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Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

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Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#51

Post by colesantiago »

detaro wrote: post #17
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…

Not really, no. Imagine the reversed situation: Everyone is on Mastodon, and now this cool new thing called "Twitter" comes along and some people are switching to it. "find everyones Twitter account and follow it" would still be a useful thing to have, over manually checking for every single person you follow if they have an account, if they maybe have an account with a different username, ... and following those you…

But we all know this hypothetical isn't the case. Centralisation is more convenient in almost ALL cases, even in email (nobody except people on HN host their own email)

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#52

Post by letier »

commoner wrote: post #45
letier wrote: post #41

I never cared much about twitter. But I’d be very happy to get a couple of good tech profiles on Mastodon recommended. :)

FediFollows (@FediFollows@mastodon.online) recommends interesting accounts to follow on Mastodon. Many of these accounts are tech and FOSS-related. https://mastodon.online/@FediFollows They've also listed all of their recommendations in a directory: https://fedi.directory

Thanks that seems like a great starting point!

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#53

Post by NelsonMinar »

Another new tool in this vein is Fedifinder. It works by scanning Twitter bios of accounts you follow for strings that look like Mastodon addresses: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/

5 years ago there was a neat tool called Mastodon Bridge that did what Twitodon says it does but much better, I think because it didn't require everyone opt in. It stopped working because of some change Twitter made to their API terms of use. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-bridge

There's also Moa Party, but it's so complicated I have never used it. https://moa.party/

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#54

Post by discardedrefuse »

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 twitter or mastodon. But isn't "people who share your interests and then connect with them" exactly what the different mastodon instances are for? You're kinda supposed to find a server that aligns with your interest.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#55

Post by nerdponx »

colesantiago wrote: post #51
detaro wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, no. Imagine the reversed situation: Everyone is on Mastodon, and now this cool new thing called "Twitter" comes along and some people are switching to it. "find everyones Twitter account and follow it" would still be a useful thing to have, over manually checking for every single person you follow if they have an account, if they maybe have an account with a different username, ... and following those you…

But we all know this hypothetical isn't the case. Centralisation is more convenient in almost ALL cases, even in email (nobody except people on HN host their own email)

It proves the value of centralized search and discovery, but it says nothing about centralized hosting in moderation. There is probably quite a bit of value in a system where decentralized instances can volunteer to submit their own discovery database to a central search platform, and where individual users could opt in to being part of that database.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#56

Post by dd36 »

Timja wrote: post #25
twblalock wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It already exists: newsgroups.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#57

Post by Dracophoenix »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #38
leereeves wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fe…

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

Why do you assume the "jerks" wouldn't decide to federate among themselves. What's stopping them from creating a Splinternet (Splinterdon?) where they're free to say what they want?

> 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.

You can't get rid of recommendations. Someone can easily build an easy to use page-ranked search engine for Mastodon servers, even if unofficial, and the engagement race will reinvent itself.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#58

Post by etchalon »

colesantiago wrote: post #51
detaro wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, no. Imagine the reversed situation: Everyone is on Mastodon, and now this cool new thing called "Twitter" comes along and some people are switching to it. "find everyones Twitter account and follow it" would still be a useful thing to have, over manually checking for every single person you follow if they have an account, if they maybe have an account with a different username, ... and following those you…

But we all know this hypothetical isn't the case. Centralisation is more convenient in almost ALL cases, even in email (nobody except people on HN host their own email)

Email remains decentralized.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#59

Post by numpad0 »

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…

[fill in here with an insightful texts on distinction between identity and content distribution being centralized] - I don't want to sort out which one of {prefix}username{suffix}{duplicate identifier}.{domain}.tld is the person I had been talking with just 5 minutes ago, nor he would appreciate such a situation, but I do not care who serves the content for me so long it's valid within contexts i.e. if it comes from amazonaws.com or onmicrosoft.com.

Imagine you could find me as @numpad0 anywhere, and you can validate shadydomain.shadywebsite.tld/uuid.htm with my pubkey to hold me accountable for weird things I'd say, and that /uuid.htm URL may be ephemeral, or could be more permanent for more respectable posts at non-shady venues, and either ways I wouldn't have to be perfect wrt handling of privkey, yet somehow usernames matches someone anywhere would be verifyably that someone. That would be ideal.

But I believe social media operators recognize the exploitable value in conflating both; this has to be why no one use cross-OAuth between social medias and web apps anymore, and rather focuses on own ID systems and federated signups. Consistent set of identities is a value, media is a means to monopolize on it.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#60

Post by cmrdporcupine »

leereeves wrote: post #49
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fe…

That seems likely to result in a split. Not a few isolated servers with jerks, but one big federation with free speech types like Elon Musk, and a different federation with heavy moderation. But returning to a chronological feed would be nice.

It's already heavily federated so it wouldn't be a binary split like you describe.

Like, it wouldn't be "one federation with Musk types" vs "another with heavy moderation" but actually already a whole bunch of nodes with different types of moderation choosing to isolate away the Musk node. Or not. It would be up to each node.

Note that "Gab" and "Truth Social" are both built on Mastodon. But they're isolated from the rest of the federated nodes.

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