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Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

joinmastodon.org

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Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#41

Post by Arnavion »

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…

>Unfortunately it looks like Mastodon still hasn’t renamed their “toots” to “posts,”

Hasn't it? The PR to rename them was merged just over a year ago, and there have been many releases since then with the new strings.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/v3.5.1/app/javascr...

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/v3.5.1/config/loca...

etc.

I do notice that the documentation still uses "toots": https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/posting/

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#42

Post by INTPenis »

SEJeff wrote: post #2

For literally anyone who wants to setup a mastodon instance but hasn't yet, read this please: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2017/08/18/mastodon-is-big-in-jap...

Yeah if you want to make your small instance a bit more federated you'll start adding AP relays and then you'll suddenly see a flood of different asian languages. Probably mostly Japanese.

And along with them will come a lot of hentai and weird porn. So when you add like 10 AP relays you'll spend several hours just silencing instances based on this. But once you're done you do get a very active federated timeline that will help your local users discover the rest of the fediverse.

I almost ban any misskey instance I see with Japanese characters now, not becasuse they're all bad but because I can't see what the instance is about easily. It requires JS and it has no "About" or "Explore profile directory" section like Mastodon does.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#43

Post by geomark »

SEJeff wrote: post #2

For literally anyone who wants to setup a mastodon instance but hasn't yet, read this please: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2017/08/18/mastodon-is-big-in-jap...

That was an eye opener for someone who was thinking of setting up an instance. Obviously there are risks to federating posts from other instances, but I wasn't ready for this.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#44

Post by sjmm1989 »

INTPenis wrote: post #35
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 la…

No post body was provided.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#46

Post by INTPenis »

viksit wrote: post #38

how does mastodon get distribution? a series of decentralised sites lacking distribution and discovery have no incentives for users to join at scale?

This is where the magic of federation comes in.

Each instance can federate with any other instance, meaning posts from the other instance will show up in your local instance's federated timeline.

On top of that they can add AP relays that will further add posts to your federated timeline.

I run a very small instance focused on geographically local users and the federation is so rapid that I have to scale up my background workers just to process all the URLs people post from across the world.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#47

Post by boyter »

themodelplumber wrote: post #27
apetresc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend https://fosstodon.org/

I'm curious, is there any reason to sign up here if one is already on another tech instance?

Its activity pub so no? Assuming they have not blocked either other you should just follow across the peers.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#48

Post by sjmm1989 »

rtpg wrote: post #40
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 co…

> Yes, your provider can read your DMs.

Vomits

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#49

Post by camjohnson26 »

Arnavion wrote: post #41
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…

>Unfortunately it looks like Mastodon still hasn’t renamed their “toots” to “posts,” Hasn't it? The PR to rename them was merged just over a year ago, and there have been many releases since then with the new strings. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/v3.5.1/app/javascr... https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/v3.5.1/config/loca... etc. I do notice that the documentation still uses "toots": https://docs.j…

That’s what I was expecting, but as of today it still shows up in the onboarding tutorial and with the big “TOOT!” button on the main page, but these may be specific to desktop. It’s a little disappointing because it was a big announcement when they decided to change, and it really is the little things that make the biggest differences.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#50

Post by nextlevelwizard »

jerojero wrote: post #18

I'm in an instance with a couple thousand users, it's not very active. I think network effects are extremely important and eventually you have most people going into the biggest instances anyway. Though obviously this is still a preferable situation, mastodon's reach is still not good enough. People don't just want to say things, they want to say things and have others engage with them. But I mean, I would still enco…

Isn't the whole point that you don't need to "explore different instances" since instances talk to each other?
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