
Decentralized social media, and the fragmentation of control - gozrik
http://secretcave.co/decentralized-social-media/
======
boardwaalk
I think Mastodon (and any decentralized social media) needs to be easier to
host. The thing is relatively a beast to get working, whether you try and
install the dependencies separately on a distribution that's not Ubuntu (IIRC)
or if you're not familiar with Docker. I host quite a few instances of things
for myself but I gave up on Mastodon (I wasn't trying that hard, to be fair)
after trouble getting it working behind the same reverse proxy everything else
is behind.

If we could get a cross-platform, statically linked, near zero configuration
social media tool where I essentially just have to forward a few ports, that'd
be fantastic for me and I'd hope many others.

The biggest draw of something decentralization is being able to own and
control all my data and having some stranger on the Internet rather than
BigCorp own it is not meaningfully different to me.

~~~
gobengo
I'm not disagreeing with you that there is so much room for improvement in
ease of use.

But tools help. It took like an hour to tweak an existing helm chart to get it
running in my personal kubernetes cluster.

All the reverse proxy stuff is handled by the nginx-ingress-controller I use.
external-dns set up all the DNS rules for me in Route53. kube-lego did all the
LetsEncrypt ACME shenanigans.

Used to try to run these all using docker on a single VM, and do some manual
nginx configging to route to them. This is much easier. Took awhile to learn,
but get to benefit from those efficiencies for years.

[https://mastodon.bengo.is/](https://mastodon.bengo.is/)

------
Sea_Wulf
I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what
problem it is trying to solve.

* Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers against something Twitter does really well.

* Creating interesting communities that can interact with each other -- See IRC, Slack, Reddit, forums, Wordpress blogs, etc.

Honest question: what problem are they solving, and/or why should I use
Mastadon instead of older platforms such as IRC or Reddit?

~~~
gobengo
there are some awesome mastodon communities that have moved off twitter
because they are trolled too frequently on there, and aren't empowered to make
their own rules to prevent that. If you're discussing somethign PTSD-inducing,
for example, this struggle is so real and hard.

There are communities, for example, that block other communities that are
'freespeechers'. i.e. communities that don't ban people for sayign things that
the former community operator deems as racist. At first I was like, "that's
messed up, it's too subjective". But then I remembered that actually, unlike
Twitter, that decision to block the people didn't affect me. They're allowed
to create their own community how they want, and I'm empowered to join or
self-host my own.

Pretty cool that vulnerable and very very helpful communities have tools like
this.

~~~
s73ver_
How well has that worked to combat harassment?

~~~
zaarn
Pretty well in my experience.

If a particular instance is harassing you, ask your admin to do something
about it, they will ask the other instance to stop and if that doesn't work,
block the entire instance.

Additionally, you can set your profile to locked so people cannot follow you
without permission.

------
egypturnash
From the article:

> With around 100,000 users on mastodon.social — the biggest instance — it is
> just 0.03% the size of Twitter, and only growing at a rate of 1,000 users
> per week. > To give you an idea of the scale compared to Twitter: Mastodon
> is 13 months old and at that same age, Twitter was around 10 times bigger.

The Mastodon Monitoring Project ([https://mnm.social](https://mnm.social))
estimates 1,019,544 accounts across the nearly 2300 instances it knows about.
Around ten times bigger than the number this person was comparing to Twitter.

I guess that means Mastodon is growing about as fast as Twitter did!

~~~
zaarn
Most of those are probably Japanese accounts, which while still being real
accounts, isn't comfortable with the Twitter crowd due to the kind of media
usually shared on the japanese instances (the kind of content which is illegal
in the US and most of the rest of the world but totally fine in Japan, which
is another reason _for_ Mastodon tbh)

------
gobengo
Mastodon 2.0 speaks ActivityPub now!
[https://activitypub.com/](https://activitypub.com/)

I made the world's first public ActivityPub implementation a little over a
year ago: [https://distbin.com](https://distbin.com)

Now I have [https://mastodon.bengo.is](https://mastodon.bengo.is)

Now I need to iron out interoperability bugs: But I look forward to the day
that you can respond to a mastodon post anonymously via distbin, and vice-
versa. And on both sides the conversation should render as threaded, etc.

