
Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary - sphinxc0re
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/10/mastodons-2-year-anniversary/
======
riffic
ActivityPub the protocol is quite promising and there are other
implementations besides Mastodon:

[https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-
activitypub](https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub)

What will really get the ball rolling will be organizations such as
governments, educational institutions, public libraries, or news agencies that
create federated social infrastructure for their own membership.

------
wpietri
Aren't these all vanity metrics? [1] Features are swell, and registered users
are nice, in that it indicates somebody was at least curious. But how many of
those 1,627,557 registered users are, say, active at least once a week for the
last 3 months? What's the NPS of Mastodon users after 7, 30, and 90 days?

I'd love to see them succeed. But I think it's dangerous for programmers to
focus on building a thing rather than serving their users.

[1] This isn't a slam; it's a technical term from Eric Ries:
[http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/12/why-vanity-
metr...](http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/12/why-vanity-metrics-are-
dangerous.html)

~~~
unicornporn
> I think it's dangerous for programmers to focus on building a thing rather
> than serving their users.

It seems Mastodon is an example of programmers actually building something
with real ambitions rather than just trying to make big money by trying to
form an addiction for their users.

~~~
wpietri
Sure, and that influences the choice of metrics. I think chasing things like
user active minutes (UAM) can lead to pathological development. But for a
social product, "real ambitions" must include people a) using it, and b) being
happy they are using it. But my point is that features and signups can't be
ends in themselves, as those are not real ambitions.

~~~
loceng
I understand what you're saying. The only counter point I'd put forward is
it's purposefully playing to the ego mind for attention - arguably deserved or
otherwise - to draw more people to trying it out. Likewise, you have to start
somewhere. Hopefully over time they can start measuring and reporting on
metrics with more meaning to them, which will require them also explaining
that meaning to educate people - which will give us all an understanding as to
what their understanding is. I still don't feel I understand the ecosystem
well enough to say if I like it or not, I do like observing different models
though to see how and if they work, what problems they solve or don't - so I
am enjoying Mastodon seemingly gaining traction; it at minimum leads to
discussion on HN.

~~~
wpietri
Sure. Vanity metrics can be great for marketing or generating reasons to
celebrate. There's nothing wrong with saying, "Wow, we have a million
registered users!" as long as they also recognize that registration is only
the first step. In a retrospective like this, I want to see them doing both.

------
unstuckdev
I made a toot with 100 boosts the other day on a new account. The average is
closer to 10-20. Tweets barely register on accounts with 10x the following.
Mastodon might _look_ small, but it's big where it counts.

I'm glad Eugen started it, and I'm glad it's thriving. It's like Twitter was
before they went impression-obsessed after the 2013/2014 Situation showed them
what was possible. And it's all funded by Patreons for the most part.

------
danso
I personally find Twitter’s centralization, despite the obvious inherent
downsides, to be its defining feature. To be able to have a real-time feed of
everything that is being tweeted by anyone in the world on a given keyword or
topic is really amazing, as well as the (reasonable) certainty that I’m
following/tweeting at the “real” @celebrityaccount. Otherwise, I’d be happy to
stick to blogging and Google searches. That said, it’s great to see a
community-driven open source social media project and watch its ongoing
development. Really loved the reflection from the developer here:

> _I’m very happy with Mastodon’s accomplishments. Overseeing such a large
> project has its ups and downs, as it’s impossible to keep everyone happy all
> the time when people have conflicting desires. Irregardless, I consider
> these to be the two best years of my life, as work on Mastodon is incredibly
> fulfilling and interacting with all the interesting people on the platform
> is very fun._

~~~
sprokolopolis
Even though Mastodon is decentralized, the interface has a federated timeline
that shows toots from all instances that the server federates with. I have
found this to feel similar to a centralized, real-time stream of posts like
Twitter.

The user can still follow hashtags/keywords from most of the users out there.
Many of the more popular instances do not federate with a few of the more
toxic, anything-goes servers, so the federated timeline won't be completely
universal. While that might be true much of the stuff posted on those
instances being censored wouldn't be tolerated on a platform like Twitter
anyway.

~~~
sdrothrock
> the interface has a federated timeline that shows toots from all instances
> that the server federates with

This is the issue; many servers are picky about who they federate with and
this creates a real bubble.

~~~
sascha_sl
Mastodon instances are not public spaces. Users can pick how much they want to
engage in political discussions by picking their instance or, if they can,
hosting their own. (The second part of the argument is flawed because most
people can't just throw up a rails app and maintain it, be it cost or lack of
knowledge)

What most people don't get about "bubbles", mostly because it doesn't affect
them, is that sometimes, if your mere existence is political, getting some
rest from it can be quite hard.

