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How Does Mastodon Work?

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Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#151

Post by satsuma »

ColinWright wrote: post #123
pard68 wrote: post #122

I joined a server. It was alright. Then I looked at the federated timeline and decided I did not wish to be a part of Mastadon. Too much hate and virtue signalling. It was like what Twitter already was.

I don't understand this. The Federated timeline is always going to be full of the same kind of crap that Twitter (and other social media) has. The whole point of Mastodon is that you can avoid that by joining an instance that matches your interests, and then only look at your notifications and the local timeline. By doing that you can see only things said by, or boosted by, people who you have chosen to associate wit…

isn't the point of twitter that you follow only who you want and other people's garbage doesn't show up if you don't want it? what makes mastodon different in that regard?

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#152

Post by [deleted] »

nafey wrote: post #67
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…

I wonder if in the long run Mastodon will still not be an "outrage machine". Twitter also didn't start out as a vent for political outrage, but as a platform grows it gets more bad apples. In the case of Mastodon it's decentralized nature actually provides them more security. It will be interesting to see it play out.

[deleted]

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#153

Post by whywhywhywhy »

satsuma wrote: post #151
ColinWright wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this. The Federated timeline is always going to be full of the same kind of crap that Twitter (and other social media) has. The whole point of Mastodon is that you can avoid that by joining an instance that matches your interests, and then only look at your notifications and the local timeline. By doing that you can see only things said by, or boosted by, people who you have chosen to associate wit…

isn't the point of twitter that you follow only who you want and other people's garbage doesn't show up if you don't want it? what makes mastodon different in that regard?

The idea that even Twitter itself has forgotten by insisting to show me garbage people I follow have liked with no option to disable it.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#154

Post by whywhywhywhy »

kethinov wrote: post #37
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.

What Mastodon badly needs is a client that can crosspost to both Twitter and a Mastodon instance to lower the barrier to slowly switching.

This never works, it just means people don't actually switch at all because in the end they only engage with one place properly. This was one of the things that went wrong with app.net.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#155

Post by rainbowmverse »

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…

Don't forget the French wave.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#156

Post by mirimir »

ColinWright wrote: post #128
mirimir wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. And it seems like Mastodon devs are starting to take the issue seriously. So perhaps there's hope.

To the best of my knowledge they have always taken account migration seriously. But it's a hard problem, and there are many, many issues to be sorted. As a result it has been and is being discussed in detail in the background while other features have been implemented and rolled out. Some of those other issues were contentious exactly because there was insufficient prior discussion, so the question of account migrati…

Thanks, that's good to know.

I interpreted some comments on that ticket as dismissing account migration as almost frivolous. But maybe that's because it's an old and difficult challenge, and I didn't have the context to understand the comments.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#157

Post by mirimir »

colordrops wrote: post #66
ReverseCold wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well first and foremost, people usually don't want their email published everywhere. Especially in this decentralized context, that'd be a gold mine for spammers.

Why couldn't you create an email identity specifically for social networking.

Right. I probably have at least 100 email addresses. Most of them I've abandoned, however.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#158

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #92
pawal wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say the same thing about e-mail and SMTP?

There has historically always only been one sensible email provider. It was your ISP, and then it was gmail.

I've never used my ISP provided email. Even before gmail, I used other gmail-ish ones (hotmail, yahoo &c.)

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#159

Post by [deleted] »

manigandham wrote: post #125
phs318u wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whac-A-Mole

This always ignores the fact that several things like networks and server hosts are still fairly centralized. Unless everyone is running instances on their mobile phones using a giant global mesh, it is perfectly within the capabilities of modern nation states to shutdown these networks.

[deleted]

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#160

Post by remoteorbust »

jancsika wrote: post #60

> Well, finding the right one is very difficult That sounds like a rather critical UX bug. Just give me the instance I should sign up on in the "sign up" area of mastodon.social. Use what you think is the most suitable algorithm to cycle through a list of "appropriate" instances, where you-- the people with domain experience-- define "appropriate" for the potential user. Otherwise you end up with this passive-aggress…

Yeah that's already happened and it's discoverable enough that I wandered onto one of those pages by accident when signing up.
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