11 ms·

Mastodon Is Awesome

108 points by idonov 4y ago

poulpy123 4y ago
Twitter puts you in contact with everyone, and you depend on a centralized and scrutinized organisation. Mastodon put you in contact with little people and you depend on a very decentralized and autonomous organisations. I really can't see the second one having the same success than the first one
- szszrk 4y ago
  Either one has different criteria of success. Also such "alternative" projects tend to attract whole communities, so users may actually feel like "all they need is here", because their beloved communities are present.
baxuz 4y ago
As far as I see it's no better than subreddits. If anything, the barrier to entry is a lot higher.
2pEXgD0fZ5cF 4y ago
I finally gave Mastodon a try because many interesting Twitter accounts I follow moved there, or at least got active on it and broadcasted the fact. I have to admit I am positively surprised so far. Very much so. Now everything depends on how much activity remains once the current dust settles. Will Mastodon overtake Twitter? I still doubt it, but honestly I really can't imagine why I would care about that as long as Mastodon manages to establish, nurture, and retain a healthy userbase. Which is all I would need to keep using it.
- teekert 4y ago
  I fear it will go the way of Signal, every time Meta forces a uela change, some people switch, most switch back... Let's hope there will at some point be a critical mass. For Signal it's too late, in my country WA is the standard sadly.
  - thelittleone 4y ago
    5+ years ago Whatsapp was pretty much the standard for all my network (apart from my US colleagues still using SMS a lot). But over the last 5 years its fragmented a LOT. I often have conversations with same friends across >1 messaging app.
angrycontrarian 4y ago
I am still struggling to understand how migrating to a censorship-resistant platform will mitigate concerns about a lack of strict content moderation at twitter.
- viraptor 4y ago
  It's only censorship-resistant as in, nobody apart from LE can force you to take your instance down. Otherwise the network is still highly moderated. Both at the local instance level (people get banned) and at the federation level (whole instances are either silenced or disconnected from others).
- cies 4y ago
  Mastodon is, IMHO, more tightly moderated than Twitter, depending which side of the split-fediverse you are on. See my other comment in this thread for my story.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  Mastodon as a whole is "censorship-resistant". Individual servers very much have rules. My home is on FOSStodon, and it's very, very far from an anarchy: https://fosstodon.org/about/more#rules https://fosstodon.org/about/more#rules It's also selective about which other servers it will interoperate with and how much: https://fosstodon.org/about/more#unavailable-content https://fosstodon.org/about/more#unavailable-content
  - Timshel 4y ago
    Nice to see the granularity of moderating servers; had not look at the subject and was kind of afraid that if it was only on/off then you might end up with a disconnected fediverse.
- FortiDude 4y ago
  But now your post won't be taken down by a paid employee of a corporation with actual contractual obligations and custom made moderation tools to limit collateral damage, instead a 17yo Discord friend of the admin will have complete access to your account!
cies 4y ago
[flagged]
- kazinator 4y ago
  The EU didn't have to give weapons to any underdogs in Afghanistan, because giving weapons to various underdogs in Afghanistan was practically the description of both the USSR and USA missions; those two had it covered.
  - cies 4y ago
    I just want to say that the EU was not breaking up trade with the USA, nor supported the underdog in the last 50 years of US invasions. Now these hypocrites cry "poor sovereign state got invaded for no reason but Putin being bad person" for months in a row.
    - hagbarth 4y ago
      I mean. You are assuming that the underdog is always in the right here. Or that it's hypocritical to support the underdog in one conflict, but not the other, which is just blatantly bad reasoning. Also, at least where I live, the same people are not in power. They can be against Afghanistan, Iraq _and_ Ukraine invasions at the same time.
      - cies 4y ago
        All arguments made to why Ukraine should be supported (sovereign country, up against the big bad guys, etc.) except for "they are white" (which as on the media in my country) are also true for the invasions of the US of the last 50 years. Only then we supported the US. > You are assuming that the underdog is always in the right here. I do not assume anyone is right. I understand that in geopolitics "might makes it right". I do not pick sides either. I just do not think my govt should piss off Russia by supporting Kiev: my problem is the shitty policy of my govt. And oh boy did they have some good propagandists ready to to teach us all how bad Russia is. Tax payer's cash put to good use /s
- 4y ago
b112 4y ago
[flagged]
jonathanstrange 4y ago
I've tried Mastodon for several months, using three different servers (or how these are called), and for me personally the experience ranged from useless to unpleasant. I got a horrible mixture of open source programming and pedophile manga culture in one home feed, and tons of Nazi posts with Pepe the frog memes in another. I never saw anything interesting in months, even after changing home feeds several times. Most of the discussions were about topics or memes I didn't even know. It was boring and I opened my client less and less often. To be fair, Twitter offers essentially the same experience to me. Although you can see a glimpse of reason from time to time in between, because there are some experts on it, it's mostly about vitriol and passive aggressive trolling. I've heard you can adopt it by blocking and subscribing strategically but this never worked for me in the three months I've tried it. I've deactivated my Twitter account, too.
