
Mastodon 2.4.0 - valeg
https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/releases/tag/v2.4.0
======
willvarfar
Is mastodon getting mainstream?

I first saw mastodon a few months ago on HN where it was suddenly 'hot'. But I
had trouble finding any content to actually consume, and I didn't poke around
very long.

Hopefully that's changed and there's tons of interesting stuff to follow and
its easy to find?

~~~
Shank
In my experience, Mastodon is in use mostly not in America. Pawoo, Mastodon
hosted by Pixiv in Japan, has 375k users with 15m statuses, connected to 4k
other Mastodon instances. But it doesn't have any metrics about still being in
use, and their instance is mostly in Japanese. [0]

The biggest problem I ran into when trying to use Mastodon is the instance
federation wars. Instances were banning other instances left and right from
federating with each other due to content disputes (lolicon, "offensive
speech," etc). This kinda made it problematic if you picked an instance that
didn't want to behave nicely with the rest of the ecosystem, unbeknownst to
you.

[0]: [https://pawoo.net/about/more](https://pawoo.net/about/more)

~~~
Torgo
Part of the problem is that Mastodon doesn't have, and apparently the BDFL
won't implement, a built-in way of a remote server telling you that your
server is blocked (either as a sender or recipient of a message.)

Which is really frustrating when, you make a post; a user on a different
server boosts your post; a third party, which is on a server that normally
blocks your posts but can see posts from that different server, sees the boost
and responds to you. Not knowing that you can't respond directly back top
them. The network is so big now that this happens all the time.

~~~
mercer
Have you looked into how Patchwork approaches this issue? It's not quite
equivalent to Mastodon, I think, but I am fascinated by their approach to
'mapping' social relationships. Would be very curious to hear what you or
others with more experience on the matter think about it.

EDIT: to elaborate a bit. While I'm only just diving into these topics, I
can't help but feel that a fundamental problem in many cases is that many
problems of 'online social' have to do with a very unintuitive/inorganic
implementation that just fundamentally doesn't work well for humans. What I
found interesting about Patchwork is that it tries, to some extent, to
resemble the way humans 'naturally' interact.

Now I'm not at all opposed to experiments in augmenting the way humans
interact with others, but I can't help but feel that many of the things we've
come up with that are popular went too far in not considering human nature (or
intentionally messed with it). And perhaps a more constructive way forward is
to come up with 'online social' tools that start with a more conservative
resemblance to how humans have interacted for much of their history, and
iterate from there.

~~~
Torgo
When I have enough free time to block out, I'll be trying Secure
Scuttlebutt/Patchwork, maybe will write a blog entry about the experience.
Looks interesting.

------
Vosporos
[https://fediverse.network](https://fediverse.network) is a good overview of
the activity of the fediverse. There's even a secret endpoint, `/stats`, with
global statistics for all the known fediverse!

~~~
wut42
thanks :) I made that. It's not perfect yet but does the job :)

~~~
Vosporos
And the job is well-done. Nice graphs ;)

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parvenu74
Is Mastodon the only high-profile implementation of OpenSocial? Given what
Mastodon does it seems like an Erlang/Elixir implementation would be right in
the sweet-spot of what those platforms do...

~~~
xj9
[https://pleroma.social](https://pleroma.social) is an ActivityPub server
written in Elixir

~~~
vasilakisfil
Wow had been looking for something like that last week on github but maybe I
should be using Google instead! Many thanks, you saved me a couple of months
dev time!

~~~
xj9
there are a lot of interesting projects that choose to self-host their git
server for various reasons. don't limit yourself to github esp if you're
looking for decentralization-adjacent projects!

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jordigh
This is really silly, but I'm looking forward to being able to label my
Chocobot as a bot. Not that there ever was any doubt, but...

[https://botsin.space/@Chocobot](https://botsin.space/@Chocobot)

He was really easy to write in D:

[http://inversethought.com/hg/chocobot/file/tip/chocobot.d](http://inversethought.com/hg/chocobot/file/tip/chocobot.d)

------
cdubzzz
Some very interesting discussion[0] around the bot badge addition:

> If you run bots on Mastodon, you can now opt-in to display a bot badge on
> your profile. This works with non-Mastodon software, too, if the ActivityPub
> actor is of the Service or Application type. In the future, more features
> might be implemented to filter bot accounts or opt-out of interactions with
> them.

[0]
[https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/7391](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/7391)

~~~
jhoh
Yeah, very interesting...

