
Mastodon makes the Internet feel like home again - smacktoward
https://theoutline.com/post/2689/mastodon-makes-the-internet-feel-like-home-again
======
rayalez
Shameless plug - come read my article about deploying your own Mastodon
instance on Digital Ocean:

[https://startuplab.io/post/deploying-mastodon-on-digital-
oce...](https://startuplab.io/post/deploying-mastodon-on-digital-ocean)

Also I've built a @HackerNewsBot that shares the most upvoted HN articles:

[https://mastodon.social/@HackerNewsBot](https://mastodon.social/@HackerNewsBot)

(source code: [https://github.com/raymestalez/mastodon-
hnbot](https://github.com/raymestalez/mastodon-hnbot))

~~~
Freak_NL
You have a small markup bug in the shell commands that use '&&' (it shows
&amp;&amp; within the pre-block).

~~~
rayalez
Oh, thank you very much for letting me know! Already fixed.

------
pmlnr
What made the internet feel like home is that you _had_ a home - it was called
home page.

Ultimately the only thing that can make the internet feel home again is if you
have your own little corner and that little corner can play nice with the
other corners.

The really important tech is either webmentions, activitystreams, Linked Data
Notifications, and all that are similar, protocoll-based tech. Mastodon can be
one of these, but it's not the only one.

~~~
WorldMaker
I have my main Mastodon account hosted on a domain I control. Mastodon is
based on OStatus/GNUStatus, with bits of ActivityPub/PubSubHubBub/WebSub, so
it is "protocol-based tech". For the most part Mastodon is "just" a friendly
brand name over some "protocol-based tech".

------
_jal
Making the internet feel like home again would involve burning down Facebook
and reanimating the corpse of NNTP.

Why yes, I do feel old and cranky today.

~~~
pmlnr
NNTP is not dead at all. However, finding data on how to run my own NNTP
instance is close to nonexistent. I'd be very glad if someone could point me
to some docs.

~~~
kruhft
Here's a quickstart:

[https://serverfault.com/questions/218747/how-to-setup-a-
nntp...](https://serverfault.com/questions/218747/how-to-setup-a-nntp-server-
for-usenet)

[http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/newsserver.html](http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/newsserver.html)

Edit: removed list of dead links. Added article.

------
jaredcwhite
I don't mean to downplay the achievements of Mastodon in any way, but what the
author is describing in the example of Mellified.Men sounds like a glorified
forum. (Yes, I know it's more than that due to federation.)

Every few years the "group discussion / chat" concept gets reinvented on the
internet, and that's all fine and dandy, but I still think there is immense
value in having a centralized identity on a service that everyone is using.
The problems of Facebook and Twitter have less to do with the fact that they
are centralized and more to due with the fact they are funded by ad revenue
and the constant pressure to impress the public stock market.

We need a centralized service driven by micropayments from the users
themselves, with little to no advertising. App.net was a step in the right
direction, and its downfall was more a result of missteps in execution rather
than a problem with the core idea.

I fear that might never happen largely due to the inherent structural problems
of VC funding. It costs a ton of money to run and scale a social network, and
most VCs will be looking to recoup their investment using the traditional
means of web-scale revenue (advertising). So what's the solution? My personal
hope is something based on blockchain cryptocurrencies. But we'll see if
anything takes off in that vein or if the evil empire of Facebook just
continues to win the day.

~~~
Toboe
>I still think there is immense value in having a centralized identity on a
service that everyone is using

Would unique names in a federation everyone is using suffice for you?

(i.e. @jaredcwhite@fictionalmastodoninstance.ycombinator.com is unique in the
whole fediverse _)

_ the whole federation of mastodon instances

------
andrew_
(my karma will likely not survive this) the title should probably read
"Mastadon makes the Internet feel like an safe echo chamber again." I get that
it's nice to escape the things you don't like to see or read, but the article
drops hints throughout to let us know that's what the author is actually
discussing. I get it, but the internet has never been devoid of things you
don't want to see, and walling one's self off is no better an idea than only
socializing with people who view the world exactly the same as yourself.

~~~
Cthulhu_
I think people need safe echo chambers, even if their views are controversial;
if you don't have a closer group of people to share your views with (and/or
who share your viewpoints), you'll end up either just not participating at all
(because someone will have problems with what you're saying), being a
controversial person (and getting a lot of shit and/or even your account
removed), or a boring or personality-less person with no personal views. I
mean all of those work, but neither of those feel like "just be yourself".

It's probably in line with the thing about id, ego, and super-ego; you need
spaces to align your id / ego, not just via the super-ego. if I'm using those
phrases correctly. Probably not.

