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.
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.
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).
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).
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?
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.
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".
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.
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
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.
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.
I think Scott Alexander's recent post about this made a good point. (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-differen...) He draws the distinction between censorship (stopping people from getting messages they want to recieve) and moderation (stopping people from getting messages they don't want to recieve). With those definitons censorship is bad and moderation is good.
Mastodon isn't as simple as the model he imagines (simple click-boxes to select what kind of messages you want) but it does give you moderation (on your local instance) while still letting you avoid censorship (by moving instances if necessary).
You can see censorship as about being able to control what people is allowed to say. The fediverse is highly resistant to that.
You can also see censorship as about being able to control what people will be able to say to you. The fediverse is not at all resistant to that.
That is, nobody can stop you from setting up your own instance, or write your own ActivityPub implementation, or find one that tolerates whatever thing you want to say.
But we can band together and prevent you from making us party to your conversations against our will, and we can prevent you from being part of our conversations against our will.
The structure of the fediverse supports that by letting groups pick instances whose moderation fits what they want, and different groups with different moderation requirements or even contradictory moderation requirements can co-exist without all being beholden to the vagaries of policies set by a third party we have no control over.
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:
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!
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).
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.
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.
> 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
This sounds like an absolutely horrible experience, I'm so sorry to hear this.
At the same time, aside from the open source programming, which is welcome, I have not ever seen any of the other things you mentioned, but I also took the time to look for a more "quiet", dataviz-oriented server myself. My feed is more people I explicitly follow than local timeline, which makes it a much more curated experience.
Can I ask you what kind of interests you were searching for when deciding on an instance? Because my hunch is that you basically had to deal with a "search engine" kind of problem, but for fediverse instances. I wouldn't be surprised if programming, anime and manga has a ton of "4chan-esque" places that drown out the more quiet "safe spaces" unless you take some time to dig deeper before settling down somewhere.
For anyone using the "fediverse", I would strongly recommend standing up your own instance because that's the only way to guarantee and retain your presence online. I understand that this is not for everybody.
I'm not referring to Mastodon/mastodon.social here, but a platform that's similar in nature. I wouldn't mind the fediblock police as much if there were to be some engagement on any actions (preferably good faith conversations). One thing I learned is that on the fediverse, one could be banned for no offense, with no warnings and no support whatsoever. It's almost no different from losing one's Twitter account or Google account, except that for the latter you can cry loudly on HN or another platform and possibly get some help. On the fediverse, one day your account works and the next day it could vanish without a trace. No responses from the admin (usually even the larger instances are run by a single person) and if there are any responses, they take weeks or months.
The various server/platform instances (including the flagship ones) may not have clear policies for moderation and may cover things up with short and ambiguously worded terms.
Giving weapons to Ukraine is unrelated to all other previous conflicts and needs to be analyzed in isolation. On the other hand, if weapon deliveries are found to be the correct move, future underdogs in invasions could receive a similar aid.
But were you blocked for this opinion or just "shat on"? If you get censored then I'm not sure what the point of an alternative social platform is. We need to talk these issues through somewhere.
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.
[+] [-] 2pEXgD0fZ5cF|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluesign|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Eddy_Viscosity2|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] angio|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cykros|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] savolai|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pupppet|3 years ago|reply
Taken over by someone who wants freedom of his own speech, not yours.
[+] [-] baxuz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poulpy123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] szszrk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angrycontrarian|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OscarCunningham|3 years ago|reply
Mastodon isn't as simple as the model he imagines (simple click-boxes to select what kind of messages you want) but it does give you moderation (on your local instance) while still letting you avoid censorship (by moving instances if necessary).
[+] [-] vidarh|3 years ago|reply
You can also see censorship as about being able to control what people will be able to say to you. The fediverse is not at all resistant to that.
That is, nobody can stop you from setting up your own instance, or write your own ActivityPub implementation, or find one that tolerates whatever thing you want to say.
But we can band together and prevent you from making us party to your conversations against our will, and we can prevent you from being part of our conversations against our will.
The structure of the fediverse supports that by letting groups pick instances whose moderation fits what they want, and different groups with different moderation requirements or even contradictory moderation requirements can co-exist without all being beholden to the vagaries of policies set by a third party we have no control over.
[+] [-] dale_glass|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] FortiDude|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viraptor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cies|3 years ago|reply
See my other comment in this thread for my story.
[+] [-] jonathanstrange|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vanderZwan|3 years ago|reply
This sounds like an absolutely horrible experience, I'm so sorry to hear this.
At the same time, aside from the open source programming, which is welcome, I have not ever seen any of the other things you mentioned, but I also took the time to look for a more "quiet", dataviz-oriented server myself. My feed is more people I explicitly follow than local timeline, which makes it a much more curated experience.
Can I ask you what kind of interests you were searching for when deciding on an instance? Because my hunch is that you basically had to deal with a "search engine" kind of problem, but for fediverse instances. I wouldn't be surprised if programming, anime and manga has a ton of "4chan-esque" places that drown out the more quiet "safe spaces" unless you take some time to dig deeper before settling down somewhere.
[+] [-] audessuscest|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tibbydudeza|3 years ago|reply
Seems like a lot of tech savvy folks are checking it out.
[+] [-] goldforever|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cies|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pjc50|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnonC|3 years ago|reply
I'm not referring to Mastodon/mastodon.social here, but a platform that's similar in nature. I wouldn't mind the fediblock police as much if there were to be some engagement on any actions (preferably good faith conversations). One thing I learned is that on the fediverse, one could be banned for no offense, with no warnings and no support whatsoever. It's almost no different from losing one's Twitter account or Google account, except that for the latter you can cry loudly on HN or another platform and possibly get some help. On the fediverse, one day your account works and the next day it could vanish without a trace. No responses from the admin (usually even the larger instances are run by a single person) and if there are any responses, they take weeks or months.
The various server/platform instances (including the flagship ones) may not have clear policies for moderation and may cover things up with short and ambiguously worded terms.
[+] [-] UweSchmidt|3 years ago|reply
But were you blocked for this opinion or just "shat on"? If you get censored then I'm not sure what the point of an alternative social platform is. We need to talk these issues through somewhere.
[+] [-] kazinator|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whermans|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] b112|3 years ago|reply
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