The pessimism of the comments here confuses me. In fact, Mastodon has handled this extraordinarily well, as I see it. I'm very much in the "median Twitter user" bucket: I don't post much, I have a feed of a few hundred accounts that I follow because I want to hear what they have to say, and I browse the feed once or twice on most days to catch up, with occasionally binges during newsworthy events.
And... I've done all that on Mastodon, successfully, over the past few weeks. And it's been Just Fine! No outages, no weirdness. Big chunks of the accounts I'm following have moved over and/or started mirroring their tweets. I see maybe 30% of the volume of "readworthy Toots" that I do on Twitter. It's really extremely usable.
I hasn't replaced Twitter yet for me. But... it certainly could.
Yeah, I run a Mastodon server, registrations are open, and it's never gone down. What I see mostly are people coming over from Twitter and making a go of it. Some bounce, most stay, and some vastly prefer it.
Part of the trick is moving over communities. You don't need the world and its dog. It's working already. It's replaced Twitter for me, and then some.
The pessimism here on HN is bizarre! Isn't this what so many people wanted?
Remember how pessimistic they were about Reddit? And some other successful startups? Someone made a full list of the predictions that were completely off once... No idea how to find that but it's out there.
HN has become The Establishment, it skews older, and thus is extremely skeptical of any change to the comfortable status quo. It's of course supremely ironic in a community that (originally) represented the Silicon Valley startup culture of Disrupt Everything.
So true. SV-types have been so conditioned to look for the monetization angle and the fediverse has been designed and built to be the direct opposite of that. I think a lot of people are so busy looking for the fame and the money that they miss the point.
Sure but that has the caveat that 75% of the staff were recently let go, the owner is an attention-deficit "BREAK THINGS AND BREAK FAST" lunatic whiplashing back and forth over policy changes and bans, and as such, people using the Fediverse have a certain tolerance for glitchiness because it's better than the alternative right now.
How could it replace Twitter? Even the Mastodon devotees admit it can't scale to that level and the sign-up process will turn off most users before they even get started.
If you want to give somebody your handle, you say "@elonmusk," instead of saying "@elonmusk@mast.don.vanity.tld".
(I didn't think Horseshoe Theory would bring back bangpaths, but here we are.)
Personally I believe a big central silo for so-called public discussions is a terrible idea, but I do understand there is some value to it. However, there will always be a problem with this sort of thing because a very large number of people are morons and/or scolds, and they seem to have a lot of free time.
Do they? I regularly have people think I work at their company when I tell them my email is <theircompanyname>@<mydomain.tld>. People try an add a ".com" to my 5 letter gTLD, and try and add a ".au" to any "@gmail.com" address.
Normal people struggle pretty hard with email. Or at least a fairly significant portion of them. Giving them something that looks like an email, doesn't work as one, and includes an additional @ sounds like a tech support nightmare.
They're not bang paths, but rather the standard user@host of email. Imagine the absurdity of arguing "if you want to give someone your screenname, you just say SteveCase instead of having to say stevecase@example.com"
What I don't get is why all of these services with the similar format have to adopt their own quirky address formatting, rather than piggybacking on the same format as email. I should be able to just tell people that I'm "someone@example.org", and have that work for email/matrix/mastondon/etc (and be autodiscovered!) with the appropriate hosting setup.
You'd need to set up your domain of example.org to have some form of SRV or TXT record to say "example.org" points to "mastodon.social", or even records per user if you wanted granularity.
You could also use .well-known or other domain verification/pointer methods. However if I'm joe@gmail.com, how does another user on mastodon know how to contact me? Where is my home server?
Someone could maintain a centralised lookup DB with auth to show you own the address (and I believe Matrix allows for that optionally), however isn't that the opposite of what the fediverse is meant to be?
It only looks difficult because the custom has not been created for advanced users, to then trickle down into functionality for basic users.
If you own a domain, you or your registrar configures the appropriate A/SRV/TXTs to point services at your chosen service provider, just like is already done. If you use something like Gmail, then you're looking at Google to run a Mastodon server or at least a stub redirection server.
On the other hand, your per-server handles can be much shorter. For example, @tim@apple.com vs @TimCook. This also comes with built-in verification; @TimCook@freerobux.com is probably fake.
A lot of things. Whether they are good or bad things is another question.
For now, Twitter scales better. There's no such thing as an instance, a slow instance, or registration simply being closed.
Twitter preserves content. Yes, I know it's currently debatable, but in general it does. On Mastodon, any instance can go the way of the dodo, and this regularly happens. Further, it's standard policy to wipe out all media attached to your toots. I think this point is a big deal. Your content simply isn't safe on Mastodon.
Mastodon has poor on-boarding. You need to pick an instance which a normie doesn't understand. Further, it has no (good) algorithms for recommended content, followers, finding people you already know. You have to bolt and stitch things together. This too is a massive issue in the age of Tiktok, where even the effort of lifting a finger is too much. I think organically building up your feed is actually great, but you have to understand that the HN audience is not the same as the masses.
Mastodon has no consistent moderation. Yes, you could argue neither has Twitter, but it's still consistent-enough compared to Mastodon, where you're at the helm of whichever volunteer runs the instance. Not necessarily an issue for middle-of-the-road conversations, but still a difference.
Lastly, and this is perhaps the most twisted point: Mastodon isn't designed for drama. Twitter is hyper optimized for it. It's quite the culture shock for some.
> Twitter preserves content. Yes, I know it's currently debatable, but in general it does. On Mastodon, any instance can go the way of the dodo, and this regularly happens.
it's super debatable. i take it most of your Twitter experience is through the website/app, rather than following links posted in chats/elsewhere.
i run a Pleroma server. anything from anyone i follow by default gets replicated locally. if/when those servers go offline, accounts get suspended, etc: the content is still viewable to me.
> Mastodon has poor on-boarding.
Twitter has poor on-boarding. post something as a new user? nobody will ever see it. on Mastodon? any instance < 1k users will have a decent chunk browsing the local timeline and you'll get a few interactions. and a lot of instance admins will "boost" first-time posters specifically to help them with onboarding.
in general though, yes: growing any social circle takes time: in person, or online. there's no real way to speedrun that.
> Lastly, and this is perhaps the most twisted point: Mastodon isn't designed for drama.
at this point it's clear you're playing the "shoot down the new tech" angle, rather than honestly evaluating the two on equal footing.
I feel like you give too little credit to the "normies". My 92 year-old grandmother figured out how to join plenty of forums for her birdwatching and knitting and whatnot hobbies (classic phpBB style things). Choosing an instance is no more complicated than that, but you get the added bonus of being able to interact with the other forums, too.
I do a lot of tech support for the elderly in my family and they don't grasp concepts a hundred times simpler than a server/instance, and they're in their 70s. It's not an age thing, it's an education thing. The vast majority of the world is lowly educated.
Besides tech skills, the additional issue is that some people are entitled. They reject any service that adds friction, since they're used to zero friction. The Tiktok effect.
I'm a server admin; I think there's merit to this thought. There is an initial hump.
We don't want to dump users randomly into a small server because the community aspect is much stronger there. Thus, we should dump them into a big server -- perhaps a randomly selected one, from a list of general-purpose trusted servers (ideally democratically selected, but for now JoinMastodon.org seems to be fine).
Then, encourage people to move to smaller instances, and make it easier to do so. It's currently too hard. I moved because I was envious of smaller server's interesting public timelines which catered more to my interests.
Last I checked, Twitter required SMS phone number verification for all new accounts. That takes a lot longer than 3 seconds, not to mention the privacy invasion.
In theory, it doesn't. But actually, if I try to make an account without a phone number, it will be immediately flagged as "suspicious" and demand phone number confirmation to be unlocked.
People will still say the same thing at 80 million accounts that they say at 8. It's easy to be reflexively pessimistic. It's hard to try and see the potential, or even admit the last thousand predictions of doom all the way back to when Mastodon was one server were wrong.
It seems the Mastodon ecosystem has serious problems scaling.