~~~
baq
i think the problem is people aren't wired correctly for this option, which
wasn't available in a high-bandwidth edition even 20 years ago, to be safe for
societies in the long run. the dopamine-driven positive feedback loop that
happens in such echo chambers cause a runaway reaction of radicalizing the
opinion of the whole bubble to the point where it's a religious issue when
confronted about it. you almost admit it yourself and correctly diagnose that
HN is also like that.

no idea about that psychology stuff. i heard those words before :)

~~~
epicide
Echo chambers obviously happen even on sites with larger userbases (follower
groups on Twitter, particular subreddits, etc.).

I don't know if having walls built into the system helps or hurts. Or does
nothing at all. Ultimately, I don't think it matters since people are going to
organize into some form of group no matter what.

------
NelsonMinar
I switched from Twitter to Mastodon a month or two ago and mostly like it. The
tech platform is fine; not as polished as Twitter but it works and has some
nice features like spoiler warnings. But the community is very thin there.
Folks are trying and in some subcultures it's pretty great, but I'm finding
I'm missing the wider world of Twitter sometimes.

~~~
kstrauser
Advice from a longer-time user: browse your instance's federated timeline and
follow lots (way more than you would on Twitter!) of interesting people from
there. You'll soon start seeing the stuff they promote and finding new users
to follow.

Non-users: the federated timeline is basically the union of all users followed
by anybody on your instance. If I follow {a,b,c} and you follow {b,c,d}, the
federated timeline will have all toots from {a,b,c,d}. This timeline is also
what gives instances their "feel". If you're on an instance with a lot of
geeks, they'll probably follow a lot of other geeks, and the federated
timeline will have lots of geekness. Same for s/geek/cat lover/ or witch or
activist.

------
Yhippa
This is an interesting new world. I'm using Telegram and Discord to be a part
of niche interest groups (certain video games and sports). Same for WhatsApp.
I don't think these alternative communication platforms will dethrone Twitter,
Facebook, or Reddit but for people who seek them out they may have more
enhanced interactions.

~~~
pmlnr
> to be a part of niche interest groups > Same for WhatsApp

No desktop client. NO DESKTOP CLIENT. How do you type?!

~~~
slazaro
Whatsapp web works fine, it's not a desktop app but it's in my desktop and I
can type with my keyboard on it.

~~~
pmlnr
Ah. That didn't exist when I last had to poke whatsapp. In that case, it's not
ideal, but better, than mobile-only things.

------
dorfsmay
I wish they designed it such that one's identity were not bound to a server.
They should have bound it to a crypto key or DNS (like email). With the
current design, if you use a sever you don't have control over and it
disappears, you lose that identity.

~~~
iak8god
This question occurred to me while reading the article. Thanks for pointing
this out. This seems like a serious limitation. Is the solution just for
everyone to run their own instances?

~~~
kstrauser
It's really exactly like email, though. If you're currently user@gmail.com but
you want to switch to user@outlook.com, you'll have to notify all your
contacts to start using your new address. At least in Mastodon you can update
your @user@instance-a profile to say that you've now moved to @user@instance-b
so that your followers know where to find you.

~~~
dorfsmay
It's exactly like email if you use gmail or yahoo. So... WHAT'S THE POINT?
Whynot use twitter then?

With email, you can use gmail, or yahoo, or buy a domain and host it yourself,
or pay a provider (including google) to host your domain.

Are there options to host your domain on Mastodon without hosting it yourself?

Also, what are the chances that the current servers/providers will still be
around in 2 or 5 years?

~~~
kstrauser
Yes, there's for-pay Mastodon hosting.

As for why not Twitter: suppose you want a private instance for your family.
Or company. Or softball team. Mastodon makes it trivially easy to launch an
invitation-only server so that you can chat and share images with just those
people.

It also means that you and I can host instances with different community
standards. Maybe you want to focus on liberal horse-lovers while I want a
hangout for Republican fisherman. Mastodon lets us both go our own way, and
gives us tools to decide whether our very different servers should even talk
to each other.

------
Mattasher
FYI I have a Mastodon instance running at
[https://freebeer.com](https://freebeer.com) if anyone wants an @freebeer.com
username. No echo chamber as of yet.

------
lazyjones
Mastodon will very likely succumb to the same fate as Usenet, unless
traffic/transit costs become irrelevant soon.

Also, it would greatly benefit from a proper client that keeps a backup for
all your posts and account data. The instance I joined went down permanently,
it seems.

~~~
kstrauser
Media is cached locally on the followers' servers by default. If you follow
me, and I upload a photo, my server will send it to yours. When you view it,
you'll see the copy from your server, not mine.

