Ellie – A Mastodon Client for Windows
ellie.software
ellie.software
Turns out, it's still way too quiet over there. At least my bubble seems to have quieted down massively again. A few selected groups seem to have made a home and built out their circles, but from what I can hear, it's mostly crickets in the night.
And, the API itself and some of the tech design around it reminds me of the same trouble Twitter went through at the very beginning. One major instance had to kill all their keys a while back (if I remember correctly), so over night, all my users were deauthenticated. The rate limits are quite tough and all designed for one specific use case, and unusable for another, etc. etc.
And every single instance could be sticking to the recommended configuration and performance considerations, or not — it really depends on the person who runs it.
But really, I think one of the things that attracts users to Mastodon is how uncommercial it all is. The current audience explicitly does not want display advertising or a website full of #brands
My engagement is still low, but on Twitter I would post something and it would just never get seen. Now at least a couple of people will often reply.
I just set up a new Masto account on a larger server, started watching, following, engaging.
A small case in point: Rands In Repose blog's accounts on both platforms. 42K followers on Twitter and 7.7K followers on Mastodon. Despite Twitter having 5.45 times as many followers, Michael Lopp reports significantly higher engagement on Mastodon. Just had this conversation with him.
As an example, going back over the last 1 day's posts on the federated timeline, about 7 posts have 1 reply each, and just 1 has more than 1 reply.
1) Only the user has a full view of engagement at any time, and generally only the user's home instance has anything resembling a "full" view of conversations/replies (and even that is going to not show things private to the user). This is a bit of a natural consequence of the federation model. You may be surprised if you follow posts from popular accounts to their home instances how much additional conversation shows up that your own instance isn't seeing (for all sorts of reasons). This is going to be especially the case in the Federeated timeline because some of the Federated timeline is already "one degree out" from the what the instance is naturally following and it won't pick up the next degree.
2) There is some pushback in parts of the Mastodon community against "popular" accounts from the perspective of other social media and there are a bunch of Mastodon denizens that don't converse with "traditionally popular" accounts such as celebrities/"Influencers" and many even actively mute and block anyone that seems more of a "Brand" than a person or that themselves act like Mastodon is primarily a "write only"/"boost mostly"/"self-advertise" media. In my experience the most active conversations on Mastodon are among people you "wouldn't expect" to be popular or in deep, weird, fun hashtags like #Monsterdon.
(maybe this is more of a "me" thing though)
Actually, I'm pretty sure that's one of the best ways to telegraph to someone that there's more to discover.
- In the feed nothing in a post is clickable except the post itself. You can't click links, handles, images. Trying to click takes you to the single post view, where then they're clickable.
- Viewing images is especially rough (which to be fair, it's always hard to show arbitary aspect ratio images in a timeline app like this). Shows in one cropped fixed aspect ration in timeline, and another cropped aspect ratio in post view. Takes two click to view the full image, where it opens in your browser.
- Vertical rhythm/spacing is off, making timeline hard to read. Difficult to see where one post ends and the next starts.
- Clicking a reply in a thread takes you to the top of the thread rather than the post you clicked.
- Can only post text. Can't even attach images.
I'm excited for a neat native Windows mastodon app, so I'll check back in on this every now and then to see how it's getting along.
I'm having a really hard time thinking of any greenfield Win32/WinForms apps I use on a daily basis that were created post 2010 or so...
WinUI 3 can be used in a 'proper native' win32 application. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/#compar...
Yes, it's all very confusing and Microsoft has done a terrible job of making this easy for anyone.
1. Instead of being blocked or shadowbanned by Elon Musk, you can now be blocked or shadowbanned by the Mastodon instance admin. 2. Making connections with other Mastodon instances is non-trivial. 3. Exporting your data and connections is not supported on all Mastodon instances.
Why aren't more people switch over to Nostr? I know Nostr has seen “meteoric” growth [1] and it's easy to find your old twitter contracts again [2] but somehow Hacker News is very quiet about this open protocol and all the various clients and implementations [3].
[1]. https://stats.nostr.band/
[2]. By using tools like https://www.nostr.directory/
[3]. https://nostr.how/
The issue with being unmoderatable is that it means that you will wind up with a network dominated by the worst people. In general, people don't like to hang out on a website with literal (or euphemistic) nazis. If there isn't a way to prevent people from having to deal with that, they're not going to go to your site/service.
Sure, mastodon is moderated on a per-instance basis, but you can always just move instances. If you consistently cannot find an instance that lets you stay, that's likely more of a indictment of you then mastodon.
It's never "just".
Sure, I don't like Elon running it, but I'd like somebody keeping the Nazis out. With Mastodon, you can pick a server that fits your moderation preferences.
It also doesn't help that the current Nostr audience is a very cryptocurrency-focused crowd, which a lot of people (myself included) find yucky.
--- start quotes ---
truly censorship resistant and decentralized social media platforms
Relays are like the backend servers for Nostr. They allow Nostr clients to send them messages, and they may (or may not) store those messages and broadcast those messages
if you notice that your Nostr client feels slow, it's most likely due to the relays that you're using. It might be worth adding a few more relays (or removing a few) to your client.
most people expect that paid relays will be the norm in the future.
--- end quotes ---
i wouldn't mind if substack notes took off, i'm willing to pay for what i'm looking for.
The other one is... all the people I want to follow stopped posting on Twitter and moved to Mastodon. Network effects work.
