I've been trying out Mastodon for the past 2 days. I like it, but it honestly has some problems that will prevent it from growing outside of niches. The main one being discoverability. There's simply no easy way to discover other users on the platform. And from what I understand, this is by design.
You can search hashtags, but not everyone uses hashtags. And the results that appear seem to be most recent, and not most liked or most boosted. It requires a lot of "work" to find interesting people and/or friends on the platform. And most people don't have time for that extra "work."
I'd like it more if I could see what's trending, but only if I specifically seek out what's trending.
Also on my Galaxy Tab S7 in portrait mode, a breakpoint is preventing the search field from appearing. I have to shrink Firefox a bit for the search field to appear. Took me a day before I figured that one out.
Outside of those issues, it has potential. I love everyone having a chronological feed.
> There's simply no easy way to discover other users on the platform. And from what I understand, this is by design.
It also feels fragmented. An account can be on any servers, anywhere, controlled by... someone? Users can move around. Communities can just shutdown or lock people out. Etc.
It's a weird solution to a problem that I agree exists.
You discover other users by slowly walking the graph from the people you know and you find the first users in the communities you like through hashtags. It's slow but you eventually build up a pretty good list of people to follow.
Also you generally join a server oriented around the subject(s) you like so you can check the local toot stream for people to follow.
There's a hidden misunderstanding here. Phrasing Mastodon as "the platform" implies you (probably subconscious) perceive it as a "classic" single, centralized, authoritative service managed by a single (legal) entity.
As you've learned: it's the exact opposite. It's not a service: it's just software.
Mastodon fits in between (self)hosted solutions like Matrix, Postfix, IRC, XMMP/Jabber. It would be the odd one out between Twitter, Slack or Discord.
> The main one being discoverability.
And that's a valid concern to have as a dealbreaker. It's also an advantage that's innate to centralized, authoritative services. Storing millions of users in a single telephone directory vastly lowers the bar for discovery compared to a distributed system of telephone directories.
Then again, it's also a chicken and egg discussion. Centralization is a key driver that prompted hundreds of millions of users to flock together. Aspects such as ease of use, convenience and discovery are key conditions as well...
... but let's not pretend this is a net positive: we also experience the many downsides of having millions of people on a single platform that provides common denominator interfaces and policies for governing interaction.
In a federated environment with many instances, agency over governance is delegated again to the countless of small communities and tribes that generally tend to emerge organically in any social context.
Remember, back in the early days, between BBS'es, Usenet, online fora, IRC communities,... the fragmented nature of online communities in itself wasn't seen as problematic. On the contrary, if anything, the freedom to be able to start your own IRC channel or host your own forum was seen as a boon.
In that regard, I don't think that discovery should be treated as a zero sum game where the only logical conclusion is a silver bullet solution e.g. either a single centralized authority or a distributed ledger that acts as a single source of truth. Discovery is massively complex and relies on innate heuristics people have used since forever to find and interact with others. It's never a "solved problem".
That doesn't mean throwing up arms not investing in discovery tools. But rather acknowledging that discovery isn't necessarily worth a trade off against other key aspects of complex interpersonal relationships such as having agency to build your own community space, and self-reliance to implement your own set of policies allowing for governance
The same handle can be used on multiple servers within a federation. Search for @NASA and you'll find at least 4 accounts under that name on different servers making discernment as to which to follow quite a challenge.
I'm not sure but who really has lack of random contacts?
Maybe those vibrant meeting places could/should be a click away from my profile. In a walled garden that means in the same garden, behind the same wall. But in a free world it can be somewhere else. And as Ronald Reagan said: tear down this wall!
Strongly agreed. Also: no lists to be easily followed?
I found some account which creates curated lists for specific interests, but then you have to go through the list one by one to click follow... surreal.
They've recently added this to the iOS app. You can browse posts, hashtags, news articles and users. It shows users and posts from people you haven't followed in a seperate style of timeline. Not sure how they figure out who to show.
I hope Elon opens up the Twitter API and lets fully-powered 3rd party clients flourish.
Ideally, moderation policies and enforcement actions can be client-specific to some degree. Ultra woke or righty twitter can implement their own policies without losing out on the network effect of the greater network.
Ben Thompson has been crusading for this direction and it’s gain traction in free-speech circles
Twitter already works that way, the block feature is available to everyone. It doesn't make any difference to any small groups or to the greater network, moderation from the platform itself still has to happen to prevent damage to it.
