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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm stunned that people still today don't realize that there is no, big and centralized free services. How would that work on the company side? Who pays for giant servers and software development and maintenance? People are not too sharp in 2018.
|...there is no, big and centralized free services. Wikipedia?
This is a good read for anyone curious what this is all about, and contains a roadmap for an "instance-of-one" via Masto.host: https://laurakalbag.com/what-is-mastodon-and-why-should-i-us...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or named their tweets "toots". It's like they want it to fail.
I'll just point out that "Twitter" sounded equally ridiculous when it first came out.
The 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…
Have you thought about the possibility that this is exactly what at least some people actually want? Reddit is a great example of a platform that has moderators basically working in a federated way and has been a huge commercial success. By having that commercial success users are now subject to negative market forces that erode the character of the platform because at the end it's not actually federated but the owners simply didn't mess much with it for a while. Mastodon has taken a huge step towards making sure that these market forces can't invade and dominate the platform because Mastodon devs don't actually have the same control that the owners of Reddit do. In other words I don't see why we need to judge Mastodon's success based on it's size but based on it's viability as a platform which is already pretty decent. And each Mastodon instance is free to solve it's own funding issues so I don't see how the fact that there is no central advertising and the "cost" of moderation is higher affects it. So the usual success rating of how many users you have does not apply directly on Mastodon.
>I can respect that Mastodon is philosophically consistent: if you want to really control your communications, you need to put in the effort. I hope to be wrong about this, but people simply to not want to put this much effort into online communities. If they did we wouldn't have FB, IG and Twitter already.
There is a fairly large number of people who put considerable hours moderating fb groups for no profit. The same goes for reddit moderators. Every one of them could potentially launch or help moderate a Mastodon instance( especially a topic-specific one). So the number of people caring required is much smaller than you might think. Besides if your point is that people don't want this control, let's remove blocks/mutes and see the chaos unfold.
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I think you're maybe forgetting that the goal of Mastodon, or any federated (as opposed to distributed) system, is not to have every single user run and administer their own instances, but rather to enable users to freely select from a wide variety of compatible interconnected peers. > People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it for them. I think people mostly want a smaller power to d…
> I think you're maybe forgetting that the goal of Mastodon, or any federated (as opposed to distributed) system, is not to have every single user run and administer their own instances, but rather to enable users to freely select from a wide variety of compatible interconnected peers. This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for electing the main node in the network, which will eventually…
You are missing the point. The fact that some instances will get way bigger than others is fine. People will choose whatever instance they prefer and will have that power. This will allow for heavily curated instances as well as more free ones. You choose your poison. You can't do that on other platforms.
The 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 think you are entirely correct and your view does not need to be changed. If you look at how everything is playing out on a geopolitical scale, authoritarian states are winning over democracy. At a macro scale, even in the politics of Tech you can see this. Tech platforms are put under immense pressure from their users to moderate the platform. No one wants to spend the time to filter someone from their view, block…
The 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…
"there are more people moderating," The net effect is that you'll more likely come into contact with the kind of preferential modding that suits your own tastes. Birds of a feather. One community might mod your type with an iron fist, but jump to another server, where a diametrically opposed set of opinions prevail, and you'll feel more at home. ...or something like that.
So tweets are "toots" in Mastodon. Could it be that extinct mastodons grunted or growled instead of tooting? I would rather bark, bleat, caw, croak, howl, quack or screech. Toot? Nah. Too many associations with musical fruits.
We can presume Mastodons shared many characteristics with modern day Elephants, which from zoo anecdotes seem capable of grunting, growling, and (both types of) tooting, to communicate different things.
Is there a way to make a mastodon instance for a private community where it requires registration (& approval) like a forum, but still have the federation between instances? (if not, is it possible to unfederate an instance?)
As I understand it, you can require users to get approval in order to register locally, and there are at least patches out there to create a whitelist of instances that are allowed to federate with you, but there's no way to require users from the allowed instances to get approval before interacting with local posts.
I'd join an HN-oriented Mastadon if there was one.
For tech there is: https://mastodon.technology/about