The author seems under to be under the wrong impression that Mastodon servers are isolated communities (and therefore compares them to subreddits). This is incorrect. Mastodon is a platform where a server of your choosing hosts your account, like an e-mail provider hosting your inbox. From that account, you follow any other account on the network, regardless of which server hosts that account. Everyone you follow appears in your home feed, and everyone who follows you receives your posts in their home feed.
It is unfortunately a common misunderstanding, and I must admit we didn't help the situation by leaning into calling servers "communities" on joinmastodon.org in the past (not anymore). There do exist plenty of "themed" Mastodon servers, aimed at specific communities, e.g. phpc.social which describes itself as a server for the PHP community, because some secondary discovery features of Mastodon lend themselves to what kind of feels like a slack/irc/subreddit, but ultimately, in their primary purpose, servers are service providers just like GMail/Outlook/Fastmail are for e-mail.
Fediverse has the unique problem (or benefit depending on your perspective) of the instance owners being able to cut their users off from other instances, which is unheard of in email. At face value this is done to keep users from being tormented by pedophiles and internet nazis, but my experience is that most of the server admins get a weird power trip out of blocking things, and will overzealously block anything that they personally find offensive or disagreeable.
This extreme amount of curation is why each fediverse instance is its own community. You only get to experience fediverse through the lens of your instance admin's moderation policy.
I think the parent comment was referring to blocking access to other server instances rather than blocking individual users.
Overzealous spam filters seem like the email equivalent. I have reoccurring issues trying to get self hosted email received by GMail/outlook addresses. Although these filters are an impersonal corporate policy rather than up to an individual instance admin's discretion.
You keep most of what you'd expect when you transfer, but you do lose your posts.
However, I agree with you that (over-)moderation is a huge issue facing Mastodon. However, that's true of any online community run by users.
The ideal, in my opinion, it's improving the process for people to self host instances. It's simply too hard for the average person currently and the copy on websites such as masto.host is ambiguous for people who may not be experienced with such concepts. My belief is that Mastodon will thrive when there are more communities of smaller groups.
Ive always wanted to try hosting my own pleroma-of-one but i know somebody who tried that and they ultimately gave up because they felt really isolated since the only servers that federated with them were the ones they had followed somebody from.
Surprisingly not, you can easily transfer your followers and follows. Even your bookmarked posts can be saved and transferred. You do lose your old posts you've made, but in the grand scheme of things that's not the worst loss
Greetings ordinary and non-remarkable commenter who has no special insight into Mastodon's workings! I don't know anything about the project but I have been watching the journey of the big social networks with interest. If you're taking questions - what do you think are the typical needs of new users as they hear about and start trying mastodon? How do you envision onboarding happening?
Number one priority for onboarding is giving new users something interesting to see. We've made big strides in this direction this year. There's a new "Explore" screen in our official apps that shows trending posts, hashtags, and news articles. We also have a system of follow recommendations.
This is only true among mastodon servers that connect to each other. As I recall, most servers would not talk to gab's servers.
Further, once you pick a server, if you are kicked off, you lose all your followers because they are following you@thatserver which you cannot get onto anymore.
...so why isn't there another layer of abstraction, where you have like a DNS to register where you (and here's your public key) are currently: you@thatserver, and you sign it... And then you can change (using the same public / private key pair) to be: you@someotherserver?
This seems obvious to me as a necessary feature...?
There is a move feature so you can transfer your account and its following relationships to a new server, without your followers having to update anything or any key signing at all. You can't use it if your account has been nuked, but it's not weird in "we're asking you to leave"-type moderation.
Sure, but these aren't my words, and you told me to stop complaining about something that I didn't complain about. I can't teach you basic rules of attributing speech, either.
In particular, the original submission has a comment which, among other things, said:
> The author seems under to be under the wrong impression that Mastodon servers are isolated communities (and therefore compares them to subreddits). This is incorrect. (...)
And then a person further replied with:
> This is only true among mastodon servers that connect to each other. As I recall, most servers would not talk to gab's servers.