Most of the servers are closed to registrations, and we are just talking about a couple million new users over 2 months. What if 100 mil users want to move?
Are we going to relive the Twitter history, which crashed every time Justin Bieber tweeted?
I've tried telling people before that the Fediverse doesn't scale, that decentralized solutions where nobody is paying for anything only work for flashcrowds (i.e. torrents), and ultimately this is going nowhere... but nobody wants to hear it. Everyone is sure that "torrents work, so this will work", neverminding the fact that the entire peer-to-peer ecosystem only works as long as there are people to seed, seeding costs money, and there's plenty of content out there with zero seeders. You'd think that would clue people in that this isn't going to work, but there it is. Hell, you'd think the history of Usenet and FidoNet would've given people a clue, but nobody wants to hear that either.
If you're not willing to pay for the services you require... you're going to have a bad time. That is the ultimate lesson of the Fediverse.
I will join you in your unpopular opinion. People have become so entitled that they can't appreciate the value they have in their hands today.
Services like Twitter, Insta, FB, the like are in many ways incredible. We've forgotten all about that, but let's explore...
They're pretty much always available. They scale endlessly without you noticing. They are fast. They have apps on every touch point. They preserve your content pretty much forever, and this content exponentially grows. They have armies of people as well as advanced AI to filter out the most horrible of human depravities, so that you don't get to see it.
And for all of this, you don't pay a single penny. Yes, you'll get a few ads. You can even block those. An incredible amount of value offered, for near-zero costs.
They do, but that's kind of my point. Libraries full of articles have been written about the negative aspects of these services. Many perfectly accurate, no disagreement here.
But think about it. We have networks in which we can connect to any other connected human being. Post near-unlimited amounts of content which is reliably preserved. We have well functioning-apps and reliable services, and relatively clean content. For the price of: 0$, and ads.
What I'm getting at is that all this stuff that we take for granted, isn't a given or free when you scale Mastodon. It costs real money to run instances which hampers growth and sustainability. There's a steep human costs to moderation.
All those systems were built and designed during a time where free money via cheap credit was available to fund growth at all costs to become the dominant market player. That money is fading with the Fed rate increases and is looking like it may stay that way for a long time. What this means for tech is more paid everything. Expect most of the free services to disappear. Twitter, Elon or not was going to have to make major cuts to stay afloat.
> And for all of this, you don't pay a single penny. Yes, you'll get a few ads. You can even block those. An incredible amount of value offered, for near-zero costs.
Interesting how you think that the only costs could be financial.
Also, the presence of ads is only tangentially related to impact on privacy (yes, another huge cost).
That's one way of looking at it, too much like explaining the wonder of efficiency that is the gasoline supply chain without mentioning CO2 though. Kinda changes the 'incredible amount of value offered' for me.
Two observations: (1) maybe it doesn't need to scale for people to ultimately have a much better experience and (2) bottlenecks tend to be identified and resolved up to the limit of the scaling laws and hardware improvements, bandwidth cost reduction and storage cost reduction tend to over time make the impossible thing from yesterday feasible today.
Keep in mind that Torrents tend to be much larger than your average Tweet/Toot/Whatever and that the interconnects between the servers need to transport only those messages for which there are subscribers, something that could be optimized for (you really only need to transport each message once per sender if there are subscribers, not once per subscriber).
Being based around a protocol rather than a single piece of software, it will likely end up that servers intended to grow large will run different software than servers intended to stay small.
That could well happen, a bit like the difference between say 'gmail' and your own private mail server. The big trick will then be to stop it from becoming siloed again.
I expect very large servers will be commercially operated and running bespoke software. When Tumblr adds ActivityPub support, it will be the largest Fediverse instance by far.
> (1) maybe it doesn't need to scale for people to ultimately have a much better experience
Big, heavy doubt. This Twitter debacle has generated ridiculous, crazy amounts of drama and emoting, the likes I haven't seen on the net in ... a while. This kind of emoting and drama stirring only works when the pot is large. A storm in a small teapot really isn't much. It reminds me of the high drama that used to happen on large IRC channels run by teens in the early '00s, where you'd wake up and some portion of the server got muted or banned for some completely opaque but intensely personal reason. (I was one of the teens so I'm not implying like I was much better than the rest of them lol.)
I'm in 20-something small Matrix rooms/spaces and Discord guilds and none of them are nearly this dramatic. The kind of folks that seek engagement on Twitter IMO are in it for the high drama that you can only get on a large social platform. The folks that stay on the Fediverse are looking for something entirely different. I'm hopeful that some folks try the Fediverse and realize they didn't need Twitter at all (not in some sense of Twitter anger, but more that it's good for folks who want to socialize in smaller spaces be aware that it's very possible to do that on the net right now.)
FWIW If you're trying to build a small community and afraid of scaling issues, I still think hopping onto Matrix or Discord (preferably in that order) is a better idea. Synapse might be heavyweight but it's still lighter than running Mastodon, and if your community doesn't want to federate, you can run the much lighter Dendrite (or even lighter Conduit which is a bit more raw.) There's a large ecosystem of clients on all the big platforms for Matrix. Discord being a centralized, closed system has all of these problems solved as well.
That's a good observation, a federated, non-commercial messaging platform has a different tech footprint than one that needs to be monetized to the max to satisfy a bunch of shareholder and generate quarterly earning reports.
Plus, it's written in Rails. [0] I love Rails but they could switch to something else and tweak it to the extreme. There were very popular sites in the past (i.e. Slashdot) that didn't have many servers and were extremely performance tuned.
> that decentralized solutions where nobody is paying for anything only work for flashcrowds (i.e. torrents), and ultimately this is going nowhere... but nobody wants to hear it.
Fwiw, speak for.. yourself? /shrug
I pay for my instance. So do many. Because it's on Patreon and fully funded right now. Yea it's small, around 16k users, but we pay because we enjoy it. Also it's ridiculously cheap to contribute, which helps.
1. The fediverse doesn't necessarily need to scale to 100 million or more people, and if it were to hypothetically hit a hard limit at 10 million, that would still be fine. Anecdotally, many people are reporting similar levels of engagement--and more positive engagement--with even a small percentage of their twitter audience.
2. Usenet failed largely because it was overrun with spam. While Fediverse moderation is distributed and therefore inefficient, it's still done, so spam doesn't seem likely to overrun anything. In theory, each server moderator moderates their own server, and any servers that don't end up blocked.
3. At least at this point in time, people seem to be willing to pay for their own servers. Many servers are running patreon accounts or similar, and most I'm aware of are running a surplus of funds. Of course, that might not always be true. Smaller server are very cheap to run.
4. I wouldn't think of torrents as an example, but rather the web itself. So so so many individual websites are out there being paid for out of pocket, and nobody seems to be worried about them all failing at once.
Regarding 1), I'm sorry but that makes no sense. Barack Obama has more than 100 million followers on Twitter. So no, a hard limit of 10 million users makes no sense for any messaging service that intends to connect people across the world. That would be a showstopper if there ever were one.
Would you say the same thing about e-mail, that it "would still be fine" if it only ever scaled to 10 million people?
The world, it turns out, contains more than just hammers.
The fediverse, it turns out, isn't primarily a messaging service.
So yes, if you define X as "a messaging service that intends to connect people across the world," then X must support as many people as possible. But if you don't define X that way, then not supporting 100 million people isn't such a big deal. Millions of people are already happily on fediverse servers despite the lack of any current or former presidents there.
People who want to follow whatever Obama wants to say can do so in any number of ways. The Fediverse might be one of those ways, or not, and it wouldn't really detract from the Fediverse if it weren't.
I mean, I see stuff from the most recent former president all the time, and he's on neither twitter nor the fediverse.
If Mastodon isn't "a messaging service that intends to connect people across the world", then I can't even imagine what it's supposed to be. Because that is exactly what it is.
