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Mastodon and Keybase

keybase.io

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Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#111

Post by eitland »

eridius wrote: post #72
silvermast wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please no. Centralization is always abused (eventually). Email + mastodon + IRC = happy little hackers.

Email is de-facto centralized at this point, with the overwhelming majority of email going through a small handful of giant providers. I don't remember the number anymore but some scary-high percentage of all email volume goes through Google servers.

1. There are still multiple options working options within the same ecosystem. And yes you can still self-host or pay to host[0]. Unlike on WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal where you have to choose one (or more) providers.

2. I find it weird how busy we are as a community are: scaring each other away from the solutions we should use by pushing Joe Average in front of us (like the post in this thread about mastodon.com being up for sale).

[0]: yes, there are problems. But FWIW mail disappeared before Gmail as well: I have memories of customers complaining about mail from "central USA" (or something) not arriving and after hassling our email provider and having them hassling their connections mail suddenly started to arrive. (And no I don't think it was acceptable then and I don't think it is acceptable now.)

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#112

Post by thinkloop »

lokedhs wrote: post #81
jeena wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be cool to see everyone's Mastodon usernames/domains, I'm on my own self hosted instance where it's a bit more difficult to find other people. Mine is: https://toot.jeena.net/@jeena

I switched to Mastodon about a year or so ago. I fully agree with the grandparent post in that the atmosphere is very different compared to the major social media platforms. As you allude to, discovery is harder since you don't have an algorithm pointing you in the direction of content you're likely to engage with (yes, engage with, and not necessarily enjoy) but once you have found the right people to follow, it's m…

> I'm committed to never be active on a proprietary, closed social media platform again.

Including HN?

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#113

Post by BinaryIdiot »

founderling wrote: post #110

This seems backward. They want ActivityPub servers to apply to a central service (keybase) to offer cross server identities. And they want users to trust that central service to decide who is who. It's always amazing, how strong the force of centralization is. Even when the whole value proposition of a technology is that it is decentralized, users will soon flock to centralized services built around it and end up in…

> It's always amazing, how strong the force of centralization is.

This is because Mastodon is a UX nightmare because of the way they decentralized it. With Twitter you go on and you @ your friends / etc and you're done. With Mastodon you have to figure out where they are and if they're not all in the same place it becomes a nightmare to try and manage.

I get it, decentralization can be great. But so far most of the implementations of decentralized social networks have been a UX nightmare for even the casual user.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#114

Post by caffeinewriter »

jeena wrote: post #18
zach43 wrote: post #15

Just wanted to say that i moved from twitter to mastodon sometime late last year amd couldn't be happier with it. Keybase integration is interesting to me, but not realky useful since i don't want to tie mastodon with my real life identity. the Fediverse as a whole has a very different 'feel' to it compared to Twitter. Twitter feels significantly more commercialized amd stressful...mastodon / pleroma feel a lot more…

It would be cool to see everyone's Mastodon usernames/domains, I'm on my own self hosted instance where it's a bit more difficult to find other people. Mine is: https://toot.jeena.net/@jeena

I'm https://takeoverthe.world/@caff :) Self-hosting Mastodon has been an adventure, for sure. However, relays have definitely helped with federation. :)

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#115

Post by zladuric »

zach43 wrote: post #109
twblalock wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know you're joking, but if you found your way on to a site called "Hacker News" at a URL like https://news.ycombinator.com , it it really going to be so much more complicated to understand that https://mastodon.social is the website of the Mastodon social network? Yes it is, because when people thing of $something, they assume the website is $something.com. If Mastodon plans to appeal to the general public then i…

I'm personally not at all attached to the 'mastodon.social' domain (i'm self-hosting my own account on a different instance), but I am somewhat surprised at this perspective on TLDs. Most users of the internet have been exposed to TLDs other than ".com". For example, wikipedia is at a .org TLD, US government sites are at .gov domains, university websites are at .edu domains. Most non-US users will frequently interact…

I would like to add a few things on top of the relatively technical reasons why this lack of .com doesn't matter.

