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Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

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Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#31

Post by jterrys »

fdschoeneman wrote: post #5

I'm curious to know why there aren't more conservative or libertarian mastodon sites. Seems like a good fit.

There are. Mastodon's problem (and/or best feature depending on how you look at it) is that it's pretty prevalent about their blocklists. So the most commonly federated and advertised places tend to be more liberal leaning. I don't keep close track of the community, but this is one blocklist that I just googled https://toot.cafe/about/more#blocked-instances

Aside from the obvious terrible shit the list itself looks kinda passive aggressive in tone

The more conservative demographic also has other more...professional(?) options in the form of Truth Social and Gab. At one point Gab was federated but got blocked into oblivion to the point where they decided to go standalone https://reclaimthenet.org/mastodon-blocks-gab/

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#33

Post by unicornporn »

My recommendation to anyone having difficulties getting started or finding interesting people: try to find a small instance that suits your interests.

Mastodon got so much better for me when I left the generalist instances. I now see my instance as a micro community with the ability to connect to a greater community.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#34

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

camjohnson26 wrote: post #3

DigitalOcean has a one click app that lets you setup a Mastodon instance ridiculously easily. For my own reasons I’m trying to migrate away from Twitter, and have found it relatively easy to sync Twitter profiles with a self hosted Mastodon instance so I can follow the accounts I’m interested in without directly interacting with Twitter. Configuring email sending and DNS is a little tricky, but if you use namecheap a…

they are called posts now https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16080

according to this PR so yeah

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#35

Post by INTPenis »

sjmm1989 wrote: post #9

Quoted post unavailable.

You're right on several accounts. I've been hosting a mastodon instance for almost 5 years now but people are horrible. Sexist, xenophobic, bitter and more. I don't think mastodon is a twitter alternative unless you just want to promote AP federation in classical communities.

That's what fascinates me about AP federation. I want to see a return to all those different punbb, phpbb, vbb type boards we had during the late 90s and early 2000s, but federated this time.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#36

Post by 3np »

(Repost from last time Mastodon was on the front page)

There are a multitude of Mastodon-compatible ActivityPub implementations[0][1]. Save for bugs, which devs and maintainers tend to be motivated to work out, they should all federate together, meaning you can follow and share between them. All have instances with open registrations and are also straightforward to self-host. There are moderation tools and admins can set policies for federation; some servers are picky with how they federate, some more free-speech-oriented. Fully unmoderated servers with open registration that try to federate promiscuously tend to get siloed of from the rest fairly quickly.

For those of you raising issues with ways in which the AP-speaking fediverse is lacking at this point, many of these points are acknowledged by members and implementers of the community. The biggest one IMO being the same challenge other federated and P2P communication systems (like Matrix) need to solve: DIDs, which should make users less under authority to their server admins, and server owners less under the authority of ICANN and registrars. The second one (which follows DIDs) being more effective models and tools for moderation and curation.

If you're actually interested in exploring constructive conversation on how to move forward to where we don't need to rely on centralized authoritarian incumbents and getting a healthier ecosystem, come join in[2][3][4].

[0]: https://fediverse.party/

[1]: https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous/

[2]: https://codeberg.org/fediverse

[3]: #socialcoding-foundations:matrix.org

[4]: https://pad.public.cat/8yNgnlxmSsGYk3TfIau46A?view

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#37

Post by dokka »

I rather like mastodon compared to the other implementations of activitypub (Misskey, Friendica and Pleroma). What I'd really like is to build my own activitypub server and client, but it's so hard. I'm going to keep using mastodon for now, but it sucks that the best activitypub implementation is basically a twitter clone. I'd really like something with a layout more like Facebook. Most of the people I try to convert to mastodon don't like twitter. I want to give them Friendica, but it needs a lot of UI work and a nice android client to really be useful to them.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#39

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #10

Folks, What are your recommendations for some Mastodon communities which might be of interest to typical HN audience and are 'absolutely legal'?

mastodon.social is managed by gargron, the dev of mastodon himself so he has an added incentive to keep that community as safe as possible

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#40

Post by rtpg »

sjmm1989 wrote: post #9

Quoted post unavailable.

The metaphor I'm going for is that Mastadon is like some weird cross between e-mail and a shared mailing list with everyone on the provider (the local timeline).

Everything flows from that. Yes, your provider can read your DMs. If you're on a very small provider there might be weird shit going on. People kinda self-identify to the domain they're on. Huge domains will not really have a feel beyond being big.

And of course you can just go into your own little corner of the internet and do your thing. There are loads of instances that are pretty chill. And if you know someone on a different instance you can just follow them!

You can choose to be outside of nonsense if you want. And unlike other forms of social media, while there is _some_ homogeneity through social spread, the fact that there are these varied instances and people kinda sticking to their own corner of the fediverse for the most part, you can just have a localized experience.

Every social network doesn't need to be everything for everyone at once.

Of course if you're going onto instances that are, like, built around being Extremely Online All The Time, yes people will be annoying.

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