I tried Mastodon for 1 day recently, and then I gave up and deleted my account.
The web interface wasn't good (worse than Twitter if you can believe it), the native client I tried wasn't good either, but the worst problem is that following accounts of a different instance was a major pain. In retrospect, I made the mistake of joining the smaller mastodon.online rather than mastodon.social, which they claimed wouldn't make a difference, but it did.
I couldn't just follow someone on another instance from their profile page, because their profile page is on a different server from mine. It wanted me to copy a URL, paste it into a search field, find the account, and then follow, which is ridiculous and tiresome.
The onboarding for new users on Mastodon seems terrible in every way.
(I also couldn't disable "boosts" in my timeline, which is something I could do on Twitter.)
I wanted to like Mastodon! But I just didn't, and I didn't feel like enough other people were going to like it either to make it worthwhile to use.
I got into Twitter six months ago for work and it took me a lot of time and patience and looking around to grok. You tried Mastodon for one day. I don't know what to tell you other than I am deeply saddened your comment is the current top. It reads as the dismissal of someone who doesn't like new things and just wished it was like their old thing. You will never satisfy people like this.
> It reads as the dismissal of someone who doesn't like new things and just wished it was like their old thing.
I've used many different social networks over the years: Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, IRC, App Dot Net (I paid for ADN!), Micro.blog, now Mastodon, and others I can't remember the names of anymore. I even used dial-up BBSes back in the day! I think I'm reasonably experienced and can make an educated evaluation of a new one.
I also tried it and yet I cannot follow the criticism of the UI. The one thing that is bad about mastodon is that it goes like: "cool, you wanna join? Here is a hundred choiced where to join and you better make the right one."
The interface is something I actually like better than the twitter one. I can actually see content from people I follow instead of weird "engaging" content. The website definitly is more usable than e.g. Instagram, which belongs to a multinational megacorp.
There is many clients but none of them seemed nightmarishly bad. The things the clients I tried offer work and are self explainatory.
The thing is: I tried mastodon years ago for a day and did also not grok it, but this had nothing to do with the UI, and everything with the people I followed and the instance I have been on. Then it is pretty much like twitter with multiple federates servers.
You can't be serious? If you can't grok it in 5-10 minutes then normal people, i.e. the vast majority of people using Twitter, are never going to use it. It doesn't take extensive analysis to realize Mastodon is a hot mess as an alternative to Twitter - and that's okay. Mastodon was never intended to be an alternative to Twitter. That also means don't expect the masses to adopt Mastodon.
I see the masses moving to Reddit. It'll be interesting to see their new registrations over the next couple of months.
I have ALWAYS used Twitter through the 3rd party TweetBot app. That basically is Twitter for me. Unless someone sends me a link to a tweet, I don’t use the web.
The Mastodon app is no comparison. It has hitches while scrolling my (tiny) timeline. I can’t figure out some of the buttons or why they’re highlighted. There are no gestures at all that I’ve found. I don’t expect the level of one of the best Twitter apps of all time, but it feels more like what a web developer would think an app is.
Also, I did join Mastodon.social. And it’s currently dead from load (I assume). So my experience is going great.
Normal people just don’t care about federation. They seem to actively dislike it, and I don’t blame them.
The only federated thing most people will ever use is email, and that’s a relic from the 1980s. And centralizing on gmail/outlook/a few others.
I can’t think of a single thing normal people use.
Most people don’t make their own site anymore, and so many that do are really just on one of the big hosts. They view content from web sites, but that seems different somehow.
I just have a hard time seeing Mastodon succeed. Between federation (yes, I know the benefits), resource issues, and simple UX issues I can’t imagine it taking off.
The UX and apps can be fixed, but by then its one chance may have passed and it may be too late.
> I can’t think of a single thing normal people use.
The Internet is federated. You can become the customer of any number of ISPs, and each can take you to any website with an IP address, in a distributed fashion, by just asking routers along the way.
ISPs all over the world are collaborating for a global network of networks.
>Normal people just don’t care about federation. They seem to actively dislike it, and I don’t blame them.
Normal people don't like any kind of freedom of choice really: they want everyone to own the exact same iPhone they have, they actively discourage everyone they know from getting anything other than an iPhone (even going so far as to refuse to communicate with them because their messages show up with a different-color dot), and then they have the audacity to whine and complain when Apple exercises its monopoly power and makes iPhones absurdly expensive and forces software updates on them which make their older iPhones slower. But they absolutely refuse to even consider trying anything besides an iPhone, no matter how much they feel screwed over by Apple.
It's not just Apple and iPhones; I see this mentality all the time with many other things.
We'll probably see the same thing with Twitter. Many people will whine and complain about the price increases, about Musk's new rules or who or what he allows on the platform, etc., but a large group of them will simply never leave Twitter no matter what, unless it finally goes the way of MySpace.
>Between federation (yes, I know the benefits), resource issues, and simple UX issues I can’t imagine it taking off.
>The UX and apps can be fixed, but by then its one chance may have passed and it may be too late.
I haven't looked at Mastodon so I'm just taking your word for it, but federation would only be useful if it were mostly transparent and not a hassle as others have described here, and the other issues will probably prevent anyone from switching, just like desktop Linux basically missed its chances to get really big over the years because of too many small issues that drove people back to Windows/Mac. First-mover advantage is a huge thing and it's really hard to unseat an incumbent.
> I just have a hard time seeing Mastodon succeed.
Very different numbers and contexts, but nobody could also predict Libera.chat would completely take over Freenode. All it needs is pissing off users, and it seems Twitter could be on the right track to do that, at least for a generous part of them.