And if it somehow hit a limit at 10 million total users, then it would be a complete failure. And to say that "it wouldn't really detract from the Fediverse" if you couldn't follow popular people because some limit were hit, you couldn't be more wrong. It would detract from it entirely and totally. It would defeat the entire purpose. And just because you don't want to follow popular people doesn't mean other people don't.
Precisely because the entire point of federation is that you're not stuck with separate forums, each on their own server, that don't talk to each other. The entire point is that they communicate in order to connect as many people across the world as users desire.
Again, how is this any different from if e-mail were capped at 10 million users total? Since you didn't answer the question.
I think you're missing the point of a social network.
Barack Obama is not social on Twitter. You can't talk to him. You can't have a conversation. Look at his Twitter feed: when's the last time he's replied to anyone? He issues mini press releases, that's all.
You can't email Barack Obama either, by the way. I mean, you can try, but good luck with that.
You talk about a messaging service, but it's entirely one-way messaging between famous people and non-famous people.
Mastodon users aren't looking to follow famous people and be passive recipients of press releases from famous people. They're looking to have conversations with each other. In this respect, Obama is irrelevant.
You're missing the point that Obama was just an example, to use the most followed person on Twitter.
There are tons of people on Twitter with over 10 million followers who interact with Twitter a ton. They're very "social".
If a social network can't handle people who are popular, then that's a real problem. And remember, people's accounts can start unpopular, and then they gain millions of followers over years. So what do you do, boot them off for the sin of saying things lots of people want to listen to and interact with?
> There are tons of people on Twitter with over 10 million followers who interact with Twitter a ton.
They certainly don't interact with 10 million people. That's impossible. They only interact with a tiny subset of their followers.
> If a social network can't handle people who are popular, then that's a real problem. And remember, people's accounts can start unpopular, and then they gain millions of followers over years.
I disagree. The most popular person I followed on Twitter had 300K followers and had been on Twitter since 2006. It's really not a big deal if there are no celebrities. The celebrities can post wherever else on the web they like. Don't need them. Let them continue on Twitter, whatever. Not a problem.
I've spent literally decades on the internet, on countless forums, never interacting with celebrities. It's fine. It's great!
This isn't about "celebrities" (a word I never used), it's about popular people all around, like authors, journalists, and so on.
And sure nobody is personally replying to all of their 10 million+ followers, but those 10 million+ followers do want to follow! And popular figures absolutely interact with and reply to tons of their followers quite frequently, that's the whole point.
Frankly, nobody cares if you "don't need" anybody popular. But to argue that a place like Mastodon should make it impossible for anybody to be popular, is ludicrous. If Mastodon wanted to stay tiny for people like you, separated into little popular-people-not-supported bubbles with a some hard max limit on followers, then why would it even have been built on federation in the first place...?
The idea that an author with only a few followers could have a best-selling book, and then at some point enthusiastic readers try to follow them only to get "error: max follow limit reached", would be a total and utter failure. A bug, not a feature.
> This isn't about "celebrities" (a word I never used), it's about popular people all around, like authors, journalists, and so on.
I don't want to quibble over terms. Celebrities, popular people, whatever you want to call them.
> And popular figures absolutely interact with and reply to tons of their followers quite frequently, that's the whole point.
And popular people have plenty of places where they can do that. But why does everyplace have to be amenable to people with 10+ million followers?
> But to argue that a place like Mastodon should make it impossible for anybody to be popular, is ludicrous.
That's a straw man. It's simply a question of whether it's technically/financially feasible to scale to that level. And there's no reason why it has to be. I don't see why it needs to be designed around the needs of super popular people.
> The idea that an author with only a few followers could have a best-selling book, and then at some point enthusiastic readers try to follow them
It's possible for a person to outgrow a place. That doesn't mean there was anything wrong with the original place. Popular people have different needs than non-popular people, but that doesn't mean we have to cater to popular people as a prime directive.
I find it ludicrous that every social space on the web would have to make itself accessible to celebrities (my word), as if it were a legal requirement like making it accessible to the disabled. Celebrities are not a protected class. ;-)
The sites that cater to celebrities are supported by advertising. They need all the eyeballs brought by celebrities. Mastodon does not have advertising. It doesn't have the same incentives. That's not a flaw, it's just a different set of choices and priorities.
> And popular people have plenty of places where they can do that. But why does everyplace have to be amenable to people with 10+ million followers?
This is where you're wrong. Twitter is the only place they can do that right now, where the audience is for that type of content. And people are positioning Mastodon as a better alternative to Twitter. So Mastodon needs to be amenable to people with 10+ million followers. That's just logic. Otherwise, people wouldn't be actively encouraging Twitter users to switch to Mastodon the way they are.
If you want a product that won't support popular accounts then that's fine, but that's clearly something different from Mastodon and the Fediverse then. Really, that's just what regular forums are for, and always have been. But Mastodon is not a forum.
> Twitter is the only place they can do that right now, where the audience is for that type of content.
Facebook? Instagram?
> And people are positioning Mastodon as a better alternative to Twitter.
People are positioning Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter that is not and cannot be controlled by Elon Musk. He is the reason people are leaving. So the last thing that Mastodon needs is to be amenable to people like Elon Musk.
Twitter gives people who want to micro-publish to many millions of people very easily a place to do that. Of course, since Twitter stopped providing simple reverse-chronological feeds, it's unclear how many people would actually ever see a given post in their timeline as it was posted, rather than quote-tweets or external links directly to the tweet web page, but point taken. It is possible--although by no means certain--that the fediverse is incapable of handling that particular use case.
You asked about email, I'll counter with actual message services. For reasons clear only to the people involved, I have contacts I can only reach via Signal, or via WhatsApp, or via Telegram, or via WeChat, or via Discord, or via Slack, and so on. How do I cope with this? I just do. Similarly, if I had to visit eight different web pages to track my favorite super-popular people, I just would. Or I'd do what I actually do, and follow almost none of them, instead letting people who are terminally online quote and link to the ones worth knowing about.
If ActivityPub filled up, and couldn't take on any more users, then I would first expect technical solutions like a sharp rise in relay servers, which combine the output of many servers into one outbox to be polled. After that, assuming there was some sort of hard limit that couldn't be overcome that way, I would expect that I would need to create a new account on some other ActivityPub-like network, or even a separate unfederated network also running ActivityPub. My chosen client (Mastonaut) can already support multiple ActivityPub accounts on different servers, so my experience would likely remain the same.
You initially suggested that the Fediverse can't scale. It's worth noting that Twitter itself fell apart long before it reached anything like today's mastodon numbers, and the "Fail Whale" was a constant companion in 2008, when Twitter had only one million users, 200k of which were active per week[0]. So already ActivityPub is scaling better across the network than Twitter itself once did all by itself. Maybe Mastodon (Ruby on Rails) will fade over time, replaced by something written in a more efficient language (like Twitter was). Maybe ActivityPub itself will be converted to use thrift or grpc or similar. Maybe ActivityPub can support 100 million users just fine. It seems to have handled going from 300K monthly active users to 2.5 million monthly active users without trouble[1].
The total Fediverse seems to have more than 8 million total users now. I guess we might find out.
But people do pay for it and set up their own instances, or pool their resources and support larger instances - and maybe that's better than having our attention monetized by opaque algorithms 'for free'.
It will be interesting to see what happens when larger commercial services like Tumblr and Flickr enter this space. There's a good opportunity for startups to experiment with social apps and sites that would have previously struggled to build a large enough network to be useful; support ActivityPub and you have a network.
Federated systems are more resilient, which is the half of the trade-off you leave out. Also, “scale” is too vague a term in this context. It could mean efficiency or it could mean uptime. These are very different, and federated systems will have higher “uptime” in the sense that one instance crashing won’t cause all to crash. However, it will be less efficient, but there are huge efficiency gains to be had with the current design.
Twitter only works because it is centralized. The fediverse works less and less well as the number of federated instances increase. It has anti-scaling properties. And, on the non-technical side, it has a disorganized anonymous set of moderators you've never met or ever heard of, with no particular guiding philosophy or rules, and these guys have total access to your profile and they can do anything they want.
