WingNews

Nemo_bis|5 years ago

Mastodon (and other fediverse FLOSS) already have millions of active users across thousands of providers. https://the-federation.info/mastodon

It's easy to set up your presence and start small, e.g. with a web app which syncs your Mastodon and Twitter accounts. https://moa.party/

sillysaurusx|5 years ago

Is it really "millions of active users"? (I don't doubt it's possible, but the incentives are very much aligned with "let's count this bot activity as a real user." It doesn't even need to be malicious -- I fell into that trap myself.)

EDIT: Odd, I'd like to report a bug in that site. https://imgur.com/EsGyvnT It doesn't seem to load. Or rather, I saw it briefly flash the statistics, once, before it went back to loading. The 0.3 seconds I saw the stats looked impressive though. :)

The only thing in dev console is a warning that seems unrelated: "<ApolloProvider>.provide() is deprecated. Use the 'apolloProvider' option instead with the provider object directly."

Ah, the root cause is that the graphql fetch takes ~32sec: https://imgur.com/q769ozR So, never mind! Just a bit slow.

---

Anyway, it claims 400,000 active users in the last month. What counts as an active Mastodon user? It also claims 400 million Mastodon posts (total?) which I suppose are tweets.

Interesting... Twitter has about ~17M tweets per day, iirc. If this growth is legit – a big if – then Mastodon may be gaining more momentum than it seemed.

Actually, twitter gets 431M tweets/day: https://twitter.com/jasonbaumgartne/status/13320033501922713...

Hmm. I wonder how much exponential growth would be required for Mastodon to catch up to twitter...

brycewray|5 years ago

> It's easy to set up your presence and start small, e.g. with a web app which syncs your Mastodon and Twitter accounts. https://moa.party/

True, but some of the more avidly pro-Mastodon and anti-Twitter regulars take it upon themselves to be gatekeepers (some nice, some nasty) if you try the dual-platform method. Just noting this for the sake of those who haven't yet done so. Feel free to give it a go, but don't be surprised if you get smacked in the face fairly early in the experience.

Blikkentrekker|5 years ago

> moral and legal needs to censor content

I for one would love for there to be a decentralized system that by design makes it impossible to censor any content, and if the content would be stored in a decentralized, encrypted manner it would also be impossible to legally enforce it as it would not even easily be known where it would be stored at all.

Think of perhaps a network that retrieves its content viā an union-routing-esque mechanism where information is published that cannot feasibly be altered any more once put there whose origins and locations would be computationally infeasible to trace and as it's stored in an encrypted fashion the parts of the network that do store it do not even know what they are storing.

posguy|5 years ago

This exists, its called Freenet: https://freenetproject.org

Not a particularly new concept, Freenet has been around for over 20 years now. Tor and I2P have more traction in this segment.

zbentley|5 years ago

While those do exist (and plenty of them), many people avoid them precisely because content moderation isn't possible or regularly done in those communities. From people who prefer not to sift through egregious amounts of bigotry/spam, to people who are at very real risk of having their physical safety or livelihoods damaged by online abuse (e.g. children), there are plenty of reasons to avoid those communities--reasons why those platforms are often ghost towns or toxic echo chambers.

Like, this isn't a "think of the children" argument that those communities shouldn't be allowed to exist. Of course they should. But don't be surprised when people prefer more centralized and "censored" (policed/moderated) communities. For the vast majority of people, that is a feature, not a bug--and they tend to realize that and boomerang back to Twitter etc. when they try out decentralized/anticensorship-oriented alternatives.

sdan|5 years ago

In the recent past, I've seen Twitter harshly ban account I randomly make. Sometimes its weeks before they ask for a phone number and if you don't have a real number (iirc they check against VoIP) they won't unrestrict you. If you have the same IP as other account I think they also might auto restrict you.

hertzrat|5 years ago

They banned my account for unnamed terms of use violations after my first post saying “well, I finally made a Twitter account.” Their support replied with “queries will not be responded to.” It was for the best

nebalee|5 years ago

When they locked my freshly created account and didn't let me use it unless I gave them my phone number I mailed them and told them I would not do so for privacy reasons. My account was unlocked the next day.

encom|5 years ago

Several years ago I tried to make a Twitter account. It got banned before I posted anything. I hadn't even subscribed to any users. I was going through the settings, and then \bam\, banned for being a bot, or some such nonsense. Nothing of value was lost.

