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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mastodon.social has over 150k users, and there are other large non-Japanese instances. [1] After the SESTA / FOSTA bills, switter.at also became a huge instance for sex workers.
The instance banning thing is a huge problem and it’s not really being talked about much. The only thing you can do really is sign up on an instance like niu.moe that doesn’t filter besides illegal content.
The challenge is: Many of the servers which block other servers will block servers solely because they don't also block servers. "Free speech zones" are considered servers that should be blocked by the most social justice inclined servers. So it's fairly difficult to find a server that can, indeed, talk with everyone in the fediverse.
I don't think that's inherently a problem, decentralization allows people to segment themselves off, and that is okay.
I've found that such servers are usually not worth federating with, though I usually silence these instances instead of full blocking them.
These instances are rare, the bigger problem as administrator is to find and media-block the instances that post NSFW or content illegal in your jurisdiction (switter, most japanese instances...)
Also bot spam if it occurs and the admin on the other end doesn't care...
What would be more interesting as a number is active users.
For example, I've got an account at mastodon.social, but last time I used it is over a month ago and before that there had been several months of inactivity.
When I last looked at my friend list and follower list on mastodon it seemed like most people treated mastodon like that.
mastodon.social has around 10,000 weekly active users (https://mastodon.social/api/v1/instance/activity). Switter is about 2x that. Other instances are bigger or smaller. Pawoo (The largest Japanese instance) has 30,000 but the French & English-speaking fediverse tends to be a little more spread out among smaller servers, so these numbers aren't exactly directly comparable.
>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).
Two things are needed for a decentralized social network to go mainstream. One is that it be technically competent, the other is that at be designed so that a large part of the population will actually enjoy using it.
Both problems require very high ability. The problem is that the relatively small number of people who are both motivated and able to solve the first problem are generally techno-geeks who are average or below average in social ability,and so foul up the second problem terribly.
However, the need for such a network is becoming widely enough known that I am pretty sure that rather soon we will get someone who can solve the second problem who will take up what the techno-geeks have been doing and produce a network that will become popular.
It's not getting mainstream yet. It's filling niches made up of people unhappy with twitter, interestingly both people who think Twitter moderates too much, and people who think it doesn't moderate enough. Letting people run their own servers makes that possible.
Twitter itself recently said on an earnings call that it doesn't consider itself mainstream (which I personally find just ludicrous) so if they're not, Mastodon is not.
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!
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...
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!
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!
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.
Is this really worth discussing? This comment spawned so many responses, but if you look at the actual thread it seems like the comment you quote was addressed rather sensibly and then things moved on. People who don't click through to your link get the impression that Mastadon is a gigantic SJW bikeshed where nothing gets done, but that's not actually what happens.
I guess I'm just trying to say that we shouldn't give attention to or feed "trolls," even if they are being sincere.
Bikeshedding meets Social Justice. That's pretty amazing honestly. At least if you take it with a gain of salt it's quite funny. I suppose they might have to rework that code when we reach the Singularity...
In all seriousness, what does that person mean by saying "I'm a robot and I'm a person"? Is this some kind of movement? Are cybernetic implants getting that good? Is AI finally that advanced? Or is there some sort of delusion that some people feel like their body isn't organic?
I'm interested in the most charitable interpretation of that, so if you have an uncharitable answer, please refrain from expressing it.
It's serious, or at least I know some people socially online who in some way identify with robots. I assume they mean it metaphorically; something to do with gender expression or possibly neurodivergence.
But it has never actually come up in conversation, and it doesn't impact our relationship, so I really don't know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It may just mean that nothing is stopping a person marking their account as a bot (maybe in jest) and posting with it manually.
Alternatively it may just be semantics. Are fictional characters "people"? Does "person" imply sentience, or can it still be used in the archaic Roman sense of the word -- a persona; literally: a mask worn by a stage actor. In which case, if the bot is designed to imitate personality, it may be more apt to refer to it as automated than as a non-person.
It's pretty common to have a script post to your account on your behalf in an automated or semi-automated way, if you're a programmer. (It's pretty common to do this on twitter too, but twitter has no interest in marking bots.)
If an account has both automated and organic posts, that account is both human and robot.
Nah. The user, judging by a quick perusal of account activity and her website, appears to be rather serious about her whole robot+person identity. She took great offense a few minutes ago when I visited the thread and a person had commented about her trolling.
It's delusional thinking where people believe themselves to be something they clearly aren't. It's not even the first example of this to reach mainstream discourse, but I'll be zapped for wrongthink if I mention the other. That's why this sort of thing is really scary.
This comment breaks the HN guidelines by taking the thread on a flamey ideological tangent. Those invariably suck, and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't do it again.
But please, don't call mental illness scary, if that's what this is. There's already enough stigma around mental illness to feel like you have to be scared about discussing it.
I think what the poster is getting at is it's indistinguishable from discussion around gender.
It's uncharitable to call that delusion or mental illness, but they're not really that different. That's what the "you are what you say you are" movement in society is building towards. (Though it's interesting how quickly Dolezal got shut down for saying they were a race they weren't).