- lokedhs 4y ago
  May I ask what instance you were on? A lot of guides don't talk about it, but there is a dark version of Fediverse, often references as the "freeze peach" instances. They are generally blocked by most mainstream instances, but enough are open so that you can't still follow a majority of the mainstream content from these instances. However, when you are on them, the content is very much like how you describe it. That's why I'm curious as to whether you (possibly accidentally) joined the one if those. If you you di, and you're not actively looking for such content, the experience can be quite terrible.
  - jonathanstrange 4y ago
    That's what must have happened to me. I think one of them was called "stereophonic" (or similar) and the other one some weird Belgian with German like "absturztau.be", both were boring but the latter was worse. The third one I don't remember. They had nice descriptions, though, which didn't really match the content. I might give it another try with the biggest US main server, though it's probably not for me anyway since I can't stand Twitter's format either.
  - baxuz 4y ago
    > May I ask what instance you were on? That's the problem with all decentralized and/or forked products. "Oh, you're using the wrong Linux distro, that one sucks." "You're on the wrong WoW server, that one sucks."
audessuscest 4y ago
All these posts regarding Mastodon start to feel like spam (or at least forced promotion), nothing really interesting in that post...
bluesign 4y ago
Unfortunately with its current design it will end up being "echo chambers". There are two main problems needs to be solved. - Identity ( it shouldn't be tied to a single server ) - Federating with selective servers ( more importantly "not federating" with some servers ) Only solution now is to keep your own server ( and federate with other servers that interests you ) but I don't think it is scalable.
- cykros 4y ago
  This is 100% the issue. When Mastodon started, it was like when IRC started -- one big server you could talk to just about everyone on. These days, it's like IRC was in 2000 or so -- many different servers you could talk to your small group on, but you'd end up joining a whole bunch of different servers to get your reach across, and unlike IRC, that really gets in the way of things like re-tooting and other broadcast issues. It's not so much that it's a problem so much as that it makes it a poor choice for a Twitter replacement. Is Statusnet (a la identi.ca) still a thing?
- angio 4y ago
  If you run your own server, aren't you risking being banned from some instances if you don't ban instances they don't like? So there is no real upside compared to joining existing instances (other than having a better identity).
  - bluesign 4y ago
    I think doesn't work like that, but I am not 100% sure.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  > it will end up being "echo chambers". The more I use social media in its various forms, the more I think that for most people this would be feature. As much as people claim to want to be shown diverse viewpoints, what really makes them happy is constant confirmation of their own existing views. So for most (not all) people, this effect will eventually put them into an echo chamber like environment cause that's where they feel most comfortable. Therefore, platforms that cater to this tendency will be more successful than ones that don't (provided they hit critical mass, which is a pre-requirement, otherwise there is not enough content/interactions one way or another).
savolai 4y ago
I bumped into this in safari on ios. Okay, I could try to follow this. I have the mastodon app. https://social.network.europa.eu/public https://social.network.europa.eu/public Copied and pasted the first handle I could find. It was cumbersome since it is also a link so long pressing on it initiates link actions, I have to start in a location elsewhere and manually narrow down the selection afterwards. But oh, this is a server with many users, how do I follow them all? Copy paste all the handles by hand? These are the kinds of UX use cases that need to be solved at a bare minimum.
greg7582947 4y ago
How long until these shill posts end? I can't help but wonder why people who supposedly want to protect democracy are fleeing Twitter because it was taken over by someone who wants to bring back freedom of speech. Mastodon seems to make sense for these people though. Breaking up the service into different moderated servers makes it more difficult to regulate with pesky laws like the First Amendment. If one server gets too much freedom, users can easily flee to another warm, fuzzy, safe server where opposing views are censored as "conspiracy theories".
- sgu999 4y ago
  Your point works in the exact opposite way too... if users feel their Mastodon server isn't free enough, they can move somewhere else with less "censorship". Not sure what you're ranting about here.
- pupppet 4y ago
  >taken over by someone who wants to bring back freedom of speech. Taken over by someone who wants freedom of his own speech, not yours.
tibbydudeza 4y ago
https://hub.fosstodon.org/why-is-fosstodon-down/ https://hub.fosstodon.org/why-is-fosstodon-down/ Seems like a lot of tech savvy folks are checking it out.
goldforever 4y ago

108 points by idonov 4y ago

Twitter puts you in contact with everyone, and you depend on a centralized and scrutinized organisation. Mastodon put you in contact with little people and you depend on a very decentralized and autonomous organisations. I really can't see the second one having the same success than the first one

szszrk 4y ago
Either one has different criteria of success. Also such "alternative" projects tend to attract whole communities, so users may actually feel like "all they need is here", because their beloved communities are present.

baxuz 4y ago

As far as I see it's no better than subreddits. If anything, the barrier to entry is a lot higher.

