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Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

blog.joinmastodon.org

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Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#51

Post by unstuckdev »

iuwhagtr wrote: post #48
kragen wrote: post #30

I'm finding Mastodon (I'm at https://nerdculture.de/@kragen at the moment) to be much more pleasant than Twitter, and much richer than IRC. The vicious culture war stuff on Twitter almost doesn't show up in my Mastodon timeline at all.

Of course it doesn't show up: most if not all Mastodon servers ban you for having the wrong political ideology, it's in the server rules of most of them.

I skimmed the rules of Mastodon.social: https://mastodon.social/about/more

It's the default, and most instances stick with it. None of the items seem controversial. Which one stands out as a problem to you?

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#52

Post by iuwhagtr »

unstuckdev wrote: post #51
iuwhagtr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it doesn't show up: most if not all Mastodon servers ban you for having the wrong political ideology, it's in the server rules of most of them.

I skimmed the rules of Mastodon.social: https://mastodon.social/about/more It's the default, and most instances stick with it. None of the items seem controversial. Which one stands out as a problem to you?

As an example, that one will ban extreme (and not so extreme) right-wingers. But you also have the opposite in other servers. And of course those servers refuse to federate with others. So there obviously are no flame wars like on Twitter... All ideologies are separated.

The reason there are no flame wars is not that Mastodon users are somewhat enlightened, as opposed to the Twitter rabble. Instead, clashes are avoided by having (and enforcing) rules and banning ideologies. The catch here is that this would never scale; this only works because there are only a few users.

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#53

Post by [deleted] »

iuwhagtr wrote: post #52
unstuckdev wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I skimmed the rules of Mastodon.social: https://mastodon.social/about/more It's the default, and most instances stick with it. None of the items seem controversial. Which one stands out as a problem to you?

As an example, that one will ban extreme (and not so extreme) right-wingers. But you also have the opposite in other servers. And of course those servers refuse to federate with others. So there obviously are no flame wars like on Twitter... All ideologies are separated. The reason there are no flame wars is not that Mastodon users are somewhat enlightened, as opposed to the Twitter rabble. Instead, clashes are avoid…

[deleted]

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#54

Post by unstuckdev »

_7gt4 wrote: post #44
sdrothrock wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the interface has a federated timeline that shows toots from all instances that the server federates with This is the issue; many servers are picky about who they federate with and this creates a real bubble.

Mastodon instances are not public spaces. Users can pick how much they want to engage in political discussions by picking their instance or, if they can, hosting their own. (The second part of the argument is flawed because most people can't just throw up a rails app and maintain it, be it cost or lack of knowledge) What most people don't get about "bubbles", mostly because it doesn't affect them, is that sometimes,…

Some people confuse boundaries with bubbles.

When they tell me I'm living in a bubble because I use an instance with rules and instance blocks, what they want is for the street preacher to be able to chase me down the sidewalk yelling fire and brimstone at me. "I wouldn't personally do that," they insist, "but people should be able to!"

They want to be able to harass people online the way they do offline, and on less advanced social networks. It's as ideological as all the opinions they reject as ideology.

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#55

Post by sdrothrock »

_7gt4 wrote: post #44
sdrothrock wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the interface has a federated timeline that shows toots from all instances that the server federates with This is the issue; many servers are picky about who they federate with and this creates a real bubble.

Mastodon instances are not public spaces. Users can pick how much they want to engage in political discussions by picking their instance or, if they can, hosting their own. (The second part of the argument is flawed because most people can't just throw up a rails app and maintain it, be it cost or lack of knowledge) What most people don't get about "bubbles", mostly because it doesn't affect them, is that sometimes,…

I'm not only thinking about political bubbles here, but linguistic or cultural ones. For example, when I joined a server here, it was federated only with a few other small Japanese servers, resulting in a fairly miserable experience. Another set had multiple languages but was just devoted to art. It's incredibly difficult (or was a year ago) to find servers that are general purpose and federated with both Japanese and English servers.

It's actually kind of interesting that me mentioning bubbles resulted in an immediately political assumption; I guess it shows how out of touch I am with mainstream Twitter.