~~~
sdrothrock
I'm not only thinking about political bubbles here, but linguistic or cultural
ones. For example, when I joined a server here, it was federated only with a
few other small Japanese servers, resulting in a fairly miserable experience.
Another set had multiple languages but was just devoted to art. It's
incredibly difficult (or was a year ago) to find servers that are general
purpose and federated with both Japanese and English servers.

It's actually kind of interesting that me mentioning bubbles resulted in an
immediately political assumption; I guess it shows how out of touch I am with
mainstream Twitter.

~~~
detaro
I think you use "federated with" in a different sense than most people do in
these discussions.

A newly created Mastodon instance by default federates with everyone in that
allows messages and following from and to every other instance.

But it's federated timeline has no posts from other instances, because that
view only shows posts that the instance actually sees. It only shows what
people on the same instance actually follow, because otherwise there is no
reason for the posts to be sent to it.

~~~
sdrothrock
That would explain a lot of things and also clears up a lot of things for me,
too! Thank you. I guess a better phrase for what I'm trying to describe is a
lack of discoverability, then.

------
kragen
I'm finding Mastodon (I'm at
[https://nerdculture.de/@kragen](https://nerdculture.de/@kragen) at the
moment) to be much more pleasant than Twitter, and much richer than IRC. The
vicious culture war stuff on Twitter almost doesn't show up in my Mastodon
timeline at all.

~~~
comesee
Your anecdote is valid but so is wil Wheaton's
[http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-
place-...](http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-right-
now-and-thats-largely-because-it-is-what-we-make-it/)

~~~
sascha_sl
Wil is inside a reality distortion field. Someone got him with a low blow joke
and he started reporting everyone from that instance (which was named after
another joke of the type, bofa.lol)

------
forrestthewoods
What Mastadon servers do folks here frequent? Which ones are worth your time?

~~~
gemma
[https://mastodon.technology](https://mastodon.technology) is chock full of
geeks, so the local timeline is all people's hacks and bugs and side projects.
It's one of the older instances, and it's maintained by this guy:
[https://ashfurrow.com/](https://ashfurrow.com/)

~~~
wyoh
They block too many instances for weird reasons like libertarian ones.

------
djsumdog
I currently run my own Mastodon server, and wrote some scripts if you want to
run your own on Vultr:

[https://github.com/sumdog/bee2/](https://github.com/sumdog/bee2/)

I'm really glad I set this up. Mastodon is an interesting platform; like one
big lopsided chatroom. You do have to follow a lot of strangers to get started
(unless you can convince a bunch of your friends to join).

People also go pretty ban crazy on there. I've been called a "Nazi stooge" and
been flagged and reported once ... which went to my instance admin .. which is
me. A lot of instances ban entire instances (instances like sealion.club tend
to get banned and bofa.lol recently imploded). So running your own ensures you
control what you see and not be censored by an instance admin.

I'd be interested in following more HN users. I suggest putting your
ActivityPub address in your HN profile.

~~~
abstractbeliefs
On bans, there are frequent waves of new users who migrate away from Twitter
to mastodon because they're told that mastodon has instances that are more
suited to their personal (typically) political inclinations, and that the
other side isn't permitted here and that discussion is more reasoned.

It's not really true. What really happens is that people are told that
mastodon is the land of milk and honey, and people of all stripes migrate
over, and continue to clash. Mastodon brings better tools to deal with it, but
the same people import the same negative behaviours but end up on instances
that typically reinforce their beliefs.

I really hoped that mastodon would be better, but it's really the same noise
as twitter but worse - people end up on hyper-polarised instances where war is
waged with blocks, bans, and federation filters. At least on twitter you have
to share a home with people you don't agree with, here you can build all the
walls you want to isolate yourself from anyone who doesn't completely agree
with you.

~~~
yorwba
> people end up on hyper-polarised instances where war is waged with blocks,
> bans, and federation filters

> here you can build all the walls you want to isolate yourself from anyone
> who doesn't completely agree with you

Shouldn't isolation of opposing viewpoints lead to less war overall? If
everyone is interacting in the same space, every controversial post can
potentially provoke an aggressive reply, and each response draws in more
followers to participate in the battle. On HN, that is counteracted by having
too many comments weigh down a submission (the famed flamewar detector), but
on engagement-based platforms like Twitter, the fighting never ends.

