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From GNU social to Mastodon

thomask.sdf.org

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Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#41

Post by RX14 »

skybrian wrote: post #13
phaedryx wrote: post #2

I've become more and more annoyed with Twitter (the company) and Twitter (the things people are tweeting) and I've been looking for a replacement. I really like the way that the Fediverse has all kinds of different groups/instances/neighborhoods. For example, I joined https://ruby.social this week and I've had some interesting discussions about Ruby programming. Twitter is a mess of everything because anything and ev…

I like it too, but having used it casually for about a week, I'm wondering how you visit different communities without creating multiple accounts? It should be as easy as visiting a different subreddit. (I do know that you can subscribe to individuals in other instances, but haven't done that yet.)

The only thing that creates an instance's community is the local time line. Everything else is federated. So what you're really asking for is to be able to easily view another instance's local timeline I guess. There's some work being done in that area, currently focused on merging multiple instances local timelines, but the same technical infrastructure could easily be used to be able to show another instances local time line in the frontend.

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#42

Post by 80386 »

freeone3000 wrote: post #18
oopsman88 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I get your point. But mine is: Mastodon shouldn't be publicised as an alternative to Twitter because it's not. It would be like publicising HN as an alternative to Reddit. HN only works as an alternative to Reddit for a very, very reduced group of people. People who share the same interests more or less, and with similar ideas about what flies in tech, politics, social movements, etc.

Mastodon isn't a monolithic thing. That's the entire point. The moderation policy of the server at mastodon.social has no bearing on the moderation policy of social.wxcafe.net or switter.net. Your complaint of "it's like irc" isn't quite true, because of a number of obvious technical and user experience differences. "Everyone should be able to reach everyone else" is proving to be less and less desirable.

Sure, Mastodon isn't a monolithic thing. But the massive influx of Mastodon users to the fediverse changed the culture to the point where I didn't see any reason to stick around.

I like the "make the internet weird again" stuff, revivals of Geocities and tilde clubs and so on. My impression of the Mastodon-era fediverse is that the culture is about as far as you can get from that - it was designed by people who thought Twitter wasn't sanitized enough.

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#43

Post by jancsika »

skybrian wrote: post #13
phaedryx wrote: post #2

I've become more and more annoyed with Twitter (the company) and Twitter (the things people are tweeting) and I've been looking for a replacement. I really like the way that the Fediverse has all kinds of different groups/instances/neighborhoods. For example, I joined https://ruby.social this week and I've had some interesting discussions about Ruby programming. Twitter is a mess of everything because anything and ev…

I like it too, but having used it casually for about a week, I'm wondering how you visit different communities without creating multiple accounts? It should be as easy as visiting a different subreddit. (I do know that you can subscribe to individuals in other instances, but haven't done that yet.)

Let me see if I understand the problem.

alice register on instance "music"

alice wants to see what's up on instance "books"

Is the problem that the default behavior of Mastodon requires alice to register a new account on "books" just to see that instance's timeline?

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#44

Post by drngdds »

cjhanks wrote: post #27

So I was curious and went to look at a few of the servers online. The top server was an unending stream (like, more than once a minute) of Richard Stallman automatically posting political references from some other service he apparently runs. Another server was just some guy who I have never heard of complaining about various things. I came across a group talking about current and passed times they had a beer. That c…

>Some guy who I have never heard of complaining about various things

You just described 90% of the content on every social media platform

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#45

Post by justinpombrio »

jancsika wrote: post #43
skybrian wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like it too, but having used it casually for about a week, I'm wondering how you visit different communities without creating multiple accounts? It should be as easy as visiting a different subreddit. (I do know that you can subscribe to individuals in other instances, but haven't done that yet.)

Let me see if I understand the problem. alice register on instance "music" alice wants to see what's up on instance "books" Is the problem that the default behavior of Mastodon requires alice to register a new account on "books" just to see that instance's timeline?

Yes, that is exactly the problem.

Although it might be better to say that that's the manifestation of the real problem. The real problem is that I want to be able to talk about books sometimes, even though I'm a musician so I registered on the musician instance. If there's a way for me to have conversations about books, I don't care whether it's an "instance" or not. I just don't want to manage two separate accounts. (As an end-user, none of my end-goals mention the word "instance".)

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#47

Post by bumholio »

TheJoYo wrote: post #23

if anyone is averse to the column layout on the default Mastodon UI they should check out https://pinafore.social for a more Twitter like layout. rather than being a mastodon instance you simply use pinafore as your portal to your existing mastodon account.

Can't really figure it out. I try to login and put mastodon.social in the Add instance field, but I get an error:

> Error: undefined. Is this a valid Mastodon instance? Is a browser extension blocking the request?

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#48

Post by phaedryx »

skybrian wrote: post #13
phaedryx wrote: post #2

I've become more and more annoyed with Twitter (the company) and Twitter (the things people are tweeting) and I've been looking for a replacement. I really like the way that the Fediverse has all kinds of different groups/instances/neighborhoods. For example, I joined https://ruby.social this week and I've had some interesting discussions about Ruby programming. Twitter is a mess of everything because anything and ev…

I like it too, but having used it casually for about a week, I'm wondering how you visit different communities without creating multiple accounts? It should be as easy as visiting a different subreddit. (I do know that you can subscribe to individuals in other instances, but haven't done that yet.)

Yeah, I've been wondering if I can write a bot that signs in to other accounts and aggregates things for a primary account.

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#49

Post by wetpaws »

xj9 wrote: post #19
wetpaws wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you can't and this is a fundamental problem of federated systems.

we're working on it ;) there are a handful of proposals for doing SSO on fediverse, but it isn't super high priority since creating multiple accounts (alts) is a pretty common practice here.

I am really really don't want to sound like an troll, but didn't you folks basically invented phpbb forums?

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#50

Post by panic »

skybrian wrote: post #13
phaedryx wrote: post #2

I've become more and more annoyed with Twitter (the company) and Twitter (the things people are tweeting) and I've been looking for a replacement. I really like the way that the Fediverse has all kinds of different groups/instances/neighborhoods. For example, I joined https://ruby.social this week and I've had some interesting discussions about Ruby programming. Twitter is a mess of everything because anything and ev…

I like it too, but having used it casually for about a week, I'm wondering how you visit different communities without creating multiple accounts? It should be as easy as visiting a different subreddit. (I do know that you can subscribe to individuals in other instances, but haven't done that yet.)

There's a tension here between different views of what Mastodon should be. Is an instance more like an email server (where it just acts as a gateway) or a web forum (with a community of people on each instance)?

It seems like the ActivityPub protocol itself is designed from the "email server" perspective, but as different instances try to differentiate themselves and attract users, I bet the platform will swing more and more toward "web forum". It'll be interesting to see how it turns out.

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