Thank you for explaining that you only used it for one day to add context. It is a different experience that takes a little time to understand. I do not remember how long it took me to get familiar with Twitter as it was long ago, but I am sure it wasn't quick. Mastodon is developed mostly by volunteers rather than a team of well paid UX specialists focused on increasing engagement.
> It is a different experience that takes a little time to understand.
I understand it fine. I just don't like it.
Obviously, different Mastodon instances don't have shared credentials. Which means that whenever you visit a different instance in a web browser, it doesn't know you, and thus you can't just follow someone, or have your preferences apply to the page, etc. It's unlikely that this problem will ever be solved, given the nature of the protocol, and given that it hasn't been solved yet.
I'm not ideologically attached to federation. All I wanted was an alternative to Twitter. I found that attempting to migrate from Twitter to Mastodon was unpleasant. I expect that other people — not everyone, but many — will feel the same way, which limits Mastodon's adoption.
> Mastodon is developed mostly by volunteers rather than a team of well paid UX specialists
I can sympathize with their lack of resources while still not wanting to use Mastodon myself.
I know it is not super easy to find and follow and your feedback is good. Another way of following someone who is not appearing in one of your timelines is to copy their ID into your Mastodon search bar and then click the follow icon that appears next to it.
Are we not on "Hacker News"? Someone could make a simple browser extension that auths with your home instance and gives buttons to follow people on other instances.
It is technically impossible to be browsing user profiles on another server and then follow people with one click for this reason: People have multiple accounts. This is a feature to compartmentalize identities on the internet. You might have one account under your real name for people to find you, and you might have a different anonymous account for publicly posting political views that you don't want your fascist government or boss to associate to you.
Yeah, in that case, I think the status quo "works as designed". But I guess you could have the button trigger a drop down to select which account they want to follow from.
Couldn't the browser remember your home instance as an autocomplete "url" value[0]?
So you would click the "Add this person as a friend on my home instance" button on the third party page, and it would bring up a little text box which you could fill and submit with a couple of clicks, then it would redirect you to your instance with an agreed URL parameter, so that your instance would ask whether you really wanted to add them.
Assuming your instance remembers who you are with a cookie (and the third party instance can remember your home instance too), the process could be minimally onerous.
The core issue is that you are trying to do Twitter on non-Twitter. You are at fault, and it is expected that it didn't work for you. The tool is different, the ecosystem is different, the environment is different, the contracts are different. That's like complaining you can't do Twitter from inside Gmail.
Learn the rules of your new place, how it works, who people are. And most importantly that no one owes you anything. The fediverse community welcomes anyone with an open mind and a will to listen.
2. You don't speak for Mastodon or the fediverse community, so you have no right to say "The fediverse community welcomes...", especially when your comment actually implies that the community is unwelcoming to non-ideologues.
3. Does Mastodon not want Twitter refugees to join?
4. I didn't say Mastodon owes me anything. I tried it, and I didn't like it, so I left. I don't owe Mastodon my usage, nor do I owe it a good review.
I'm sorry if my comment was unkind, but your dismissal of all the work done entirely by open-source volunteers after a single day of testing isn't exactly reflective of the platform, whatever the platform.
> 2. You don't speak for Mastodon or the fediverse community, so you have no right to say "The fediverse community welcomes...", especially when your comment actually implies that the community is unwelcoming to non-ideologues.
I speak for many accounts and many people having the same view: be open to something different, and your experience will be better. Be closed to newness and you will just not like it. It's not an ideology, it's valid for any situation where you will switch usages.
The toxicity of Twitter and its 1-liners that exacerbate misunderstanding and misinterpretation thanks to an algorithm that favors anything is not something that the fediverse community wants.
> 3. Does Mastodon not want Twitter refugees to join?
The fediverse (not Mastodon) wants many things, but the most important one is probably that communication be free. Maybe Mastodon, the microblogging is good. Maybe WriteFreely, or Plume, the blogging software, are good for people. Maybe people want federated image sharing, so they'll be more interested in PixelFed. It's not about having the biggest numbers, because there's no benefits; it's about the freedom of its users.
So, yes, if you want to keep on microblogging, please do come to the fediverse, but understand that the rules are different
> 4. I didn't say Mastodon owes me anything. I tried it, and I didn't like it, so I left. I don't owe Mastodon my usage, nor do I owe it a good review.
Good, because it sounded like you found your initial experience atrocious and assumed Mastodon needs changes to accomodate people migrating from Twitter.
> your dismissal of all the work done entirely by open-source volunteers
Here's the thing: I honestly don't care whether it's open source and run by volunteers. I was looking for an alternative to Twitter, period. Whether it's closed or open source, a business or a charity, that makes no difference to me. I just spent years on a closed-source for-profit platform.
> be open to something different, and your experience will be better. Be closed to newness and you will just not like it.
I object to this characterization. It's a straw man. I'm open to software that works well. I'm not open to software that doesn't work well. I didn't find this software to work very well for me. Maybe it doesn't align with my goals and priorities, and that's fine, but don't expect me to change my goals and priorities to accommodate Mastodon's.
> assumed Mastodon needs changes to accomodate people migrating from Twitter
Well, I do think that if Mastodon wants to attract and retain people migrating from Twitter, it does need to change. But I'm not personally demanding that it change. I've lost interest in it. On the other hand, if Mastodon doesn't want to attract and retain people migrating from Twitter, then don't change. :-)
If a service isn't compatible with my goals and priorities, then I leave. That's what I did with Twitter, and that's what I did with Mastodon, though for different reasons in each case.
I agree that cross-instance communication is very difficult. There should be a special URL scheme that points you to your instance which is installed as a handler.