It is as if there existed only two exclusive options: either you federate with Gab, or your server is a lone island. If you share the same sentiment, I think I can understand your wider experience and frustration with the Fediverse.
There is a difference between blocking every other server and blocking a singular server and the different shades between. In particular gab is full of toxic, stupid, offensive, psychos wearing human skin masks so that they can blend in and prey upon actual humans.
Most people when consuming content at scale want SOME filter on the content whether they know it or not unless the community is very small and self selecting. This is because a singular scumbag can trivially ruin the good time of a thousand users. Large completely unmoderated communities always turn into nightmares at some point.
The block if any should be at the user level per user and not at the admin level. No matter what gab user's beliefs are, it's wrong to dehumanize them. If anything, you're doing the same thing you're accusing them of doing: Dehumanizing humans with different (race)beliefs to commit (genocide) segregation.
Choosing not to associate with a person or a group of people is one of the most basic human rights, not dehumanization. A private Fediverse instance has the full right to invite, or uninvite, any sort of people or content; you're just seeing the effects of that right being exercised, independently, by multiple administrators of multiple instances.
yeah but its not just gab that gets blocked, just about every instance has a long list of blocked instances, and most instance admins will block anything that hosts content they disagree with. im not being hyperbolic when i say that a sizable portion of the fediverse is run by admins who think free speech is analagous to nazism.
The problem with this idea is that if by some unfortunate accident of history, Nazis gain power again, they'll say exactly what you just said except replace the word Nazi with Jew.
I would flip what you just said on its head and say practically the opposite: the virtue of Mastodon is that when the Nazis seize power not all instances will be forced to censor Jews (whereas Twitter will be forced to do it or shut down).
What exactly is your threat model — every single country will simultaneously become a nazi dictatorship? Is their a world domination beforehand which somehow misses the “nuke the Earth” part?
For a server to operate you only need a very basic power source and internet connection, even in an occupied country it seems plenty doable.
Example: an extremist government comes into power in the US and orders all social media and traditional media companies to censor a certain type of speech. They could very well have popular support if there has been a war or a depression or some other crisis, it was only 75 years ago that we had a literal Office of Censorship, were putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps etc. US media is very concentrated today, the government only needs to go around to a handful of companies to censor the vast majority of outlets Americans get their news from.
Sure someone can set up a server somewhere and publish whatever they want but if no one reads it it won't really matter. Most people won't change where they get their news overnight even if the government does impose censorship. That's why federated social media is so valuable, widespread use of it ASAP is a benefit to society. It can de-concentrate the ownership of media distribution, decentralize control and make the next Office of Censorship's job much harder.
>The author seems under to be under the wrong impression that Mastodon servers are isolated communities (and therefore compares them to subreddits). This is incorrect. Mastodon is a platform where a server of your choosing hosts your account, like an e-mail provider hosting your inbox. From that account, you follow any other account on the network, regardless of which server hosts that account. Everyone you follow appears in your home feed, and everyone who follows you receives your posts in their home feed.
I've been aware of Mastodon pretty much since its inception and I had no idea that this was the case. The messaging really needs improved.
>I've been aware of Mastodon pretty much since its inception
You must be part of an exceptionally small minority then. I, too, have known about Mastodon since it's inception, and this was not news to me. As another commenter said, a debate during that time was that users were beaten over the head with too much discussion of federation and instances.
This is always how it's worked, and it's nearly impossible to join any instance without following & interacting with people from other instances on a daily basis. It's like the one thing about Mastodon you can't escape knowing about even if you actively try.
>This is always how it's worked, and it's nearly impossible to join any instance without following & interacting with people from other instances on a daily basis. It's like the one thing about Mastodon you can't escape knowing about even if you actively try.
I don't use Mastodon, so perhaps that's why. It always seemed like a Twitter clone except with fewer people and, importantly for this particular discussion, where you can't interact with anyone.
Guess I was mistaken, but that's why I never bothered to learn anything further about it.
The sixth sentence on the project homepage: "Joining a server on Mastodon provides you with the power to communicate with any server across the globe."