Meanwhile maybe 10% did make the move to mastodon and I followed them instantly. The problem? All they talk about is twitter.
It seems that lots here need a lesson about how network effects work in order to understand why little to no one is interested in moving to such niche social networks which appeal to only weird techies, furry garbage or crypto zealots and bitcoin maximalists.
Both are hopelessly utopian and don't even have a slither of a chance in beginning to challenge Twitter. Nostr might be too early to tell but I already don't like where it's going with its over ecclesiastical preaching of bitcoin. But we have given Mastodon 7 years, and that is enough time to conclude that it has failed to challenge Twitter or even take off.
Even attempting to bring up the daily number of users on Mastodon after 7 years would be extremely painful to mention since Twitter still remains unchallenged.
This is before even mentioning the friction of 'Choosing an instance', already being the first barrier to entry being a failure for the user.
I've been on Twitter since the first year. I watched it grow and change for the good and bad. I find I use mastodon far more these days. Pretty much daily. Why? The people I want to interact with are on Mastodon discussing the topics I want to discuss.
For me there is simply no comparison anymore. Mastodon wins hands down because: 1. signal to noise ratio is 1000x better and 2. the responses to my posts are high quality, faster, and 10x more than I get on Twitter (where I have 10x the followers).
I'm the admin on mine.
> Making connections with other Mastodon instances is non-trivial.
It's been entirely automatic for me?
> Exporting your data and connections is not supported on all Mastodon instances.
Pick accordingly?
Only downside is the "local" timeline is... pretty empty. You won't find new people to follow in there, but you can always browse other interesting servers' local timelines if you're searching for more.
In Nostr, users multi-post their tweets to “relay servers”, and relay servers push it to you. Follow actions are a type of tweets as well so all relays can know who you are following. You can also have as many relays as you want.
Isn’t it going to waste a lot of bandwidth, you may wonder. It does!
Huge benefit of Nostr architecture is that your identity is based on your generated private key and optionally a DNS name you happen to own, so any server operators’ opinions about you won’t affect your identity.
This happens a lot with existing platforms, not limited to Twitter. “Yesterday evening I took pictures of gorgeous Egyptian sand hills, and since this morning Google left me saying I violated them, now even the embassy says they can’t verify my nationality status” - can’t happen on Nostr.
I don't understand this.
Don't pick random instances, get together with friends and family on a community-owned instance. Or run your own. The whole point of getting away from Twitter is to own the means of communication.
You can also get blocked or shadowbanned by nostr relays, and the incentives to run a relay are even worse than for Mastodon
> 2. Making connections with other Mastodon instances is non-trivial.
Lies, there is literally nothing to do to connect to other instances. Subscribe to an account there and you're plugged.
> 3. Exporting your data and connections is not supported on all Mastodon instances.
Goes back to point 1: don't go to a generic universal instance.
Why so much FUD ? Why the hate ? ActivityPub has real issues, but those are not it (in fact, it's a pretty good indication that you haven't used the network to know what you're talking about). Just like nostr has issues, but if we're going to ditch Twitter and centralized communications, why lie ?
Do you think if I had friends that I would be on social media?
I hate Facebook but Discord is already fulfilling the role of a common space.
That's the point: take your community with you on your own instance and recreate your AFK network inside computers. Don't let them go through the hassle of choosing an instance, do it for them if you know how it works.
That isn't a social media, that's a mailing list. Won't even have to be on the Internet, you can put up a physical bulletin board and the result would be the same. Might as well drive to their places with packs of cans in the back. Discord/Mattermost works too.
> Why so much FUD ? Why the hate ?
It's not FUD or hate or exaggerated non-issue when a ton of instances are blacklisting the very top second and third and some bunch of top 20 instances. I understand that getting held responsible for users' legal responsibilities is naturally never worth Gargron's time, but if everyone has to to justify blocking pawoo.net(850k users), mstdn.jp(350k) and misskey.io(150k), totaling >17% of total ActivityPub population(7900k), there is clearly a family of elephants in the room.
I used the tool to find my Twitter followers on Nostr and of the ~300 people I follow a grand total of one, Jack Dorsey, is using Nostr. He's apparently the second most followed account and gets about 90 likes on his posts.
Tbh the reason nobody talks about it is probably because barely anyone's using it. The global feed is just one guy spamming JSON dumps
People will pay for convenience. Whether it's closed source or open source is usually priority number 110 000 for them, waaaaaaay after all other priorities
well if you dislike something you can see how it works and look to improve it.
Strange that so much of open-source is actually really bad UI-wise then.
But UX is something that a lot more people care about than whether the source is open. So when they’re evaluating which product to use, that’ll be first on their mind.
If a developers follows the conventions of the platform they're developing for (iOS, Android) then it's easy to get a usable application, but many open source apps seem to have been made because the developer wanted a solution to their specific problem and design was only a low priority feature.
Closed source applications often have the business incentive to gain new users at the cost of the competition, which means they need to be attractive rather than just solve a problem in a particular way. That usually translates to more (unique) styling, for better or for worse.
Being proprietary doesn't improve your UX, it just helps incentivize good UX which is why many closed source applications have better UX than their open source counterparts.
At the end of the day, a proprietary client to an open API still prevents lock-in. Maybe at some point the UX of the proprietary is so good that some people are happy paying for it, while others will maybe use a lightweight OSS CLI client that fits their need better.
It's all good for me if I am not forced to use the Electron client because the API is not open (e.g. Slack, Discord).