How does it deal with spam?
Nobody wants to use it, so the ROI for spam is very low. This keeps spam to a minimum.
174,000 mostly-trendy tech people? Someone wants to market to them at low cost.
How Does Mastodon Work?
11–20 of 186 posts
Re: How Does Mastodon Work?
#12How does it deal with spam?
What about phishing? @isl@isl.tld and @is1@is1.tld look pretty similar.
Re: How Does Mastodon Work?
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody wants to use it, so the ROI for spam is very low. This keeps spam to a minimum.
174,000 mostly-trendy tech people? Someone wants to market to them at low cost. https://mastodon.social/@usercount
Is this counting registered users? Who cares? What's the RMAU?
Re: How Does Mastodon Work?
#14Finally, a cogent explanation. Edit: But missing a key issue, perhaps. > Because Mastodon uses a collection of Instances, you’re not at the beck and call of one site owner. If you don’t like the direction an Instance is taking, you can pack your virtual bags and go. Mastodon even has an import/export tool that allows you to migrate the people you follow from one account/instance to another. That sounds great. But if…
With e-mail there is a way to migrate without losing your identity, if you own your own domain, and point its MX records at your provider (who is a real e-mail provider and not a "free" walled garden like GMail or AOL). Unfortunately owning a domain is not as accessible for 95% of the population as it ought to be.
This concept of digital identity mobility is important to ensure that one's digital life is not tied to a single service provider. XMPP provides this capability as well, through SRV records. Bizarrely, given its aim to free users from walled gardens, Mastodon does not support SRV records [1]. The developers give some excuses about the WebFinger protocol, which basically means that if I want to own my own Mastodon identity, I must run my own server (either Mastodon or a WebFinger redirect).
Apparently Diaspora made the same shortsighted decision [2]. I'm surprised and saddened that the concept of identity mobility is seemingly not well understood by those developing decentralized social platforms.
Re: How Does Mastodon Work?
#15Finally, a cogent explanation. Edit: But missing a key issue, perhaps. > Because Mastodon uses a collection of Instances, you’re not at the beck and call of one site owner. If you don’t like the direction an Instance is taking, you can pack your virtual bags and go. Mastodon even has an import/export tool that allows you to migrate the people you follow from one account/instance to another. That sounds great. But if…
With e-mail there is a way to migrate without losing your identity, if you own your own domain, and point its MX records at your provider (who is a real e-mail provider and not a "free" walled garden like GMail or AOL). Unfortunately owning a domain is not as accessible for 95% of the population as it ought to be. This concept of digital identity mobility is important to ensure that one's digital life is not tied to…
Yes, I know that. But email was just the analogy ;) For Mastodon, that would be running your own instance, I guess.
Re: How Does Mastodon Work?
#16Re: How Does Mastodon Work?
#17Finally, a cogent explanation. Edit: But missing a key issue, perhaps. > Because Mastodon uses a collection of Instances, you’re not at the beck and call of one site owner. If you don’t like the direction an Instance is taking, you can pack your virtual bags and go. Mastodon even has an import/export tool that allows you to migrate the people you follow from one account/instance to another. That sounds great. But if…
Some interesting discussion here:
https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177
It seems possible!
Re: How Does Mastodon Work?
#18With the death of certain Twitter APIs coming up soon, I wonder if many Twitter client developers will start to make Mastodon apps. I would love to see "Tootbot" by the Tweetbot developers.
Re: How Does Mastodon Work?
#19The thing I never really see from these is about setting up on an existing instance vs running my own. And if I set up my own, does it need to be a community? Am I shutting myself out of an experience by creating, say, a Mastodon instance for my family? I'm bought in to the idea of Mastodon, but getting started is like being handed an atlas of the US and being told, "Please pick a neighborhood to live in."
1. And if I set up my own, does it need to be a community?
No. Mastadon and other compatible servers like GNUSocial do have single-user environments. [0]
2. Am I shutting myself out of an experience by creating, say, a Mastodon instance for my family?
No. The entire thing is federated, users from all servers can speak to each other.
[0] https://github.com/ummjackson/mastodon-guide/blob/master/sin...
Re: How Does Mastodon Work?
#20With the death of certain Twitter APIs coming up soon, I wonder if many Twitter client developers will start to make Mastodon apps. I would love to see "Tootbot" by the Tweetbot developers.
Besides a few neckbeard types, does any significant number of people actually care about Mastadoon? I remember App.net got all buzzy several years ago. Whatever happened to that? Facebook got big because college students wanted to get laid and that’s where their friends were. Twitter got big because it captured the Zeitgiest and had a FOMO aspect. I am not sure what Mastadoon has going for it to convince normal people to care.
How is a Twitter client developer going to actually make any money on this? How is anyone going to make money on this?