On the technical side, the whole thing is lossy as hell. If I view a foreign profile on my instance it shows a handful of posts and then says that "older posts" aren't shown from other instances. Then if I go to the other instance there are hundreds of posts that aren't older, they were just missing on my instance. None of it really works or makes any sense.
It's a push-based protocol. If somebody on your server follows the account, its posts will be on your server, but they can also be there through boosts, which leads to a seemingly random handful being populated.
A mechanism to backfill posts would definitely be a good addition.
Edit: for clarity, ActivityPub provides an outbox from which another server (or anything else that speaks HTTP) can pull posts. Adding a backfill feature to Mastodon would not require any changes to the protocol.
>The fediverse works less and less well as the number of federated instances increase. It has anti-scaling properties.
In some ways, and for some purposes, this is very likely a feature. A good amount of the fediverse wants small healthy communities, not Twitter but federated (i.e. everything going everywhere all the time).
I will absolutely agree that it's sub-par for almost anything happening now, which is a problem. But it's experiencing unprecedented growth - there will be growing pains, just like non-federated things do when they have unprecedented growth.
Every instance has its own moderation policies, and the user has the option of moving to another instance (and keep being able to interact with the fediverse at large) if they clash with the mods or don't think they're doing enough. Instance maintainers are named and contactable if you have issues with them or other users. If you don't trust them with your account, move to an instance that you can.
What can you do if you have issues with the moderation team at Twitter? Honest question-- I've been off Twitter for over a decade and hear about everything there second-hand.
This sword cuts both ways for the fediverse (allowing bad actors to just move to another instance, for example) but on the whole I find it allows for a more people-centric approach to online community.
> And, on the non-technical side, it has a disorganized anonymous set of moderators you've never met or ever heard of, with no particular guiding philosophy or rules, and these guys have total access to your profile and they can do anything they want.
Nobody knows what the hell is going on with MuskBird, but when it was still Twitter there was a two-sided terms of service, under which Twitter offered its users concrete, enumerated benefits. Mastodon instances do not have "terms of service" they have "rules". The "rules" are unilateral in that they bind the user and not the service provider. The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was.
> Mastodon instances do not have "terms of service" they have "rules". The "rules" are unilateral in that they bind the user and not the service provider.
Of course they do. If the instance administrators do not abide by the rules they set, every user has the possibility to jump ship to an instance whose team actually does its job properly. This is undoable on Twitter, which makes me doubt that the overly general statement of
> The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was.
> The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was.
The model does make it difficult for an idiot to take over _the whole thing_ and ruin it, though.
Your position as a user on any given Mastodon instance is worse than it was on pre-Musk Twitter, undoubtedly (post-Musk it just has a CEO ruling by fiat, which I would argue is a worse situation than you have on most Mastodon instances), but it's unclear that your position as a user of Mastodon writ large is.
This is probably the right post to refer everyone to the Mastodon Server Covenant, which does bind the service provider to some level of consistency: https://joinmastodon.org/covenant
When we talk about scale, are we really talking about bottlenecks?
What fascinates me, is that LetsEncrypt has 2 beefy servers and that's it.
Surely, a few million packets of highly compressible text over the pipe isn't that much of an issue? Is it? I've never done it so interested in hearing thoughts.
> If you're not willing to pay for the services you require... you're going to have a bad time.
Agree. I've been using Kagi for a few months now and have been pleasantly surprised I haven't had to revert back to Google once. I resisted for a long time, but Googles results have been going downhill for a whle, and I realised that if I want to use something, somebody has to pay for it, and that somebody should probably be me, the user.
"Unicorn" companies like social media live off investment dollars then usually ads. The former has dried up, only leaving the latter. I'd never pay $8 a month for Twitter, but I also don't care about it. I'd imagine many daily users would.
I've been a part of many communities where the owners have to beg for money for running costs monthly. It's always a struggle, and I don't see Mastodon being any different without compromising their principles.
Agreed. However, if Mastodon instances hosted attached media/images over IPFS, in theory it would lead to a significant decrease in bandwidth that those instances need to transfer themselves, as that media could be distributed p2p between users who have loaded it already.
Thankfully, there already is work being done to implement this kind of functionality, giving instances the option to serve images over IPFS gateways. Further decentralizing Mastodon needs to be a very high priority for it to be sustainable longer term.
We ought to distinguish between Mastodon not scaling with Fediverse doesn't scale. I mean Email seems to be working relatively fine. It seems to all comes down to implementation of the protocol.
While I love writing Ruby (what Mastodon seems to be mostly is build with) it's syntax and cleanliness, it always had an issue with scaling.
Keybase and IPFS seem to show that a P2P fediverse scales, I don't understand why people are trying to make a fidonet/BBS style fediverse where 10s of thousands rely on one person' altruism instead of every peer caching some encrypted data and responding to some queries a few minutes or hours a day.
> I don't understand why people are trying to make a fidonet/BBS style fediverse where 10s of thousands rely on one person' altruism instead of every peer caching [...]
people are doing things like this too. you hear about Mastodon and ActivityPub because it's the easiest to setup, has the widest network, and works "well enough" for the userbase that's grown on it organically over the last decade.
if you're passionate about a particular experimental/p2p design, go seek it out. Secure Scuttlebutt might be up your alley.
I don’t know how those protocols work but it seems a major problem is no one skillful enough is planning for a constant high-pressure streams of data. Devs always assume that posting is event based ordeal that happens in probability over time rather than as a constant flow.
why would they listen if you don't even differentiate between federated and peer to peer solutions? The costs could be made thrivial by sharing in a p2p network.
Some of the new users will have to run new servers.
For example if public officials are moving to Mastodon, I expect the state to run their own servers. It was never a good idea to allow Twitter to be a platform for (semi-)official communication.
Is the problem of scale a) broadcasting the one person that millions of people want to see the tweets of or b) millions of people recieving the tweets of one person?
If the government does not want to put public communication into the hands of tech billionaires again, their second best option after using available software is to build a platform from scratch.
> Really? Email scaled. Internet scaled. Decentralization is scalable.
I don’t see any normal person self-hosting their own email service. Even if they did, good luck with handling spam. It can only viably scale to hundreds of millions with centralization; hence Gmail, Outlook, etc to reduce / limit the spam issue.
Mastodon has the same mistakes as the other federated alternatives and has already proven to be unable to scale more efficiently than Twitter, let alone the ridiculous hurdles to begin using it.
We are talking about scaling to hundreds of millions, not ten thousand or a shy hundred thousand and it falls over on a single moderator’s instance.
> But email didn't fail as a result. Just as you said, email services popped up.
With centralization; hence the spyware, bans and spam prevention which only benefits the big centralized email services like Gmail, Outlook, etc.
Email was meant to be used as a decentralized protocol such that one can operate their own email service; but despite many here claiming to run their own, they gave up and many still won't. Even sending an email to a Gmail and Outlook addresses will just fail their spam filter test.
So it has been a failure for email without centralizated providers.
> Just give it a little time.
A 6 year federated experiment is not early days to see that a worse version of Twitter has already failed.
It's an error to treat the Fediverse as you would treat Twitter, where there is a singular platform in some way external to its users. Fediverse is a mesh network with single-user instances being feasible. If a single node has problems scaling, split it up. If a whole network has problems scaling, add more nodes. Fediverse is not yet at levels where the whole network is congested, either.
This is a nice thought, but reality is always different.
A really popular person might have many millions of followers on tens or hundreds of thousands of nodes.
That person then boosts a post from another server and they have effectively DDOSed that server. All the other nodes will start querying that server about that post or image.
You can say that a single user should not have that many followers, however the root of the issue is that mastodon will have some scaling issues.
Yes, and we're already seeing it e.g. with https://mas.to getting hugged to death because of pg joining it. If anything, it can be treated as a technological problem, solvable e.g. by (theorizing now) splitting a single instance over a series of machines, or a social problem, by (not theorizing anymore) a famous enough person hosting their own instance as already suggested several times on the Fediverse. The Fediverse will eventually establish a concrete way for handling that sort of matters.
