131–140 of 395 posts
No, wait, the terms are LGBTQ+ and Black American, whatever was I thinking?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don’t even understand ... It works exactly the same as Twitter, except that not everyone is using Twitter.com. Some are using mastodon.social, some are using some other instance and so on, but you can still follow people on other instances, like you can email people using gmail from a hotmail adress and so on. A username is @username@instance instead of just @username as with Twitter.
E-Mail doesn't have moderation (besides Spamfilters). It's unclear to me how this all ties in, if I follow someone and they get banned from their instance, how does it affect me? How does it affect their content? Not saying there aren't solutions for this, I'm saying it's unclear from just looking at the service and I don't care about moderation in the first place . So it's unclear to me how this is "better".
if you're thinking "that's expensive", look into Pleroma, it can run on a $1 a month server or a raspi. Set something up purely for you, then find some people on other instances you'd like to follow
OK, here's the problem in a nutshell: no one among regular people cares. You guys are splitting hairs right now when talking about the difference between tweeting and boosting or public companies vs open source or what have you. None of that attracts users. If you have no users, then for regular people, your product is useless. Even the article is not really making a pitch for mastodon that indicates any features at…
To summarise what you've said in one sentence: "mastodon is a technology, not a product" - it doesn't have a business model, a way to scale and grow like a business. And if it did, well it'd be just another commercial social network, and most of them completely suck. Technology is not the solution to this problem.
No, my non-nerd friends do not wish to "Join the Federation!"
Not to knock what Mastodon are doing, rather to criticise the idea that it's a social network for everyone.
What Mastodon badly needs is a desktop client as good as Twitterrific that can crosspost to both Twitter and a Mastodon instance to lower the barrier to slowly switching. Something like Pidgin/Adium is for IM. That way people can default to Mastodon where possible and fallback to Twitter where necessary.
I use this service: https://crossposter.masto.donte.com.br/ It posts your posts from one to the other, so I can use them interchangeably. I definitely prefer Mastodon, although I was never a big Twitter user.
OK, here's the problem in a nutshell: no one among regular people cares. You guys are splitting hairs right now when talking about the difference between tweeting and boosting or public companies vs open source or what have you. None of that attracts users. If you have no users, then for regular people, your product is useless. Even the article is not really making a pitch for mastodon that indicates any features at…
You say problem, I say advantage. Not everything has to be a massive public square! It's okay to be niche. Until the mid/late 2000s, the internet was far more decentralized and often much the better for it. In other words: https://mastodon.social/@helldude/100572161034726032
I went to the Mastodon website and clicked "Get Started" and was brought to a menu where I needed to choose a server. Many of them focus on niche interests, and it was not very clear what to do if I wanted to be a member of more than one of them. I'm a techie; I could figure it out. But it is too much to ask of the general public to wade through many niche servers they won't understand, e.g. the one for BSD fans and…
You make a good point (and one that's being worked on being overcome, better onboarding and whatever). But consider twitter: >Compare that to getting started on Twitter: pick a username and password, boom, done! And then what? follow some celebs? Figure out if you know anyone? On mastodon you can use the local feed to find people interested in the same subjects (or same culture), and then you start talking. I've seen…
People have no problem doing the same thing on Twitter.
> As a result, Mastodon users basically never boost toots to say how wrong they are, and there isn't an issue with armies of followers descending on the original author. Because Mastodon is full of like-thinking people, and the ones they'd strongly disagree with aren't joining. This isn't a bad thing (it's the "local" point this post makes), but it's important to emphasize this as the primary factor responsible for p…
or they're on other instances. there's some far-right political instances, for example (that the leftist crowd of the larger majority of early adopters don't really talk to, although they could in most cases)
> One of the most pernicious parts of Twitter is how people will retweet something dumb, offensive, or awful that an opponent said, along with a message mocking that opponent. Over time, this leads people on all sides of an issue to see only a distorted caricature of their opponents, comprised of an amalgam of all the worst features of that group. > How does Mastodon solve this issue? Well, Mastodon doesn't have retw…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
The gist is that pithy, low-effort strawmans of an opposing tribe are highly attractive and contagious memes.
I don't think it has anything specific to do with Twitter. You see similar issues everywhere: Facebook, Reddit, and of course meatspace. It's a human problem.
Twitter and the short character-limit may magnify it a bit, I'll admit that. But the actual problem can't be solved on Twitter or Mastodon. Each individual needs to be aware of this human problem and to constantly make an effort to notice and counteract it in their own brain (which is very difficult and error prone). Perhaps if enough people start doing that more, then cultural change will take place. I don't know.
Could anyone share their thoughts about the attractiveness of a platform that says how many characters long your posts can be? What I see on Twitter is that people are constantly fighting this limitation by writing several tweets in a row (sometimes marking them as parts of a whole message). I would think that’s an annoyance. So what’s the attraction?
Also, let me be honest, the language in the article is the sort used by people who have arguments about whether lolicon should be legal or not. This is not something I'm interested in talking about. Just like voat.co and friends this is a fringe-people network. No thanks. I don't want 99% of my conversations to be about furries.
Consequently I would ignore you.