Perhaps something like activitypub://another-instance.rocks/contenturl
Also, cross-instance search and discovery is difficult. There is no global index for topics which you can follow. Perhaps DHT or Gnutella can serve as inspiration.
The funny thing is there is totally a fix for this.
Activitypub relays show content from other servers from the relay, and users will show up in search like twitter.
Its just that Gargon doesn't use them for some reason.
The idea that Twitter's future is "bleak" is really premature. For that you have to separate your possible dislike of Musk from the actual ideas, instead of jumping to hysterical conclusions.
Musk won't turn it into 4chan because that would be fatal, his entire investment gone with no goals achieved. As he claimed, he seeks to amplify the current silent majority (80%) whilst pissing of the political extremes to the same degree equally. Surely a delicate balancing act, but I find it a noble goal.
The tiny little rush of harmful slurs, fueled by people thinking they can now say whatever they want, was immediately stopped in its tracks. Next up, a moderation board will oversee moderation/censorship. We don't know yet what this will bring, so there's little point in drawing conclusions. It's about 2 days old.
He's experimenting with alternative payment models. We always criticize the toxic ad model, so I think this is refreshing. He's looking to flatten the influencer curve by dampening the run-away status effects found in Twitter's algorithms.
He claims to want to onboard longform content and video, and I would expect quite a few other product improvements/ideas. Judged by his reputation, I would expect them to be delivered rapidly. Quite a culture change from Twitter's product team producing close to nothing.
I'm sure he'll continue to be an unhinged unpredictable character and asshole, but I consider Twitter to be so broken that the ideas at face-value do not come across as "bleak", promising instead.
Fair enough. But my point is that Musk is the kind of person that can say "let's do video, you have 3 months".
It doesn't really matter that it takes 4 or 5 months instead. That's still rapid in comparison to Twitter's reputation where despite having thousands of engineers and more than a decade of time, the app feels unchanged.
People talk about email as the prime example of federation that we all use every day, but... gmail.com alone has a 30% market share, and 61% of 18-29 year olds[0]. The only reason that number isn't much higher is work emails, and a goodly number of work emails these days are actually Gmail behind the scenes as well!
People don't want federation, people don't like federation, people are actively annoyed by federation. Of course, people also don't want to have an AI model decide they've broken unwritten rules and have their digital lives walled off, but if federation is the only solution to that (I'm not convinced) then people will take their chances.
my brother, the www as a whole is federated and people eat that shit up. visit foo.net and it loads fonts from google.com, embeds from twitter.com or reddit.com, images from some-other.site, and forwards a user to another-place.org when they perform an action, and all these sites will happily back-link to you.
maybe hopping from one site to another really is more annoying than hopping between pages on the same site, and you install a monolithic app to avoid having to interact with more than one site. bad news for you my friend, your packets are still being sent through internet exchanges following some route based on which providers choose to federate (peer) with each other!
i don't think people are necessarily annoyed by federation: they're annoyed by obstructive UX. make it so they don't notice, or that it feels natural, and they won't be annoyed.
IIRC, what really drove people to Gmail was the huge storage space. Finally, no more having to manage your own quota, no more dealing with bounced email, etc. I think that's a far easier sell than 'modern interface', although I'm not sure what the equivalent for Mastodon users would be — maybe simply "it's free" if Twitter becomes a paid service.
My reason for Gmail was pretty simple: it was free and free from the constraints of a work email account, and reasonably trustworthy.
People aren't annoyed by federation. They just want something reliable, trustworthy, that connects them to content and people, and costs as little as possible.
Twitter gained ascendance for the same reason: it gave everyone a free personal RSS feed.
The formula is simple: make it possible to have your own personal X for free (where X is some widely used but technically challenging or costly tool) and it will take off.
I would go even further: people don't want to think about federation, for the most part. It doesn't matter whether I use Gmail, my company work email, or my own local email server; if I send an email to somebody, they'll receive it, regardless of what they're using. All I need is their email address.
A federated microblog needs to be just as accessible, imo — if I have to adapt my behaviour based on whether somebody is on the same server as me, that's a problem.
My point wasn't that people fled federated email to congregate at gmail. My point was that most people don't care one wet slap about federation, and will happily use whatever people point as easily usable (and free), whether Hotmail, or Yahoo, or Gmail.
Well, I will say that while you might think that Twitter has somehow taken a grim turn for the worst. Most people, outside of the most niche instances, will not find a "safe" harbor.
I'm a long time user of the fediverse, I can't help but say that I love the freedom of having a bunch of independent nodes all communicating, all with our different standards and so forth. It's very freeing but it comes at a cost, most instances, however hard you try, will not censor half the things you would never see on Twitter. People like Twitter because of their draconian moderation efforts, I was banned from Twitter because I told someone that a death threat was not ok; apparently Twitter decided that I since i said "shut up" that i was somehow the aggressor.
I'm tired of this idea that "Twitter's future is bleak" mentality, all because some rich guy bought it that would rather the platform be less strict when it comes to political thought. If it is the town square of the internet, it makes sense that people should be able to say what they want and be laughed at if they are being an idiot. Twitter was never a good platform in any sense of the word, it is probably now the best it's ever been, and it will be better once the active user count is under a thousand. People ruin things, don't be surprised when they ruin some mastadon instance you spend time on.
As a side note, the people that run mastadon are a bit... off when it comes to ethics, so i would recommend pleroma which has had less, egregious, errors in the past.
I think what we need is just a twitter feed without any censorship (apart from those required by law), that will allow us to add our own customized filters. And maybe people can publish (and probably even sell) their custom filters. Somewhat like adblock lists that we have now.