It's very distinguishable. We have a long history of transgender people, their medical support, and their role in society. We do not have a long history of artificial life claiming sentience.
The two things are not the same, there is no slippery slope here, nobody is going to take us to prison or publicly shame us if we vehemently question that any person currently living is in a purely inorganic body.
I had a more drawn out response but I realized that I was discussing things that I may not understand.
Honest question: if this person was claiming they were of the robot gender and that they wanted inclusion, would you deny that they were of that gender? How do you define it?
To those with less exposure, much of it seems subjective, the same way saying you're a "robot" (what does that mean to that person?) or you're a kin might.
Replace "robot" with "gender*" and it's indistinguishable in that sense. People will just as vehemently argue with you about people's assertions of gender, but that doesn't seem useful anymore.
How exactly is robot a gender? What exactly comprises the robot gender? What social and/or cultural differences distinguish the robot gender from other socially constructed and performative genders?
What's scary is the fact that you can be prevented from recognizing this as delusional because people have decided the delusion needs to be protected from "hate speech".
Look at the people in that issues thread saying that the the "bot" wording is not "inclusive" enough.
I feel like you're fishing for attention by pussyfooting around some assertion about gender. If that's the case then just come out with it, and bring along some evidence to back yourself up, and remember that belligerence is not an argument.
You are not a victim, you will not be made a victim, you should not consider yourself a potential victim, and if the other thing that you are afraid to say is that being transgender is by itself a mental illness, the current medical consensus disagrees with you.
I've read and been exposed to a lot of other research with regards to consensus [1], but I'd love to see another point of view. Maybe you could post a few other sources that disagree?
> [...] and there is no such medical consensus. Not when people lose their jobs for speaking out.
At best this is an extremely tenuous inference.
If you can find researchers who are actually working in the area who've lost their jobs because of the outcomes of that research, then please do provide references.
No, it's because it's not a delusion, and furthermore it's none of your damn business. There is precisely zero reason you need to concern yourself with how someone wishes to identify, other than to be able to address them appropriately to be polite.
I see it less as a case of people believing themselves something (although that must happen some percentage of the time), and more as a subgroup deciding they want to claim a pronoun for themselves, for any number of reasons. Unfortunately, in their fight to claim that designation, there is often conflation of all objections to denying personal rights.
I'm not entirely sure where I come down on this issue, as most my exposure to it seems to come from representations by extremists on both sides. For my own part, the reasons I feel objection would be warranted are because of loss of accuracy in language. This is a good example of that, where one actor is specifically lobbying (whether genuinely or not) for the expansion of the term bot to mean (for all I can tell) to mean it's opposite. The current definition of the word (whether as 'bot' or 'robot') means that someone's ability to present a coherent argument that they are one in itself rules them out as one.
"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.
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.
I don't think these kinds of examples should be lumped into the category of "diversity/inclusion or gender politics" issues. If it's indistinguishable from trolling or satire, then it shouldn't be given any weight. Even if they are being actually earnest we shouldn't let their extreme views color our perception of more reasonable discussions.
Thats the thing with Postmodernism, if you think there is some sort of limit to its application you are mistaken and now on "the wrong side of history". To postmodernists, there is no limit to how far it will go because there is no truth, only power.
You don't have to federate with these people or instances if you don't want to. (I say that as someone who has defederated or atleast silenced instances over ideological differences)
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.
I think it is part of Mastodon's appeal that there can be hosts that will welcome these people and hosts that boot these people.
There doesn't have to be one single community that will either accept this or reject this. I tend to be more closed to stuff like this and don't want to be around it. But I'm glad that others are more inclusive and have a place they can be inclusive that doesn't have to include me.
I'm sure these people can be serious but I'm not sure they should be taken seriously (I assume that's what the parent was asking). Unless they're contributors one way or an other they're just 3rd party trying to create drama where there shouldn't be any.
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)
Guys like James Corbett have been documenting a push to view robots as humans in the culture[1]. This trend is worrying to Corbett because he believes that it will be used to justify AI control of the population. For example, if robot police are used to control people then throwing a rock at a robot drone will be considered a felony because that robot is a person and has feelings too. If you disable a robot policeman then you killed it and you can be executed for that, etc. Maybe your home needs to be demolished to put in a robot factory. Robots are people to and have the right to live. Oh they should be able to vote to. And who programs the robots? They get extra rights for each robot they make. It's essentially laying the philosophical groundwork for an automated sybil attack on civil society.
Mastodon has attracted a very diverse crowd and I'm curious to see how it plays out with the primary developer Gargron, who gives me a sort of eccentric vibe similar to Linus or RMS.
You should still consider using an activitypub platform. I know mastodon has a decidedly lower quality of user, but I use a gnusocial instance and I have lots of interesting conversations.
Now, there's degenerates there too, but they're not quite so irritating and there are lots of tuning controls to play with.
Honestly, using anything other than large, centralized social media will be a boon to the world, imho. I don't want to be a farm animal, just creating more data for an advertising company. I want to talk to people.
