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Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

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111–120 of 131 posts

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#111
post #108

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 Mas…

You are correct. My post was just intended to show that you have to be careful since there are several malicious communities present on the "fediverse" that have a lot of influence. Also, email does not have a federated timeline where everyone is connected and you can see each others posts. This is not a Mastodon issue but a fediverse issue.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#112
post #64

My favorite Mastodon feature is the ability to subscribe to hashtags [1] which makes discovering people to connect with super easy and you don't feel like a victim to some magic algorithm. Another thing I love about it is the small niche little community instances like this photographer [2] community. Themed instances make a huge difference in organizing your social media time - it feels less of a distraction and mor…

> My favorite Mastodon feature is the ability to subscribe to hashtags [1] You need to enable "advanced web interface", search for a hashtag, click the top right icon and then pin it, right? I had no idea I could do that. Thanks! EDIT: I'm having a hard time adding tags like "#matrix", it insists on me using autocomplete and propose #matrixdotorg.

Ahh, what a disappointment. Being able to subscribe to hashtags is the feature I wanted to see for so long and when I saw the first comment, I thought they did it finally. But no, it's not what I needed. It should not be called "subscribing hashtags", but "pinning" them

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#113
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"It's not child pornography, it's drawings of child pornography." This is one area I think Musk will have trouble with if he honestly does go in the "free speech" direction. There will immediately be speech that's so toxic it will drive off the majority of other users.

The defining feature of child pornography is that it includes an actual child.

Drawings, animations, and written works that depict fictional children in sexual situations may be quite icky to me, but to claim that they are the same as something depicting an actual living child is to deeply miss the point.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#114
post #43
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.

Yeah… it’s why I shut mine down fyi. Got tired of fighting that mess that I linked you to.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#115
post #91

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

and, you can get an RSS feed simply by appending '/rss' :

https://nitter.net/handle1,handle2,handle3/rss

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#116
I just spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to search/follow people/toots on other instances. I still don't know.

Not sure what that says about either the onboarding/ui or perhaps it's just me :-)

EDIT: aha, so i see this is not possible (yet): "[FEATURE] Follow public local timelines from other instances" https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/6942

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#117

I just spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to search/follow people/toots on other instances. I still don't know. Not sure what that says about either the onboarding/ui or perhaps it's just me :-) EDIT: aha, so i see this is not possible (yet): "[FEATURE] Follow public local timelines from other instances" https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/6942

Well.. you can follow people on other instances. Issue 6942 just is about the feed from all people on an instance. Just to make sure.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#118
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, if we overanalyze everything, the same could be said about the neediness of tweeting birds to get the attention of a possible partner [1]. [1] https://i.imgur.com/Ks17qEJ.png

It’s not over analyzing though, it’s literally the first thing many people will notice.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's not child pornography, it's drawings of child pornography." This is one area I think Musk will have trouble with if he honestly does go in the "free speech" direction. There will immediately be speech that's so toxic it will drive off the majority of other users.

The defining feature of child pornography is that it includes an actual child . Drawings, animations, and written works that depict fictional children in sexual situations may be quite icky to me, but to claim that they are the same as something depicting an actual living child is to deeply miss the point.

I don't think I did claim they were the same thing. Drawings of child pornography are repulsive (to me) and I wouldn't use a website where I would expect to encounter such. I think most people feel the same way. That creates a problem if you want to run a website that is so free of speech as to admit drawings of child pornography but also has the ambitions to retain a large audience - the two are mutually exclusive.

Re: Mastodon – A Federated Twitter Alternative

#120
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? You've unfortunately been doing it a lot, in this thread and also in other threads. Examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31129481

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30969820

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30951510

We have to eventually ban that sort of account because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

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