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#56

Post by Lambdanaut »

iuwhagtr wrote: post #52
unstuckdev wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I skimmed the rules of Mastodon.social: https://mastodon.social/about/more It's the default, and most instances stick with it. None of the items seem controversial. Which one stands out as a problem to you?

As an example, that one will ban extreme (and not so extreme) right-wingers. But you also have the opposite in other servers. And of course those servers refuse to federate with others. So there obviously are no flame wars like on Twitter... All ideologies are separated. The reason there are no flame wars is not that Mastodon users are somewhat enlightened, as opposed to the Twitter rabble. Instead, clashes are avoid…

However each instance has its own self contained moderation, allowing moderation to scale horizontally.

If an instance is unable to moderate all its users, they can shut down signups temporarily.

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#57

Post by wpietri »

unicornporn wrote: post #24
wpietri wrote: post #16

Aren't these all vanity metrics? [1] Features are swell, and registered users are nice, in that it indicates somebody was at least curious. But how many of those 1,627,557 registered users are, say, active at least once a week for the last 3 months? What's the NPS of Mastodon users after 7, 30, and 90 days? I'd love to see them succeed. But I think it's dangerous for programmers to focus on building a thing rather th…

> I think it's dangerous for programmers to focus on building a thing rather than serving their users. It seems Mastodon is an example of programmers actually building something with real ambitions rather than just trying to make big money by trying to form an addiction for their users.

Sure, and that influences the choice of metrics. I think chasing things like user active minutes (UAM) can lead to pathological development. But for a social product, "real ambitions" must include people a) using it, and b) being happy they are using it. But my point is that features and signups can't be ends in themselves, as those are not real ambitions.

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#58

Post by _7gt4 »

sdrothrock wrote: post #55
_7gt4 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon instances are not public spaces. Users can pick how much they want to engage in political discussions by picking their instance or, if they can, hosting their own. (The second part of the argument is flawed because most people can't just throw up a rails app and maintain it, be it cost or lack of knowledge) What most people don't get about "bubbles", mostly because it doesn't affect them, is that sometimes,…

I'm not only thinking about political bubbles here, but linguistic or cultural ones. For example, when I joined a server here, it was federated only with a few other small Japanese servers, resulting in a fairly miserable experience. Another set had multiple languages but was just devoted to art. It's incredibly difficult (or was a year ago) to find servers that are general purpose and federated with both Japanese an…

I only know one instance (awoo.space) that does whitelisting instead of blacklisting. Mastodon can't even do it out of the box (although pleroma can).

My instance bans the sort of instance described in the sibling comment to yours, like qoto (who advertised their Mastodon as "free speech twitter"... on twitter ads)

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#59

Post by makomk »

unstuckdev wrote: post #54
_7gt4 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon instances are not public spaces. Users can pick how much they want to engage in political discussions by picking their instance or, if they can, hosting their own. (The second part of the argument is flawed because most people can't just throw up a rails app and maintain it, be it cost or lack of knowledge) What most people don't get about "bubbles", mostly because it doesn't affect them, is that sometimes,…

Some people confuse boundaries with bubbles. When they tell me I'm living in a bubble because I use an instance with rules and instance blocks, what they want is for the street preacher to be able to chase me down the sidewalk yelling fire and brimstone at me. "I wouldn't personally do that," they insist, "but people should be able to!" They want to be able to harass people online the way they do offline, and on less…

One of the ways instance blocks are used, in practice, is to discourage other instances from enforcing boundaries. For example, one of the biggest and oldest Mastodon instances recently blocked an entire up-and-coming instance because they banned one person who has a trail of allegations that they solicited underage kids for sex. A number of other, smaller instances also block instances that ban another alleged serial rapist.

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#60

Post by ryukafalz »

wpietri wrote: post #16

Aren't these all vanity metrics? [1] Features are swell, and registered users are nice, in that it indicates somebody was at least curious. But how many of those 1,627,557 registered users are, say, active at least once a week for the last 3 months? What's the NPS of Mastodon users after 7, 30, and 90 days? I'd love to see them succeed. But I think it's dangerous for programmers to focus on building a thing rather th…

>But I think it's dangerous for programmers to focus on building a thing rather than serving their users.

Dangerous for whom?

Mastodon isn't a product, it's an open source project. More active users is nice, but isn't fundamental to the project; it will continue as long as there are people interested in working on it.

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