
Mastodon is not Twitter - rainbowmverse
https://digitalscofflaw.com/writing/mastodon-is-not-twitter/
======
personjerry
This was what I got:

"Mastodon is different. It has all of the same functionalities, but it's
_different_. Also, following and contacts and everything are the same, but you
can export your info, and that's different. People don't understand, but it's
different."

I honestly can't tell if I'm reading a piece of satire.

Having started with no knowledge of Mastodon, at the end of the read all I
know about it is that it seems to have all the functionality of Twitter?

At the risk of being crass, this sounds like a desperate founder or investor
trying to self-validate and coming up woefully short on evidence.

~~~
egypturnash
Mastodon: Twitter, except with moderators who will kick Angry White Boy
Assholes (Nazis, gamergaters, trolls, etc) off.

Mastodon: Twitter, except with a 500-char limit and no "sponsored tweets".

Mastodon: Twitter, except without a whole bunch of VC investment that it needs
to try and pay back by monetizing your eyeballs and keeping you on the site as
long as possible for as long as possible, regardless of whether that's by
making you happy or enraging you.

Mastodon: Twitter, except a bunch of technical bullshit you probably don't
care about unless you'd like to run your own Mastodon server for you and your
buddies.

~~~
s73ver_
I mean, all they had to do was say that first one, and a lot of people would
probably perk their ears up.

~~~
egypturnash
Seriously! This is the initial value proposition that got me and all my
friends to check it out.

------
JoshTriplett
> Since all instances are more or less part of the same federation, it’s as
> simple as clicking follow when they see you’ve followed them from a new
> instance.

That's not simple, not at scale. It doesn't tell you who the new account is,
match them up to the old account, unfollow the old account, automatically
remind you when you go to @mention them, or otherwise make the transition
automatic.

Simple would be the old account that you trust signing a message saying
they're now the new account, and when your instance saw that message, it
automatically moved your follow over, remembering the old account and using
that as a hint to help you switch over.

------
goatsi
Decentralized projects never seem to gain steam until mainstream users are
forced away from centralized services. Take a look at this recent article
looking at why the majority of mastodon users are from Japan:
[http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2017/08/18/mastodon-is-
bi...](http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2017/08/18/mastodon-is-big-in-japan-
the-reason-why-is-uncomfortable/)

~~~
criddell
What are some examples of decentralized projects that won over centralized
services?

~~~
xena
email

~~~
bitcuration
Not exactly. Gamil, Hotmail etc. are some successes that had clearly
centralized email despite remained on the same protocols.

~~~
criddell
Gmail and Hotmail are still part of a federated email system. Email won over
messaging on centralized services like Compuserve and Prodigy.

------
ztratar
Exporting is the differentiating feature?

As someone who worked in the social space for years, I find this quite
misguided.

Users want more than exporting. When building a social produdct, you have to
be able to excite a mainstream audience.

The math behind a superior network connection model or techy-feature like
exporting is practically useless to these people.

Build something people (from St. Louis) want.

~~~
egypturnash
The two biggest differentiating features in my circles seem to be:

* less nazis/gamergaters/people who think it is fun to be assholes on the internet (unless you wanna go hang out on an instance that welcomes them, which is probably banned from federating to a lot of other instances)

* you can actually emit a paragraph containing a complete thought instead of a very simple sentence

Being able to hide the bulk of your post behind an arbitrary user-entered
"content warning" tag is damn nice too.

~~~
wpietri
> you can actually emit a paragraph containing a complete thought instead of a
> very simple sentence

This is one of those interesting things about a two-sided product. That is a
feature for _writers_ , but it's not always feature for _readers_. I use
Twitter for breadth; I follow a lot of people. The more people can write, the
fewer people I can follow. So for me, "they can write more" is an anti-
feature.

~~~
egypturnash
How many of these people regularly make 3-4 tweets in a row, in which they
emit a complete thought?