> a famous enough person hosting their own instance
So if the likes Obama or Stephen King want to move over to Mastodon their barrier of entry would be to complete this laundry list [1] or find a service that does this for them? Given that they own the instance, they would also need to provide moderation for it.
I don't disagree that there are solutions to the scale problem. What I have trouble seeing are solutions that are viable. That's the thing about a centralized service--you have a company that handles all of this so your users don't have to.
Assuming that Mastodon growth continues, such services will probably emerge (there are already a couple of Mastodon hosting services, but there's probably a market for a "so you're a celebrity who wants a single-user Mastodon instance" service which has yet to be filled).
> Given that they own the instance, they would also need to provide moderation for it.
If it was a single-user instance, that would be fairly trivial :)
I do wonder if the next phase of social media is to encourage people to use a single user instance similar to mastodon.host. It would probably have to offer more than just twitter though e.g peertube, pixelfed etc. Start with a free tier, have it all running on auto scale and then notify people when they start getting popular that they need to scale up and start paying for their instance if they want to grow their audience. Don’t know if it would work or not but it’s an idea.
When you start off an an empty instance, the only thing you see is yourself. There are no trends, there are no posts, and everywhere you click is just you.
You have to start following people for it start populating, but that requires knowing strings to follow. And then you can you see is stuff in your bubble (maybe a feature?).
But it really missing the dopamine response, as after you read the stuff people you follow posted or boosted; there is nothing.
A dedicated person can push through this initial period. But for mass appeal, people will quickly bounce if they feel like no one else is there.
> That person then boosts a post from another server and they have effectively DDOSed that server. All the other nodes will start querying that server about that post or image.
But that's fixable in several ways - local media cache for an instance, the boost including the preview rather than each client fetching it for themselves, etc.
The problem* with ActivityPub is that it's been designed and developed in a bit of user vacuum and it definitely has issues but they can all be worked on. Much like Twitter going from Rails to Scala, etc., to fix their issues.
I suppose I should have been clearer - apologies. I was talking about a cache for previews (which would presumably be folded into the local media cache since it's already there.)
> you still have a thundering herd when a popular person boosts a message
Not if the boost includes the preview - that -should- cut it down significantly (and indeed it has been proposed but is still being bikeshedded by the Mastodon devs because "what if someone sends a fake preview?!?!?!?!")
Yes, this is a real thing that will happen. However, this is no different than a popular website like, say, HN, linking to someone's hack project and giving it the hug of death. This stuff happens, and if any operational element boils down to someone's hobby then you'll see some issues. That doesn't mean Mastodon is inherently flawed any more than web pages being inherently flawed.
What will happen is the same thing that happened to web servers and email servers. Businesses will pop up to run your instance for you.
And who is supposed to do all of that? Without a central organisation doing resource planning, scaling, and paying for all of that, this is never going to run smoothly. 99.99% of users have no interest in running their own instance. Even groups or organisation will eventually get to the point where running and scaling their instance becomes a full-time job. But without any way of monetising that work, or finding sponsors, there is not much incentive to do that.
I think many people are too used to the centralised model and having one org responsible to blame for issues.
You know how we use websites right now? Who's responsible for planning, scaling, and paying for all of that? Users have no interest in running their own "website instance". Right?
And we're already at the point where for big groups running your own requires multiple full time jobs.
Even if things don't work smoothly, it's fine. Most breakage is instance local and temporary. I've been on Twitter with a weekly failwhale and it's been fine too.
If we take the 99.99% as a hard fact that means 1 admin for 10,000 users. Sounds reasonable. Especially, if we consider that most of those will never even post anything according to Twitter behavior.
With respect to monetisation, I hope the fediverse will provide a live sandbox to try all kinds of experiments at eye level: Free, ad-supported, fees, one-time fees, pay-per-toot, pay-per-followed-instance, whatever. Multiply by private, non-profit, and for-profit approaches.
Donating to server admins seems to work for the instances whose growth I'm in/directly observing. And then, running an instance with a few hundred users is not a resource hog.
Email mailing groups figured out a way of scaling despite the same sort of exponential congestion. If anything, Fediverse traffic between larger clusters may eventually ossify around some larger pipes, not unlike the Internet traffic being handled by backbone operators.
Or pay a hosting company to run one for you. At least you get to control your own community and moderation.
Even if you are still subject to the whims of your hosting company, you still retain a fair amount of autonomy unless you are running a community like Kiwifarms (in which case I find it hard to be sympathetic anyway), or your hosting company happens to be located in a jurisdiction with enforced censorship laws.
Exactly. The average person is dying to pay to have the privilege of an extra job moderating and administrating their own social feed! This is a bulletproof plan that really understands consumer behavior.
You are aware that an entire generation of Internet forums operated (and still operate) this way, right?
Big forums had big hosting costs and required donations from members, had issues with spam, had to source volunteer moderators from the community, etc., just like big Mastodon instances today.
Small forums had few of those issues because the scale was smaller. The problem was not that nobody wanted to run a small forum: it's actually kind of fun to be a forum admin for your friends, and only one person in the group actually needs to be the admin. The problem was that nobody wanted to be on a small forum because it was small.
Now you can have it both ways: a small instance with trivial running cost and moderation demands, but all the benefits of being on a huge forum with thousands of concurrent users.
See also: Discord servers. Administering a Mastodon instance that you pay someone to host is not much more difficult than administering a Discord server. If people found it difficult to moderate a Discord server, why would so many friend groups, gamer groups, content creators, sub-Reddits, and software projects have their own small Discord servers? The answer is that the cost of moderating a small group of people is really small because small groups are easy to moderate, and the main downside of a small group isn't really relevant when the small group can follow and interact with anyone in the huge federated network.
> You are aware that an entire generation of Internet forums operated (and still operate) this way, right?
And yet many of them died or, better put, most of the new forums were never born nowadays because communities moved to centralized, managed solutions (Facebook, Telegram, Discord, Slack etc)
I mostly attributed this at the time to UI/UX improvement in the centralized platforms, and not needing so many different logins for different communities.
what's interesting about Reddit is that moderation is (in theory) decentralized and handled independently by each sub. Only account creation and discovery are centralized, from the perspective of an average user experience. The whole point of a federated system is that you get the best of both worlds: global discovery and one single account/login for all communities, but you retain per-community moderation.
I was 'web socialized' in the 90's. IRC, web forums, and so on. Before that we had BBS. This is nothing new. And nothing prevents a major player to enter the fediverse btw.
You're providing a real service to your friends - a mastodon server. It takes real time, real skill and real money (buying hardware or renting a vps) to do this. Your friends should compensate you and it's fair to ask them to do so.
How you do this is up to you.
I host a gameserver for my friends. This is a really nice bit of hardware in a datacenter. It costs me $600 a year directly and maybe 4-6 hours a month. I have about 8 folks who play on it with regularity.
For my friend group, we "compensate" via trading food, either cooking for each other or catching dinner out. That works well for my friend group and I perceive this as fair.
Your friend group may be different. You may literally ask them to throw in $5 a month or maybe you trade services (your barber friend gives you a free haircut on occasion, whatever).
There isn't a magic equation of what is fair or right for your circumstance.. and it's ok to experiment. Part of why the fediverse is good is that these experiments can be run.
Then it's not really a good faith reply to their point is it?
The problem presented wasn't how you pay, it's the fact that you pay and take on moderation duties and curation.
Getting reimbursed by friends doesn't change that, and if anything it convolutes the latter part of the problem by leaving the door open to some awkward dynamics.
A centralized group chat that needs funding to stay alive sounds like a pretty awful product.
I don't think you have any reply to the topic being discussed.
The point is that people went from an experience where they didn't take money out of their pocket every month unless they wanted to, and didn't have to curate for others or moderate for others.
I pay for a game server and won't accept a dime from my friends for it not so I can feel like king of some fiefdom, but so we can enjoy a game amongst ourselves.