There is a kernel of truth though. Many communities are organized per instance, so if you want to be part of multiple communities you must register on multiple instances. You can follow an account, but you can't follow an entire instance and have all toots of everyone there displayed in a timeline on your own instance.
Humans are naturally converging towards communities, and Mastodon leaned into that. But it's actually not the right tool, because in the end it's centered around individual accounts. Lemmy is the closest thing to what the author wants I guess.
It seems like it should be trivial to extend the Mastodon protocol and software to support following other instances. Is that not so, or why has that not been done?
It's probably possible to use ActivityPub to do that. But looking at gargron's messages in this thread, it sounds like Mastodon doesn't want to continue in the "1 instance = 1 community" direction.
> a combination of Twitter’s chronological feed with the community-driven spaces of Reddit
Eugen's product vision is fighting the "community-driven spaces" idea as hard as he can, as far as I understand – to the extent that that maps onto instances, and not the [groups that don't yet exist].
> But because each server effectively acts as a separate version of Mastodon, participating in multiple instances is a hassle. For each one, you must maintain separate profiles and follower lists, and there’s no way to view multiple “Local” timelines in a single feed.
I agree that it'd be nice to be able to view other instances' local timelines. But from here on out, the piece gets real confused by its idea that this is the only way to use Mastodon and thus that you should have one account per instance – this is not how most people use Mastodon.
> The mobile app isn’t really set up for hopping between instances, either. If you get bored with once instance and decide you’d like to check out another, the only option is to sign out of your account and sign up for a new instance from scratch.
So... log on to your desktop and [move].
> The overarching issue here is that Mastodon is trying to be too much like Twitter when it really ought to be more like Reddit.
If you want ActivityPub Reddit, you want [Lemmy], but with less FOSSy users.
> In the ideal version of Mastodon, users would be able to browse the content of those communities, and jump between them at any time, but would still have easy ways to interact with anyone else on the network.
This... is what I do. This is how I use Mastodon. This exists???
>But from here on out, the piece gets real confused by its idea that this is the only way to use Mastodon and thus that you should have one account per instance – this is not how most people use Mastodon.
Yeah, this is like the most fundamental thing about Mastodon. You can access numerous instances from a single account. You don't need one account on every instance.
>This... is what I do. This is how I use Mastodon. This exists???
I share your sense of incredulity here. That's.... what Mastodon does! How could you write a piece about what Mastodon is or isn't good for and... guh. It's like suggesting that cars are good but wouldn't it be better if there was a highway system so people could drive their cars and meet each other.
Yup, pretty much just this. I make lists of folks in certain groupings to be able to fake being able to see posts-from-the-subset-of-people-I-follow-from-yesterweb.social and similar (and hooo could this functionality use some ux polish), but mostly I'm looking at the feed of all people I follow.
For initial discovery you can (web-)browse a large instance by hashtag. Results will include posts from other instances.
Then you follow anyone who is posting or boosting interesting stuff. On a large instance you can also subscribe to tags. I don't think you can remote-subscribe to tags (except via RSS). On a small instance tags are less useful as they only show posts the instance already knows about (e.g. from people someone is following).
Once you follow enough people, you'll see them boosting posts from all over the fediverse. Then you have the inverse problem. You'll have to ignore or unfollow, because mastodons seem to be allergic to the concept of algorithmic feeds. (You can guess why.)
> browse the content of those communities, and jump between
Ah, the magic of web links. Click a post date or profile, and Bam! You're on their instance.
I use an instance I host myself that only has one other user on it. I've found that in such a case you have to follow very aggressively (to get content federating over to your instance; X who I follow RTed something from Y that sounds interesting, Y's profile seems like a good vibe, I follow) and unfollow aggressively (Y is live-tooting a reality show with many, many posts), which is kind of doing the work more manually that Twitter's algorithmic regime does for you. But it's also giving you control, so... trade-offs.
All social media plattforms that manage to fill their niche early and well, like twitter did, become natural monopolies. The main draw of the user to sign up for twitter, becomes the large user base, and people signing up for twitter enlargens the user base.
