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Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

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Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#81

Post by Normille »

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...
No. This is where the great misinformation about federated social media comes in.

It's painted as being this great decentralised, liberated alternative to Twitter et al "If you don't like the instance you're on, just go elsewhere..."

The reality is; you can't take your data elsewhere. There's no way to download your post history from one instance and upload it to another. There's no way to download your post history from one instance and upload it to your own server, if you decide to self-host.

The so-called Fediverse is vastly over-hyped. It would be better named the Fragmentiverse.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#82

Post by haunter »

CodeArtisan wrote: post #69

Mastodon became popular in Japan after Twitter banned lolicon and Pixiv[1] decided to start its own Mastodon instance named Pawoo[2]. It had a mobile app and all[3]. Last year, Pixiv stopped supporting the mobile app and transferred the instance to Russel[4]. I haven't followed recently but it seems to be still quite active (Japanese speaking mostly). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixiv [2] https://pawoo.net/abou…

>Mastodon became popular in Japan after Twitter banned lolicon

I'm not sure CP is a good advert for Mastodon.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#83

Post by mariusor »

Barrin92 wrote: post #8
tdhz77 wrote: post #4

I wish I could be happy to use this, but I’m afraid big tech is just too big for me to jump ship. (Network effect) I’m starting to think that Government should think about breaking up social media sites or highly regulate them. The twitter Elon saga makes me think it will be impossible in the United States.

>Government should think about breaking up social media sites or highly regulate them they don't need to do anything that drastic. They literally need to do one straight forward thing. Force Twitter to open up their API and let people build a bridge to ActivityPub. Hell Elon could do it if he is serious about decentralization.

There are already bridges from twitter to activitypub, however most of the people in the fediverse feel themselves superior to twitter and actively discourage this. If there's a way for twitter to interop with activitypub you will most likely see instances specifically blacklisting it (especially if it becomes a free speech platform).

Personally I don't understand why, the negativity and the assholes are already there but maybe in lesser numbers.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#84

Post by Normille »

fdschoeneman wrote: post #5

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

Assuming by 'conservative' and 'libertarian' you mean 'right wing'... [sorry. But American political labels are confusing from a European viewpoint] ... that's because the fediverse is just as censorious as all the social media it seeks to replace.

Last time I looked into this fediverse stuff, the biggest 'Mastodon' instance by number of users was affiliated to gab.com. But good luck finding that, if you check out any of the directories of instances, as they [the rest of the fediverse] pretty much all decided to blacklist the Gab instance and block users on those Gab instances from being able to interact with any of the other instances. I think, in the end Gab went off, forked Mastodon and rolled their own version.

BTW --I'm not a right-winger or supporter of Gab in any way. I have no interest whatsoever in US politics. But I did note the irony that; the first thing the kind of people who protest most loudly that we need open alternatives to Twitter et al did, when they got their hands on the control levers of their own tiny Twitter clones, was to start banning people and silencing viewpoints they disapproved of.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#85

Post by ranguna »

haunter wrote: post #82
CodeArtisan wrote: post #69

Mastodon became popular in Japan after Twitter banned lolicon and Pixiv[1] decided to start its own Mastodon instance named Pawoo[2]. It had a mobile app and all[3]. Last year, Pixiv stopped supporting the mobile app and transferred the instance to Russel[4]. I haven't followed recently but it seems to be still quite active (Japanese speaking mostly). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixiv [2] https://pawoo.net/abou…

>Mastodon became popular in Japan after Twitter banned lolicon I'm not sure CP is a good advert for Mastodon.

It's not porn, it's just a fantasy drawing with almost no parity to real life except that they look like humans. It took me a while to realise this as well, but in the end, that's what it is. You should never fully compare anime to real life, it's a fallacy that can get you in trouble.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#86

Post by robin_reala »

Springtime wrote: post #80

Maybe I'm still not familiar enough with HN's algorithm but was a bit surprising to see this topic with 180 points in one hour is now on the second page since I last checked about ~15 minutes ago, while others hours older with less points are on the first page.

There’s an unclear set of factors that can nerf a post. The most normal one is a high comment-to-post-upvote ratio (sign of a flamewar). I assume this triggered one or more of those factors.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#87

Post by mattdesl »

How does this prevent a single instance growing to massive proportions, and then its property (and private data!) being sold to highest bidder? Those who self-hosted their data will have no problem, but the majority of users aren’t self-hosting, and will lose posts & media upon switching to a new instance (which may lead to the same network effects we see now with Twitter users not willing to migrate).

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#88

Post by rvieira »

mattdesl wrote: post #87

How does this prevent a single instance growing to massive proportions, and then its property (and private data!) being sold to highest bidder? Those who self-hosted their data will have no problem, but the majority of users aren’t self-hosting, and will lose posts & media upon switching to a new instance (which may lead to the same network effects we see now with Twitter users not willing to migrate).

It doesn't. IMO it's not that different from email. Most people will open an account with a few major players (instances) they trust. Others will self-host or use friends/work/neigbourhood D&D group instances. The rest will be taking a chance.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#89

Post by gaius_baltar »

sohkamyung wrote: post #16
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'?

For those with an interest in books, try BookWyrm [1]. It's a Mastodon instance that caters for books (think 'federated Goodreads'). I use it to put up my reviews of books and to find new books and bookish people. [1] https://bookwyrm.social/

Beware that Bookwyrm is distributed under the "Anticapitalist software license" [1] so you must be very veyr very careful before using it. It may be actually impossible to legally deploy it for a lot of people.

[1] https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm/blob/main/LICENS...

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