If everyone chooses an instance with people that think alike and that filters
content they strongly disagree with, it's not going to lead to more people
changing their minds; but at least they won't constantly see things that make
them mad and draw them into useless fights.

~~~
loceng
No, it can lead to a protected bubble of indoctrination and propaganda
spreading efficiently without any countering - which then spreads into the
real-world, where real clashes and violence is materialized. Even if the
populations were on both or could both move to their own isolated islands,
eventually a bad actor is likely to try to take control for their own benefit
(and then perpetuated, whether by something like a military-industrial
complex, or other); and when land isn't an issue then populations can stay
separate enough, however yeah, someone always seems to want more and invade,
and so at minimum you have to plan to protect against such potential threats -
and without using fear tactics to control or manipulate a population.

------
sascha_sl
I run deadinsi.de. I wrote some kubernetes definitions and they work, but in
the end there was too much overhead, uncertainty about storage stability and
cost to keep it running on k8s.

But if you have access to a cluster and want to try it, here you go:
[https://github.com/SerenityLaboratories/cluster](https://github.com/SerenityLaboratories/cluster)

It includes a storage provider I wouldn't trust all too much yet and the docs
are sparse, but you should be able to get it running if you know Kubernetes.

------
TarpitCarnivore
I’ve been enjoying the use of Mastodon, though it’s not fully replaced Twitter
for me. There’s a few TV/Movie & Video game related things I enjoy Twitter
for.

While I’ve settled into two instances on Mastodon the one problem I’m finding
is that you do kind of need multiple instances. Some instances, even with
decent user bases, just don’t have the correlating activity. That or the user
base skews to a time zone which can shift the discussion time.

The upside is being able to mute/block from the get go. This helps keep the
federated timeline much more quiet. There’s a ton of bots & hashtag heavy
people posting reblog kind of stuff. Things that aren’t really much value to a
discussion so being able to just declutter that out has been helpful.

------
AnaniasAnanas
My only issue with Mastodon is that it does not solve the issue of
authenticity - you can't verify that a post sent by a user was not forged or
modified by one of the servers in the federation. This is where public key
crypto could help.

~~~
RX14
This is untrue, Actors have a keypair and inbox POSTs are signed with that key
to ensure authenticity. For boosts (Announce), mastodon uses a complex signing
algorithm based on JSON-LD, and pleroma just re-requests the post from the
original instance and uses that, discarding the relayed object.

~~~
NoGravitas
It also (now) can verify that the @my_cool_username@mastodon.social is the
same person/group as runs my_cool_web.site, by using a rel=me link on
my_cool_web.site. So it ties verification to DNS, which is centralized enough
to serve for that kind of verification. You can also prove that you hold both
a mastodon identity and an identity on another social network, if the other
social network lets you post rel=me links in your profile.

------
piracyde25
Should I leave Twitter for this? Looks so good.

~~~
vpzom
That sort of depends on what you use Twitter for. I used both for a while, but
eventually found myself checking Twitter less and less and discovered I didn't
really care. Basically just Mastodon and Reddit for me now

------
heydonovan
Does Mastodon suffer from the same problems as Reddit in terms of censorship?
I've been part of a few communities that have been banned or quarantined. I'm
looking for a platform where freedom of speech is something everyone can have,
regardless of opinion.

~~~
zanny
Reddit is a centralized proprietary product, Mastodon is not. The worst that
can happen to a user in terms of censorship is:

* Your instance banning you, which means you can just join another instance. The hardest thing about Mastodon is chosing an instance whose administration you can trust. The reason the service is valuable and important is that barring any instance being trustable to you you can always start your own.

* Another instance banning you (or your entire instance) which just means users on that instance don't see you in the fediverse. This can lead to complications where swarms of instances cooperate their ban lists and thus getting banned from one of them can see you cut out of a swathe of the network, but in practice those using mastodon pride themselves on not centralizing and thus there is limited interest in centralizing moderation like this in the first place.

Of note there are degrees of that second kind of ban. The lightest form is
that you or your instance just doesn't show up in timelines - users can still
find you by other means and follow you. The most severe is the total noop
communication with that instance server which means its users don't exist to
the instance doing the banning.

------
natural219
It doesn't seem like a lot has been accomplished since launch.

~~~
MrEldritch
I mean, it successfully created a social network I find enjoyable enough to be
my primary social network, and which is sufficiently active + growing that I
don't see it dying out the way Diaspora did, so regardless of whether they
accomplished a _lot_ , they certainly have accomplished _enough_

~~~
natural219
Oh yeah. I think Gargron accomplished a lot when he launched the initial
version. Just wondering what this list is supposed to communicate. I'd hope
for more active development on the critical issues.

