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Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

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Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#21

Post by anotherrandom »

twblalock wrote: post #13

Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized platform over a federated platform? The centralized platform made it very easy to find people. Now people who are moving to a federated platform miss the value of centralization, so they are writing a tool that will leverage that value and import it into the federated platform. Maybe if Mastodon was a centralized Twitter-style platform it would be more usable, an…

Honestly the fact that more tools are needed to make Mastodon usable shows that federation technology is "not there yet." I hope we are able to improve stuff to the point where it is usable.

Something I'm keeping an eye on is the @ protocol that is being designed specifically for the creation of federated social media applications -- it allows for portable identity and your social graph is portable, these things are not tethered to an instance of something. Hopefully that will be an upgrade so there will be less "jury-rigging" like this required to make federated applications usable

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#22

Post by twblalock »

Timja wrote: post #20
twblalock wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait and see what happens. The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have not changed. It is a free service that needs to convert user engagement into advertising dollars. Unless Twitter moves to a paid model, that will always be true no matter who owns it. And if Twitter fails, any potential replacement will need to deal with the same incentives and solve the same problems Twitter did.

A replacement could be just a protocol. If you signed your message with "This is a reply to msg 33398198 by Timja. Signed: twblalock", then nobody could take this converstion away from us again. I could copy it and put it on any server. Owned by myself or run by some service provider. And it would always be clear to everybody that this conversation really took place between the two of us.

Yeah but who would use a system like that outside of a small hardcore contingent of techies?

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#23

Post by rybosome »

michaelwww wrote: post #9

I find this whole situation to be incredibly depressing, especially with Musk tweeting out a fact free insinuation about Paul Pelosi (since deleted without apology.) The proverbial shit is going to hit the fan on Twitter on election night Nov 8 in America and I don't think Musk is prepared to handle it. I'd love to live in a country where we could have nice things, but apparently America is not it.

The shit hitting the fan on election night will not be limited to Twitter. Expect chaos in meatspace, exacerbated in part by Twitter.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#24

Post by kemenaran »

twblalock wrote: post #13

Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized platform over a federated platform? The centralized platform made it very easy to find people. Now people who are moving to a federated platform miss the value of centralization, so they are writing a tool that will leverage that value and import it into the federated platform. Maybe if Mastodon was a centralized Twitter-style platform it would be more usable, an…

To find someone on Mastodon, I would either enter their nickname in the search bar (no need for the domain, it will search on all instances) – or simply click on their profile on a post I like. Just like a centralized network. This tool just exists to do this automatically and in bulk.

It seems to me that finding someone on a federation is as easy as on centralized systems. Do you have a use case in mind where centralization makes it easier to find someone?

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#25

Post by Timja »

twblalock wrote: post #22
Timja wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A replacement could be just a protocol. If you signed your message with "This is a reply to msg 33398198 by Timja. Signed: twblalock", then nobody could take this converstion away from us again. I could copy it and put it on any server. Owned by myself or run by some service provider. And it would always be clear to everybody that this conversation really took place between the two of us.

Yeah but who would use a system like that outside of a small hardcore contingent of techies?

The interface could be just like Twitter or Hacker News.

In fact, users could use any service they like.

It would not matter what client you use to reply to me. Your reply would appear on Hacker News, because HN would follow the protocol and accept properly signed comments relayed to it.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#26

Post by prmoustache »

anotherrandom wrote: post #21
twblalock wrote: post #13

Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized platform over a federated platform? The centralized platform made it very easy to find people. Now people who are moving to a federated platform miss the value of centralization, so they are writing a tool that will leverage that value and import it into the federated platform. Maybe if Mastodon was a centralized Twitter-style platform it would be more usable, an…

Honestly the fact that more tools are needed to make Mastodon usable shows that federation technology is "not there yet." I hope we are able to improve stuff to the point where it is usable. Something I'm keeping an eye on is the @ protocol that is being designed specifically for the creation of federated social media applications -- it allows for portable identity and your social graph is portable, these things are…

If anything, they just shows they were late to the party.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#27

Post by echelon »

twblalock wrote: post #13

Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized platform over a federated platform? The centralized platform made it very easy to find people. Now people who are moving to a federated platform miss the value of centralization, so they are writing a tool that will leverage that value and import it into the federated platform. Maybe if Mastodon was a centralized Twitter-style platform it would be more usable, an…

> Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized platform over a federated platform?

Not at all. These types of centralized platforms won because they raised capital to grow fast and meet market needs before anything else. Email is still king, but if it were to be designed today, it would have been designed as some proprietary centralized system.

Distributed systems are hard.

In any case, I don't think federation goes far enough to save us from the problems we're seeing. I want a peer-to-peer social feed / social news app that doesn't depend on federation or servers at all.

Takedowns (DeCSS), takeovers (Twitter, FreeNode), shutdowns (Google+, Orkut, Digg, mastodon.technology), censorship (everywhere; should be an individual choice), maintainer-imposed spying (Apple CSAM), and maintainer-imposed changes or limits (Digg, modern Reddit, Twitter API) seem an order of magnitude harder to pull off if we have full control at the protocol and node level.

Federation would be nice for anonymity and aggregation of interest graph metadata, but at the core we should just have a swarm of content to sample and consume. It's fine if the content is naturally ephemeral as a consequence. We can use a constellation of opt-in 3rd party distributed (federated) services to provide durability, ranking, recommendation, filtering, etc. where desired.

Bittorrent, but for Twitter/Reddit/HN.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#28

Post by prmoustache »

Timja wrote: post #12

Twitter is the only platform I know where you can search for people who share your interests and then connect with them. The whole #buildinpublic community is just insanely great. Everybody is building something. Everybody is having similar issues to talk about. You can make so many great connections and help each other out. But I feel that with Twitter becoming a private company owned by a single controversial perso…

I don't know I started reusing twitter 2 months ago after years of not really using it.

My main gripe is it looks like it locked me up in a bubble full of accounts with similar interests and ideas. I don't really feel challenged and I am almost totally excluded from other subjects that could theorically interest me.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#29

Post by spaceywilly »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #3

Surely there has to be another way to do this besides logging in with Twitter. Heck, they could just have you post a verification tween on your Twitter account.

Maybe they can create a specific pattern people can enter in their Twitter bio, then build a crawler
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