If moderation is the part of that experience that you're cherishing, it's no wonder you can't relate to the complaints others have.
> The point is that people went from an experience where they didn't take money out of their pocket every month unless they wanted to, and didn't have to curate for others or moderate for others.
That was basically a vivid hallucination. You offshored the mod work to underpaid contractors in foreign offices and paid by selling your focus and privacy. You didn't have to feel guilty because some nice folks in fancy clothes with a big PR department told you it was cool.
Those folks in the fancy suits are realizing it's too hard to make money that way.
You can still chase that bargain. You will see more and more ads. Your privacy will only get more invaded. Eventually you will have to pay.
I mean you're certainly free to paint it as a feature, but Mastodon is getting pushed very heavily by many Mastodon users to Twitter users as a backup (see "movetodon.org", which starts with "Log in with twitter") so I the scaling issues deserve more than the "that's a feature!" I see thrown at every person who brings them up
> Each server in the fediverse should stay relatively small.
Certainly doesn't vibe with the project owners pushing a set of "blessed" servers to every visitor: https://joinmastodon.org/servers
I think this is the biggest reason Mastodon will stay a fringe platform. No one who enjoys it will accept anything of its issues as valid criticism, and if you point out the fact that such a mentality will keep it from getting popular, the reply will be "good! I don't want it to get big!"
Meanwhile the project itself very clearly wants to get popular, and it's clearly being sponsored with the intent that it should become more and more relevant, much to the chagrin of those who were using it before it was cool.
It seems like eventually the cool kids who start to shut out the new kids to stave off an Eternal September, leaving the project in an awkward spot and a steady decline for everyone involved as the old guard shifts energy to building taller and taller fences around their respective echo chambers. (Now what was that about registrations again?)
Serious question: if a community is so small as to be just your friends, why not start a Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord group? Free, fully managed, content preserved, well established.
It's because most of the servers are not nearly on the level of setup that a normal large-scale social network would probably need...which in turn is also because a lot of them have been run by hobbyists and the like, which in turn is also because no one ever needed to scale it this high before.
This is like saying email can't scale. Of course Mastodon can scale, especially for those businesses willing to do it as a service. It's an entirely new, legitimate territory.
A couple of things:
* It's mostly hobbyists running their instances, some literally in their basement.
* Most scaling glitches have usually been addressed within a few days. The comparison to early-day Twitter is fair, maybe people have literally not expected such a fast scaling route.
* I don't think anyone in their wildest fever-dreams expected Elon Musk to burn down Twitter this fast, thus causing a mass-migration.
it’s not built to scale as a feature. it won’t be the twitter replacement but some people might stay once they understand the benefits of small niche communities
But what about tracking and ads? Would be difficult to track users that are in a different instance, with no way of showing ads to them - not sure twitter could survive without that.
i remember. but was google "successful" with that approach? XMPP is a pretty niche thing, but i can count at least a couple friends who use it on occasion, whereas i haven't heard a single person near me mention gtalk in years.
My biggest gripe is that (afaik) there's no 'view other server's timeline' view-you need to actually go to that server, then back to yours when you want to follow someone. Instances are becoming sort of like meta-hashtags so I hope that gets added eventually.
People aren't great at using them yet. Anyway, the instances bring together a bunch of different topics broader than a single hashtag would collect, like infosec.exchange and sdf for tech stuff.
I don’t understand why someone hasn’t just launched a full blown clone of twitter yet. The decentralized stuff doesn’t matter to basically all of the population.
Twitter is not an advanced product concept. A competent team can clone it quickly. Make it easy to migrate your past tweets over, maybe some way to migrate your connections, boom.
The value of Twitter is in the network of people who use it, not the software or infrastructure that runs it. No matter how easy it was to migrate, nobody would do it unless everybody did it.
Something like you're describing would have a better chance of succeeding given an existing network to talk to. If you want to make a Twitter clone with good import tools, it's more likely to succeed if it speaks ActivityPub and networks with Mastodon. There's probably a userbase for a product like that (but not necessarily a business model).
I agree that the thing preventing people for years from making their own Twitter Clone was never the technical hurdle of replicating twitter's microblogging platform, but the network effect that Twitter had. Twitter at its source is a simple CRUD system. Yes it encounters exciting complications at scale to manage that amount of data, but its still a CRUD application.
However, if there ever were a time when the network effect could shift enough to "cross the chasm" to public adoption, it is now (and quite literally TODAY).
People are looking for an alternative. Mastadon is the closest to achieving it. There are plenty of things I don't like about Mastadon, but unfortunately I think thats what we have. I do believe that the time is right for a clone to exist and actually gain significant adoption. As more and more prominent "influencers" (i hate that term, but its the reality) move off of Twitter and onto Mastadon, the masses will move where the influencers are. Remember that something like 95% of social media users are "lurkers". They don't create content, they only consume it. So they will move to where the creators are and if their creators are on Mastadon, then the masses will move over there.
Note: "Crossing the Chasm" is a marketing term that refers to the inflection point where early adopters and mass minority have joined a platform, and then majority mass follows. For example, when your parents started joining Facebook, that was Facebook "crossing the chasm".
Would be interesting if the top, say 20-100, most followed all banded together and left to a clone that they owned. It would make enough chatter to create a wave. Not sure how it would end or if they could run it profitably, but would be interesting to see that happen is all (IMO as a non-twitter user).
The top 20 or 100 would be pretty irrelevant to most Twitter users I would think. Not sure I followed any of them personally. Twitter is a patchwork of communities, many if which don’t really overlap. Which is why it can lose users to Mastodon bit by bit, rather than just collapsing.
> why someone hasn’t just launched a full blown clone of twitter yet.
They did? Mastodon is basically a full-blown clone of Twitter by a competent team.
Yes, it's also open-source and decentralized. But you can mostly ignore that most of the time, and 99% of users do so. (in much the same way that iPhones are decentralized across cell carriers, but that mostly doesn't matter to regular folks).
> Make it easy to migrate your past tweets over, maybe some way to migrate your connections, boom.
They also did this. When you need to migrate all your tweets and connections over, suddenly your really thankful Mastodon was quietly-decentralized underneath, and makes doing this mostly just a two-click operation.
> But you can mostly ignore that most of the time, and 99% of users do so. (in much the same way that iPhones are decentralized across cell carriers, but that mostly doesn't matter to regular folks).
That wasn't the case at least for me.
I couldn't ignore the decentralized part of the deal, because I couldn't register at mastodon.social like how I could with twitter.com. Registrations were disabled (still the same as of today) and I was told to find a server.
I guess most people would give up at that point, though I still gave their server browser a try, and couldn't find anything that looks remotely official on the first page. It seems every Mastodon instance is its own kingdom managed by people I don't know running on arbitrary rules they've set. I could build my kingdom, but of course I won't, since I wasn't interested in the decentralized bit anyway.
tl;dr for now mastodon doesn't offer an easy path to just use the service w/o thinking about its details.
> It seems every Mastodon instance is its own kingdom managed by people I don't know running on arbitrary rules they've set.
Yep! This is also exactly how e-mail works, and yet everyone manages to get an e-mail account (or ten) with no problems.
> I still gave their server browser a try, and couldn't find anything that looks remotely official on the first page.
"Hello, helpdesk? I can't find the official email server. No, not Hotmail, not Yahoo, not G-mail, not Apple Me. I only want the official email server. Hello?"
> tl;dr for now mastodon doesn't offer an easy path to just use the service w/o thinking about its details.
Sure it does? Pick a free+open provider to register yourself (or ask any of your friends for an invite to their server).
It's no more effort than say, signing up for a cellphone telephone number, and everyone figured out how to do that. Children manage to handle "you have to pick a server first" when they load up Minecraft (each of which has it's own moderators and their own unique rules! -- some are even invite-only!), and the kids seem to get along just fine.
---
I get your point. Being a free, open, decentralized network means there's one extra step to registration -- I agree with your complaint.