All social media should begin to be viewed through this lens if we are ever going to make any progress with creating better online tech, because each and every single one of these monopolies are currently levereraging their positions in the economoy to influence politics and society at large in a very toxic way.
It's largely replaced Twitter for talking to a lot of my friends. Which is the only reason I ever joined Twitter in the first place - all their Livejournals got replaced by these autoposts of cryptic fragments of conversations, and I reluctantly followed them to this annoying world of ultra-short posts that just kept getting shittier and shitter as Twitter kept on trying to make it profitable. And I can preemptively block entire instances full of chuds for myself and everyone else on the instance I run. It's great.
It's nice. It's kinda like the Internet used to be before Endless September started.
I do think it could be a lot better if Eugen would stop trying to make it so much Like Twitter, I upped the post length limit to ~7k and it's fucking wonderful. I can have conversations with my friends. In paragraphs.
Have you looked at your email inbox lately? Email is full of spam, and business, and businesses I dealt with in the past trying to entice me into giving them more money, and spam filters that can register false positives on stuff I do want to see.
A non-profit social media site just has my friends, without any need to regularly spend time keeping up filters.
Whatever, ActivityPub is still a really cool thing. Just looking at the public timeline of a well connected AP node gives me hope for a user owned social media federation.
The author has probably not used Mastodon for more than 5 minutes to write such a ignorant piece about the network. The sign is that he talks about the immature Mastodon mobile app while unofficial clients have been around for years before, and are much more feature-full. If you don't know a topic, don't write about it.
The author is an experienced 'new mastodon user'. And can therefore write about how it is for a new user to join. Much better than you or I (some 6years on the network, write software for the network) could ever do.
Telling journalists what they may, or may not write, is always worrying. But telling they aren't allowed to write about problems they, from experience, see, even more so.
Mastodon's biggest Twitter differentiator and feature - multiple instances - is also its biggest flaw when it comes to ease of use. Users don't "get" the multiple instance concept. The article is spot on in that it is disorganized and there is no easy way to unify your account across instances.
Perhaps not for you, but for me, who has never been on twitter it does ok.
That aside, The whole twitter style, shouting into the void, microblog communication platform is really stupid.
When I decided to give mastodon a try because someone I know set up an instance devoted to a subject I enjoy. the whole experience was baffling and inefficient compared to other communications systems I have tried. I stick with it because local instance is only about 100 people and they are all good folk. I Have a hard time imagining how terrible it is to have the whole world on one instance and am rather happy that I passed on twitter.
We have given it enough time to realize the claims as a Twitter alternative and it has simply failed. Twitter had tens of millions of users in its first 6 years. Mastodon is still struggling and considers 20 people as 'trending'.
Mastodon is a total failure, and virtually no-one is there or uses it frequently or daily other than the general hyper tech-crowd and that is the fact.
Regardless of the $48BN takeover, I'm already seeing the Mastodon circus running back to Twitter as they knew Mastodon was going the way of the Mastodon; extinction.
It's not a failure. This idea that it has to be huge to be a success comes from the instagram, Facebook, twitter and YouTube way of counting success. 100 million views, 10k likes in an hour, 100k followers... these humongous numbers are not normal, and they're not necessary for a rewarding social experience online. In fact I think the opposite is true.
Lots of people use the network daily. I do. It's more fun than twitter. You can experiment. You can say whatever you want if you pick the right servers. And you'll see people doing that, and saying things you don't like. And thats fine.
I'll never use big corporate social media again in any form.
It's a total failure. John Mastodon, the CEO and founder of Mastodon, was just fired from the company after their stock prices hit an all time low.
That's not how it works. It's open source and can be forked and improved upon. It doesn't need millions of users to survive and be useful to a lot of us.
Outside of the tech circle, virtually no-one cares at all after 6 years of existence especially with the constant comparisons to Twitter back then and today. This also explains that many people who left Twitter to Mastodon months ago came right back to post on Twitter again because the level of interaction on Mastodon is extremely low.
It isn't early days anymore and 6% of registered users are not using it. If that is not a failure to convince Twitter users to use or migrate to Mastodon, then I don't know what is. Not exactly a convincing elevator pitch for normal users to use outside of tech.
