I'd join an HN-oriented Mastadon if there was one.
For tech there is:
Mastodon 2.5 released
61–70 of 105 posts
Re: Mastodon 2.5 released
#62I'd join an HN-oriented Mastadon if there was one.
But it's not really about joining a themed mastodon instance. You can join any mastodon instance and subscribe to people who are HN oriented.
There is an HN bot but it just repeats what is posted on HN.
Re: Mastodon 2.5 released
#63The broad approach to social networking presented by Mastodon and other federated networks is "spend your time/resources on funding the network instead of paying someone else much less to do it." It wont "work" for the same reason everyone doesn't host their own email service. It flies in the face of a broader cultural movement we have: specialization of labor. For instance, the solution to content moderation and har…
> I hope to be wrong about this, but people simply to not want to put this much effort into online communities.
Users love putting enormous amounts of effort into building functional, healthy communities online. What was that Reddit spectacle where r/ThanosDidNothingWrong "banned" half the users? That's a perfect example of how sophisticated a userbase can get-- using a feature of a service in a clever and unexpected way but without causing harm to the users or the system.
If it seems like users don't want to do that kind of work on a particular social network, it's probably a symptom that something fundamental isn't working in the software.
Users will do creative things on services that give them the freedom to do it. But they can't and won't fix design issues to make the service usable in the first place.
Re: Mastodon 2.5 released
#64I'd join an HN-oriented Mastadon if there was one.
But it's not really about joining a themed mastodon instance. You can join any mastodon instance and subscribe to people who are HN oriented. There is an HN bot but it just repeats what is posted on HN.
Yes, but it's sometimes good to look at the local instance timeline and find most toots (tweets in Mastodon for the uninitiated) related to your interests.
Re: Mastodon 2.5 released
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't entirely understand why you assume that one node will come to dominate such that it will be equivalent to a centralized system? One, or a small number, and because this is the history of these types of things. > The term "federation" is borrowed from political science for a reason. Just like in the USA, multiple federated states who share broad-strokes policies maintain interoperability while also maintaini…
> The USA is actually not a federation, and purposefully stopped being one (it turned in a confederation You have it backwards. The USA was a Confederation (a weak alliance of almost entirely independent nations) under the Articles of Confederation , 1776-1789 Then in 1789 it became a Federation (a strong national union of autonomous but not independent states) with the new Constitution. In a confederation, the centr…
Sorry yeah, I reversed the terms, in response to this:
> The term "federation" is borrowed from political science for a reason. Just like in the USA, multiple federated states who share broad-strokes policies maintain interoperability while also maintaining their own sovreignty.
which is not true, under a federation the members do not maintain sovereignty, and this is the important point. The Colonial States gave up their sovereignty when they became federated.
Everything else, besides the terms reversal (my bad), it seems we agree on?
> The EU is arguably a confederation, and it's pretty much the only modern example, because confederations rarely last long.
Exactly!
> That is not the model that the Fediverse wants to uphold
So what are we even arguing about here? We agree decentralization wont last long. If you're using the US as an example of a desirable "light hand" federation I guess that's just where we agree to disagree.
Re: Mastodon 2.5 released
#66The broad approach to social networking presented by Mastodon and other federated networks is "spend your time/resources on funding the network instead of paying someone else much less to do it." It wont "work" for the same reason everyone doesn't host their own email service. It flies in the face of a broader cultural movement we have: specialization of labor. For instance, the solution to content moderation and har…
What purpose does HN serve when we already have reddit? Replicated work!
The tricky thing about naysaying technology is that naysayers are almost always correct. This doesn't mean that they have useful information (you could refer to Bayes theorem for instance, and look at P(Failure|Prediction), the probability of failure given that an inexpert observer has predicted failure). It's just very easy for casual observers to pick at things.
Additionally:
-What would you say about a site like reddit that "replicates moderation" at each subreddit?
-You also seem to be saying that creating a small business is a dead-end endeavor, that competition between similar businesses is old-fashioned. What if an entrepreneur wants to create a twitter competitor?
