
What is Mastodon? [video] - rainbowmverse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPSbNdBmWKE
======
uabstraction
Mastodon surely isn't the first decentralized social network to come about,
but it seems to be the first one that I would refer to as a success.

This style of federation is the future of the web - and the only alternative
to the corporate walled garden and advertising surveillance hell it has
become. When the users have the power to vote with their feet, they become
emancipated. When the administrators have the power to take decisive action in
the interests of their communities without pleading their case to a greedy
board of directors, our ability to freely conduct civil debate in good faith
is protected.

I am looking forward to a handful of other projects taking up the same model,
in the same spirit as Mastodon. It is truly one if the few remaining rays of
sunshine available on the net.

~~~
progval
Mastodon itself isn't a new network, it leverages existing networks (OStatus
and ActivityPub).

~~~
OrganicMSG
I only just found out about these. What are they and how long have they been
running?

~~~
progval
OStatus is a collection of protocols, which was known for powering StatusNet
(now known as GNU Social) since 2010.

ActivityPub is a lot more recent, and is a "consolidated" protocol designed to
replace OStatus. It's fairly recent, so Mastodon is one of its first
implementations, and Gargron (the main dev of Mastodon) contributes to the W3C
Working Group in charge of the spec since ActivityPub support was added to
Mastodon.

------
darklajid
So it seems it suffers from the same issue that Dispora has (or had for all
the time I followed): No decent user migration?

That is, it seems I pick an instance (or host my own, but still: I pick a
host) and can never move without losing all stuff? If I join one of the big
instances to play around and later want to self-host I'm .. out of luck?
That's quite sad. Still far better than Twitter I assume and I will give it a
try. But I would've felt better knowing that I can take my ball and play
elsewhere when I feel like it.

[https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177)

[https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/t/migratory-
accounts/268](https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/t/migratory-accounts/268)

~~~
progval
An account migration feature is getting closer. An update earlier this month
added the possibility to download a dump of all your toots, boosts, and likes.

~~~
bscphil
OT: It doesn't bother me personally, but I'll never understand why they added
an unnecessary barrier to entry like that. Not many serious people are going
to join a platform that risks them getting quoted in the press as "X tooted
that ...". I guess it was supposed to be a funny parody of twitter?

~~~
gkya
I'm not sold on "tweet" either. It sounds childish and weird. I'd rather have
"X posted on Twitter/Mastodon/whatnot where he said ...".

~~~
saurik
But tweet was't an existing word.

~~~
ChristianBundy
tweet (n): the chirp of a small or young bird

~~~
saurik
Woah. Huh. I totally managed to never notice that.

FWIW, the place I was going was "the only place where toot normally comes up
as a word is when people talk about the sound of a fart or in the phrase 'to
toot your own horn', which is way too close to home".

~~~
saurik
(And "tweet" still does not feel like "a word" in the way that "toot" does. I
would want to see a survey done, as a random dictionary is not how you define
if a word exists, to the extent to which a word can exist at all.)

~~~
Terretta
Tweet dates to 1851, myriad examples:
[http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/377843](http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/377843)

Chaucer came up with twitter:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/10/ch...](https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/10/chaucer-
coined-twitter/322107/)

Craig Hockenberry applied the one to the other:
[http://furbo.org/2013/06/28/the-origin-of-
tweet/](http://furbo.org/2013/06/28/the-origin-of-tweet/)

------
Arkanosis
Here's a demo of Mastodon and PeerTube federation (on a PeerTube instance):
[https://peertube.cpy.re/videos/watch/da2b08d4-a242-4170-b32a...](https://peertube.cpy.re/videos/watch/da2b08d4-a242-4170-b32a-4ec8cbdca701)

------
patrickbolle
I like the video. I also really like Mastodon. I've completely ditched Twitter
and all my needs are satisfied with mastodon (granted, I don't follow sports /
friends on Twitter). The interface is sweet and my instance is great.

------
andreyk
I'd really like to see something like this take off... It just seems like the
ethically right thing for social media to be decentralized and open source, so
we truly own the data and not sell out our privacy for the simple right to
reliably and easily have access to people online.

Something I've been thinking a lot about recently: why does HN not have an
instance in Mastodon or Diaspora? Clearly a lot here detest traditional social
media but like talking to each other, and could even contribute to the open
source projects, so it seems like a neat way to bootstrap a lot of people to
join such a thing (ive tried Diaspora pods but it seems pretty...empty. Stupid
network effects). In fact I am thinking of setting up an unnoficial HN
Diaspora* pod, but I'm just one guy...

------
technion
I really want to get into Mastodon on principle alone. The sticking point is,
as with any new social network, I don't know anyone there.

If anyone can point me names in tech, particularly security or cryptography,
that are worth following on Mastodon, I would probably be convinced.

