StreetPass: Find Your People on Mastodon | Hacker News Reader

StreetPass: Find Your People on Mastodon

streetpass.social

149 pointsdoener41 comments

I love the name, Nintendo's StreetPass was such a cool tool. It was awesome just finding someone random to play with in an airport or waiting room.

I still bring a 3ds in my bag when I fly just on the off chance I get a street pass. Sure I know you can run your own relays at home, but it was always neat finding a random person, more so when you had a repeat.

I don't think the home relays have worked for years. Nintendo shut down the backend servers at some point.

Nintendo had a deal with someone (att?) that all their free wifi hotspots would work as street pass relays. The way this worked under the hood is that your 3ds would see a wifi network named attwifi and then check the mac address of the ap, then it would report to Nintendo backend "hey, I just passed near mac xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx". Then Nintendo would note that down and also make it so the previous 3ds who visited that spot is now a street pass hit on your 3ds.

So, you would setup openwrt to broadcast a network named attwifi and make it switch every minute to a random mac from a list shared by everyone else doing this and you had yourself a guaranteed 10 hits a day (10 being the artificial limit Nintendo imposed).

Ah, I haven't looked at it in a while, but that would make sense. I have a raspberry pi (1st gen) in a 3d printed nintendo 64 case some where around here that ran the PiPass stuff. I might dig it out and put it on display in the office now.

Still, was a cool idea!

Being in college when the 3DS came out was neat. Just wandering around the CS building (GCCIS) I got a ton of hits and was able to beat the adventure.

Maybe I'm missing something about this one, then. How is detecting "me" Mastodon links on Web pages similar to discovering people who are online near you?

Or as that not what Nintendo's did? Anyway, thanks for any insight.

I guess that it finds people "near" to you in the sense that you visit their site.

An actual mobile app that worked like StreetPass that broadcast your Fediverse address via Bluetooth would be fun, except that it would hardly ever find anyone unless you are at a conference.

Indeed the name is a bit misleading if you go by the 3ds' streetpass, it's not what Nintendo did. I just had a few good memories with streetpass, so seeing the name again (even in a different context) brought me some joy :)

Hey everyone creators here! The Fediverse Report recently posted a really good thread about the product if you’re interested in learning more https://mastodon.social/@fediversereport/109813142639096272

I love the nod to the 3DS StreetPass. It would be nice to have this built into a Mastadon mobile app rather than a browser extension.

I'm not sure I understand what you're suggesting—this extension is useful because it can basically passively surveil every single site you visit to determine which ones have Mastodon links, and make a list of them in the background. The whole point is that you don't have to take any additional action to seek out these links, you just collect them passively by browsing the internet already. How could a mobile app possibly add a feature like that?

The original street pass feature of the Nintendo 3DS would let you “passively” play some games with other 3DS players you encountered in real life (even and especially when your 3DS isn’t even opened). That way you would check your 3DS later and see the players you bumped into during your trip. I think OP is suggesting to have a similar thing for Mastodon. Users would keep the Mastodon app running and other users you meet along the way would be added to a list. (I’m not specifically fond of the idea, but just try to bring in some clarity and context here.)

> StreetPass for Mastodon takes the same idea, but applies it to the web instead. Every time you visit a website, you can make a connection with the owner of that website, if the website has registered a verification on Mastodon.

What is the advantage versus writing "my mastodon is at <link>" on the web page?

As far as I understand, that's the sort of links the service scrapes (as well as literal <link>-tags).

The point is that this browser extension collects those links passively so that you can see a list of all of the Mastodon accounts on pages you've visited, even if you don't notice them at the time (when you were reading the page)

This is really cool.

+1 for Safari!

It's a solid improvement but the move from Twitter to Mastodon is not happening[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34693037

Both are crap now. English and technical people are on Mastodon, while institutions and official bodies are still on twitter.

Not everyone I think. I'm still on Twitter mostly because I for the life of me can't figure out how Mastodon works.

I think I'm just too old for this.

It's actually pretty simple. Just sign up to any instance/server. It doesn't really matter which one. You can follow and interact with anyone, regardless of which server they signed up for. Then it's just like Twitter for the most part.

I feel the "multiple instances" aspect of Mastodon really confuses people. Highlighting it to new users is not working in their favour.

Does the instance one registers on become part of their identity?

I think this is the thing that always made me pause - I didn’t want to pick a server I’d regret later.

> Does the instance one registers on become part of their identity?

Yes. You can't transfer your posts, you can't transfer your filters, and you can only transfer followers if the server cooperates.

> I didn’t want to pick a server I’d regret later.

This happened to me: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/mastodon.html

Sort of, similar to how an email domain does and how others might perceive you based on whether you have an @hotmail, @gmail, @outlook address.

I'm using mastodon.social since I signed up years ago, but if I were to create an account today, I'd just look for the coolest sounding instance that has a lot of users. Like the other comment mentioned, you can always migrate to a different one (although you might lose your post history, you'll keep all your followers/followings).

Yes and to my knowledge whomever set up the server will have full access to your private DMs so choose wisely.

If you're on iOS, install the Ivory app from TapBots – I wouldn't be able to use Mastodon without it.

Institutions move slowly.

I didn't deny that, I just described what my experience is. Also many things that move quickly like sport and media accounts are still on Twitter.

The point of Mastodon is not for everyone from Twitter to move there.

The point of Mastodon is that it allows for diversity of opinion (even in the meta-level - opinion as to what's allowed/not).

Some want to find their Twitter peeps on Mastodon. You're free to feel othewise.

Our statements are in 100% agreement.

True, and good point.

It’s also completely counter to the popular narrative of people who now hate Musk (but lately used to love him).

Let’s not pretend that Twitter hate has anything to do with technology or intended uses.

Your comment is tangential at best to the topic at hand. This does not belong in this discussion.

What's the point of automatically finding Mastodon profiles if they're either not there or not posting?

You're assuming that Mastodon users are all Twitter refugees. I assure you, this is not the case.

I know that after initial influx, Mastodon is losing momentum and activity. Both from the article linked and my own experience.

Theoretically, Mastodon could tap some previously untwitterized microblogging niche but I haven't seen that.

my timeline there's is very active, and interact more with my posts than on Twitter. But thanks for your opinion

This changes nothing about my original comment. Whether Mastodon is popular or not, growing or shrinking, "Twitter light," or microblogging-fed is entirely irrelevant to the original topic in question.

If you have something useful to say about StreetPass or social account discovery in general, please do contribute.

Twitter's replacement will not look like MySpace -> Facebook. It will look like the decline of Craigslist. It will still be here a decade from now, but people will have moved on from a number of different types of reliances on Twitter to a number of different other options.

Mastodon will be one part of that.

I guess it depends who you follow. Most iOS Developers I followed on Twitter have all migrated to Mastodon, as well as many indie game devs. My Mastodon feed is actually significantly more interesting these days than Twitter. For fun I just logged into Twitter and the first 20 tweets I looked at in the "For you" tab were from brand accounts, major media accounts, sponsored tweets, suggested accounts, and tweets others have liked. Over half were from accounts I don't follow. The "Following" tab was entirely brand accounts and media accounts.

That was a funny news story because I'm sure it was a case of Hanlon's razor, but had they talked to any old school fedi admin they would know that the user retention is normally between 20 and 40%. So if that holds true for the latest twitter waves, we won't just lose 30% of active users, we'll lose 60%!

No service has 100% user retention, and unfortunately the Mastodon software was counting each new sign up and login as a monthly active user.

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