But it's literally just one extra step, and it's not even a difficult one. The idea that this makes Mastodon difficult to use because of that, seems completely farfetched -- every other popular network has had a similar step and managed to overcome it with zero issues.
> Yep! This is also exactly how e-mail works, and yet everyone manages to get an e-mail account (or ten) with no problems.
The vast majority of people have their primary address in one of the following ways:
1) Their ISP gave them an email when they signed up (with handhold support)
2) Their work gave them an email when they started (with handhold support)
3) They asked a tech savvy friend who told them to use GMail instead of 1 or 2 (with some support from said tech friend)
4) They signed up for a hotmail account 20 years ago and are still using the same password
You can't just handwave away that picking a server is _hard_ for non tech people, as they don't understand the significance of their choice. Twitter for comparison, is one site with a big "sign up here" button.
The value is the network and it's hard to get a person's entire network to move over at once. You're right that most people don't care about "decentralization", but they really care about not losing access to their account, avoiding hate/bullying, and many other things. A Mastodon type decentralized platform where you join the server that best aligns best with your interests/needs is one way to solve this. More friction though, so not sure on what will win out.
I don't think anyone has launched it because they can see how much difficulty Twitter had turning a profit. There are a number of companies that could launch such a thing (especially now that hiring former-Twitter employees should be as easy as it will ever be), but they also have financial teams capable of modeling whether or not it would be profitable.
The 80% twitter clone that's "not an advanced concept" is fully eclipsed by Mastodon. You're free to host a Mastodon server that federates with no one, and there's your clone. The problem is the remaining 20%, which Mastodon has covered some of, but certainly wouldn't be done "quickly".
They have. Hive, Post News, Cohost, etc. But most people don't care about whether a system is centralised or decentralised, so Mastodon seems to be doing best stats wise.
How does scaling laws of the fediverse differ to scaling laws of email? Hadn’t the success of email already shown that it’s possible to scale decentralized protocols?
It's possible, but there is no advertisements, and most servers are run by volunteers.
Right now, with current tech stack, which isn't most efficient I heard Leo Laporte who runs TWiT Podcast network and ~5000 user https://twit.social server it costs him 380 dollars / month for fully hosted using https://masto.host server.
Sure it can scale, it's not harder than newsletters, but it needs money, I have serious doubts it can scale without advertisements.
It doesn't cost that much when properly configured and on dedicated hardware. My own instance, oc.todon.fr (running since 2017 and with currently ~2500 users), runs on a 5€/month server (HTTP front-end) and less than a quarter of the resources of a 800€ server at home.
> How does scaling laws of the fediverse differ to scaling laws of email? Hadn’t the success of email already shown that it’s possible to scale decentralized protocols?
It's only kinda decentralized now. Email massively re-centralized around gmail and a few other providers.
Movetodon lists all my Twitter follows and their corresponding mastodon handles but the tool doesn’t let me follow them? Clicking the mastod name leads to a as 404 and that’s it? I was hoping to be able to just say ”follow all” or at least do it one by one. Am I not holding it right.
Most of the mastodon ecosystem is semi functional at best right now. They got a small herd of people showing up which means pretty much all the existing capacity is full so stuff is breaking left and right.
Give it a few months and a fraction of the people still interested can probably sign up without issues.
I don’t see any options or ”follow all” at all, just a list of accounts. This is safari on iOS 15. The only two buttons are “Logout” and “Hide followed accounts”
The discussions how a decentralized system like Mastodon won't work reminds me of the early days of networks. People were saying the same thing about the web and the internet and claiming CompuServe and AOL would dominate.
Twitter is like CompuServe and AOL, Mastodon is like the internet. One based on proprietary systems, the other based on open standards like ActivityPub.
History showed that centralization is ultimately extremely fragile.
> History showed that centralization is ultimately extremely fragile.
but how many people today use Discord et al. compared to IRC? I think the centralized-decentralized thing is a cycle, not a one-way logical progression.
My comment is uninformed, but I feel like centralised companies have the R&D resources to create innovation, which communities then steal (in a good way) to make the technology free (as in freedom) for everyone. That's why there's a cycle.
Which is why I believe that once the fediverse has fractured along ideological lines, as it inevitably must, the end result won't look much different from the old internet: big influencers running their own site/blog, with loose connections to ideological allies and a bunch of commenters in orbit.
I mean, arguably that has _already happened_; it's just that the Big Two far-right mastodon instances (Gab and Truth Social) do not federate. Note that Gab actually used to.
IMO, the most likely result is one or more large, heavily connected meshes centered around an ideological middle ground of significantly online people (probably divided by liberal/conservative ideology), sparsely connected to somewhat more fringe instances (maybe a socialist instance that doesn't restrict overt calls to violence, but is still largely ideologically acceptable to the average liberal), and some archipelagos/unfederated instances of even more fringe social groups.
And that's a good thing. Individuals get to choose servers that align with their views on moderation and morality, server moderators only need to deal with occasional maliciousness rather than trying to walk a fine line of tolerance, and your social group isn't at risk of being disrupted by a billionaire moving in and blowing it up.
Mastodon is not and will not ever be a replacement for Twitter.
Twitter's too large and the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu check status over others.
That's why Mastodon won't replace it. Sure, a few small (relative to Twitter) alternative Mastodon instances will pop up, but no real challenger or contender for the throne.
I mean, it depends what you mean by 'replace'. Mastodon is already filling many of the functions that twitter filled for millions of people. Will it be a like-for-like replacement for Twitter? Of course not; I don't think anyone's saying that. But as Twitter crumbles, it's a place for many Twitter users to go which will work for many purposes.
> the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu check status over others.
You're talking about, maybe, on the order of 50,000 people there. To a large extent... who cares? Extremely high follower count people are important to Twitter's _business model_ (or were, when it had one), but arguably not all that important to the _average user_.
I think it depends on what you mean by _celebrities_.
For me, the appeal of Twitter is being able to interact with various communities (such as the legal twitter community). There are people who are fairly popular in that sphere, that I really like being able to see their thoughts on various issues and even ask the occasional question (Popehat, Akiva Cohen, Mike Dunford, Greg Doucette), etc.
Are these people celebrities? Kinda, in their niche, yea. In the broader sense of the word not really.
But all of those people have moved to Mastodon. So, I think that kind of reinforces the point. It's more communities within Twitter that move. That move is relatively sticky. And there are people within that community that are highly connected in that community ("celebrities" within the niche), and when they move it tends to solidify the move of the community.
Yeah, that's another point that I think probably goes in Mastodon's favour. Most of the people who could be loosely classed as celebrities that I follow either are posting to both, or have flat-out moved. But they generally are niche "celebrities", not people with millions of followers.
Yea, I think this is the biggest thing. Most "real" celebrities can still post on Twitter or whatever. If Elon Musk or Lebron James or Barack Obama posts something important, I'll probably see it wherever they decide to post it. They could just yell random things at passersby on the street and I'd probably find out about it if it was interesting enough.
The value of Twitter a lot of the time is less the big name Blue Checks, but the long tail of niche blue checks. I bet a massive amount of people on Twitter have no idea who Paul Graham is, or Popehat, or Marco Arment, or even dril, but they all have some number of people who were mostly on Twitter because of them primarily, so if they and their friends all move to something else, their fans will follow.
In some ways, it's not too different from TV hosts or journalists of note. People will watch John Oliver on whatever TV network he's on. For certain niches, no one cares where they write/speak as long as it's not so insanely paywalled or otherwise cumbersome that it's a problem to follow them to it.
... Eh, I mean that is probably the appeal to _some_ users (though note that you can do that on Mastodon too, of course). But not all, or, I think, most. Twitter is many things to many people (the one I was always surprised by is that some people have Twitter accounts which they use for making consumer complaints and nothing else)...
I think maybe what you're getting at is the people who are celebrities solely _because_ they are big on Twitter/TikTok/Instagram/whatever. I would agree that the Mastodon model doesn't work particularly well for those. I don't see it as an issue for _normal_ celebrities, tho.