That would get rid of blanket censorship (at the server level if it's mastadon) as well as allow people to consume/engage with accounts they choose.
I'm not sure why blocklists aren't sufficient. Users with similar interests pool together to block content that they find disagreeable, so that others with similar views also aren't subjected to that content. It's basically an opt-in filter bubble. If your views change, so then can your filter bubble.
All of the existing moderators at Twitter could do their exact same job--the difference is that users get to choose whether or not they subscribe to their filter or not (which even makes the filter more of an editorial product).
It sounds nice in theory. In practice, what has already happened is that users get bullied by political extremists into blocking instances said extremists don't like, under threat of themselves being defederated. Most instances yield, because getting cut off from the main network defeats the point of running an instance in the first place.
In the end, Mastodon gives users freedom to pool and block content they find disagreeable... as long as they disagree with the same content the activists disagree with. Otherwise, you get branded as undesirable by association, in an "if you're not with us, you're against us" fashion.
I don't see why this is a tragedy. Yes, broadly speaking, instead of a single fediverse, there is a "free speech" fediverse and a "safe space" fediverse with little federation between them. But if the people on the safe space instances are happy with that, and the people on the free speech instances are fine with that, then what's the problem?
If you really find it upsetting, you could set up your own instance which won't be on anyone's defed list yet, then just be careful not to post anything that will piss off either side.
> But if the people on the safe space instances are happy with that, and the people on the free speech instances are fine with that, then what's the problem?
I don't think people on either side are fine with that. Most just keeps their heads down. It's mostly fine if you're not into engaging into politics overall, but it does get annoying when, every couple weeks or so, some event happens that turns half your feed into inane political drivel, and you can't even comment on it for the fear of getting kicked out of the instance.
The main reason I'm talking about this is because I dislike false advertising, and the most touted feature of the Fediverse - the ability to individually choose who you peer with - isn't actually usable. It's a bit like gimbal lock[0] - technically you still have three axes of rotation, but in practice, the system reached a state in which it lost one degree of freedom. Yes, you can theoretically choose who you peer with - in practice, you'll either align your blocklist with the main branch or end up on everyone's blocklist.
> If you really find it upsetting, you could set up your own instance which won't be on anyone's defed list yet, then just be careful not to post anything that will piss off either side.
That's what I'm already doing as a user of a large instance; setting up my own instance has the same risk profile of getting kicked out, for a lot of extra work involved with maintaining an instance. And note that just being "careful not to post anything that will piss off either side" is not enough - you have to be careful to not follow (as a user) or federate with (as an instance) or keep users that follow (as an instance with many users) the instances on the "unwanted" list, or else you get banned/defederated by association.
We have a great example to see why - email has existed for decades and neither spam or abuse is a solved problem. Both waste years of manhours each day.
It's an endless cat-and-mouse game. It might be true that people individually are not getting that much spam (on more modern platforms), but email is much more than gmail and in terms of volum a lot of spam still lands in people's inboxes (otherwise it wouldn't be done).
I think you must be in the minority. I just checked my gmail and emails #3 and #4 are both spam. And that's in Primary, not even Promotions or Social. A long time ago, it felt much better than this but it seems the spammers are slowly fighting back.
There is a lot i can't really talk about on this forum as I want to be sensitive to others and I can't exactly "spoiler" details that are gross/disturbing.
If you so desire the information is out there, and there are blogs and so forth on the internet that link to the details.
However i will summarize. Mastadon has taken a staunch position against racism and nazi ideas, which is fine. However they will go after those who are not so militant in this en devour, even if they do not support the aforementioned ideas, there's a lot of shaming that goes on if you don't all decide to block the same instances for example. However they have, many times over, allowed certain, borderline illegal (usually linking to illegal) content to be freely accessible on said platforms in the early days (for like a good 6+ months) of mastadon. After a lot of complaints they still did very little to nothing to stop that behavior. This is the source of my hate for mastadon and those instances. They have shown in the past that they are not consistent in what they block, they do not allow others to have agency and still federate with them, and they have turned a blind eye to the proliferation of child abuse.
Gab has a hard block coded into mastadon, you can not federate with them unless you actively modify the code; however, other instances that are completely untenable are not blocked in the same manner.
It was for this reason that the great "split" happened, about a year or two-ish ago. Where a lot of mastadon instances no longer federate with large portions of the fediverse. It's caused a weird bubble. I just will never forget the twisted concept of, "if you are racist, or like Hitler we can't have you" while on the other hand, leaving a large (believed intentional) gap for illicit materials that personally, it breaks my heart to see that kind of degeneracy. On our instances we do not block political ideologies, however when it comes to drawn or real child abuse, we have never allowed it, and will never allow it. It is one of the greatest evils of our time.
EDIT: this is my opinion from what i saw back in the early days, they could have changed, i don't chance it, just know when reading that this was a long time ago in internet years and a lot of those people aren't as active as they used to be. I hope they have improved the community, but i will always hold this grudge.
Thanks for the explanation. I noticed something similar a couple years ago with reddit where a sub becomes either a full on sjw circlejerk or an alt right hellhole. There's a shrinking middle ground. I feel like HN has yet to be compromised by this trend so far, but it's driven me off social media pretty much entirely for the past couple years.
Not only this but there's been a lot more harassment and nastiness on pretty much all social media. So much negativity and so little value offered in return. Sorry for my pessimism but I'm just calling it how I see it
Edit: and also all of the rampant shilling that's only increased in the past couple of years. There's some online communities that I don't even visit because it seems like literally every other post is shilling some kind of product or value set that leads to some product
I think you might be conflating the activity of instance admins that run Mastodon with the actual developers of Mastodon, which isn't fair. Similarly, the developers of Chrome shouldn't be held responsible if people use Chrome to browse CP and terrorist advocacy sites.
