Number one priority for onboarding is giving new users something interesting to see. We've made big strides in this direction this year. There's a new "Explore" screen in our official apps that shows trending posts, hashtags, and news articles. We also have a system of follow recommendations.
Mastodon is used by German and European government agencies (e.g. social.bund.de, social.network.europa.eu). There was a real-life meet-up of Mastodon users a few hours away from where I live last month. Jan Boehmermann, a German comedian and TV personality started his own Mastodon server, and the Mastodon logo appears in the intro of his TV show. The uni I studied at uses it, and so does the bank I use.
Why the obsession with total registered users? Do Twitter or Facebook even publish that data? I cannot find it. Every number they use is based on MAU or DAU. Which is because the registered users number is quite meaningless. It just goes up over time. Spammers, bots, multiple accounts, banned accounts. No business or service has a 100% retention rate. Half a million MAU is not the scale of Twitter, but it's not nothing, and it's way more people than you'll ever want to have in your home feed.
The author seems under to be under the wrong impression that Mastodon servers are isolated communities (and therefore compares them to subreddits). This is incorrect. Mastodon is a platform where a server of your choosing hosts your account, like an e-mail provider hosting your inbox. From that account, you follow any other account on the network, regardless of which server hosts that account. Everyone you follow appears in your home feed, and everyone who follows you receives your posts in their home feed.
It is unfortunately a common misunderstanding, and I must admit we didn't help the situation by leaning into calling servers "communities" on joinmastodon.org in the past (not anymore). There do exist plenty of "themed" Mastodon servers, aimed at specific communities, e.g. phpc.social which describes itself as a server for the PHP community, because some secondary discovery features of Mastodon lend themselves to what kind of feels like a slack/irc/subreddit, but ultimately, in their primary purpose, servers are service providers just like GMail/Outlook/Fastmail are for e-mail.
Mastodon considers 20 people in a hashtag as trending because people don't use hashtags for new topics very often, and the hashtags that do get used often and regularly are exactly the opposite of "trending". And because trending data is somewhat limited by your server's view of the fediverse (each server calculates trends based on content from users it is subscribed to).
Just 6 days ago somebody posted a poll asking people how often they log in to Mastodon [1]. 2,691 people responded to their poll, 71% answering "every day". Consider it was posted by someone with 201 followers, and people only had 6 days to respond. That, to me, is slightly more than virtually no-one. 2,859 sysadmins consider Mastodon worth running on their domain.
I use Mastodon on a daily basis. I follow interesting people on it, I get more than my fair share of cat pictures through it, I find out about things happening in the world through it. I don't use Twitter. To me, it is a Twitter alternative, because it has replaced Twitter for me. Don't see what other claims there are to realize.
Despite the name of your source, it seems to consider less than half of existing Mastodon servers. According to my own crawler, the up-to-date active user count is 540,258.
The friction you are describing is when you leave Mastodon's web app and go on the public pages of different servers (that have no way to know who you are because they are separate websites with separate cookies). You do not have to leave Mastodon's web app to interact with users and content from other servers. When you naturally see content or users from other servers in your home feed, on the explore tab, in notifications, and so on, there is no difference in how you interact with them. And if you need to look up something that isn't in the interface, you can use the search bar (you can paste URLs into it, too)
The metric for "it works" is whether people successfully get started and continue to use the platform. For commercial companies this coincides with them making money. Even though Mastodon is a non-profit and does not and has no way of making money from having more users, it is a valuable goal in itself. Each new user decreases the network effects pull of commercial social networks and increases the usefulness of the network for everyone on it. Especially since the userbase is never static as people leave due to natural and unnatural causes, it is important to keep an eye on new user retention.
Chronological home feed is our selling point. You can also opt-in to notifications when specific accounts post if you don't want to miss them (bell button on profiles). Finally, you can also split your home feed into lists. However, nothing precludes someone from developing a client that reorganizes your home feed somehow.
If you are self-hosting for yourself, you can make-do without an e-mail server. You'd have to create an account from the command-line (`tootctl accounts create aquova --email=you-login-with@this --confirmed`) and turn on TOTP 2FA once you login for the first time to avoid e-mail based security challenges. For personal use, you won't need any other e-mails.