Mastodon is used by German and European government agencies (e.g. social.bund.de, social.network.europa.eu). There was a real-life meet-up of Mastodon users a few hours away from where I live last month. Jan Boehmermann, a German comedian and TV personality started his own Mastodon server, and the Mastodon logo appears in the intro of his TV show. The uni I studied at uses it, and so does the bank I use.
Having 3 million registered users and only 192,000 using it every month in the end after 6 years is more than 90% of all users not using it. With those numbers, there is virtually no-one using the platform which explains why many continued to keep posting on Twitter, more than on Mastodon.
So it is still a massive and complete failure in almost every way.
2) 192000 is the number for mastodon, there's a wider network that mastodon servers are a part of,
3) this is not some company like twitter or gab or whatever with quarterly performance announcements and user on boarding targets, it is software that works, works well and people use it. That's the criteria for "not a failure" in this case.
You know whats a failure? The corporate "unite the world by sharing ideas, a better world through freedom of information exchange" ideology and motivation of the founders of the big tech sites, specifically twitter. They have already proven this by abandoning it. They're failures.
It is a platform. The creator of Mastodon seems to think it is.
> 192000 is the number for mastodon, there's a wider network that mastodon servers are a part of,
That is the daily active user count of the entire Mastodon network and instances that have been online for long enough to at least have one user login once a week.
> this is not some company like twitter or gab or whatever with quarterly performance announcements and user on boarding targets,
Yet, out of 3 million registrants and only 192k use it. That is more than 90% of people not using it meaning that there is virtually no one using it on a daily or even weekly basis. That is a failure for something that has been constantly compared to as a 'Twitter alternative' or 'alternative social network' ever since its 1.0 or 2.0 release and each time Mastodon is brought up anywhere else other than Mastodon; like this site for example [0][1], Twitter, Facebook and online news articles.
After 6 years of existence, it really is a total failure and the denial, constant contradictions by it's supporters (it is a platform like it or not) and deflections underscores the low usage with a clear majority of users still running back to Twitter after a few days of using Mastodon.
Yes it is, when compared to the total number of registered Mastodon users as I have mentioned from the start with "virtually" meaning 'nearly', 'almost', 'more or less', 'close to'. My use of the word could not get any more accurate and clearer.
192,000 of 3,000,000 is around 6.4%, where that is closer to 0 than 94% is, meaning that approximately 2,808,000 users are still not using it regularly after registration and after 6 years of existence, it has struggled with that ever since.
You can try to deny it. But the numbers don't lie.
Why the obsession with total registered users? Do Twitter or Facebook even publish that data? I cannot find it. Every number they use is based on MAU or DAU. Which is because the registered users number is quite meaningless. It just goes up over time. Spammers, bots, multiple accounts, banned accounts. No business or service has a 100% retention rate. Half a million MAU is not the scale of Twitter, but it's not nothing, and it's way more people than you'll ever want to have in your home feed.
> Sorry, I thought we were doing the "my opinion is the rightest, because i said so!" thing.
Except mine isn't an 'opinion' and is based on Mastodon's own statistics in daily active user numbers, registered users, user behaviour and the claims, and comparisons made at the time when it already launched and was pitched as a Twitter alternative, especially on HN. [0] [1]
Fast forward 6 years later, 94% of people registered are still not using it. That is virtually no-one, other than the tiny tech circles that even still need to post on Twitter since there is still little to no-one on Mastodon.
That is a fact; not an opinion.
> But no, it's not a failure. "low user numbers" does not automagically mean something is a failure
It is a failure and I have repeatedly shown that the numbers don't lie after 6 years of operation. If it is not a failure, then what I am seeing here is the complete denial of this failure.
It is absolutely an opinion. Your metrics are right, but "it's a failure" is absolutely an opinion. It's your opinion, based on what you place value on. Mastodon is not a failure to the 200k people that use it, it's a success to them. Thats their opinion, because they value different things than you.
