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Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

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Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#31

Post by johnchristopher »

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…

Or an opt-in for submitting a piece of private information like a phone, an email, a public key, etc. so you can prove who you are to your friends.

Who am I kidding, these people are looking for an audience, not their friends.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#32

Post by fazfq »

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 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.

What exactly is he supposed to do? I don't see how Nov 8 is megacorp's business.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#33

Post by leereeves »

michaelwww wrote: post #16
Zigurd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also isn't as if Elon was just thumbing his nose at naysayers. A day earlier he pledged to advertisers Twitter would not become a "free for all hellscape." Now that's the new tagline.

It will be easy to switch to another platform and there will be tools to help as this post indicates. 4chan users are having fun saying the N word on Twitter and Le Bron James is complaining about it. And this is only day 2. I certainly think people should be able to exercise free speech, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to it. I can go somewhere else if Twitter gets too depressing.

> I certainly think people should be able to exercise free speech, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to it.

Would that be different on Mastodon? I've never used it, but as a decentralized service, I assume it won't have a central authority banning users?

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#34

Post by michaelwww »

fazfq wrote: post #32
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 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. What exactly is he supposed to do? I don't see how Nov 8 is megacorp's business.

> What exactly is he supposed to do?

When Twitter is flooded with threats of violence and calls to form mobs will he just do nothing? Is that what you are suggesting? He can take the site dark if he wants and he may have to.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#35

Post by martythemaniak »

You know, I think Reddit is actually the best positioned Twitter alternative. You can use your real name, or anonymous account. You go there to follow particular subreddits, but there no reason why I shouldn't also be able to follow people and see their non-topic (ie, not part of any subreddit) microblogs interweaved with posts from subreddits. They deal with spam and trolls reasonably well.

They have all the pieces, they just have to put them together tastefully.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#36

Post by yosito »

Someone should build an app like this that is integrated with all the social networks. Give it a sexy UI, and a catchy feature or two to keep people checking in. Eventually, it could serve as a federated contacts hub that links people between networks. A vital piece of infrastructure to support mandated interoperability.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#37

Post by klyrs »

yosito wrote: post #36

Someone should build an app like this that is integrated with all the social networks. Give it a sexy UI, and a catchy feature or two to keep people checking in. Eventually, it could serve as a federated contacts hub that links people between networks. A vital piece of infrastructure to support mandated interoperability.

We had Trillian back in the day, but then the messaging services locked down their protocols. I don't expect such an app would survive the cat&mouse with major players for long.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#38

Post by cmrdporcupine »

leereeves wrote: post #33
michaelwww wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be easy to switch to another platform and there will be tools to help as this post indicates. 4chan users are having fun saying the N word on Twitter and Le Bron James is complaining about it. And this is only day 2. I certainly think people should be able to exercise free speech, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to it. I can go somewhere else if Twitter gets too depressing.

> I certainly think people should be able to exercise free speech, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to it. Would that be different on Mastodon? I've never used it, but as a decentralized service, I assume it won't have a central authority banning users?

The difference is that each node has its own set of moderators.

So jerks will get moderated there. And when they do that, they'll probably jump servers. And so get cordoned off into wherever federated node that they isolate themselves into.

Note that each server decides which other servers it will federate and share content with.

So eventually nodes that collect jerks will just get cut from most of the rest of the federation.

It's certainly vulnerable to abuse. But it also leaves more room for community response.

And it also doesn't have a recommendation "algorithm". You see the content you explicitly subscribe to. In chronological order. So dark patterns that arise out of feeding people rage tweets and engagement hacking and amplifying "controversial" crap for engagement... doesn't happen. So the platform isn't going to give an outsized "recommended" audience for crap just because it has high "likes" -- that's not how the platform works.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#39

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#40

Post by masukomi »

kemenaran wrote: post #24
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 centra…

it will not search "all instances".

It will search a subset of instances.

How do we know this to be true?

a) there is no central listing of all mastodon instances, or even all public ones.

b) it would take FREAKING AGES TO COME BACK because there are so damn many, you can only make so many parallel requests at a time, and you have to process the results from all of them.

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