"some bots are people"

"i want to use the bot badge and i dont want to be called not a person"

"Okay, I'm gonna show my hand a little: as a transhumanist, I object to the
implied conflation of "person" and "human". This is a situation where we can
afford to be forward-thinking and open-minded without a cost to current
functionality and, honestly, without a significant cost in terms of work."

I hosted a Mastodon instance until a couple months ago. It was stuff like this
that made me leave the platform.

~~~
haolez
For those who didn’t understand, these are actual quotes from the comments
section. One user goes as far as saying “I’m a robot and also a human”. Really
confusing.

~~~
kzrdude
Is there any reason to believe we should take those comments seriously?

~~~
jhoh
Check out the issue and read the comments. Then check out the profiles that
make these comments. Some of them have blogs that very actively discuss these
topics.

Again, I've been on the platform for some time. These people are dead serious.

~~~
djsumdog
I feel like Poe's Law has to come into play here. It's analogous to flat
earthers. We don't really know if they're just trolling or genuinely taking
themselves seriously without knowing the intent in their own heads (or some
other verifiable writing/posts to indicate they know they're trolling)

~~~
robotbikes
They we're just programmed to start trouble, don't hate the robot, hate the
code.

------
djsumdog
Has there been any discussion on how the GDPR affects EU citizens who want to
setup Mastodon instances that they allow friends to register on?

~~~
codefined
In a similar vein, if there is no feasible way to remove information from a
service (E.G. placing data in a blockchain), does that break the rules of
GDPR?

~~~
chatmasta
Probably, but who can get sued for it?

~~~
djsumdog
Anyone holding a copy of the entire blockchain ledger? Potentially?

I wonder if we'll see exchanges that will be unable to use EU servers/hosting.

~~~
chatmasta
Given that Citizens United set a precedent for “money as speech,” it would be
interesting to try such a case on the basis of free speech.

~~~
lokedhs
The GDPR is an EU law, and as such it is unlikely that anyone prosecuting
under it will pay any attention at all to what the US definition of free
speech is.

------
zaarn
Some comments on here discuss the Mastodon community and I hope I can chime in
a bit (as someone who runs an instance with fairly large reach although not
many users).

Mastodon should not be seen as a singular community, outside Mastodon there is
pleroma and GNUSocial, all projects do attract different kinds of people
(though GNUsocial and pleroma developers are often called out as nazis because
some alt-right instances use their software, not sure why that matters).

If you're looking for an instance, it's IMO important to discover the
community and general feel of it. Some instances will be very strict with
rules and generally boot federation with others fairly quickly, while other
instances will basically federate with everyone until they break some serious
rules or laws. (My instance is a mix, I have a lot of alt-right and deep-far-
left instances silenced on account of excessive spam or being way to
aggressive, though the instance I run is themed and politics in general are
frowned upon)

I think the second most important thing is to divorce the developers and
software from their community. Mastodon hosts a very diverse community and a
lot of niche, fringe or otherwise rather peculiar characters. A lot of them
are nice, a lot aren't, most probably don't care. The federated network is
what you make of it, follow people you want to follow and your timeline will
likely fill with stuff that isn't too outside of your filterbubble (though
there will be anti-filterbubble stuff)

If you don't like mastodon itself, I severely recommend to try Pleroma
instead, the developers for both projects are generally very enjoyable.

------
Moter8
Why does not a single link on
[https://joinmastodon.org/](https://joinmastodon.org/) (scroll a bit for the
example sites) work?