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 4y ago

I finally gave Mastodon a try because many interesting Twitter accounts I follow moved there, or at least got active on it and broadcasted the fact. I have to admit I am positively surprised so far. Very much so. Now everything depends on how much activity remains once the current dust settles. Will Mastodon overtake Twitter? I still doubt it, but honestly I really can't imagine why I would care about that as long as Mastodon manages to establish, nurture, and retain a healthy userbase. Which is all I would need to keep using it.

teekert 4y ago
I fear it will go the way of Signal, every time Meta forces a uela change, some people switch, most switch back... Let's hope there will at some point be a critical mass. For Signal it's too late, in my country WA is the standard sadly.
- thelittleone 4y ago
  5+ years ago Whatsapp was pretty much the standard for all my network (apart from my US colleagues still using SMS a lot). But over the last 5 years its fragmented a LOT. I often have conversations with same friends across >1 messaging app.

angrycontrarian 4y ago

I am still struggling to understand how migrating to a censorship-resistant platform will mitigate concerns about a lack of strict content moderation at twitter.

viraptor 4y ago
It's only censorship-resistant as in, nobody apart from LE can force you to take your instance down. Otherwise the network is still highly moderated. Both at the local instance level (people get banned) and at the federation level (whole instances are either silenced or disconnected from others).
cies 4y ago
Mastodon is, IMHO, more tightly moderated than Twitter, depending which side of the split-fediverse you are on. See my other comment in this thread for my story.
dale_glass 4y ago
Mastodon as a whole is "censorship-resistant". Individual servers very much have rules. My home is on FOSStodon, and it's very, very far from an anarchy: https://fosstodon.org/about/more#rules https://fosstodon.org/about/more#rules It's also selective about which other servers it will interoperate with and how much: https://fosstodon.org/about/more#unavailable-content https://fosstodon.org/about/more#unavailable-content
- Timshel 4y ago
  Nice to see the granularity of moderating servers; had not look at the subject and was kind of afraid that if it was only on/off then you might end up with a disconnected fediverse.
FortiDude 4y ago
But now your post won't be taken down by a paid employee of a corporation with actual contractual obligations and custom made moderation tools to limit collateral damage, instead a 17yo Discord friend of the admin will have complete access to your account!

cies 4y ago

[flagged]

kazinator 4y ago
The EU didn't have to give weapons to any underdogs in Afghanistan, because giving weapons to various underdogs in Afghanistan was practically the description of both the USSR and USA missions; those two had it covered.
- cies 4y ago
  I just want to say that the EU was not breaking up trade with the USA, nor supported the underdog in the last 50 years of US invasions. Now these hypocrites cry "poor sovereign state got invaded for no reason but Putin being bad person" for months in a row.
  - hagbarth 4y ago
    I mean. You are assuming that the underdog is always in the right here. Or that it's hypocritical to support the underdog in one conflict, but not the other, which is just blatantly bad reasoning. Also, at least where I live, the same people are not in power. They can be against Afghanistan, Iraq _and_ Ukraine invasions at the same time.
    - cies 4y ago
      All arguments made to why Ukraine should be supported (sovereign country, up against the big bad guys, etc.) except for "they are white" (which as on the media in my country) are also true for the invasions of the US of the last 50 years. Only then we supported the US. > You are assuming that the underdog is always in the right here. I do not assume anyone is right. I understand that in geopolitics "might makes it right". I do not pick sides either. I just do not think my govt should piss off Russia by supporting Kiev: my problem is the shitty policy of my govt. And oh boy did they have some good propagandists ready to to teach us all how bad Russia is. Tax payer's cash put to good use /s
4y ago

b112 4y ago

[flagged]

jonathanstrange 4y ago

I've tried Mastodon for several months, using three different servers (or how these are called), and for me personally the experience ranged from useless to unpleasant. I got a horrible mixture of open source programming and pedophile manga culture in one home feed, and tons of Nazi posts with Pepe the frog memes in another. I never saw anything interesting in months, even after changing home feeds several times. Most of the discussions were about topics or memes I didn't even know. It was boring and I opened my client less and less often. To be fair, Twitter offers essentially the same experience to me. Although you can see a glimpse of reason from time to time in between, because there are some experts on it, it's mostly about vitriol and passive aggressive trolling. I've heard you can adopt it by blocking and subscribing strategically but this never worked for me in the three months I've tried it. I've deactivated my Twitter account, too.

