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Mastodon – an open source alternative to Twitter

mastodon.social

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Re: Mastodon – an open source alternative to Twitter

#41

Post by yogthos »

marban wrote: post #17

Haven't we been through this with the likes of identi.ca / statusnet?

I think the climate might be more favorable today. People are starting to realize that walled gardens have serious drawbacks, so there's more interest in decentralized solutions.

Conversely, hosting has become much cheaper and easier than before. You can spin up a DigitalOcean droplet for 5 bucks, get a Let's Encrypt cert, and spin up a Mastodon Docker image in an hour or so. The barrier to running an instance is very low nowadays.

Re: Mastodon – an open source alternative to Twitter

#42

Post by lightedman »

tscs37 wrote: post #9

I'm a mastodon user, so I might be a bit biased, but I find it a lot better than twitter. Different servers can also carter to different cultures or groups so you can find your own niche there.

Niche? Most every Mastodon instance I've joined has been more like clique, almost the exact opposite of an open social thing.

Re: Mastodon – an open source alternative to Twitter

#44

Post by api »

j_s wrote: post #25
daveid wrote: post #10

Perhaps it would be better to submit https://joinmastodon.org instead of the flagship instance. The project homepage has links to all the info as well as a directory of servers (instances), which might spread out new users better.

When did the 'flagship instance' begin accepting new users again? I wonder how long it will last this time, and whether or not this HN post will affect that! Of all the random strangers hosting the service, I waited until I could get onto the instance hosted by the actual project itself; the bus factor feels higher, and the account suspension process less arbitrary. https://web.archive.org/web/20170406103653/https://…

... and here we have one of the largest problems with the federated model of decentralization. Who wants to be in a province when they could wait for an account in Rome?

Throw in a DHT and a key pair for every user and you could fully divorce account ID from instance.

Re: Mastodon – an open source alternative to Twitter

#45

Post by api »

baxuz wrote: post #32

Honestly, it's a barren wasteland, worse than Google+. As far as I've seen it's mainly used as a replacement for imageboards. Most of the server topics are either a variant of /b/, or a gathering place for SJWs, furries and lolicons.

What no Nazis? Can't have an imageboard without Nazis. Then you have the Nazi furries...

Re: Mastodon – an open source alternative to Twitter

#46

Post by detaro »

nosuchthing wrote: post #16

Mastodon impliments a very very confusing username system, due to the design of domain-name based federation. alice@mastadon.social alice@mastadon.network Twitter suffers from impersonator accounts on its own network, imagine the confusion of an unfamiliar user having to find a real account on mastadon.

On the flip side, Alice could have Alice@alice.com thanks to federation. There isn't all that nice software for it yet, but that could be be an attractive option. It protects you from an external instance dying and links your user clearly to your other web presence.

Re: Mastodon – an open source alternative to Twitter

#47

Post by glenstein »

tkmh wrote: post #38
vidarh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big difference is that with e-mail we've long ago stopped expecting discoverability. You don't expect to be able to search and find their e-mail address. You do expect to be able to search for them on Twitter.

I think not being able to search for is a good marker of how mastodon is trying to be something other than just a decentralized twitter clone. I personally find the twitter microblogging model, wherein most tweets seem to be retweets of high-profile users or comments on their posts, quite unhealthy for discussion among equals. Twitter is essentially a media site, whereas (I think) Mastodon hopes to be something else,…

The other thing to keep in mind is that idiosyncratic norms and conventions pop up that are products of how people use the platform, and these have a way of turning problems into non-problems.

Maybe the network will just evolve to value interactions that aren't centered around brand pushing. Maybe it will let the rest of the social ecosystem take care of that and meanwhile mastodon will do it's own thing.

Or maybe a mastodon instance will seek to distinguish itself by providing this kind of verification and become the de-facto instance for verified brands. (There's already a mastodon that explicitly courts business brands.) Maybe we'll even discover that we just don't value such a thing that much, when it occurs on a network structured to make it easily separable from the rest of social activity.

All of which is not to say we should waive away the problem, only that it need not be a conversation-stopper when it comes to the question of whether mastodon has offers "enough" value in its current form.

Re: Mastodon – an open source alternative to Twitter

#48

Post by sprokolopolis »

newscracker wrote: post #13

I'm looking forward to platforms that are decentralized as well as allow rich media content (photos, videos, etc.) to be embedded/uploaded. Such platforms would have some chance of being an alternatives to centralized walled gardens like Facebook and Google+. Edit: As pointed out by daveid (thanks!), Mastodon does allow uploading photos and videos. So my statement referring to it as text-only was incorrect, and I've…

For groups, people just tend to pin hashtags at this point. Glitch.social added a feature to pin a column from a search and it looks like most instances have added it now, too. Also, there are a some instances that tend to loosely target certain themes/subjects.

I totally agree that it is a bit barebones at the moment and could use real groups and other social features. The fact that admins of different instances can hack on their servers separately might promote third party features being created and merged.

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