"194k people use it, that's more than the populations of 20 sovereign nations! That's a success" has correct metrics, as correct as yours, but using that to call it a success is an opinion. Just like your statement is an opinion.
The fact that multiple companies have those numbers indicates the numbers are in fact “normal”. What isn’t normal is continuing to insist that the typical person cares enough about the ideology that motivates projects like Mastodon in spite of the literally hundreds and thousands of failed projects indicating the contrary.
I dont know what hundreds of thousands of projects you're talking about, or what ideology for that matter. It isn't about ideology. I can actually talk to hundreds of thousands of people and say whatever I want. Whatever I want. And they can too. And nobody comes in and tells us to do anything. And there's not a bunch of political influencers and journalists coming around trying to tell us what to think, there's no billion dollar names, just people. It is legitimately a better experience.
I don't care what a typical person cares about, that's the point you're not getting. Nobody on fedi does. Nobody on the internet does outside of the stockade. Caring about what other people care about is how you get these monoculture wannabe coca cola commercials that are the mainstream 5 site web. The old internet we have nostalgia for is still there, with modern technology, you just have to go use it. So that's what people like me do.
It is dead. Even the users who 'moved' to Mastodon came back to Twitter again are still posting on Twitter. Why? Because there is no-one on Mastodon even after the Twitter 'exodus'.
We are talking 6 years and even less users using it. That sounds like a total failure on Mastodon's side to be a viable Twitter alternative.
I use it, and sometimes I unfollow people because the timeline gets to be too much to keep track of (so not dead). I have met people off it in real life.
I also have a twitter account, that I use to follow a few (6 maybe?) accounts I care about. I scroll through that every week or two. I like those accounts, but twitter feels needy, constantly screaming for more attention. This is the website, not using an ad blocker.
You say Mastodon is dead, so maybe you like a website constantly pushing you to engage more? I can understand how it would make the site feel more lively, especially for new users.
Mastodon is not the same as Twitter, but there are plenty of us that prefer it. If you want 100000 followers it's the wrong platform, I'll give you that.
> Even the users who 'moved' to Mastodon came back to Twitter again are still posting on Twitter. Why? Because there is no-one on Mastodon even after the Twitter 'exodus'.
There have been many small exoduses, and some people stayed with Mastodon.
It is indeed dead. We have given it 6 years and little to no-one is on the platform.
> Mastodon is not the same as Twitter, but there are plenty of us that prefer it.
With the constant comparisons and mentions of Mastodon, being an alternative to Twitter even in its early days, it will be judged as so and my strict judgement is that it has failed.
> There have been many small exoduses, and some people stayed with Mastodon.
I'm almost certain that this year's Twitter exodus to Mastodon, that more than 90% of users who registered at the time do not use it regularly and have moved back to Twitter due to little to no interaction there.
That is the fact of the matter after 6 years of operation.
Just because you are not there, doesn't mean other people are not.
> My conservative estimate of current Mastodon network totals, based on my own stats aggregation, is 3 million registered users and 250k monthly active users.
It's because it is dismal and Eugen is right as well and there is evidence supporting that [0] which it is still true to this day with the up-to-date instances that are active and with users who have logged in at least once over a week.
3,064,237 total registered Mastodon accounts and only 192,384 users using it. That is 7% of active users using the platform and 93% of everyone else not using it. There is virtually no one to talk to or interact with on the platform.
This is enough to tell us that Mastodon is indeed a failure and has not replaced Twitter after 6 years of marketing itself as a Twitter alternative.
Having a low active user count doesn’t mean there’s no one to interact with. I use it sometimes, I see lots of interaction. It’s not a success as a business (which it’s not necessarily trying to be) but that doesn’t mean it’s not a thing (a protocol) that many people are regularly using.
>This is enough to tell us that Mastodon is indeed a failure and has not replaced Twitter after 6 years of marketing itself as a Twitter alternative.
I think this is pretty obviously false. There are vibrant communities on Mastodon that left Twitter so they could exist in peace. Furry and furry friendly community, lgbtq+ webcomic artists, sex workers are a few off the top of my head that created their own communities.