You can just ignore what's being said in "free speech circles", those people have no idea what they're talking about. If they were actually trying to solve these problems they wouldn't be pursuing a solution that we already know doesn't work.
The problem is everyone has been burnt by this before. The moment you build a 3rd party solution, then they pull the API away from you 1-x years from now, your dead in the water. Thats not to say people wont give it a go, but I wonder how viable you can build an eco system onto of someone else's API?
The problem of third-party clients has always been more complicated than optimism of the will can solve IMO. Client specific moderation sounds like fodder for another set of messy congressional hearings. It can be done well of course. It would be interesting to hear the blockers the team sees internally and what is higher priority in their opinion.
Filter bubbles should just be a platform-wide thing applied to your experience. Everyone gets a mandatory set of filters for illegal things in their geo. Then you can add whatever you want and share the filter set with other like-minded people. “No conservatives” can be one filter pack, “no liberals” another. “No politics at all” could be yet another. Filters can be as simple as grep, could include ML stuff, or even have moderators.
So a new wave of people can see how unusuable it is. I guess I'm not shocked that Mastodon has improved so little since I joined 6 years ago.
- The very first instance I joined within a few weeks of launch stopped existing within a year
- Maintainers of instances got into weird internet fights and started banning entire instances
- DMs can be read by practically anyone
- in 2022, still zero discovery
- in 2022, fairly poor UX on a variety of web UIs, terrible UX on mobile clients
Mastodon really isn't worth your time unless you prioritize true decentralization. Unfortunately that appears to work against the concept of "community" and good software design.
Mastodon's onboarding UX is an absolute fail... I just didn't have the patience for it do I doubt the casual users won't either. Once I had an account it got even worse, so it's very unlikely I'll login ever again. If that's supposed to be a twitter alternative I now understand there's no competition
I've been using mastodon over the last few days and the difference between tech twitter and mastodon tech instances are dramatic. People engaging with my content has gone way up compared to twitter. I feel like unless you have a ton of followers on twitter, you get completely lost in the shuffle. Joining smaller instances increases the chances that your post will get noticed.
Also, joining tech focused instances means the content you are reading is almost exclusively about tech. Twitter has mechanisms to filter the content you want, but it feels totally different and a little forced.
For example, my sidebar has entertainment news articles on Twitter. I don't want to see that crap on my page.
"Tech Twitter" has been heading towards lowest-common-denominator content targeted at beginners and wantrepreneurs, for a few years now. Those audiences engage a lot more. And it's easier to throw in click bait content or low-density information threads, because the audience cannot yet tell the difference.
How does one find the bigger Mastadon instances? They aren't even listed on this joinmastodon website. I know it is intentionally decentralized, but it seems like it can never catch on because it feels like 100s of separate websites. You have to make logins for every single one.
You don't. You join one - or host your own - and your mastodon instance is connected to the others. You can follow users on any other public mastodon instance.
It is federated like email so if you have an email (@gmail, @yahoo, @custom.domain, etc) they are all interoperable. (Modulo moderation / spam filters)
You don't have nor would be able to create an email address in all public email servers. (Without mentioning private/non-public email servers or personal/family ones of others)
Someday a tech giant will mainstream Mastndon by recentralizing it, either by (1) running a large enough instance that its gravity sucks in everyone else, or by (2) creating a service/client on top of Mastodon that creates a unified Mastodoniverse. Decentralized services don't become mainstream without restoring the user conveniences of centralization.
If that 30,000 is mostly the kind of people that like to be shouty about their worldview being so correct while gloating at the removal of voices they don't like or won't tolerate, then I'm sorry for your gain.
Curious to see if this holds or if there's a deficit of ~30,000 in three months time...
Imho mastodon's got an onboarding problem since before you even start you have to decide where to make an account, a decision with unclear ramifications. That'll scare a lot of people off at step 1.
Unpopular opinion but here goes 1. UX is hopeless (menu on the right, post on the left? ) and different to be different (use common design patterns, don't re-invent the wheel to be different. User have expectations from other sites they use, don't violate them)
2. Onboarding unclear
3. Non-existent discoverability
4. Tons of different domains joinmastodon.org, mastodon.social, mstdn.social doesn't work nicely with password managers and difficult to remember which to go to login...
Sadly, it will enjoy a bump for a few weeks...and then float back into obscurity. In my eyes this is DOA in its current state.
