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How Does Mastodon Work?

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Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#111

Post by robjan »

shakna wrote: post #75
ReverseCold wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. No. Mastadon and other compatible servers like... Well that's the easy answer. I run my own instance and it's near impossible to find interesting people to follow. I started making alternate accounts on various other servers and it was immediately much better. Also, (from my experience) people actually do pay attention to the local feed. People are more likely to find about (and talk to) you when they see you on…

I don't think any of the 20 odd people I find interesting enough to follow belong to my instance. Nor was I aware of a 'local feed'. I see all instances that interact with mine, and their feeds. It may be harder to find you on your own, unless you're reaching out to others... And frankly that just sounds like network effects. People are more likely to 'discover' you if you interact with celebrities on other social si…

I'm pretty sure the fediverse feed just shows all people from all instances who are followed by someone on your instance.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#112

Post by codesections »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #101

I understand HOW mastodon works. I've got my account. But I still don't understand WHY. I got into twitter and facebook when I was a university student who gave a crap about broadcasting myself to the world. Now I'm old and don't care anymore, and I'm not deluded enough to think that anyone else cares. Is there a use case that goes beyond teenagers chatting at the lockers?

You clearly see value in HackerNews—my use case for Mastodon isn't that different from my use case for HN.

My instance (https:/fosstodon.org) is mostly focused on free and open source software (hence the name). Conversations there tend to be a lot like conversations on HN, but with the benifit of a local community where you get to know the regulars.

(I'm not saying that there's no purely personal talk—but think "office water cooler" not "high school lockers")

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#113

Post by subdivisions »

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…

The potential for division in the fediverse as a whole is worse. On twitter, there were McCarthyesque, opaquely curated user blacklists to worry about. A conglomerated instance could enforce this kind of arbitrary censorship across entire communities by imposing rules on who their federation partners can federate with, and control network disruption by refusing to federate with new, <100 user instances under the excuse of "preventing spam". Centralized social networks have already isolated people into information bubbles bad enough as it is.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#114

Post by robjan »

colordrops wrote: post #54
newscracker wrote: post #32

I wish the author had expanded on migration from one instance to another and what it entails (similar to the questions and responses here). Another point I would've liked to see is on encryption and privacy — who, other than the people I choose as an audience, can see my Toots (the admins of the instances, someone sniffing the network, etc.). If these platforms are being sold as "awesome", there need to be more reaso…

A (distributed?) search that crawls the federated network and indexes toots could be the killer feature that grows adoption. The search API could be seemlessly integrated into any mastodon client. Or does such a thing already exist? My short experience with it made it seem hard to find anything.

The developers have avoided implementing full text searching to reduce the risk of harassment

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#115

Post by intothemild »

apatters wrote: post #94
Vinnl wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling it already is one. In my timeline there are a lot of LGBQT activists (which I think is the case for much of Mastodon at the moment?), and since I generally agree with how they'd like to see the world and am otherwise not really involved with that movement, I don't really interact with those posts. However, I see a lot of "I simply blocked this hateful person lalalalalala" which makes me, as an outsid…

If you look at the adoption pattern and growth rate of Mastodon, it has around 1.5M users, the majority of which have arrived via three big waves. The first wave was people with left wing identities who were tired of being harassed on mainstream platforms like Twitter. The second wave was Japanese lolicon enthusiasts (without diving too deep down this rabbit hole, lolicon is a popular but weird and nerdy thing to be…

Yeah that first wave are huge with using content warnings for the silliest of things.

[cw: food] I ate a burrito

I've since disabled content warnings, because I think it gets in the way.. But then it fails the second and third waves, because they post childporn and sex ads..

So I've ended up blocking pawoo.net and switter.at

Which is kinda the problem on mastodon, there's nothing in between silly content warnings written by people that are offended by the slightest thing, and content warnings for childporn drawings

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#116

Post by intothemild »

subdivisions wrote: post #113
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…

The potential for division in the fediverse as a whole is worse. On twitter, there were McCarthyesque, opaquely curated user blacklists to worry about. A conglomerated instance could enforce this kind of arbitrary censorship across entire communities by imposing rules on who their federation partners can federate with, and control network disruption by refusing to federate with new, <100 user instances under the excu…

The blocklists are equally as McCarthyesque..

I remember being on mastodon when the second wave of users hit (pawoo.net). Suddenly overnight we had to worry about what was on our servers cache.. suddenly there was lolicon porn, which might be legal in japan, but outside it could be illegal.

So naturally blocklist's appeared, blocking all the new wave of Japanese servers.

I remember there was a disagreement between those in favor of block list's and the creator of Mastodon. Who didn't want any form of blocking, back at that time the tools to do any form of blocking was either non-existent or very raw. I had an instance at this stage, and the thought about having some kind of childporn drawings in my servers cache scared the living shit out of me. Enough to shut it down.

But the blocklists weren't vetted back then, and I don't think there was a central list that I can remember.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#117

Post by bopbop »

Apologies for the vulgarity, but I am presuming someone has informed the initial design team that toot is slang for a fart (at least in England) - which leads to the phrase "a mastadon toot" being quite a double entendre.

How well ingrained is the name? Is it as commonly used in the community as a tweet in twitter? As in do the users identify the messages they send as toots, and are likely to say as such?

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=toots

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#118

Post by willvarfar »

bopbop wrote: post #117

Apologies for the vulgarity, but I am presuming someone has informed the initial design team that toot is slang for a fart (at least in England) - which leads to the phrase "a mastadon toot" being quite a double entendre. How well ingrained is the name? Is it as commonly used in the community as a tweet in twitter? As in do the users identify the messages they send as toots, and are likely to say as such? https://www…

Is someone who uses Twitter a twit?

Silly names that mean things in different places don't seem to deter Americans (I'm a Brit but I've never heard the slang "toot" before; I guess it might be very regional)

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#119

Post by rwmj »

bopbop wrote: post #117

Apologies for the vulgarity, but I am presuming someone has informed the initial design team that toot is slang for a fart (at least in England) - which leads to the phrase "a mastadon toot" being quite a double entendre. How well ingrained is the name? Is it as commonly used in the community as a tweet in twitter? As in do the users identify the messages they send as toots, and are likely to say as such? https://www…

FWIW I've lived in England my whole life and never heard a fart referred to as a "toot". The only meaning I'm aware of is "toot[ing] a horn", meaning sounding the horn on a car ("honk" in US English). That seems appropriate in the context of Mastodon.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#120

Post by needle0 »

I'm not sure if this will be relevant to its longer-term success, but I notice that the word "Mastodon" seems to be very easy to misspell -- In the comments here alone I already find "Mastadon", "Mastadoon", etc.
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