~~~
ColinWright
As with any social network, you need to join, follow a few people, see what
they say and who they quote, and then build your list of followees from there.

I'm @ColinTheMathmoon@mathstodon.xyz[0][1] and I follow a few tech people. One
is @cypherpunk on mastodon.social and then you can follow people quoted by
them.

Who would you like to follow? If you are on any Mastodon instance then you can
follow anyone on any other instance.

[0]
[https://mathstodon.xyz/@ColinTheMathmo](https://mathstodon.xyz/@ColinTheMathmo)

[1] [https://mathstodon.xyz/](https://mathstodon.xyz/)

[2] [https://mastodon.social/@cypherpunk](https://mastodon.social/@cypherpunk)

~~~
technion
Thanks Colin! I think you've pointed at a reasonable start and an instance
with a reasonable subject matter and sizing, and I'll go from there.

~~~
ColinWright
It's quiet there, really quiet, but there is a background of "stuff" going on,
and if you follow me I'll try to make sure I boost some people of interest.

------
Klasiaster
Isn't this just a Diaspora* clone or does it have any advantage? I am not
convinced that this federation approach will truely take off more than the
others… However, while a true p2p system without accounts on specific servers
is more appealing, the HTTP-based federation content is easily accessible for
non-participating users with a browser.

~~~
synchronise
It's more GNU Social with a UI that isn't clunky, so Twitter.

Diaspora* is more Google+ but without some of the stuff that people need in a
social network like event management. True that isn't available in Mastodon
either but it isn't really suited to the use cases of microblogging anyway.

------
toomuchtodo
Is anyone offering hosted Mastodon instances for a monthly/annual fee? Or is a
VPS the route to go?

~~~
progval
[https://maastodon.net/](https://maastodon.net/)

~~~
toomuchtodo
Tremendous. Thank you.

------
jancsika
What happens if Mastodon scales up 100x? Would it continue to operate
smoothly?

~~~
progval
There are Mastodon instances with hundreds of thousands of users and millions
of messages.

However, Mastodon is federated, so there are thousands of instances with less
users. And because each instance does not need to store the state of the whole
network (only accounts followed by its users), it scales very nicely.

~~~
crowbahr
I feel like that's the answer to reddit it many ways too.

Reddit will go the way of Facebook within 5 years I suspect and self hosted
federated subreddits are the logical increment. I bet someone is working on it
already.

~~~
zaarn
Yup, I'm working on something like this.

I plan to use ActivityPub so it can integrate with mastodon and peertube more
easily but also have an option to pull over from reddit so people can use
their own instance as a frontend to reddit. Makes migration easier IMO.

~~~
gkya
Your profile has no links, it there any page to follow what you're doing, or
are you developing it offline? Anyways, I'd love to be able to follow news
about what you're on to, it sounds really exciting!

~~~
zaarn
If the development goes anywhere I'll probably do a Show HN and put it up on
github. I'm hesitant to show off incomplete projects.

~~~
gkya
Totally understandable. Looking forward to news from your work! Thanks in
advance for working for the betterment of internet!

------
neocraftster
I like a lot of Mastodon's ideas, but whats to stop if from going the same way
as Diaspora?

Had this thought because i just had it open, but couldn't something like
keybase just add this on top of their existing identity platform? I feel like
the only missing critical feature is the ability for different instances to
interact as a federation. Which, now that i think about it, would be really
cool.

------
zaarn
I recommend everyone reading this to atleast check out Mastodon and other
software that understand ActivityPub like Pleroma (which works with Mastodon
or it's own server as backend).

It's a nice change from twitter and you can pick out and join a community you
like. But you can still talk to everyone who's on a compatible server all
around the world.

------
ColinWright
To complement that, here is something I wrote:

[http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/ThinkingAboutMastodon.html?HN_...](http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/ThinkingAboutMastodon.html?HN_20180323)

------
narven
Good. nice timing

~~~
gorp
I mean it's not like we aren't being marched right into this.

From the devops perspective, social media is following a make-one-break-one
change process. As sufficient numbers of Mastadon hosts spawn, corresponding
Facebook nodes on their server farm will be drained.

------
Nelkins
Can anyone speak to the difficulty of hosting your own instance? Is there any
reason (besides maintenance) for everyone to not be on single-user instances?

~~~
Nelkins
Also, how does this compare with Secure Scuttlebutt?[0]

[0] [https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/)

~~~
zamber
Secure Scuttlebutt is p2p and offline-first.

Mastodon is neither one of these and community-hosted. More about building the
community part of the social network than the truly decentralized backbone
(where each user has a copy of all posts of users in his/hers network).

------
ntnsndr
Social.coop is a cooperative instance of mastodon. A better kind of network
also needs a better kind of business model. You might like it. We do.

------
technoboy10
This is adorable.