And I would have thought this was self evident, but you can be an alternative and succeed as an alternative without it meaning you have to replace the original or absorb all the active users of the original.
Despite the name of your source, it seems to consider less than half of existing Mastodon servers. According to my own crawler, the up-to-date active user count is 540,258.
Facebook claims 700+ million login daily but many are bots.
It doesn't matter because you are not talking or interacting with them. You have a small list and unless you explore groups.
Most of the world uses google search outside of China. I don't feel connected to them and if the volume dropped to a few hundred people using google search it wouldn't affect my experience.
Facebook isn't a community site it is a social media with expectations that you consume more content than you contribute.
Mastodon considers 20 people in a hashtag as trending because people don't use hashtags for new topics very often, and the hashtags that do get used often and regularly are exactly the opposite of "trending". And because trending data is somewhat limited by your server's view of the fediverse (each server calculates trends based on content from users it is subscribed to).
Just 6 days ago somebody posted a poll asking people how often they log in to Mastodon [1]. 2,691 people responded to their poll, 71% answering "every day". Consider it was posted by someone with 201 followers, and people only had 6 days to respond. That, to me, is slightly more than virtually no-one. 2,859 sysadmins consider Mastodon worth running on their domain.
I use Mastodon on a daily basis. I follow interesting people on it, I get more than my fair share of cat pictures through it, I find out about things happening in the world through it. I don't use Twitter. To me, it is a Twitter alternative, because it has replaced Twitter for me. Don't see what other claims there are to realize.
By virtue of the incumbency and respective "business" models, it is possible for Mastodon to not lose even as Twitter wins, while the converse is ... implausible.
Twitter is literally experimenting with being more "Mastodon-like" with "Circles"
Are there any paths or efforts toward the reverse? I know that's not the design but might there be some value, utility, and possibility in a more "centralized" Mastodon?
Specifically, the value of centralization here wouldn't be governance, but analytics. Finding out what people are "mostly talking about" and perhaps getting more attention to bigger names. I know that's not everybody's bag but I think it would be valuable.
The good thing about having multiple Mastodon servers is you can sign up for multiple accounts (one on each server) and use each one for a specific purpose. I have three separate Mastodon accounts: one for general postings, one for posting photos only, and one for book reviews. Followers can choose which 'aspect' of me to follow and ignore the rest.
This is unlike Twitter, where followers have no choice but to put up with my thoughts, book reviews and photos even if they are only interested in one thing.
You should check out bookwyrm.social for posting book reviews! It is a federated Goodreads alternative that makes it easy to share my book-related activity via my Mastodon account, and to keep track of my reading progression, quotes, reviews etc.
I REALLY like the idea (and practial implementation) of linking different domains of information together trough an open standard like ActivityPub!
You can have multiple accounts on Twitter; it’s allowed and even encouraged since both the mobile app and the web app have an account switcher, and TweetDeck lets you use multiple accounts at once IIRC.
I never use Twitter apps, so I have no idea about TweetDeck's capabilities.
If multiple Twitter accounts are encouraged, I've never seen the people I follow use it. They all post multiple kinds of things through one account, and never ask followers to follow any other Twitter accounts they may be using.
What!!! No!!! You’re not supposed to have multiple accounts !!! Mastodon federates !! The whole point is that you can have an account on one server and then follow and interact with people on other servers !! That is literally the whole point!!!!
Nothing can equal Twitter as the place for the rich and powerful to make complete fools of themselves. It’s got that niche locked down. Also seems to have the online lynch mob niche pretty solid.
On a technical level it is easy to make a product that is better than Twitter: replicate it exactly but fix the complaints.
The reason it is not getting actually replaced by another product is very simple: they can't move the community of Twitter there. Largest public place to go and make your political enemies seethe and cope in 280 characters or less.
I've had a mastodon account for years. Not only you can't get a tenth of the audience or quality publications you get on twitters, but also there is less diversity.
A mastodon instance is often its own island, with one view of the world, and they don't connect to any other instances with a different view of the world because the others are intolerant assholes (but themselves are alright, of course). Ironic, given the protocol is made specifically to link instances together so that the network become more robust, and that people joined because it's a more open design than twitter.
