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Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

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Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#101

Post by temp8428i »

i5heu wrote: post #99
temp8428i wrote: post #98

I felt the obligation to mention that Mastodon is not friendly at all, and you will have to resort to blocking and filtering all the time. For example, there are instances which I won't name that are solely made to harass, doxx and stalk other people. There is also a significant amount of political extremism from both the right and the left, and drama is very prevalent just like on Twitter. You really have to conside…

I think mastodons approach is a very good approach. You can as a user block entire instances. And if you are on a good instance many abusive instances are already blocked. So everybody can have their little space without shitty people. Especially because city people tend to accumulate in certain instances since they’re not welcomed on eg. mastodon.social

Unfortunately, a lot of instances that block have a double standard where they won't allow nazis but allow anarchism and communism, and all the other ideologies, with people openly promoting harassment towards others. I have not seen an instance that blocks both yet.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#102

Post by jlelse »

Markoff wrote: post #91
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…

> I can follow the accounts I’m interested in without directly interacting with Twitter You could just use Nitter.net and put all handles you wanna follow separated by comma after slash like this https://nitter.net/handle1,handle2,handle3

Thanks for the tip! I have a Nitter instance, but didn't know about this.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#103

Post by i5heu »

temp8428i wrote: post #101
i5heu wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think mastodons approach is a very good approach. You can as a user block entire instances. And if you are on a good instance many abusive instances are already blocked. So everybody can have their little space without shitty people. Especially because city people tend to accumulate in certain instances since they’re not welcomed on eg. mastodon.social

Unfortunately, a lot of instances that block have a double standard where they won't allow nazis but allow anarchism and communism, and all the other ideologies, with people openly promoting harassment towards others. I have not seen an instance that blocks both yet.

You can always create your own with like minded ppl.

Maybe some non political instances are a shot worth.

The problem there is that everybody has its own definition of “extreme left” and “extreme right”. So it could be that your preferences are just a bit niche or something like that :)

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#104

Post by mattdesl »

i5heu wrote: post #100
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).

If a instance I sold, you can just move to another instance while you don’t lose contact to alle the people you follow. There is even a feature which enables you to say “this is my old account, over there is my new one”

But, 1) your past media and posts are not migrated to the new instance, so your timeline effectively has to 'start over', and 2) from what I understand the move is not seamless; you must announce your account has moved, and hope that your follow-base is proactive enough to re-follow you on the new account.

Since the architecture doesn't prevent take-overs, and requires instances to be continually maintained and upheld by their owners, you might have to do this several times over the years (take-overs, instances shutting down), leaving behind a trail of dead accounts. I presume most users will just end up sticking to a single major instance due to network effects and the desire to avoid these migrations.

More concerning is that all of the private data (including direct messages) on the old instance is now in the hands of its new owner, who may have a different idea of what to do with it.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#105

Post by krainboltgreene »

temp8428i wrote: post #101
i5heu wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think mastodons approach is a very good approach. You can as a user block entire instances. And if you are on a good instance many abusive instances are already blocked. So everybody can have their little space without shitty people. Especially because city people tend to accumulate in certain instances since they’re not welcomed on eg. mastodon.social

Unfortunately, a lot of instances that block have a double standard where they won't allow nazis but allow anarchism and communism, and all the other ideologies, with people openly promoting harassment towards others. I have not seen an instance that blocks both yet.

That's not a double standard. It's very weird to suggest nazis and anarchists are the same kind of thing.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#108

Post by 3np »

temp8428i wrote: post #98

I felt the obligation to mention that Mastodon is not friendly at all, and you will have to resort to blocking and filtering all the time. For example, there are instances which I won't name that are solely made to harass, doxx and stalk other people. There is also a significant amount of political extremism from both the right and the left, and drama is very prevalent just like on Twitter. You really have to conside…

> Mastodon is not friendly at all

This is akin to saying "e-mail is not friendly at all" because you get a lot of spam and scams. It's in the nature of permissionless communication and the answer is the same as for e-mail (filtering and moderation, by user and/or server). If you want to be conservative you can use an allowlist (rather than blocklist) approach.

That has nothing to do with the "friendliness" of the Mastodon project.

Mastodon is not one place. It is many places, many of which interconnect.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#109

Post by xigoi »

metamet wrote: post #57
JetAlone wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Unfortunately it looks like Mastodon still hasn’t renamed their “toots” Maybe we wouldn't have so many reasons to leave twitter if people had taken tweets less seriously in the first place. If everyone knows that artificially short posts with insanely widespread potential reach are all 屁s, that could help fix a lot of what's wrong in our world.

I suspect there's a limited number of people who want to be told so explicitly that they're just farting their thoughts out online.

There are many people who are proud of “shitposting”.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#110

Post by 3np »

geomark wrote: post #43
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.

You could start with an allowlist approach; add servers to federation when you see they have content/people you want to connect with. Over time the list will grow.

E.g. start with the biggest ones and maybe some that are specific to your interests. Over time you will see people resharing posts and commenting on threads from other instances and you can add those as well.

If you run a server for other users you could have an account set up for your users to ping with servers they want you to add.

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