This is changeable per-instance. For example, I don't want to host a lot of
hentai or lolicon, even if my users were into that kind of stuff. I can
configure my instance specifically not to cache media from servers that host
it.

------
jack1243star
It is hard to choose an instance if you do not know whether the instance is
defederated by other instances. The fediverse is fractured into (roughly) safe
spaces and free speech zones.

------
tenkabuto
This article reads to me as if Tumblr had renamed itself "Mastodon," as the
cultures sound so similar.

Both entail the notion of instances, Tumblr with subdomains ( _.tumblr.com)
and Mastodon with users on one 's own or another's instance (_@*). I wonder if
there's a sense of ownership entailed in that that leads to greater personal
disclosure, which Twitter hasn't brought out.

------
nh2
Something is broken with the scrolling on that page. If I press arrow-down or
page-down, nothing happens. It just shows "toot toot", not a great experience.

Only after 20 seconds I figured that clicking the page and then the button
makes it work. Other pages don't have this problem.

------
cinquemb
Well, also when other platforms seek to try to "verify" your accounts with all
sorts of mechanisms, escaping to self hosting/federated platforms start to
make sense for some.

------
jhiska
Yet another social-media thing.

I thought the consensus in non-social-media media was that all social media
was unhealthy.

Now we're getting an ad (or infomercial, if you prefer that term) from
traditional media for an open-sourced Facebook / Twitter wannabe killer.

I guess they just take whatever stance that fits their unstated goals.

~~~
egypturnash
There’s no company. There’s a W3C-approved standard (two of them, actually -
OStatus and ActivityPub), a guy who spent a year or two writing a user-
friendly client for them, a Github project with a growing number of
contributors, a bunch of other people hosting servers, and an assortment of
Patreon campaigns to pay for continued development and to help pay the bills
for the servers that aren’t being run out of someone's deep pocket. And enough
people deciding that they are fed up with Twitter for there to be enough of a
community to make it worthwhile.

Corporate-owned social media that tries to pay its development and hosting
costs by putting as many ads in front of your eyeballs is unhealthy. The fact
that this is pretty much all we've had for the past decade or two makes it
easy to assume this means _all_ social media is unhealthy.

~~~
jhiska
One can argue that replacing real-life relationships with digital ones is
unhealthy.

And digital lives are more easily monitored by governments -- not just the
American or European governments, which is already bad enough. This too is
dangerous.

Being able to go into a community of like-minded people translates in the
meat-world to meat communities where your neighbors might have a completely
different perception of reality than each other. This too is problematic.

I understand now that there is no company behind it. It's open-source and
developed with good intentions, but as the saying goes, the graveyard is full
of good intentions. I deeply distrust anything that entices me to reveal
personal data in a medium monitored by the secret police.

How much these objections weigh for you depends on your priorities. Non-
corporate, open-sourced social-media isn't significantly different for me to
assuage my very real Internet privacy terrors.

~~~
kstrauser
> One can argue that replacing real-life relationships with digital ones is
> unhealthy.

One can argue lots of things, but I think it's a crucial support network for
people not near lots of like-minded others. What "real life" peer group is a
trans kid in small town in Kansas supposed to hang out with and get support
from?

~~~
jhiska
That is a fair point.

I worry for what transpeople -- who lack meat-world social choices -- are
enticed to reveal about themselves online to the secret police. Our
governments' thugs are happy to lend an unsympathetic ear to their problems.

~~~
kstrauser
That's a fair point, too. And non-governmentally, there's nothing preventing
Joe Neonazi from creating an LGBTQ-friendly-seeming instance to collect people
to harass.

One mitigating factor, though, is that there seems to be a wider disconnect
between Mastodon IDs and real life IDs than there is between real life and
Twitter. I have plenty of Mastodon friends who could be sitting at the next
desk as I type this for all I know. Also, having multiple Mastodon accounts is
seen as a perfectly normal and acceptable thing to do, so @joe@joefamily.name
might post vastly different stuff than on their @jane@transfriendly.social.

------
rurban
Joke, right? Nobody wants to give up the internet for home.

------
kingmanaz
Do try SDF.org's instance (as well as their other services).

[https://mastodon.sdf.org/about](https://mastodon.sdf.org/about)

------
kevwil
"Not exactly a high bar to clear given the garbage pile Twitter has become.
... It’s the place where being a Nazi will result in the severe consequence of
losing verification."

Ummm, what? Defending nazis are we?

~~~
ekimekim
I believe the author intended that to be sarcastic. Their point being that
being a Nazi should result in a stronger censure than losing a mostly-
meaningless check mark.

