Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch • Hacker News Board

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#21

Post by lazyjones » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 2:29 PM UTC

ChristianBundy wrote: post #14

DanAndersen wrote: post #5

>Finally, with instances, you keep control: if you find that you don't like the moderation policies or culture of a particular instance, you're always free to pick up and move to a different one. Last I heard, Mastodon didn't support migration between instances while still keeping followers, etc. Instead, you have to essentially start from scratch with a new account on a new instance. This is a serious problem becaus…

Yeah, I spent a few weeks (months?) on Mastodon, and even though I was on a cooperatively owned and operated instance[0] it just wasn't a substitute for a fully p2p social network. I found another network called Scuttlebutt[1] that I've been using almost daily. It has a few neat features: - your account is just your public key - your profile is an append-only feed of JSON messages, each cryptographically signed - whe…

Sounds very nice, but Scuttlebutt seems to be for desktop computers/servers only. I can‘t use it on an iPad or on the smartphone...

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#22

Post by brightball » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

peatmoss wrote: post #11

The posting from a few days ago that reimagined email as a social network really got me thinking how much our approach to social networks has been led by the webbification of everything. The spirit-of-the-nineties approach to recreating mastodon would probably look like one or two dominant native apps and something like a newsgroup server. Or maybe something like a really great RSS reader. Questions about federation…

I’ve been saying the same for a long time. Email gives you both a distributed delivery mechanism to unlimited users and a data storage platform. If you want things available in more than one place, leave it on the server and sync with IMAP.

All you really need to turn it into a social network is an app that can read it, parse it and arrange it in a more convenient manner than clicking on individual messages.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#23

Post by digi_owl » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 2:35 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #22

peatmoss wrote: post #11

The posting from a few days ago that reimagined email as a social network really got me thinking how much our approach to social networks has been led by the webbification of everything. The spirit-of-the-nineties approach to recreating mastodon would probably look like one or two dominant native apps and something like a newsgroup server. Or maybe something like a really great RSS reader. Questions about federation…

I’ve been saying the same for a long time. Email gives you both a distributed delivery mechanism to unlimited users and a data storage platform. If you want things available in more than one place, leave it on the server and sync with IMAP. All you really need to turn it into a social network is an app that can read it, parse it and arrange it in a more convenient manner than clicking on individual messages.

Something like Delta Chat?

https://delta.chat/en/

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#24

Post by ColinWright » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 2:36 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #16

eat_veggies wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be interesting to have sort of a signed "302 moved permanently" message that signals to other clients to automatically follow the other account?

But what if the original instance shuts down, or becomes malicious and doesn't cooperate?

In any kind of distributed system there are failure modes you can't protect against, the best you can do is create a mechanism that will work in most cases and go with that.

When you leave you can export the people you follow, and it's likely that without too much trouble you can get the list of people who follow you. I've just done so, and it didn't seem to hard. There isn't really a simple interface for it - I just listed them and saved the HTML, then extracted them from that.

Having got your list of followers you can then ping them to let them know you've moved, and I suspect someone somewhere is working on a way of doing that semi-automatically.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#25

Post by jamesrcole » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 2:39 PM UTC

I think the term "toots" is spectacularly bad, and could majorly hinder broader uptake of their service.

Word of mouth (or 'word of text') is a major way services like this spread. Imagine discussions of Twitter in the media but where the words "tweet" and "tweeted" are replaced with "toot" and "tooted".

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#26

Post by jadbox » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 2:40 PM UTC

kylnew wrote: post #12

I can’t quite get over this critiquing of Twitter’s Retweet system. I totally understand how it’s misused but all the benefits are overlooked too. I love retweeting with commentary for positive reasons. I find they are a great way to validate and engage people who reply. I never think of using them as a tool for shaming, so I would be sad to see the feature go.

There's two issues I'm concerned about. As you mentioned, one is yanking retweets because 'it can be used for ill'. I doubt that would make any real difference in toxic behavior, but would hurt positive commentary more.