CyberRabbi|5 years ago

Many alternatives exist but none reach critical mass because twitter has buy in from the major media outlets and the journalists they employ. Unlike other social networks that grew spontaneously, Twitter was effectively crowned.

Every twitter clone that tries to compete without first having the approval of the major media outlets will either be publicly ignored, belittled, or outright attacked.

rtpg|5 years ago

This is a very conspiratorial vision of things.

Really, it's just that social networks work by having a lot of people, and lots of people are on Twitter because other people are on Twitter (I think there's an audience thing as well).

Though, to your point, I think Twitter has outsized influence for the same reason Google Reader did: loud nerds and journalists were always using it. Though now the politicians using it probably count for a lot too

betwixthewires|5 years ago

When it comes to publishing, it doesn't matter where you publish, only that you can put your words out there. If someone has a web browser they can read what you say. The only thing that suffers is engagement, which you'll have a hard time getting regardless what website you use to publish if you're just starting out. But engagement is either meaningful or noise, and meaningful engagement comes from thoughtful words, not the size of the website.

So don't worry about critical mass. Pick where you want to publish based on what is important to you.

I almost exclusively use FOSS, federated networks to publish my thoughts, the only exception being this site. I engage here pretty often because I like the quality of the discussion and the rule of only contributing if you have something constructive to contribute, but ideally this website wouldn't be a silo.

thinkingemote|5 years ago

Twitter got popular because early adopters used it, then celebrities, then Oprah and then media journalists and then Arab Spring and then news journalists and then early adopters left.

oarsinsync|5 years ago

Do you have more information and / or evidence of this? I was an early Twitter user (2008) and I don’t recall things playing out this way. I’m not suggesting you’re wrong, and it’s entirely possible I was (am?) being naive about how things played out and would love to learn more.

Tipewryter|5 years ago

Can you name some alternatives? I am not aware of any.

Please note that I explicitly said "centralized". Because decentralized solutions like Mastodon have not resulted in viable alternatives for the average user so far.

betwixthewires|5 years ago

Easy.

https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ is an interesting way to do it.

RSS with comments can work. Mastodon, Pleroma, misskey, gnusocial all do it. They have the added benefit that a user cannot be censored from the network entirely, only from servers by their admins, and blocked by users.

tomjen3|5 years ago

You can't even get people to write their stories on their blogs and then link to Twitter, instead somebody created a twitter bot that will do that, but it has to be summoned in the comments.

darkhorn|5 years ago

https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon

Tipewryter|5 years ago

That is a software repo. Not a public centralized service that lets users communicate with each other.

jasonkester|5 years ago

Twitter tried to build one of those back in 2007.

You can go back and read tech media from the time about all the engineering challenges they ran into and the regular downtimes from trying to scale the thing to a tiny fraction of its current volume.

Turns out to be hard.

rusk|5 years ago

That’s because they wrote it all in ruby, which don’t get me wrong is a fine language but did have scaling issues back in the day. As it happens this was a growth experience for ruby too.

However limited their technology choice might have been from a performance standpoint it did give them the adapatability and flexibility to provide the fun and entertaining product that got them off the ground in the first place.

It did inevitably lead to the growing pains we discuss but I doubt anybody expected it to get as big as it did.

WRT the original comment here ... the main limiting factor nowadays is just getting people to use it. The network effect. Mastodon is a thing, and people do use it but it’s a minnow relatively speaking.

The next big challenge I think will be some kind of decentralised twitter based on some kind of blockchain (by which I mean progressive content hashing and consensus) and I don’t mean federated, like mastodon. The mastodon name is ridiculous too .. I’m not going to go into why but if you know you know, and stupid as it is it does matter.