Re: Mastodon 2.5 released
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried Mastodon? You still pay someone else to run the server (or not, if you prefer), you can just choose who you pay, and which server. Sending toots does not require that you set up your own infra, re: the email example. > People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it for them. It's why we have representative democracy instead of direct democracy: people don't want to be invol…
> Have you tried Mastodon? Yes. > You still pay someone else to run the server (or not, if you prefer), you can just choose who you pay, and which server. Sending toots does not require that you set up your own infra, re: the email example. Right, you either pay with your time or your money, as opposed to FB for which you pay nothing at all. Specialization of labor reduces costs, federation increases them. > This is…
If your criteria for success is a large centralized for-profit monopoly, then of course Mastodon will never be successful, since that is the definition of failure in the context of the federated network. And since we have that now, you of course should be perfectly happy with the status quo.
Re: Mastodon 2.5 released
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, now what if I were to tell you that email itself is a federated system, exactly the same as Mastodon. All of your questions can be answered with "what does our currrent email system do?". Sure, most people don't run their own email system. But some do. And you are not forced into a singular option that everyone is required to use. Despite what people might claim, Hotmail, or numerous other email options are all a…
Right email is the exact model I'm basing my thinking on. You don't see people running their own email servers, you see 4-5 companies in the world gobbling up the VAST majority of the network, even with weak network effects.
I've been thinking about this recently myself and also used email as my go-to example -- and it's not lost on me that, if Mastodon really follows that path, we're likely to end up with a few immense instances that provide added services, either in exchange for a small fee or for ads (or, let's be honest, through data mining).
I suspect one of the biggest potential places for improvement will be providing a semi-formal process around moderation. The current approach presents itself as a kind of socialist/libertarian communal utopia, and it can be depending on how a given instance is run -- but in practice, each instance is a monarchy with absolute power over not only your presence in the kingdom but which other kingdoms you're allowed to talk to. Your social graph can be broken at any point because your admin has decided, for any reason, to stop federating with an instance you have followers on, or vice-versa. The net effect is that you can be punished for transgressions, real or imagined, that you weren't a party to (and might not even be aware of). And I don't think that has a technical solution, just a policy one.
Of course, it's possible that Mastodon -- or, more likely, a future similar network, maybe one built on ActivityPub, too, so it could federate with Mastodon servers transparently -- will solve this by requiring instances to agree to slightly more formal policies around federation and moderation: here is disallowed content, this is the reporting process, this is the appeals process, etc. This can absolutely be done; it was done, three decades or so ago, back in the days of FidoNet. But I suspect the folks most enthusiastic about Mastodon as it exists now would find that anathema.
Re: Mastodon 2.5 released
#69Re: Mastodon 2.5 released
#70The broad approach to social networking presented by Mastodon and other federated networks is "spend your time/resources on funding the network instead of paying someone else much less to do it." It wont "work" for the same reason everyone doesn't host their own email service. It flies in the face of a broader cultural movement we have: specialization of labor. For instance, the solution to content moderation and har…
What purpose does HN serve when we already have reddit? Replicated work! The tricky thing about naysaying technology is that naysayers are almost always correct . This doesn't mean that they have useful information (you could refer to Bayes theorem for instance, and look at P(Failure|Prediction), the probability of failure given that an inexpert observer has predicted failure). It's just very easy for casual observer…
> What purpose does HN serve when we already have reddit? Replicated work!
I think you're missing the point. All of these are examples of successful centralized networks. The idea that mastodon will not fall prey to the same incentives facebook did is based on it being meaningfully decentralized. It is extremely unlikely to me that as the network scales (it has 100kish DAUs right now) meaningful decentralization will continue to exist.
> -What would you say about a site like reddit that "replicates moderation" at each subreddit?
It doesn't, in a meaningful way, because if the government wants to shut something down on reddit they contact reddit, not the moderator of a subreddit.
> -You also seem to be saying that creating a small business is a dead-end endeavor, that competition between similar businesses is old-fashioned. What if an entrepreneur wants to create a twitter competitor?
I would agree with that in most cases, depending on your goals, and would wish the twitter competitor the best of luck.