To allow people to review their followers before accepting them ("follow requests") all subscriptions in ActivityPub require the followed actor to send back an Accept activity. This, and the Webfinger requirement to confirm the username@domain address that predates ActivityPub, preclude plain static sites from being followable actors as seen from Mastodon. Although nothing prevents you from publishing a static feed in the ActivityStreams format, this would require a different, feed-like subscription mechanism where the publisher is not aware of subscribers and the subscriber has to poll the publisher periodically.
For news stories, moderators can approve publishers (e.g. techcrunch.com) and then they don't need to review individual links anymore (though the ability to override this for individual links remains). Same for posts and authors.
If a post is edited to be something bad, there is still the fallback on reports and post-hoc moderation, making it not any more risky than having the local/federated timelines in the first place.
There's a finite number of publishers/authors that regularly create popular content, so the workload decreases after an initial burst.
If you support subscribing to RSS feeds maybe you'd want to also support ActivityPub? Let your users follow Mastodon accounts and vice versa, become part of the growing fediverse.
Would you care to finish reading the sentence you're quoting the first part of?
> As far as personal feelings are concerned, of course we would prefer if people so antithetical to our values did not use and benefit from our labour, *but the reality of working on free software is that you give up the possibility of choosing who can and cannot use it from the get-go*, so in a practical sense *the only issue we can take with something like Truth Social is if they don’t even comply with the free software license* we release our work under.
It is not that the admin tools do not correctly keep track of old media, it is that the judgement over what to keep is left to the admin since it is not so simple to programmatically decide whether a resource being currently unavailable through the network means it's gone forever, and whether it's gone intentionally or unintentionally. A server that went down might come back after a month of downtime, all sorts of things happen. If you don't care about such minutea you may simply setup a cronjob to run the `tootctl media remove` utility every week and then your primary concern for unbounded storage growth are files uploaded by your own users, which is something you have to deal with regardless of whether you choose Mastodon or Pleroma.
Pleroma may save storage by not downloading federated media locally, but hotlinking to 3rd party servers leaves your users vulnerable to tracking by malicious operators, leeches off the bandwidth of remote servers, and, far more practically, does not guarantee that the media that needs to be displayed is in a file format that is playable on the users' devices. For example, as Pleroma makes no effort to convert user-uploaded files to browser-compatible formats, if Mastodon didn't go through the trouble of converting formats, Mastodon users on iOS would not be able to see many "GIFs" and videos uploaded by Pleroma users in the popular WebM format that is not available on iOS (yet).
You may prefer one or the other but there are definitely reasons for why Mastodon does it that way.
We definitely want to improve content/people discovery. One recent addition was the follow suggestions you get when you first sign up. It pulls up the most popular/proactive accounts in your language. Trending tags should also help, but we want to explore more options for discovery and are open to ideas.
Hi, yes, you can move your followers to another account, and export/import other contacts. Perhaps not entirely without the old admin's cooperation though.
I've just opened the YouTube frontpage from a private window to see what it's like. There is literally nothing on there I'd want to click on. I think the value of YouTube is in 1) being able to link to a video 2) subscribing to creators and having them in your feed and 3) related videos. But none of that is the kind of browsing around you can do from the frontpage.
It's not a Ruby gotcha, it's a Rails routing gotcha. You can specify alternative formats on any path, e.g. you can access /path to get HTML (or whatever the "default" format for that controller method is) or you can access /path.json or /path.xml and if the controller method specifies handlers for those formats, you get that format. So if you allow a username like "john.doe" and the route is something like /john.doe then Rails will interpret the "john" as the ID part of the path and "doe" as the format part of the path. You can override this in your routes to support periods but then you do lose the capability of accessing alternative formats which sometimes can be useful.
> My recollection is that to be listed in their directory of instances, you need to abide by the content rules created by key Mastodon people, and those instances in turn are required to only peer with other instances that follow the same rules. Those rules basically include moderation based on various progressive political stances, so you can’t honestly discuss controversial topics from different perspectives.
Here are the requirements for us to promote your server:
The only hard requirement related to content is that racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia be not allowed. There is no requirement to peer with anyone or have any specific political stances. If your political stance or perspective requires you to dehumanize people of different races or sexual orientation, then yes, you are not welcome.
We at mastodon.social don't copy our blocklist from anybody and don't consider ourselves to be on anyone's "side". Our blocklist is of a quite reasonable length for 5 years of operation and based on personal experiences of our moderation team only:
It's self-contained by default and as you follow outside users it starts receiving their posts and so on. You don't have to participate in the whole fediverse.