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Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

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Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#71

Post by GeckoEidechse »

On the topic of Twiter, Mastodon, and the Fediverse, why do federated FOSS alternatives to popular platforms not offer a read-only version of said platform as one of its instances to augment its lack of content?

In the example of Twitter, Nitter already exists as an alternative front-end. Now what if there's a Mastodon instance that uses Nitter to wrap official Twitter content and serve it as if it where the twitter.com mastodon instance? Again it would need to be a read-only version as Twitter is not Mastodon but it would help fill the content gap for sure.

Now Mastodon might not have a content issue but PeerTube for example very well has and in that case masquerading YouTube as a PeerTube instance would become very interesting.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#72

Post by nopenopenopeno »

nerdponx wrote: post #55
colesantiago wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is commonplace for decentralized protocols. Torrents are probably the most obvious example.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#73

Post by [deleted] »

masukomi wrote: post #42

ugh. this has a killer flaw > Looking for Mastodon users progress, scanned 867 of 867 users you follow on Twitter. Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon who have previously linked their Twitter and Mastodon accounts by logging into Twitodon. WHO HAVE PREVIOUSLY LINKED ACCOUNTS... BY LOGGING IN TO TWITODON the odds of that having happened for any notable subset are so low as to make this useless.

[deleted]

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#74

Post by augustuspolius »

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.

The messages would still need to be stored somewhere, right? Is SMTP a decentralized protocol in this sense? You can send a message from any client... however most people still use centralized solutions, not their own mail servers.

In your example HN would still need to retrieve and store billions of messages, handle user authentication, discovery, aggregation, additional data handling (e.g. you want to attach a video, or go live). They will need to monetize _something_. So we are back to square one, just with a much more inconvenient client setup process (like we do right now setting up pop3/smtp/imap).

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#75

Post by linuxhansl »

Heresy: Why do we need a replacement for Twitter?

There was a world and a life before Twitter, and there is one without Twitter as well.

I deleted my Twitter account about a year ago and have not missed anything. People and topics I am interested in I can updated on by many different means.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#76

Post by ttepasse »

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)

That hypothetical was the case: back in 2007/2008 people of the blogosphere slowly stopped blogging and started tweeting. And if you had a good but suddenly more empty feedreader you’d then had to follow the great migration and re-find those people on Twitter.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#77

Post by cmrdporcupine »

linuxhansl wrote: post #75

Heresy: Why do we need a replacement for Twitter? There was a world and a life before Twitter, and there is one without Twitter as well. I deleted my Twitter account about a year ago and have not missed anything. People and topics I am interested in I can updated on by many different means.

I don't think Mastodon is meant to be a replacement for Twitter, or will ever be that. It would be a mistake to treat it that way.

It's more like this place than Twitter, in a way.

Or, it's kind of similar to how Usenet was in the early 90s.

It's a simple linear feed of who've subscribed to, or what the people you've subscribed to have "boosted". So you find the interest groups you're into and join a node that matches that, then find the people you like on various nodes, and follow them. There's no recommendations really. There's hashtags, but few ways to "discover" them and they don't seem to get heavily used right now.

It's maybe like Twitter when it first launched. Certainly not what it became (which I never personally participated in).

It certainly doesn't have the level of "action" or "engagement" you'd find on Twitter. And that's probably a good thing.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#78

Post by shafyy »

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)

Decentralization doesn't mean hosting your own instance. It's about open protocols. There are hundreds or thousands of email providers that you can use and still send an email to a Gmail user without hosting your own instance.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#79

Post by georgyo »

contravariant wrote: post #62
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…

In that scenario is Mastodon not centralized?

No, it's still federated. But my account of alice@foo.com follows bob@bar.com

Bob registers his new Twitter handle so I, Alice, can find it on the central service of Twitter.

A mapping of users to users can be across any service, including centralized to centralized (ie Twitter to Facebook) or decentalized to decentralized (IE Diaspora to Mastadon). It is just saying this string registered somewhere else as that string.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#80

Post by p1necone »

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 is decentralized. It's mature enough that there's a bunch of trusted providers out there and you can use it without caring about the technical details, it's basically a perfect example of a successful mature decentralized service.
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