But that just seems like _such_ a niche. The majority of people, I'm reasonably sure, do not use Twitter primarily to follow internet celebrities.
That was the promise, but realistically huge accounts were so swamped that your actual chances of having such an interaction turn out to be slim to none. The game was dominated by people who would reply to a celeb's every post, people shilling for crypto, etc.
The entirety of twitter is too large to just lift and shift to mastodon - absolutely correct. There are also slightly different social norms and styles of discovery.
However, communities and professions have already moved and will continue to move.
This isn't about platforms but rather communities - and these things are "sticky". It's hard to get a community to move off a platform, but once it does move, it makes it hard to keep the remaining people as the pull to the new platform becomes stronger and stronger.
> the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu check status over others.
This is not a thing people regularly did? Old-school blue checks were never a status symbol, just a way Twitter used to denote "real" (meaning from-the-author-stated) and "fake" (real-humans-parodying-someone-else) accounts.
The idea that they denoted status was a criticism born from misunderstanding and invented by far-right activists who mostly were never involved in Twitter socially during the first 10 years of it's run, and never really understood Twitter user's culture. 99% of people with "blue checks" were not doing some holier-than-thou dance or whatever. (It's also why none of these people are rushing to pay $8 for this newly-invented blue-as-status symbol thing -- it was never about status, these people are already often rich and famous or at least noteworthy in their field, they don't need some weirdo micro-validation from Twitter.
Only a completely tone-deaf crazy person would pay money for Twitter in an attempt to gain validation or status.
Despite it not being their stated purpose, they absolutely were a bit of a status symbol, though one that waned as more of them were given out of course. People routinely complained (both jokingly and seriously) about not being verified. It's not that rich and famous people needed the tiny bit of bonus (though some of them probably did), but that it was a marker of notability for less famous people. It's kind of like appearing in a crossword clue.
The thing about putting the badge into Twitter Blue is that it makes it not a status symbol: both because it's just generally accessible (so even what little cachet you might agree it previously implied is now gone) and because for many you might see "enthusiastic about Elon Twitter" as an negative signal.
There's a whole separate axis to this where it was clearly easier to get verified as a mainstream journalist than for many other kinds of professions or claims to fame (understandable both just under the basic "verification" goals and for presumably being pretty easy to actually verify as such things go). Much "anti-blue-check" sentiment is just the same familiar fights over the media, simply filtered through Twitter's systems.
Yea, for the folks I know who got blue checks in the sort of post "because you know someone at Twitter" zone, the whole exercise was more people joking or complaining about how random the whole thing was. I remember one time where half of the hosts of a show I follow got verified, but not the others, which was insane since the only possible verification that would be relevant would be that they were, in fact, the hosts of that show.
They're a status symbol, but I don't think almost anyone really cared about outside it of people who didn't have them and felt like they should. I'm not sure I ever saw a sort of "why would I trust you if you don't have a blue check" sentiment.
I hope Mastodon doesn't "replace" twitter (as in becomes like twitter). So far Mastodon is much nicer than twitter so I hope Mastodon stays like it is and is something better than twitter had become.
I think this is where it's going. Particular Mastodon servers will provide certain guarantees to their users and about their users. It's easy to envision a white-glove server + service that provides user screening, phone support, etc. at a price. Over time when certain celebrities join it becomes the popular server and sought after as a username destination.
By this logic, there should've been no new social networks after Twitter. I point to Tiktok as a contradiction. There are many more factors that your simplification ignores.
It replaced Twitter for me. Pretty much everyone I was following on Twitter is on Mastadon now, but also a whole bunch more because discoverability is easier for me on Mastadon.
Maybe it will never replace Twitter as the place to follow celebrities, politicians and corporations; so you can see what their social media teams have thought up in the last hour. But for keeping up with personal interests and chatting with other like-minded folks? Absolutely. And I'm not gonna miss the use-case that falls away. Also not going to miss the ads!
This view of "the blue checks" as a uniform elite class is really fascinating to me — and I think is partly why Elon bought the thing in the first place.
It cuts both ways — both the overvaluing of the check and the denigrating of those who have it.
How can Twitter make money without high engagement scores? Do you know of a profitable social media platform with users that do not partake in content creation and commenting?
Not that I necessarily want this feature implemented or that this is a good idea, but I can foresee some large Mastodon instances asking for X dollars a month to put a blue check mark in front of your name.
You can add these shortcodes (eg. :verified:) to your Mastodon display name or your profile. If you don't see them immediately convert, try F5-ing the page and they should render.
People have been putting check mark emojis in their Fedi display names forever, as a joke. While I could see an instance considering something like that to help pay for server costs I don't think it's likely to be very popular.
To put it another way, Twitter is/was a notary/PR firm as well as a "microblogging" service. Popular people and brands could verify their identity with Twitter, and users could trust it.
I think, though the idea is unoriginal, that there is money in hosting Mastodon servers as well as hosting a particular mastodon service that does brand/personal identification. Perhaps even semi-automatically, such as via DNS.
These badges are emoji - currently e.g. https://infosec.exchange/@lcamtuf has three of them. That's 200% more than you can get on Twitter, and $8 cheaper, too.
The "verified badge" on mastodon is just a satirical emoji.
Mastodon does have a mechanism for instances vouching for their users actually having control of a webpage (using rel=me links). Those are the links in green boxes here: https://hachyderm.io/@nova (It doesn't cost anything, and isn't exclusive to famous people).
I assume the person I'm replying to is aware of all of this... but for everyone else...
all that I want is a place where I can see other tech people's comments on stuff I care about in tech; coding, architecture, cool technologies, whatever. People say that the network effect makes it impossible to switch over fully but look what happened with Freenode -- virtually _everyone_ moved to libera.chat in literally like two weeks. Is there an equivalent for Twitter? Which Mastodon "node" is the thing I'm looking for?
Mastodon is a bit less centralised around nodes, but there are a number of tech communities gathered around a couple of instances already (although they all interact with each other and other instances, so it's not that big of a deal): https://hachyderm.io, https://fosstodon.org and https://front-end.social are big ones in my circles.
…but will it replace it for a significant number of people who matter (for whatever arbitrary definition of "people who matter")?
Think of the quotation of "The Velvet Underground and Nico only sold 10,000 copies, but each person who purchased the record went on to form their own band"
in the past few weeks I've personally found it very amusing to see pre-$8 bluechecks on twitter telling their followers that they're moving to other (non-mastodon) social media services, then you click the link to their new profile there and almost without exception find out that they've been "Verified" on that platform too. it's like they can't imagine using a social media website unless they have some kind of visible Status Signifier that the unwashed masses don't get to have. all other leadership decisions aside, the $8 bluecheck is the best thing anyone could've done to twitter.
Whoever threw too much money at clubhouse at the top valuation should have them start an excluseive, private, invitation only mastodon server. Like clubhouse was before mere mortals could join.
It's a tool to migrate who you follow from twitter to mastodon. This isn't about how many new users joined Mastodon (which yes, would include bots). Your comment is entirely irrelevant.
> exposing the greatest human rights violation in American history through the Twitter Files scandal
I don't usually reply in these Twitter threads, but cmon... surely you can see what a ridiculous hyperbole this is?
American history includes:
> Mass enslavement
> Incarceration of Japanese-Americans during WWII
> Hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in war
> Torture programs
> Blacklisting of (ostensible) communists during the McCarthy era
> Extermination and displacement of Native Americans
And that's just to name a few off the top of my head.
None of those were a constitutional crisis except mass enslavement and the Constitution in that case was on the side of the slavers. Joe Biden is the worst President in American history no hyperbole. Hacker News mods are clearly on the side of censorship.
And... I've done all that on Mastodon, successfully, over the past few weeks. And it's been Just Fine! No outages, no weirdness. Big chunks of the accounts I'm following have moved over and/or started mirroring their tweets. I see maybe 30% of the volume of "readworthy Toots" that I do on Twitter. It's really extremely usable.
I hasn't replaced Twitter yet for me. But... it certainly could.