On the other hand, Twitter that is full of trends, SJW, extremists of all sides and censorship, manage to send me toward new paths of thinking regularly.
It's like the problem isn't the platform or the technology, but people aren't meant to voice their ideas for the whole world to see, anonymously. It's such a naive view that it's a good idea to attach a megaphone to anyone's mouth.
The focus on decentralisation and not on solving the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory [1] means they focused on the wrong problem. They've just created an island for jerkwads that think they are better from the other jerkwads at the bird site.
Now, I wouldn't be against a Twitter-like for direct friends. Like Google+ for a moment tried to do before it imploded.
So I get the whole point of the article, I get the criticisms, and I get that nobody but the most technical minded, kool aid drinking fans of the technology care about what I'm going to say.
Most of the problems listed are UI problems. You can use any client you want.
A few shortcomings of all current clients, particularly application clients (not web clients) are the inability to merge timelines, the inability to create custom timelines, the inability to follow instances and the inability to remote follow (client only follow, your account isn't actually following). These are all things technically possible that expand the usability of the software but nobody seems to implement it.
Beyond that, there's more than just mastodon there.
And the network can replace twitter. And it will, either it or something like it. Twitter is a company, it has to show revenue to investors, which means it has a limited lifespan hardcoded in. It has to change things, which always means alienating users. An open network like activitypub on the other hand, can function just fine with 2 users for a hundred years before people start using it. It doesn't have to have growth, which means it can continue on indefinitely. Nobody has to change anything, but you can if you want. Open tools will, in all cases, supplant the corporate offerings they compete with given enough time.
I think you are referring to some of the mobile clients not interacting with gab. This wasn't mastodon itself. It's an open protocol, anyone can write a client.
If you're referring to something else let me know, I'd be interested.
Just because anyone can work around it, doesn’t mean they should have to. If the package maintainers themselves are censoring stuff as best they can, that’s beyond the pale.
Gab had no more toxic content than any twitter thread on a contentious topic.
If MS Outlook started refusing to communicate with 163.com, would it be fair to say that email had banned 163.com? Would it be fair to say that email users had to work around this block?
I think it's an issue with MS Outlook, not with email.
AFAIK, the two apps that blocked gab were Tusky and Toot!. This isn't like all email clients were doing this. The other thing is that local server admins blocked gab en masse. This is why you should find an instance that matches your requirements.
Over years on the platform I've built up a number of lists of people who I think have very interesting things to say on a number of topics. Where, outside of Twitter or a close replacement, could I find something like a thread delving into why Hollywood "antiwar" movies are actually usually a whitewash? https://twitter.com/mmabeuf/status/1324573014407729153
Maybe this isn't the way most people are using Twitter though, I would agree that being off the platform entirely would be better than just letting their algos serve up content to you and becoming addicted to the dopamine rush of likes and retweets.
It's sad that TruthSocial and some right wing instances in the past (like Gab once was) was one of the biggest Mastodon instances, this cements the main Mastodon instance as a very niche social network which the mainstream will never use.
I don't think Mastodon can ever recover from this even with the so called 'migration' that happened because of Elon buying Twitter, I don't think that caught on to shift anything, probably only a small fraction of techies use the main Mastodon instance and that is pretty much it.
It's a bit odd that mastodon is seen as a far right platform when Twitter is such an enormous company with corporate interests which will ultimately continually add features to alienate users, while the free and open source nature of mastodon is based in a much more liberal and progressive type of origin/framework.
It is unfortunately a common misunderstanding, and I must admit we didn't help the situation by leaning into calling servers "communities" on joinmastodon.org in the past (not anymore). There do exist plenty of "themed" Mastodon servers, aimed at specific communities, e.g. phpc.social which describes itself as a server for the PHP community, because some secondary discovery features of Mastodon lend themselves to what kind of feels like a slack/irc/subreddit, but ultimately, in their primary purpose, servers are service providers just like GMail/Outlook/Fastmail are for e-mail.