part of the UX w/ Mastodon. It's fine if it's properly communicated AND if porting your old tweets/accounts/followers/etc over to new servers is easy... but even then it's an adoption hazard (people avoid complexity they don't understand).

Currently it's communicated as a Twitter of FB competitor, which may very likely come back to bite them (not to mention the UI sucking).

> But I'm just imagining having to explain to my mom why she can't participate in [X, Y, Z] set of Mastodon communities

"X and Y don't like each other, so they refuse to talk to each other. Think of it like how you can't talk to people on Facebook from Twitter". People siloing themselves is not a new concept for people.

Ironically, the new thing with Mastodon is that you don't need accounts for each of X, Y, Z to talk to people there even if X, Y and Z defederate from each other, as long as you can find "neutral territory". Only for a very small set of instances is this a challenge.

Being used to silos seems to also be behind a lot of the confusion over having to pick a server - people end up fretting over the choice when it matters a lot less than they think. I wish joinmastodon defaulted to just suggesting a random "generic" instance, and hid the rest behind an "advanced users" button.

> Why are her old "tweets", followers, DMs, etc not available on the new server?

Her follows and followers are available on the new server if she moves the account. When I moved to my new instance, most followers had auto-migrated within minutes. It can definitely be made simpler, but given the number of non-technical users I've seen migrate, it's not that big a barrier.

That the old posts are not I agree is an issue - it is likely to get solved, as the objections to migrating those with the rest are minor and stupid (you can migrate those too, but it requires a friendly admin willing to do a data import, or running your own instance, so for all practical purposes most users can't)

> (not to mention the UI sucking).

There are multiple UIs competing to improve this, before even considering the Mastodon alternatives that all can talk to Mastodon (e.g. Misskey, Pleroma), so this is improving rapidly. Personally I use the advanced interface and I think all it takes is some custom css and it'd be superior to Twitter in most ways (the advanced interface is somewhat like Tweetdeck; I run it with custom CSS that makes column widths configurable). Because of the total open nature of the API, there's far more room to get something good here than there is for Twitter, which is fairly awful.

> What about the inherent bubble-y nature of Mastodon?

So, I'd kind of question whether this is a real thing in any important way. In the early days of the Twitter exodus it _did_ look like it was going that way a bit, but in practice most instances quickly sorted out moderation to a reasonable degree. There certainly are largely defederated instances, but they're probably not of much interest to most users.

I would have some concerns about what happens if Twitter goes down for a protracted period and there's a much larger less self-selecting exodus, but for the moment at least fediverse balkanisation feels more like a theoretical problem than a real one which is likely to impact significant numbers of users.

One other potential looming challenge, I suppose, is Tumblr. If that does add ActivityPub support, it'll be, in effect, a very big, extremely poorly moderated, yet culturally very important instance, and how instances treat it could provoke a split.

> A key difference in Twitter vs Mastodon UX is that users would have to make different accounts for each "Balkan country" server they join.

Sure, but this is functionally no different from the days of forums when you'd have an account on many different forums to discuss the topics of interest to those forums. Just like forums, they may all be running the same two or three codebases, but the communities are different. The cool new thing federation adds on top of this is that communities can organically merge and split while retaining a basic level of cohesion.

And since they're all running the same protocol, it's straightforward for clients like Fedilab to make multi-account use easy.

To add on to this, remember that there is a Fediverse plugin for Wordpress as well.

And lots of other popular sites, like Tumblr, are adding Fediverse support as well.

And Drupal

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