> People like Twitter because of their draconian moderation efforts, I was banned from Twitter because I told someone that a death threat was not ok; apparently Twitter decided that I since i said "shut up" that i was somehow the aggressor.
Such a strange comment because it's diametrically opposed to my experience of Twitter. People aren't complaining about 'draconian moderation efforts' as much as rampant abuse, trolling, and disinformation.
A simple "shut up" tweet would never get banned — far, far worse seemingly goes unpunished. I suspect there's more context to that one than you're letting on.
These issues are unfortunately predictable, and it seems Gargon won't fix them any time soon.
Its kind of funny that in Mastodon(basically Activitypub at this point) a federated platform, starting your own server is almost impossible unless people actually know you outside the platform, your chances of growing inside the platform are basically zero.
You won't show up in other instances search unless someone from the other instance follows you.
Even if you reply to users from that instance and its users liked your toots, you still won't show up in the instances search, its amazing.
Heck, even Matrix, a chat protocol has better discoverability than Mastodon, user in rooms I'm in will show up immediately in my servers search.
Its not a federation problem, its a Mastodon problem.
- show up in search here is meant as in showing up by just typing your display name / username without the server address, because no one knows which server you are in.
Because Mastodon values anonymity, no real verification is built into the protocol. One way to establish your real ID account is get your own domain yourname.something and give that to people. Point the domain to a page such as yourname.neocities.com or even to your Mastodon page.
I too host a Matrix homeserver, but I chose not to use the central name server when I setup. So you cannot discover me on Matrix. I might later setup my own name server as others do.
Mastodon does not have an official central name server, but people have setup unofficial ones that people can choose to list themselves in such as https://fedi.directory/ and twitodon.com.
I'm not using one either.
But matrix shows users from rooms you have joined, automatically.
Unlike mastodon which even if you reply or like a "toot" you stills don't show up in search or the federated timeline.
Its kind of ridiculous honestly.
I think the fundamental issue with Mastodon is the user experience is non-existent, it's actively painful to use.
Everyone focuses on the 'tech stack', but when it comes to actually using a product no-one cares about that, not even other 'tech' users. People just want something that works so they don't have to.
People can hate on Twitter but it's polished, and it works.
Can Mastodon ever reach the scale of Twitter? Does their architecture answer the question of what happens when Obama tweets an image to 150 million followers? Hopefully the answer is not "the local Mastodon instance owner gets a $100k AWS bill next month."
Currently Mastodon.social, which I understand to be the largest instance, has tragic performance with only ~125k users. Every page load takes multiple minutes. It leaves me wondering how Mastodon can replace Twitter in practice.
Edit: and when I say "multiple minutes" that's an estimate ... it's been several minutes and there's no sign that it will ever render.
Mastodon is Ruby on the backend ... as was Twitter in the beginning, and Twitter also fell over when it reached a certain size and had to be reimplemented. So present Mastodon won't scale to Twitter size, no.
It's also not the goal, people seem to assume that Mastodon is a Twitter clone that has exactly the same experience and feel the need to post how shocked and disappointed they are when they discover this is not in fact true. Fediverse is a different model for social media which prioritizes decentralization over ease of use, where "ease of use" means being able to easily be spoonfed entertainment in bite-sized pieces. I personally don't feel it will ever be a majoritarian platform and that's perfectly fine. There are plenty of ways for people to find out what BTS is doing and not every platform needs to optimize for this purpose.
Many servers/communities exist in which you might find a good home, but you will need to live with their rules and moderation policies. If you are a politician, journalist, or other high profile person who wants full control to avoid censorship, trolling, and cancellation, get your own domain name. I recommend gandi.net, but other registrars are available. If you already have a domain name, we use a subdomain such as social.yourdomain.com.
1. Setup your own Mastodon instance that you fully control. You have several options here:
a. If you already have your site hosted on a server, you can co-host it there.
b. If you want someone to take care of all the install and maintenance, contact someone such as https://masto.host/.
c. If you want to run it from hardware sitting in your office or home, you have many options to do that too.
2. Setup your server rules, logo, and users such as your staffers.
3. Go to https://twitodon.com/ and register your new account connected to your Twitter account. Also update your home page with this account if you have one.
That did not really answer the question. Twitter allows me to disseminate a photo or video to the entire world, at no risk to myself, for free. How does mastodon address the use case?
And to answer the question about bandwidth: If Obama with 150K followers spread across 1500 servers posts a 200KB image:
Obama's server will:
- have an outbound bandwidth of 300MB
- storage increased by 200KB.
The 1500 subscribing servers will:
- each have inbound bandwidth of 200KB
- have outbound bandwidth to devices of 20MB if they have 100 users each
- increase storage by 200KB
Those subscribers can boost(retweet) the toot, and then their subscribers will see it too. If they are on the same servers, the increase in bandwidth is only getting it to their devices.
- increase in storage of 200KB
Anybody following your account will receive that toot and photo unless the server they are on has blocked your server or your account. I don't believe there are any limitations to how far your toots can fly other than that.
That is due to too many users jumping on when the servers were not sized for the amount of activity. My server is doing just fine, but I have a relatively small number of users and activity.
I think mass migration of people from Twitter to Mastodon is unlikely, but I do have some hope that specific communities will be able to make the switch. For instance, just yesterday I set up a new instance -- which was incredibly easy thanks to masto.host, literally two clicks and a config change on Namecheap -- that can hopefully become a space for people interested in AI to move to from Twitter (in case you are curious, it's https://sigmoid.social/).
