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Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

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Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#101

Post by Abimelex »

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…

For only username based have a look at Fedifinder: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#102

Post by viraptor »

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…

> That is the reason why I am not enthusiastic about Mastodon. Mastodon is not decentralized. Unless you run your own instance, you do not own your social graph.

That's needed for practical reasons though. Actually decentralised alternatives like for example Scuttlebutt have this common issue: "This “inital syncing” process can take up to an hour and use a fair amount of data." (https://scuttlebutt.nz/get-started/) You don't get popularity with non-tech people that way.

With mastodon, the profiles can be migrated. So effectively you can start with some main hub, move to a more interesting instance if you want to in the future, and move to your own instance if that is what you want.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#103

Post by wrycoder »

You would want to think very carefully about giving Twitodon these rights to your Twitter account:

Things this App can view...

People who follow you and people who you follow.

All the Tweets you can view, including Tweets from protected accounts.

Any account you can view, including protected accounts.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#104

Post by cmrdporcupine »

augustuspolius wrote: post #95
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #44

I was skeptical on Mastodon. But I'm actually realling enjoying it. It's having a surge in popularity the last few days. When I checked it out a couple years ago it didn't click with me. But now I'm liking it, and I think there's potential there. It won't "replace" Twitter. But a good crowd of people has collected around there, and there's quite a bit of enjoyable content coming through.

Is there a non-niche general Mastodon instance that's really popular? That would be the easiest way for me personally to embrace it. I checked a few instances and it's all very niche and very empty. (To clarify, I don't mind niche instances, just at this stage there isn't enough discussion or interesting profiles to follow.)

mastodon.social is by far the largest, but the recommendation is generally to find the one that has interests & people on it you find interesting to start. you'll get content from people on mastodon.social anyways.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#105

Post by bkuehl »

augustuspolius wrote: post #95
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #44

I was skeptical on Mastodon. But I'm actually realling enjoying it. It's having a surge in popularity the last few days. When I checked it out a couple years ago it didn't click with me. But now I'm liking it, and I think there's potential there. It won't "replace" Twitter. But a good crowd of people has collected around there, and there's quite a bit of enjoyable content coming through.

Is there a non-niche general Mastodon instance that's really popular? That would be the easiest way for me personally to embrace it. I checked a few instances and it's all very niche and very empty. (To clarify, I don't mind niche instances, just at this stage there isn't enough discussion or interesting profiles to follow.)

You can be a part of a large or small instance and your consumption/conversation is not limited to users on that instance. You can follow people from other instances as well as scroll through a timeline that is posts/toots from across the fediverse (not just your local instance)

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#106

Post by anigbrowl »

When are Mastodon stans going to figure out that the reason people like Twitter is that it's (nominally) flat and you can interact with anyone unless they've blocked you for some reason? It's easy to build silos, which is what most instances are. Mastodon just reinvented single sign-on.

It's not a terrible thing to build, but whenever you make a product that's just imitating someone else (Twitter has 'tweets' but Mastodon has 'toots' because the logo is an elephant!) then it needs to be way better, not just a slight improvement. Longer messages are a good thing on Mastodon, though Facebook already does that. But what else does it offer that offsets the confusion of finding target instances, or conversely not being easily findable by people you don't want to converse with?

99.9% of users do not care about federation as a principle, it's just another level of technical gabble that they don't wish to be distracted by. Virtually every decentralized service struggles with this issue. Decentralization is primarily of interest to nerds, and for online services that requires you to be a bit of a computer and a bit of a politics nerd, shrinking your already small target pool.

Twitter's original win was that it was staggeringly simple, just asking new users to post about 'what they're doing right now' and offering simple controls to reply, repeat, or express approval. They realized that people felt more connected to a scrolling ticker of headline-style status updates than a newspaper.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#108

Post by anigbrowl »

kortilla wrote: post #89
colesantiago wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

many people don't care that it is decentralised, hence gmail, an open protocol is irrelevant. In mastodon's case decentralisation is a hindrance since they want centralisation back. email isn't a social network and lots people outside of HN don't self host them as such.

I think you’re quite confused about email users. Very few of the companies I worked for outside of startups used google for email hosting. Business email is very dependent on the fact that it’s an open protocol.

Companies like hosting their own email. Users don't because because they don't have an IT department whose job it is to filter spam etc.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#109

Post by [deleted] »

colesantiago wrote: post #85
ttepasse wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

this means that centralisation works better?

[deleted]

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#110

Post by augustuspolius »

bkuehl wrote: post #105
augustuspolius wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a non-niche general Mastodon instance that's really popular? That would be the easiest way for me personally to embrace it. I checked a few instances and it's all very niche and very empty. (To clarify, I don't mind niche instances, just at this stage there isn't enough discussion or interesting profiles to follow.)

You can be a part of a large or small instance and your consumption/conversation is not limited to users on that instance. You can follow people from other instances as well as scroll through a timeline that is posts/toots from across the fediverse (not just your local instance)

Got it. Does it make any difference where I register first? E.g. if that instance disappears overnight, will I be able to recover my account or not? I understand that I can access posts from all instances in the instance I use, but not sure how account handling/ownership works.
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