I tried 10 of them but none of them work?

~~~
xj9
[https://instances.social/](https://instances.social/) needs to up their game
apparently.

the pleroma instance picker seems like its giving more reliable results:
[http://distsn.org/pleroma-instances.html](http://distsn.org/pleroma-
instances.html)

------
phaedryx
The only thing I really use Twitter for is to get certain
updates/notifications. Is there a way to pull my twitter feed into a Mastodon
feed? I've done a little looking, but didn't find anything.

~~~
Royalaid
The best I have found is apps on android
[https://github.com/TwidereProject/Twidere-
Android](https://github.com/TwidereProject/Twidere-Android) is what I use
currently. For cross posting I use [https://moa.party/](https://moa.party/).
For I unified feed on web I am still looking.

------
rqs
One question: How to move my account from one Mastodon Instance to another?

I mean, if I was on 'Mastodon Instance One', now I want to move to 'Mastodon
Instance Two', do I need to register an new account on the Instance Two and
manually import all my data? Wouldn't that resulting a new Mastodon ID
(@myname@InstanceOne -> @myname@InstanceTwo)?

~~~
boyce
You can export and import your follows. Yes it would be a different account.
There is an option to mark your old account as "account has moved" and specify
where you've gone, which an app could treat as a redirect.

------
ben_utzer
Updated privacy policy is commmit #666..6 :-)

------
jaequery
Is there a SPOF for Mastadon? How does Mastadon handle database (multiple
masters, etc)? Genuinely curious if this is truly decentralized platform or
just a poor man’s open source social networking app with some RSS type of
functionality sprinkled on top of it, sort of like Wordpress in a sense in
terms of hosting it.

~~~
codewiz
Mastodon is part of a federated network called the "fediverse":
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse)

The fediverse works by propagating statuses a set of standard protocols:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub)

Typical Mastodon instances have one or more frontends (Ruby on Rails) backed
by a PostgreSQL database (possibly replicated). Several cloud providers offer
managed PostgreSQL instances which mitigate the SPOF of using an RDBMS
backend.

Accounts of users are bound to the instance where they were created, but
recently Mastodon added a data export function that could be used to move an
account to a different instance. I doubt you'd retain your followers in this
case.

Unboundling user identity from instances sounds like a difficult researh
problem, given that users can upload considerable amounts of data.

~~~
billions
So profile can be censored by taking down the instance hosting it?

~~~
SolarNet
It's basically like email. As it evolves, people will deal with those issues
in different ways. The point is that unlike twitter people have options to
choose different instances that are unlikely to censor them.

~~~
sintaxi
Mastodon is hotmail & gmail, not email. Accounts are centralized and therefore
subject to censorship.

~~~
zaarn
You can setup your own Mastodon instance and nobody will delete the accounts
there unless you want it.

And it'll work with other mastodon instances.

Mastodon isn't hotmail or gmail it's an MTA+MDA, anyone can setup those on
their own servers and become reachable by email...

------
guiomie
"Progressive Web App" ... I just learnt a new thing today.

------
fareesh
Is anyone doing anything interesting on this platform that I can check out?

~~~
hnarn
That's a pretty wide order.

~~~
tomcatfish
That, from my preliminary checks when trying to buy in, is going unfulfilled.
It seems like no one wants to join yet another network just to wait for it to
get users. As some other people havenoted jn other discussions, Mastadon seems
to be either non-English or specialized in ways that don't apply to me at all.

~~~
CrystalLangUser
I've run into this myself, so I'm working on creating an instance that's a bit
more geared towards engineering / tech discussion. It's nyquist.space [1] if
you're interested.

It's not hosted on Mastodon but on Pleroma [2] instead so it's more barebones
at the moment. (But saves a LOT on cpu/memory resources)

Disclaimer: I'm the only user currently. :-)

[1]: [https://nyquist.space](https://nyquist.space) [2]:
[https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma](https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma)