lokedhs 4y ago
May I ask what instance you were on? A lot of guides don't talk about it, but there is a dark version of Fediverse, often references as the "freeze peach" instances. They are generally blocked by most mainstream instances, but enough are open so that you can't still follow a majority of the mainstream content from these instances. However, when you are on them, the content is very much like how you describe it. That's why I'm curious as to whether you (possibly accidentally) joined the one if those. If you you di, and you're not actively looking for such content, the experience can be quite terrible.
- jonathanstrange 4y ago
  That's what must have happened to me. I think one of them was called "stereophonic" (or similar) and the other one some weird Belgian with German like "absturztau.be", both were boring but the latter was worse. The third one I don't remember. They had nice descriptions, though, which didn't really match the content. I might give it another try with the biggest US main server, though it's probably not for me anyway since I can't stand Twitter's format either.
- baxuz 4y ago
  > May I ask what instance you were on? That's the problem with all decentralized and/or forked products. "Oh, you're using the wrong Linux distro, that one sucks." "You're on the wrong WoW server, that one sucks."

audessuscest 4y ago

All these posts regarding Mastodon start to feel like spam (or at least forced promotion), nothing really interesting in that post...

bluesign 4y ago

Unfortunately with its current design it will end up being "echo chambers". There are two main problems needs to be solved. - Identity ( it shouldn't be tied to a single server ) - Federating with selective servers ( more importantly "not federating" with some servers ) Only solution now is to keep your own server ( and federate with other servers that interests you ) but I don't think it is scalable.

cykros 4y ago
This is 100% the issue. When Mastodon started, it was like when IRC started -- one big server you could talk to just about everyone on. These days, it's like IRC was in 2000 or so -- many different servers you could talk to your small group on, but you'd end up joining a whole bunch of different servers to get your reach across, and unlike IRC, that really gets in the way of things like re-tooting and other broadcast issues. It's not so much that it's a problem so much as that it makes it a poor choice for a Twitter replacement. Is Statusnet (a la identi.ca) still a thing?
angio 4y ago
If you run your own server, aren't you risking being banned from some instances if you don't ban instances they don't like? So there is no real upside compared to joining existing instances (other than having a better identity).
- bluesign 4y ago
  I think doesn't work like that, but I am not 100% sure.
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
> it will end up being "echo chambers". The more I use social media in its various forms, the more I think that for most people this would be feature. As much as people claim to want to be shown diverse viewpoints, what really makes them happy is constant confirmation of their own existing views. So for most (not all) people, this effect will eventually put them into an echo chamber like environment cause that's where they feel most comfortable. Therefore, platforms that cater to this tendency will be more successful than ones that don't (provided they hit critical mass, which is a pre-requirement, otherwise there is not enough content/interactions one way or another).

savolai 4y ago

I bumped into this in safari on ios. Okay, I could try to follow this. I have the mastodon app. https://social.network.europa.eu/public https://social.network.europa.eu/public Copied and pasted the first handle I could find. It was cumbersome since it is also a link so long pressing on it initiates link actions, I have to start in a location elsewhere and manually narrow down the selection afterwards. But oh, this is a server with many users, how do I follow them all? Copy paste all the handles by hand? These are the kinds of UX use cases that need to be solved at a bare minimum.

greg7582947 4y ago

How long until these shill posts end? I can't help but wonder why people who supposedly want to protect democracy are fleeing Twitter because it was taken over by someone who wants to bring back freedom of speech. Mastodon seems to make sense for these people though. Breaking up the service into different moderated servers makes it more difficult to regulate with pesky laws like the First Amendment. If one server gets too much freedom, users can easily flee to another warm, fuzzy, safe server where opposing views are censored as "conspiracy theories".

sgu999 4y ago
Your point works in the exact opposite way too... if users feel their Mastodon server isn't free enough, they can move somewhere else with less "censorship". Not sure what you're ranting about here.
pupppet 4y ago
>taken over by someone who wants to bring back freedom of speech. Taken over by someone who wants freedom of his own speech, not yours.

tibbydudeza 4y ago

https://hub.fosstodon.org/why-is-fosstodon-down/ https://hub.fosstodon.org/why-is-fosstodon-down/ Seems like a lot of tech savvy folks are checking it out.

goldforever 4y ago