I'd say most users won't type "mastodon.com" in their "browsers". They will type "mastodon" in their "internet" or, if technically savvy, into Google first. Second, from following the fediverse (not just mastodon, but also pixelfed, peertube etc), i have a feeling that they aren't into mainstream, general audience anyway. A lot of them are small focused instances and as such, won't even be attracting new people via Google, but by invites anyway. Many instances have closed registration anyway. So if you need to land anywhere it's likely not on mastodon.social, but something like ...(checks last five accounts to post directly on top of timeline): icosahedron.website, fostodon.org, mastodon.social, mastodon.technology (my instance) and hackers.town.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#116

Post by Nursie »

founderling wrote: post #110

This seems backward. They want ActivityPub servers to apply to a central service (keybase) to offer cross server identities. And they want users to trust that central service to decide who is who. It's always amazing, how strong the force of centralization is. Even when the whole value proposition of a technology is that it is decentralized, users will soon flock to centralized services built around it and end up in…

It's always amazing to me to hear assumptions that decentralisation is a feature in and of itself.

For most people it's an entirely secondary concern, not a concern at all or even an anti-feature.

Who do I appeal to, to take down that cyber-bullying material? How do I get my transaction reversed, as the victim of fraud? What do you mean I can't and the system was deliberately designed that way?

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#117

Post by ragebol »

jeena wrote: post #18
zach43 wrote: post #15

Just wanted to say that i moved from twitter to mastodon sometime late last year amd couldn't be happier with it. Keybase integration is interesting to me, but not realky useful since i don't want to tie mastodon with my real life identity. the Fediverse as a whole has a very different 'feel' to it compared to Twitter. Twitter feels significantly more commercialized amd stressful...mastodon / pleroma feel a lot more…

It would be cool to see everyone's Mastodon usernames/domains, I'm on my own self hosted instance where it's a bit more difficult to find other people. Mine is: https://toot.jeena.net/@jeena

https://mastodon.technology/@Loy

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#118

Post by speedplane »

Nursie wrote: post #116
founderling wrote: post #110

This seems backward. They want ActivityPub servers to apply to a central service (keybase) to offer cross server identities. And they want users to trust that central service to decide who is who. It's always amazing, how strong the force of centralization is. Even when the whole value proposition of a technology is that it is decentralized, users will soon flock to centralized services built around it and end up in…

It's always amazing to me to hear assumptions that decentralisation is a feature in and of itself. For most people it's an entirely secondary concern, not a concern at all or even an anti-feature. Who do I appeal to, to take down that cyber-bullying material? How do I get my transaction reversed, as the victim of fraud? What do you mean I can't and the system was deliberately designed that way?

> It's always amazing to me to hear assumptions that decentralisation is a feature.

Decentralization is not a feature for the end-user, it's a feature to developers. It's probably impossible for a new social network to take on Twitter, Facebook, etc. directly. However, a decentralized social network allows startups to move far quickly and implement other features that the big social networks are lacking.

I suspect that whatever social network eventually pushes out the dominant players today, will use tools like these.

One good precedent for this is AOL. AOL was safer and more user-friendly than the world-wide-web, but the web's decentralized nature allowed competitors to spring up much more quickly. I suspect something similar will eventually happen to today's social networks.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#119

Post by willvarfar »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #113
founderling wrote: post #110

This seems backward. They want ActivityPub servers to apply to a central service (keybase) to offer cross server identities. And they want users to trust that central service to decide who is who. It's always amazing, how strong the force of centralization is. Even when the whole value proposition of a technology is that it is decentralized, users will soon flock to centralized services built around it and end up in…

> It's always amazing, how strong the force of centralization is. This is because Mastodon is a UX nightmare because of the way they decentralized it. With Twitter you go on and you @ your friends / etc and you're done. With Mastodon you have to figure out where they are and if they're not all in the same place it becomes a nightmare to try and manage. I get it, decentralization can be great. But so far most of the i…

People managed to share email addresses, which are name@domain.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#120

Post by lokedhs »

thinkloop wrote: post #112
lokedhs wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to Mastodon about a year or so ago. I fully agree with the grandparent post in that the atmosphere is very different compared to the major social media platforms. As you allude to, discovery is harder since you don't have an algorithm pointing you in the direction of content you're likely to engage with (yes, engage with, and not necessarily enjoy) but once you have found the right people to follow, it's m…

> I'm committed to never be active on a proprietary, closed social media platform again. Including HN?

That's a good point. Clearly I still use this platform, but I do see a difference between them.

I don't “post” on Hacker News. I do comment, but I don't think anyone who are interested in following whatever it is that I may have to say would come here to look up my posts.

Or, to put it in another way, if this place would introduce some social media features, such as the ability to follow people and post to followers, then it is highly unlikely that I would be interested in using those features.

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