It seems some people find this federation aspect "complicated" . To explain it simply, just think of it like email account. I might have a zoho account, you might have gmail, we can still talk to each other. A federated system is sort of like that. We all can get account(s) on various servers/service providers. We can talk to each other by using each other's "handle" (like email address). It's really that simply for a user.
If you want to selfhost, cloudron and yunohost have 1-click apps. Could not get any simpler with either of them.
I've also commented before as to why I don't believe decentralization is a solution to the problems of current social media and instead introduces problems of its own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513
> Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat.
This is correct. Communities grow around "something". Create an utility, a game, or anything, and you have a community form around it. It's impossible to replace facebook with a new facebook because people are already in facebook.
Mastodon , Matrix etc are missing this key feature: Make it dead-simple to integrate with an existing community. Let every wordpress site easily integrate their users with mastodon or matrix, and you will see adoption. As it stands right now, people don't have a real incentive to run a server, maintain a community, and possibly be legally liable for that community. So only the typical ideologues of OSS will run instances, and they will be extra cautious because for them it is only a hobby.
Yes to all of those. The only issue is some smaller instances with limited admin bandwidth might only federate automatically with larger, well moderated instances to help reduce their own moderation burden.
If you want to be well federated even with the smaller instances, you need to hang around for a while; build connections within the larger communities; then ask to federate with any smaller instances you want to connect directly with.
Twitter's censorship created the problem of echo chambers. Twitter was never full on hostile toward conservatives, it was more to do with specific issues/narratives.
Conservatives looked at mastodon. Mastodon was worse than twitter, conservatives never made it to mastodon. Mastodon was hostile toward conservatives and this was an unfortunate large mistake.
Conservatives built alternatives like parler or gab. But they failed because they were echo chambers.
>We’ve been steadily working towards the ultimate goal of providing a viable alternative to Twitter since 2016, and have proven the scalability and resilience of the platform through organic growth over the years.
Ironically many of these alternatives like gab stole Mastodon code to operate. Which is very interesting because why couldn't conservatives simply join the mastodon network? As an up and comer you would not only be best suited to invite anyone to your platform.
>listing only such servers that commit to standing up against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.
Mastodon will never be in the spotlight because they have fallen into the same echo chamber problems. Gab supports free speech? That must make them racist transphobes!
Looking at Gab and having your one takeaway be "free speech" is akin to looking at Russian news coverage and thinking "wow they really support the troops".
Yeah, Mastodon and most of it's clones are run by some of the worst sewage runoff from Twitter, who rampantly defederate and block any 'other' who encroaches on their echo chamber. I wish it wasn't the case, but sadly it is.
Mastodon reminds me of Woznaik's vision of what Apple should be and could be (in contrast to Steve's). It's totally awesome but lacks key insights of branding, marketing, and understanding users. This thing is built by geeks for other geeks.
There certainly is a role to be played by federated open-protocol communication in the future, but why limit your app to being a mere Twitter-clone? It will then always be worse than Twitter in terms of the quality of its network.
After having been reminded of Mastodon and the fediverse's existence, I decided to try setting up a server to go along with the rest of my self-hosted services. But kind of turned off from it all now, first tried using the Mastodon implementation, then Pleroma. Former was a complete non-starter behind a reverse proxy, way too heavy and not too useful documentation wise, latter at least worked enough to log in, but ran into some strange federation issue. In the end just nuked it all out of frustration.
I used to think that setting up matrix-synapse was unfriendly to users, but it's way friendlier than either of these.
This happens every time a company is acquired. I remember the “mass migration” when GitHub was acquired. In the end Gitlab did see some new users but GitHub remained on top.
Do exist some kind of blocklist services so all the bad mastodon postings and instances can be blocked easily? Mastodon is compared to email here, so it would be great to have blacklists, too.
Of course all kind of automated tools or services that helps to keep an instance clean would be very useful. Imagine "Fediverse Cleanup Service" where you can subscribe to "NSFW", "CP", "Right", "Left", "Spam", "Whatever" block lists.
Also big social networks could share their blacklists (as a service?) - selling ads and cleanup services will give them a good position in a world of decentralized platforms.
Does exist already a YC startup that does all this work?
[+] [-] aceazzameen|3 years ago|reply
You can search hashtags, but not everyone uses hashtags. And the results that appear seem to be most recent, and not most liked or most boosted. It requires a lot of "work" to find interesting people and/or friends on the platform. And most people don't have time for that extra "work."