The other concern is the "block posts by tag" (e.g. ban all #politics). This could cause an even greater problem where it allow stronger social bubbles to form because one side could outright block the other (people blocking #dems or #gop). It could become like a Black Mirror episode where people literally do not know what's happening outside of their group/tribe because they've blocked entire groups/topics/nodes. We have this problem today to an extent, but I worry about new platforms that provide more tools for group isolation.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#27

Post by danShumway » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 2:41 PM UTC

From the article:

> Twitter Is in the Outrage Business; Mastodon Isn't a Business

I need to spend way more time thinking about this, but I feel like in some scenarios there is a competitive advantage to not needing to care about stuff like stock prices or insane prices.

If you can get a business or a project to the point where it's stable and competitive and it's funding you enough to keep going, then there's a whole bunch of stuff that you don't need to care about. That's obviously not universal, but there are clearly downsides to large businesses. There are things that large business will always be worse at then a small business or personal project.

Again, I haven't thought enough about this to make a cognizant point, but... it feels like something I want to think about more. Being a nonprofit or a small business or a completely non-commercial entity should in some instances give you a competitive advantage over other businesses. Facebook can copy every single feature and then some of Snapchat.

But Twitter can't really copy everything that Mastadon is doing, because some of the stuff that Mastadon is doing is completely contradictory to Twitter's entire business model. I feel like there's something to be said about (if you're in Mastadon's position) figuring out some way to tie at least a few public-facing features into that nonprofit model that you know, 100%, your largest competitors will literally never be able to do.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#28

Post by peatmoss » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 2:42 PM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #21

ChristianBundy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I spent a few weeks (months?) on Mastodon, and even though I was on a cooperatively owned and operated instance[0] it just wasn't a substitute for a fully p2p social network. I found another network called Scuttlebutt[1] that I've been using almost daily. It has a few neat features: - your account is just your public key - your profile is an append-only feed of JSON messages, each cryptographically signed - whe…

Sounds very nice, but Scuttlebutt seems to be for desktop computers/servers only. I can‘t use it on an iPad or on the smartphone...

This is delightful. Scuttlebutt appears to be very much the sort of approach that I was talking about in another thread about 90s app-centric approach.

And here we see the downside of that approach: “it doesn’t support my platform.” The irony being that the unsupported platforms are arguably the last bastions of “I expect a native app.”

All told, I think I’m coming around to the idea that this problem is better than the problems of walled services. This one is fundamentally technological, while the Facebook / Twitter service problem is corrosive to individual privacy and society.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#29

Post by icebraining » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 2:42 PM UTC

peatmoss wrote: post #11

The posting from a few days ago that reimagined email as a social network really got me thinking how much our approach to social networks has been led by the webbification of everything. The spirit-of-the-nineties approach to recreating mastodon would probably look like one or two dominant native apps and something like a newsgroup server. Or maybe something like a really great RSS reader. Questions about federation…

In the 90s app-centric view of the world this is a non-issue, because following other people is the client’s job, for better or worse.

In the 90s, if you moved from your universities' mail server to Lycos, you also lose all the people who you were following, since they still had the previous email address.

Mastodon just happens to work in the reverse (you have a list of people you follow, rather than of people who follow you, as in email), but the issue is the same.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#30

Post by raverbashing » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 2:43 PM UTC

> Well, Mastodon doesn't have retweets; it has "boosts". Boosts are essentially like retweets, with one key difference: there's no option to add your own commentary.

I disagree. Retweets can be an issue but they have their place as well

What all "timeline" social networks are missing is the underboost, the downvote button, call it as you want.

People will boost good stuff but they will boost crap.

Networks need the contrary signal, they need the "WTF are you thinking posting this crap here" signal.

Not censorship, but a "tone down" indication.

Twitter has been cutting down and restricting/banning accounts which I'm not fundamentally against it but they are focusing on one side of the political spectrum. With that, I can't agree.