Here's my rationale: Twitter is kind of invaluable if you are an academic working in AI (and in many other fields as far as I can tell), it's a great way to discover new work as well as promote your own (and yeah there is silly drama sometimes, but it's rare). Many academics genuinely love it, including myself. Those same academics generally loathe or at least dislike Musk, and worry about the future of the platform, and don't care that much about non AI stuff on there. So if just the part of Twitter you care about it migrates to a Mastodon instance, such academics would likely consider it. And if you are a person or entity with a decent following on Twitter, it does seem feasible to encourage the community to at least try to move over. Maybe, maybe not, but I figure it's worth a try (I am planning to announce it on Twitter later this week).
I joined a Mastodon server yesterday ("mastodon.online") and I immediately started searching the 'fediverse' for people I already follow on Twitter, seeing if I could build myself a little feed to read. The first few people I searched all had multiple accounts, across multiple servers. So immediately this is a problem:
- Which one is the one I should follow? I guess I'll click on each one and see which one they're actually using to post.
- How do I stop someone from impersonating me by creating an account with my same username, on a different server?
- What happens when the unpaid/volunteer mods on a server get overwhelmed with the content moderation task? What happens when they just start censoring stuff they disagree with (exactly what the wingnuts claim Twitter/FB have been doing to conservatives)?
I don't get this whole "a protocol is the answer" thing either. Sounds like the same kind of nebulous thinking we hear when people start pontificating about blockchain.
Twitter was (is?) successful because the model makes sense. A for-profit company whose motivation to fairly and competently moderate content and verify users is driven by their need to be a safe space for the advertisers upon whose money they rely.
Note that those exact same questions exist for email. Which email addresses are your friends actually using? What stops me from registering "oldandboring@yahoo.com" if you haven't already claimed it?
- usually they have alts, you can send them a message to please update their twitter bio with the link to their main mastadon account.
- You can not stop someone from impersonating you; however even the most infamous/famous characters on the fediverse have links to their channels, websites and blogs that link back to that account; so this doesn't happen often, it's very rare.
- Even though i don't appreciate your dismissal of a very real problem; there is no protection, however it is very easy to set up your own instance if you feel your voice is being wrongfully censored. As a consequence, no one is ever truly "banned".
- Ignore the hype, I love the fediverse but it has some severe issues; the protocol is never the issue as we are dealing with human beings here.
Instead of advertising, we rely on donations and the good will of the community, advertisers are scum in the fedi world. If you know anyone thinking they can rep their product on it they will be in for one heck of a backlash.
> Even though i don't appreciate your dismissal of a very real problem
Conservative content producers literally and demonstrably dominate shared content on Facebook and Twitter. And if all your follows are conservative, these viewpoints are all you'll see. What warrants takedowns, shadowbans, and permabans is hate speech, incitement of violent, harassment and spam/platform manipulation. While I'm not saying the platforms do a perfect job, it's undeniably their goal to keep those elements off the site while otherwise allowing you to say what you want to whoever will listen.
If you're conservative, you are free to go on these platforms and call Biden an idiot or whatever. But when you start spreading dangerous misinformation or inciting political violence, all bets are off. I can't tell what's more frightening: the possibility that the people claiming they've been unfairly censored actually WANT the freedom to make hate speech or incite violence on a privately run platform, or that they truly think what they're doing is just fine.
I've read through your contradictions, and those like it, for years; it's exhausting and i wish you all would grow up and cast off this rhetoric.
They do not "literally and demonstrably" dominated shared content. What rock have you been under? If you see one or two conservative commentators that have really good lawyers, that is not "dominating" that is those who have money, using it to threaten lawsuits against companies like YouTube and Facebook.
If my viewpoint contains "misinformation" (that i don't know about), who's to say that you viewpoint doesn't also without you knowing it? Who's to say what's dangerous, or how wrong does someone need to be before it's considered dangerous? We have the agency to protect ourselves, we are adults. If "dangerous misinformation" destroys western civilization, then it should not have existed in the first place. This is the basis for Darwinian Evolution, the weak fall, the strong survive.
Hate speech is not a legal standard here in the US; which is great, because what was hate speech two years ago is not what it is today, and I'm worried it will just continue to grow, it is not a standard i recognize or will ever recognize.
If those who held your opinion didn't push so hard and use "hate speech" as a weapon to silence opposition; while turning around and telling people that they should kill themselves because they are "scum" (calling people scum and telling them they shouldn't exist sounds pretty hateful to me). When i was in college I remember getting screamed at by a worthless human being who said that I wasn't allowed to be there or speak (even though i was just trying to get to my class) because I wasn't black; ironically, neither was she, i had no intention of speaking or loitering, I WAS WALKING, and she nearly got decked (as she wouldn't stop touching me). Any how, that's off topic, but it's a pretty perfect picture of what those who actually believe "hate speech" gives them the right to silence others implicitly allows, extending to those who might oppose them in any way real or imaginary.
I'm a fairly reasonable person, I don't like the government, and i dislike too much change too quickly, i like the tried and true method. I prefer my freedom, and i prefer people to have the freedom to say what they want and do what they want as long as it's not causing direct physical damage to others. I don't like how "we" have decided that any voice against any commonly accepted behavior is considered hate. I don't hate gay people, I don't share in their proclivities, but I really don't mind them, but I really don't appreciate the parading in SF that they often engage in, for example. I believe those demonstrations to be obscene; if you did the things they do by yourself, with one other person, you would be arrested for indecent exposure and lewd acts in most civilized societies. This statement, I've been told, though i think it's reasonable, is "hate speech". Just because i don't want my 8 year old niece to see grown men in bondage gear doing some weird things with strangers outside in broad daylight, I'm "hateful". This is how absurd it's getting. If that is "hate speech" then i will more than happily accept that title, which means nothing.