I'd like it more if I could see what's trending, but only if I specifically seek out what's trending.
Also on my Galaxy Tab S7 in portrait mode, a breakpoint is preventing the search field from appearing. I have to shrink Firefox a bit for the search field to appear. Took me a day before I figured that one out.
Outside of those issues, it has potential. I love everyone having a chronological feed.
[+] [-] movedx|3 years ago|reply
It also feels fragmented. An account can be on any servers, anywhere, controlled by... someone? Users can move around. Communities can just shutdown or lock people out. Etc.
It's a weird solution to a problem that I agree exists.
[+] [-] usrn|3 years ago|reply
Also you generally join a server oriented around the subject(s) you like so you can check the local toot stream for people to follow.
[+] [-] CaptArmchair|3 years ago|reply
There's a hidden misunderstanding here. Phrasing Mastodon as "the platform" implies you (probably subconscious) perceive it as a "classic" single, centralized, authoritative service managed by a single (legal) entity.
As you've learned: it's the exact opposite. It's not a service: it's just software.
Mastodon fits in between (self)hosted solutions like Matrix, Postfix, IRC, XMMP/Jabber. It would be the odd one out between Twitter, Slack or Discord.
> The main one being discoverability.
And that's a valid concern to have as a dealbreaker. It's also an advantage that's innate to centralized, authoritative services. Storing millions of users in a single telephone directory vastly lowers the bar for discovery compared to a distributed system of telephone directories.
Then again, it's also a chicken and egg discussion. Centralization is a key driver that prompted hundreds of millions of users to flock together. Aspects such as ease of use, convenience and discovery are key conditions as well...
... but let's not pretend this is a net positive: we also experience the many downsides of having millions of people on a single platform that provides common denominator interfaces and policies for governing interaction.
In a federated environment with many instances, agency over governance is delegated again to the countless of small communities and tribes that generally tend to emerge organically in any social context.
Remember, back in the early days, between BBS'es, Usenet, online fora, IRC communities,... the fragmented nature of online communities in itself wasn't seen as problematic. On the contrary, if anything, the freedom to be able to start your own IRC channel or host your own forum was seen as a boon.
In that regard, I don't think that discovery should be treated as a zero sum game where the only logical conclusion is a silver bullet solution e.g. either a single centralized authority or a distributed ledger that acts as a single source of truth. Discovery is massively complex and relies on innate heuristics people have used since forever to find and interact with others. It's never a "solved problem".
That doesn't mean throwing up arms not investing in discovery tools. But rather acknowledging that discovery isn't necessarily worth a trade off against other key aspects of complex interpersonal relationships such as having agency to build your own community space, and self-reliance to implement your own set of policies allowing for governance
[+] [-] dano|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mro_name|3 years ago|reply
I'm not sure but who really has lack of random contacts?
Maybe those vibrant meeting places could/should be a click away from my profile. In a walled garden that means in the same garden, behind the same wall. But in a free world it can be somewhere else. And as Ronald Reagan said: tear down this wall!
[+] [-] trenchgun|3 years ago|reply
I found some account which creates curated lists for specific interests, but then you have to go through the list one by one to click follow... surreal.
[+] [-] radicalriddler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flappyeagle|3 years ago|reply
Ideally, moderation policies and enforcement actions can be client-specific to some degree. Ultra woke or righty twitter can implement their own policies without losing out on the network effect of the greater network.
Ben Thompson has been crusading for this direction and it’s gain traction in free-speech circles
[+] [-] throwaway82652|3 years ago|reply
You can just ignore what's being said in "free speech circles", those people have no idea what they're talking about. If they were actually trying to solve these problems they wouldn't be pursuing a solution that we already know doesn't work.
[+] [-] laurencei|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] femiagbabiaka|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbbk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teeray|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stanislavb|3 years ago|reply
I don’t believe Musk put those billions for the greater good… I won’t be surprised at all if Trump is welcomed sooner than later on Twitter again.
[+] [-] raydev|3 years ago|reply
- The very first instance I joined within a few weeks of launch stopped existing within a year
- Maintainers of instances got into weird internet fights and started banning entire instances
- DMs can be read by practically anyone
- in 2022, still zero discovery
- in 2022, fairly poor UX on a variety of web UIs, terrible UX on mobile clients
Mastodon really isn't worth your time unless you prioritize true decentralization. Unfortunately that appears to work against the concept of "community" and good software design.
