Live data from Hacker News

From GNU social to Mastodon

thomask.sdf.org

51–60 of 155 posts

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#51
post #9

With all of its faults, I'll take Twitter and its almost free speech over Mastodon any day. Many people say they are quitting Twitter because of the algorithmic timeline and so on, and they are going to Mastodon where a cabal of people choose to ban opinions that are perfectly legal.

there's definitely instances that serve as a DMZ between "opinions-banned-social" and the pleroma free speech "almost-everything-goes" types. or just make your own and associate as you please.

Pleroma doesn't lack content moderation options[0]

Pleroma culture, on the other hand, is generally geared more toward free speech.

[0] https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/wikis/Message%20r...

- marking incoming messages with media from a given account or instance as sensitive

rejecting messages from a specific instance

- removing/unlisting messages from the public timelines

- removing media from messages

- sending only public messages to a specific instance

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#52
I decided to join Mastodon when it first came out. I planned to stand up my own server, but I kept.putting it off...

Flash 2 years later, last week I finally got a Mastodon instance up, and I don't host it myself. I'm using https://masto.host

They let you used your own domain.

My thought process is to not waste my time writing automation to stand up a server until I know I really want to use it.

So far I love it even though I only have 3 followers. I'm "micro blogging" more frequently than I used to on Twitter.

Of you have been meaning to stand up a Mastodon instance but just have not gotten around to it, maybe give mastodon.host a try.

They provide the ability to export and self host.

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Yeah, I guess I'm confused about why an instance has any topic whatsoever associated with it.

For a federated design I'd assume the main difference among instances to be code of conduct/ToS.

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#54
post #44
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

Yeah, I'm a part of the 90% I suppose. :)

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#55
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…

For any kiwi twitter refugees, I'm setting up https://mastodon.nz. Very quiet so far, but fully functional and federation is working well. Come on over!

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#56
post #22

With all of its faults, I'll take Twitter and its almost free speech over Mastodon any day. Many people say they are quitting Twitter because of the algorithmic timeline and so on, and they are going to Mastodon where a cabal of people choose to ban opinions that are perfectly legal.

I follow people on blacklisted instances and have no problems viewing their posts. Counter Social seems to be a walled garden but it suits their mission statement. EDIT: the article mentions shitposter.club as a blacklisted instance. I've been following https://shitposter.club/moonman for years with only minor migration issues.

> Counter Social seems to be a walled garden but it suits their mission statement.

It's not, but counter.social users are blacklisted by Mastodon folks who don't like how th3j35t3r[1] is running his Mastodon node.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jester_(hacktivist)

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#57

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?

I wouldn't say that's the problem. You do not need to register a new account to see an instance's timeline.

For example this page shows the instance's timeline without logging in: https://mastodon.sdf.org/about

If you like someone's toots there, you can follow and message any user on SDF's instance from your account on any other instance.

As mentioned elsewhere, the only thing you would gain by creating an account on sdf.org is to have your toots appear by default in the local timeline of other sdf.org users.

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#58
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?

You'll see that error if the Service Worker failed to register. Check your browser console?

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people have the freedom to associate in communities that censor if they are okay with it. You'd think, but no. Some instances are run by "free speech absolutists" (in quotes, because they're really not) who block instances which, in their opinion, are "too aggressive" about blocking spam and bad actors. For example, mastodon.social blocks counter.social, preventing all counter.social users from federating with mast…

Uh no. Counter.social broke themselves off of the federation. Also: your Mastodon admin could well be someone you know personally, rather than @jack.

> Counter.social broke themselves off of the federation.

Ah, assuming that's true this is the first I'd heard. My guess is that we'll see more of this as a handful of instances dominate and (in at least some cases) consolidate.

My point about @jack is that, for now, you're trading one benevolent dictator for many. The result is a Tower of Babel of moderation and federation standards. Maybe that's a feature and not a bug?

Post reply on HN