We are no longer children, most of us are grown adults who should be able to withstand "dangerous misinformation" and political violence was never legal to begin with. If i scream fire, but there is none, in a crowded building, that isn't protected speech as I'm inciting panic, which can do harm. If i tell you that you should kill the president (which i am definitely not) that is not protected either. Free speech is hate speech, wholesome speech, disagreeable speech, agreeable speech; the law even extends to non-verbal expressions of ideas! Any attempt to silence opposition indicates that the thing you are trying to protect does not stand on it's own, ideas should stand on their own; "hate speech" (not the idea, what it actually is) is necessary as anyone when opposed can and often will see that as "hate speech".
Most people want to be able to say what they believe, even if a soulless corporation deems it "bad"; most don't want to incite violence (which is unilaterally illegal) and only a small minority actually make "hate speech" (in it's truest origin), which is subjective in nature and only really a fairly "recent" cultural phenomena.
I've written at length, though as per usual, it won't make a difference :)
I'd just like to mention that if you are considering joining mastodon that you should join an instance with a specific topic and not one of the large generally known ones. You will find a community instead of just a platform, and this is where mastodon shines. There is a tool called joinmastodon which will help.
The "normal people don't want federation" sentiment is really just a misstatement of "normal people don't want bad and/or complicated UIs".
Easy to conflate, because (yes, email aside) there are essentially no good examples of good normal-people UIs for federated things. Partly because they tend to be volunteer, open-source efforts with the concomitant lack of budget/resources, I guess, but partly also because you need a better UI to deal with the added complexities that are introduced by federation in the first place. There are more choices to make.
In theory, of course it is possible to make a good UI for federated chat, or micro-shitposting, or whatever.
But in practice, Matrix has forty-five GUI clients and zero good ones. Mastodon likewise.
>The idea of Mastodon is good but it's too annoying to use, and that will torpedo any hope for wide use.
If by "the idea of Mastodon" you mean "you can connect to isolated versions of Twitter and view it with whatever client you want, but users maintain an account for every instance", then Mastodon is great.
The majority of people who use Mastodon use it in this way, and it's reportedly excellent. The two largest instances are identical in purpose, to the point that their userbase doesn't see their sharing of identities to be a liability, and it's functionally irrelevant to their social graph- their "usernames" are a combination of their Twitter handles and their contributions don't vanish if banned. Novel content is widespread, because the posters are all artists.
However, if by "the idea of Mastodon" you mean "you can have a unified identity, but server admins have the final say in which instances that identity is allowed to talk to and can fragment it at will", then Mastodon is over-complicated, unstable, and hostile.
The majority of articles featuring Mastodon emphasize this as a feature (well, that and the custom client thing), but "small groups of people whose only common trait is that they like custom Twitter clients" is not predictive of post quality or quantity, and the fungibility of one's post means coming into conflict with an unstable platform is just that much worse (you can follow a timeline of usernames in art if/as they change simply due to style, something that's not true for hot takes or even semi-long-form text posts like this, so if your instance turns hostile the only thing you have is your username... which can trivially be taken from you.
And I think it's this latter group for which Twitter will continue to have the edge simply because there, usernames are unique, and all notable people post there anyway simply due to audience size. You don't have to worry that your social graph is going to get split in half (and your posts effectively banned from half the network that can see them by default) overnight; stability like that is valuable.
Where are you getting that most users have an account on "every" instance? I've been on Mastodon for several years, and this isn't my experience at all.
Right now Mastodon is a bit weird; all the servers are overloaded and everyone is talking about twitter. But in a few months I think it will go back to being a nice social network.
I'm always a bit amused at these kinds of posts, as if twitter has to fail for Mastodon to be successful. For a lot of people Mastodon is already good, and has been for some years.
I have been on twitter for a long time and I have a lot of good people that I like to follow. And I imagine a good portion of them are also looking for options. No one wants to be on a platform where the CEO cannot tell the difference between truth and lies.
The fact that he wants to sell the blue check mark is a good indication of how much he does not know about what he bought. It is a horrible plan and will generate so little revenue. He is a rich idiot.
I went on mastodon several months ago and the big servers for topics i was interested (They were non-political, technical topics) in had racism in the rules. The one i remember was that calling for the death of all white people is explicitly allowed. Might as well just stay on twitter if that's the standard being set there.
The ergonomics of the fediverse just aren't fleshed out yet. Why do I need to join a server? What advantages/features do I get?
At least with email, I get clear understanding of what I'm signing up for with individual email hosts, like spam filters, privacy, inbox size, attachments, app compatibilities, etc...
Joining a server is fine. The friction between servers is not (why is this thread not showing every response from the whole fediverse, why is it so hard to browse what people said, jumping through different instances? Why are there two different UIs for viewing a message and only one of them uses your home instance etc)
Is there a way with Mastodon to have an account on a hosted server but use an ID from a domain you control? Like if I wanted to have my ID be @me@social.apitman.com but pay for an account on another server rather than have my own.
Seems like it should be possible with Let's Encrypt.
Some third-party fediverse hosts allow you to point your own custom (sub)domain at the instance they operate for you; you can also just set up your own instance.
Not sure what Let's Encrypt would have to do with this, though.
I am on a smaller server but I'm seeing delays from the big servers, yeah. I'm trying to advocate for people to find smaller servers (e.g. < 10k users) but it's something that really needs improving in the UX (that is, encouraging people to use smaller servers instead of joining one big server. I try to recommend https://fediverse.party or https://joinfediverse.com).