[+] [-] CraftingLinks|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qudat|3 years ago|reply
Also, joining tech focused instances means the content you are reading is almost exclusively about tech. Twitter has mechanisms to filter the content you want, but it feels totally different and a little forced.
For example, my sidebar has entertainment news articles on Twitter. I don't want to see that crap on my page.
[+] [-] rchaud|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] izzydata|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcchambers|3 years ago|reply
You don't. You join one - or host your own - and your mastodon instance is connected to the others. You can follow users on any other public mastodon instance.
[+] [-] ryukafalz|3 years ago|reply
You only have to make a login on one, and you can still talk to people on the others. It’s like email.
[+] [-] fabianhjr|3 years ago|reply
You don't have nor would be able to create an email address in all public email servers. (Without mentioning private/non-public email servers or personal/family ones of others)
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|3 years ago|reply
One: https://joinmastodon.org/communities
Another: https://instances.social
[+] [-] CharlesW|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] headsoup|3 years ago|reply
Curious to see if this holds or if there's a deficit of ~30,000 in three months time...
[+] [-] Pxtl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sas1ni69|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radicalriddler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thewojo|3 years ago|reply
Sadly, it will enjoy a bump for a few weeks...and then float back into obscurity. In my eyes this is DOA in its current state.
[+] [-] the_common_man|3 years ago|reply
If you want to selfhost, cloudron and yunohost have 1-click apps. Could not get any simpler with either of them.
[+] [-] dangom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nextgrid|3 years ago|reply
I've also commented before as to why I don't believe decentralization is a solution to the problems of current social media and instead introduces problems of its own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513
[+] [-] jdrc|3 years ago|reply
This is correct. Communities grow around "something". Create an utility, a game, or anything, and you have a community form around it. It's impossible to replace facebook with a new facebook because people are already in facebook.
Mastodon , Matrix etc are missing this key feature: Make it dead-simple to integrate with an existing community. Let every wordpress site easily integrate their users with mastodon or matrix, and you will see adoption. As it stands right now, people don't have a real incentive to run a server, maintain a community, and possibly be legally liable for that community. So only the typical ideologues of OSS will run instances, and they will be extra cautious because for them it is only a hobby.
[+] [-] jdrc|3 years ago|reply
That is dumb. Not because racism is cool, but actively policing is a looooooot of work to pledge.
How many instances are not listed here? Many? I m considering to make a directory
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|3 years ago|reply
Has anyone done this? Does linking to other servers work OK? Any upsides/downsides?
[+] [-] tekromancr|3 years ago|reply
If you want to be well federated even with the smaller instances, you need to hang around for a while; build connections within the larger communities; then ask to federate with any smaller instances you want to connect directly with.
[+] [-] ajayyy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xvilka|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://pleroma.social/
[2] https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma
[+] [-] fknorangesite|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] incomingpain|3 years ago|reply
Conservatives looked at mastodon. Mastodon was worse than twitter, conservatives never made it to mastodon. Mastodon was hostile toward conservatives and this was an unfortunate large mistake.
Conservatives built alternatives like parler or gab. But they failed because they were echo chambers.
>We’ve been steadily working towards the ultimate goal of providing a viable alternative to Twitter since 2016, and have proven the scalability and resilience of the platform through organic growth over the years.
Ironically many of these alternatives like gab stole Mastodon code to operate. Which is very interesting because why couldn't conservatives simply join the mastodon network? As an up and comer you would not only be best suited to invite anyone to your platform.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/07/statement-on-gabs-fork...
White supremacists?
>listing only such servers that commit to standing up against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.
Mastodon will never be in the spotlight because they have fallen into the same echo chamber problems. Gab supports free speech? That must make them racist transphobes!
[+] [-] rchaud|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoItToMe81|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] systemvoltage|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryukafalz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prvc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fluctor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dotnet00|3 years ago|reply
I used to think that setting up matrix-synapse was unfriendly to users, but it's way friendlier than either of these.
[+] [-] Gigachad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] POPOSYS|3 years ago|reply
Of course all kind of automated tools or services that helps to keep an instance clean would be very useful. Imagine "Fediverse Cleanup Service" where you can subscribe to "NSFW", "CP", "Right", "Left", "Spam", "Whatever" block lists.
Also big social networks could share their blacklists (as a service?) - selling ads and cleanup services will give them a good position in a world of decentralized platforms.
Does exist already a YC startup that does all this work?