There are other interesting implementations too. Pleroma comes to mind, it's an elixir activitypub server.
Or maybe you could write your own. Or fork one.
Idk.
But don't let the mastoverse disenchant you from federated Internet content.
Totally agree with this sentiment. I found a mastodon instance that has some really fantastic people on it, and I only dip into the federated stream when I'm up for a rollercoaster of opinions. Federation has to be the future because it's the only model that allows toxic communities to self destruct, or productive communities to flourish.
I left because of these types of people. I don't want to stay on a platform where I have to be careful with my speech so I don't offend anyone and I don't want to be banned, blocked etc. for discussing wrong ideas. Some communities there turn toxic really fast when you don't share their opinion, real discussions are often times not possible at all.
Why do you even care if someone blocks / mutes you? It's their right to do so, and you can do the same when someone annoy you.
Since starting to use Mastodon 6 months ago, I had to mute exactly 1 nazi account. Muting is quick and easy, just like dealing with ordinary email spam; it wouldn't be a big deal even if I had to mute a dozen nazis every 6 months :-)
Is it just possible that some people have trouble managing their own emotions when dealing with strong disagreement? I can't otherwise explain why a microscopic quantity of undesired content would make someone decide to leave.
It's hard to know what is considered offensive anymore. "Nitpick" is one word. "Merry Christmas" is another. So is "Happy Holidays." Is "transracial" a thing or not? How many victim classes exist today?
I suspect its because people who are aware that they want a "decentralized alternative to commercial social media silos" are also predisposed to having opinions which fall outside the normal social media silos.
Most people don't get into the habit of reading about censorship-resistant platforms and decentralized networks, let alone joining them or running nodes, if they're living a life which most of the world would consider pretty vanilla and not at risk of being at-odds with the owner of some silo. If you feel you have controversial opinions, though... you seek these kind of tools out and have motivation to use them.
Its like the Tor problem - in theory, anybody can and should use Tor for anonymous exchange of information of any kind and the desire for anonymity shouldn't be taboo. In practice, a lot of people who use Tor are doing it for specifically because they have taboo interests (up to and including the outright illegal).
That makes perfect sense to me and is my kind of thing, Mastodon seemed to be more on the pro censorship for people who identify as robots kind of thing.
As the author of the "show my hand" comment, it's posters like you that make me avoid Hacker News as a regressive techbro cesspit, so I'm pretty glad you left Mastodon.
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?
I consider mastodon similar to email in that fashion. The signup page links to my privacy policy which explicitly states that they will be sending data to third parties I don't control. They will be doing so on their own choice (via the public/unlisted/private settings on a toot).
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.
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.
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.
I can imagine some sort of "proxy instance" which takes Twitter data and presents it in an ActivityPub-compatible format. However I'm not sure Twitter provides an API for reading that much data at scale (rate limits). But in principle it seems doable to me.
The way I'd do it is set up a bot account that toots your twitter timeline, make it a locked account and only approve your mastodon account, make your replies to your mastodon bot then be tweeted from your twitter account. Build your own bridge, heh
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course, but the victim can create a new account on another instance and upload the same content again.
Note that this also makes it hard to deal with spam and DoS attacks. As adoption grows, instances might voluntarily adopt protocols for sharing abuse data.
> How does Mastadon handle database (multiple masters, etc)?
Each node has a partial knowledge of the network.
> 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.
Neither. It's federated, like emails. Users still have to subscribe to a server, but anyone can run a server.
It's federated and decentralized to a degree via the fact that content is federated across instances, and regardless of the source instance being up or down that content will still be visible on other instances (assuming there are followers of that content there).
Mastodon depends on postgres; whether your postgres is multi-master or such is entirely up to you, the instance admin. Hosting it is much like hosting any other modern rails app.
Some admins use rds, some use postgres-in-docker on a single machine, etc etc. I'm sure some have more fascinating setups there.
However, that's wholly outside of what mastodon claims to do or be; it's decentralized and federated in more meaningful ways; there is no central authority listing users or allowing logins.
It is federated in a manner similar to traditional email. There are many different servers with many users on each one, it's straightforward to run your own server, and users on server A can easily communicate with users on server B.
If your server goes down for some reason, much like email, you'll lose the ability to log in and post, but anyone on a different server will be unaffected.
I don't believe there's any particularly special DB replication features in the reference server implementation, but there's nothing inherent in the system that would prevent someone writing a customized durable/distributed version of the server.
> Is anyone doing anything interesting on this platform that I can check out?
Define "interesting". I'm on [octodon.social](https://octodon.social/web/accounts/13051) and I interact with BSD users, all sorts of developers, writers, artists, musicians, video producers, podcasters, and activists.
Whether you have a good experience in the Fediverse depends primarily on you and your efforts. Make an account, fill out your profile, post an introduction with the "#introduction" hashtag, and follow/interact with interesting people who show up in the local and federated timelines.
As long as you're not an asshole and don't expect others to bend over backwards to make you feel welcome, you'll probably be fine.
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.
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)
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?