How much of your Twitter feed is people quote-tweeting the first of many of
these, with a comment along the lines of "Thread"?

~~~
wpietri
Of the people I follow? It's a pretty rare for me to see multiple tweets in a
row.

The quoting of one tweet in a thread is more common, but that's fine by me.
Indeed, I follow a number of people specifically because they're good at that;
it helps me increase breadth.

------
htormey
Mastodon really isn’t a replacement for Twitter. The original Wired article
did a poor job of critiquing it.

I think this guy does a much better job of critiqueing Mastodon than the
article linked in the parent post.

[https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-
water-888c10e...](https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-
water-888c10e8abb1?gi=78a14d4791ce)

Key points:

“The foremost problem is that federation is a lie. Well, it’s partially a lie.
The benefits described above do work; if you send a message to anyone at
@username@custom.website, it will be delivered to them. But if @custom.website
is a domain that mastodon.social deems inappropriate, replies from that users
on that domain don’t show up in your notifications or on your feed, unless you
explicitly follow them. So if you’re having a conversation with your friend,
@person@custom.website, and another user from custom.website wants to chime
in, they will be invisible to you.”

And

“Suppose you’re a semi-famous content publisher. You have 10,000 followers on
Twitter, whom you converse with regularly and have a large history of
communications with. If you decide to switch networks to something like
Mastodon, you immediately come into contact with the Hardest Problem of
Identity on the Internet, which is that your social graph is not portable
between platforms.”

I feel these are two very important limitations to understand about Mastodon.

I see Mastodon as basically Wordpress for people who want a twitter like
experience off of twitter. Aka niche communities.

~~~
sp332
For the first, you're always at the mercy of the whims of the mods for
whatever service you're on. The difference with federated services is that you
can move to or even set up a server with different mods. Can't do that with
Twitter.

For the second, that's a limitation of Twitter. If you had 10,000 followers on
a federated system, you could switch networks and your old followers could
just re-follow you there. They wouldn't have to switch with you.

~~~
htormey
Yep, fair points. To clarify, I think Mastodon is really cool and a big step
in the right direction. I don't mean to come across as overly critical.

I do feel the second issue he raises is still valid. re-following is a lot of
friction, even in a federated system, albeit less so than moving from one
centralized service to another. It would be nice if Mastodon provided some way
of altering users when someone switches to a new instance.

------
falsedan
How is Mastodon not like Twitter? I didn't understand after reading the
article, it mostly repeats:

> _Mastodon is different. <describes how it's similar to Twitter>_

~~~
sp332
It's a reaction to this article
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15244596](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15244596)
which is linked in the first sentence.

~~~
falsedan
I read that, and I still don't understand the point the article is making
about how Mastodon is different to Twitter.

------
Crontab
Mastodon is very interesting to me but discoverability would seem to be an
issue. Despite Twitter's flaws, I can at least search all of it.

What are people using to find things across Mastodon servers? Google search?

------
publicfig
Not really sure what point to take away from this article. It's not Twitter,
because of some differences in the way the network is set up? It doesn't
really seem to make any arguments to the first article (or more so comment
thread) that it links to. Obviously Mastodon is a different service than
Twitter, but to ignore and dismiss the comparison seems lazy and misguided.

------
s73ver_
I feel that trying to dismiss criticism of something by saying "It's
different!", without actually saying why those differences matter is pretty
weak sauce.

~~~
kstrauser
I think this was in response to some articles flying around earlier this week
that said, essentially, that Mastodon will fail because some of its features
are slightly different from their Twitter equivalents. The target audience was
like people who had read them.

~~~
s73ver_
Yeah, but just saying, "It's different! You don't understand!" doesn't really
inspire confidence, or reflect well.

------
weego
It's the same because of how it is but different because of techy features no
one who is needed for it to get traction cares about so it's doomed to
obsolescence.

------
jaydestro
i wish this was about the band.