As with sibling, it's possible but it hasn't happened in any way that bothers me. Seems like it's just CAP theory in action. I don't think consistency is the corner of that triangle to optimize for in this case.
Coincidentally as I was trying to reply to you HN gave me:
> We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!
I kind of miss the fail whale. I don't need every service to have 100% uptime. HN going down for an hour or two every day would probably boost productivity. :)
I still don't see how would you make people pay because as it stands most, if not all, big servers are purely run on donations. And as I was looking around the software itself doesn't support ads or promoted posts.
I liked the idea of Mastodon but if it ever gets big (which is also a interesting considering 6 years in the biggest server still doesn't have 1m users [0]) then I can't see people paying for it, just like how most people don't pay for Twitter, Discord, or reddit or for email to give a federated example.
I want mastodon to succeed but the deal breaker for me is that the conversation threading is basically non existent. It's worse than twitter, which is itself a total dumpsterfire if more than 2 people start commenting on anything.
FYI, there are at least two other cases of "Mastadon" in the article rather than "Mastodon", although the link is obviously the most important! I'd also like to note that having a difficult-to-spell name is not going to help improve take up of Mastodon.
ActivityPub is the protocol Mastodon implements as stated in the article.
You can run your own instance or pay someone to host an instance for you that you otherwise have full control over. You can pick exactly how much or little of your stack you want to own from the code to the followers.
The README for that repo discusses Mastodon/ActivityPub:
>The problem with Mastodon and similar programs
>User identities are attached to domain names controlled by third-parties;
>Server owners can ban you, just like Twitter;
>Migration between servers is an afterthought and can only be accomplished if servers cooperate.
>It doesn't work in an adversarial environment (all followers are lost);
>There are no clear incentives to run servers, therefore they tend to be run by enthusiasts and people who want to have their name attached to a cool domain. Then, users are subject to the despotism of a single person, which is often worse than that of a big company like Twitter, and they can't migrate out;
>Since servers tend to be run amateurishly, they are often abandoned after a while — which is effectively the same as banning everybody;
>It doesn't make sense to have a ton of servers if updates from every server will have to be painfully pushed (and saved!) to a ton of other servers. This point is exacerbated by the fact that servers tend to exist in huge numbers, therefore more data has to be passed to more places more often;
> Then, users are subject to the despotism of a single person
Isn't this basically why people are fleeing twitter?
>Since servers tend to be run amateurishly, they are often abandoned after a while — which is effectively the same as banning everybody;
As an example, the admin of mastodon.technology recently closed the server due to personal reasons. He gave everyone a month to migrate. The process was pretty smooth for me.
> It doesn't make sense to have a ton of servers if updates from every server will have to be painfully pushed (and saved!) to a ton of other servers.
Not all data is sent, this is why not every post ends up in the federated timeline.
Yes, if everybody would run their own instance, that would make it decentralized. But that is not going to happen. We need a protocol that allows ownership of your social graph without having to host your own server.
Your original post said you wanted a protocol, not a decentralized protocol.
Mastodon/ActivityPub have chosen a federated model over a decentralized one. Federated has a lot of usability and scalability benefits over decentralized, but users sacrifice some privacy and ownership abilities. Everyone is free to choose their own tradeoffs.
I generally agree - without solving the underlying issues you end up back centralized on a handful of providers again (except with a shittier experience) sort of like email.
I work on Urbit now[0], but I also think it (or something a lot like it) is the only way out of this that I've seen with a potential path to actually working.
Mostly because it tackles the upstream reasons why federated system fail (spam, distinction between account and server, linux being too hard to administer, keeping things on the same version, etc.)[1][2]
I have been playing with this (you can too by creating a pub/priv keypair at https://astral.ninja or https://branle.netlify.app/) and am impressed with the simplicity (but potential) of the protocol
You also have the options of pleroma, misskey, and a few other options.
I prefer pleroma.
I hold a great dislike for mastadon, though they are all compatible so feel free to do your research for what you are looking for in a software stack. It's hard to move when you establish yourself.
I suspect it's related to the recent news that Elon Musk purchased Twitter (Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/technology/elon-musk-twit...). I think some folks may be curious about alternatives to Twitter given the unknown nature of changes to come.
Twitter has been a left wing extremist echo chamber for years. Ever since it became acceptable to silence and ban anyone and everyone who failed to comply with far left dogma. Now the sky is falling because they fear twitter might bring back something close to free speech. So they're panicking, fluttering around, squawking, etc, seeking another safe space.
The funny part is that if they all migrate to Mastodon, they'll find it's where all the really weird extremists went before them. I mean Mastodon is packed with serious right wing and left wing extremists of every sort, along with probably dangerous p3rv3rts, and various other disgusting individuals such as politicians and reporters.
I mean all you have to do to not get banned is not act like a child and name-call, inflict/wish for violence or threats, and any other illegal things. It seems one political ideology can’t seem to post without those things. Interesting.
The web interface wasn't good (worse than Twitter if you can believe it), the native client I tried wasn't good either, but the worst problem is that following accounts of a different instance was a major pain. In retrospect, I made the mistake of joining the smaller mastodon.online rather than mastodon.social, which they claimed wouldn't make a difference, but it did.
I couldn't just follow someone on another instance from their profile page, because their profile page is on a different server from mine. It wanted me to copy a URL, paste it into a search field, find the account, and then follow, which is ridiculous and tiresome.
The onboarding for new users on Mastodon seems terrible in every way.
(I also couldn't disable "boosts" in my timeline, which is something I could do on Twitter.)
I wanted to like Mastodon! But I just didn't, and I didn't feel like enough other people were going to like it either to make it worthwhile to use.