Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Does Mastodon Work?

kevq.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 186 posts

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#41

Post by jaequery »

samcat116 wrote: post #18

With 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.

correct me if I'm wrong but i don't think there is one single place developers can create APIs for. if anything, developers will be picking and choosing which "instance" they want to write for if willing. this is like having thousands of "twitter" clones all acting as their own environment. kind of like how we have thousands of wordpress sites out there.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#42

Post by tomjakubowski »

Pfhreak wrote: post #3

The 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."

> The thing I never really see from these is about setting up on an existing instance vs running my own.

Mastodon instance admin have the power to block entire other instances. So if you care deeply about who is blocked or whether other instances are blocked at all, that might help to guide your decision.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#44

Post by lxe »

How are email and ActivityPub different in spirit? If they are so similar, and often compared, then why not use the well-known email stack to build "federated" social/messaging apps? I think "not being gmail-compatible" was the core flaws of Google Wave.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#45

Post by caf »

codesections wrote: post #35
caf wrote: post #6

How does it deal with spam?

Spam is an issue, though not (yet) a huge one. Mastodon has a couple of key advantages, though. * First, if the spammer is coming from a "good" instance, the admin of that instance can ban them—and the number of instances means that there are more mods to go around. * Second, if the spammer is coming from a pure spam instance, other instances can ban/unfederate with the whole instance. That said, it's an area that th…

Yes, I was more wondering about the "spam instance" problem rather than the "spam user" problem (which that issue is discussing).

From the overview it seems like dedicated spam instances could be quickly spun up in the same way that email domains are?

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#47

Post by cortesoft »

jaequery wrote: post #41
samcat116 wrote: post #18

With 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.

correct me if I'm wrong but i don't think there is one single place developers can create APIs for. if anything, developers will be picking and choosing which "instance" they want to write for if willing. this is like having thousands of "twitter" clones all acting as their own environment. kind of like how we have thousands of wordpress sites out there.

That doesn't seem right. The API for an instance is going to be the Mastodon API, which will be the same for all instances. Each instance isn't going to be creating their own API - really, all Mastodon is is an API spec.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#48

Post by cortesoft »

mirimir wrote: post #16
ISL wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about phishing? @isl@isl.tld and @is1@is1.tld look pretty similar.

Right. There really ought to be key-based authentication.

Key based authentication isn't really going to protect against a homograph attack.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#49

Post by sdrothrock »

briandear wrote: post #20
samcat116 wrote: post #18

With 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 peopl…

mastodon is used by pixiv here in Japan, which is essentially what deviantart used to be -- a sprawling, incredibly active community of artists (amateur, semi-professional, and professional alike).

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#50

Post by colordrops »

codesections wrote: post #36

I wrote a companion piece that explains what makes Mastodon better than Twitter. It starts like this: > Mastodon is a newcomer social media platform that is a lot like Twitter—short messages, followers, hashtags, all that. But Mastodon is much better than Twitter, and not just because being totally ad-free and keeping chronological timelines make it far more enjoyable to use (though that certainly helps!). All that i…

"outrage machine". What a perfectly succinct description. That said, Mastodon would likely turn into an outrage machine if it ever reached critical mass.

I suppose you could stay in your own mastodon instance to avoid it.

Post reply on HN