Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon • Hacker News Board

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#121

Post by augustuspolius » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 10:49 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #115

augustuspolius wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are migration tools to move your followers and your followings between nodes. But no way to move your posts. And so, yes, your identity partially/kind-of doesn't move. But mostly sort of does? At first this bugged me, but then it was pointed out that if you could just move your posts you could also potentially violate the moderation rules of the host you were moving to. So it makes some sense.

Thanks. I am more worried about the identity than the posts. If my identity belongs to the host, then in that sense this is no better than a centralized Twitter. Just theoretically speaking (I have not been banned from anything ever), if a mastodon.art user is banned from mastodon.art - everyone who followed them will have to find them on another instance and subscribe again? If exporting data is a process that depends on the host instance, when they ban you - that's it, your identity is not recoverable.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#122

Post by notatoad » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 10:50 PM UTC

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…

even if this were true, which i'm not sure it is, it isn't a reason to make the whole platform centralized.

you could argue that there's benefit to centralized friend-finder tools, but there's no reason that has to be tied to a centralized platform. a decentralized and open-access platform allows for choice and competition amongst friend-finder tools

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#123

Post by anigbrowl » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 10:56 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #117

anigbrowl wrote: post #106

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 Mas…

> (Twitter has 'tweets' but Mastodon has 'toots' because the logo is an elephant!) It's a mastodon, not an elephant!!

Oh noes I invalidated my whole argument ToT

edit: y'all are taking this exchange much too seriously.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#124

Post by doctor_eval » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 10:59 PM UTC

wrycoder wrote: post #96

p1necone wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise, gmail would be totally useless if it was actually centralized and you couldn't email non gmail users.

But they can’t necessarily email you, given Google’s procedures regarding “spam”, i.e. anything from a small email server.

This is true. My last company used fastmail, but one guy insisted on using Gmail. Sometimes fastmail didn’t arrive at Gmail. We (tech team) said, this is a problem with gmail. C-suite said this is a problem with fastmail.

And so the word comes down, we have to move to Gmail. It’s believable decision making, but that’s how it works.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#125

Post by drc500free » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 10:59 PM UTC

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.

It seems that this tool is fairly equivalent to everyone posting their mastodon and twitter handles to this thread.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#126

Post by smoldesu » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 11:00 PM UTC

jdeibele wrote: post #120

anigbrowl wrote: post #106

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 Mas…

I actively dislike the federation that Mastodon is using. If they would let me use somebody@gnail.com or somebody@hotmail.com, fine. Or somebody@mastodon.master-name-server. Instead, you have somebody@mastodon.technology. Guess what? mastodon.technology is closing down. Any connections using that address are going to be lost. It's really too bad that the idea of where you connect became conflated with what your name…

> Guess what? mastodon.technology is closing down. Any connections using that address are going to be lost.

If you want a globally unique identifier, pay for it. I hate to be "that guy" but nobody owes you DNS namespace. If you are caught on the unfortunate end of this, Mastodon explicitly offers account migration tools to mitigate the pain. That will redirect your old account to your new one, so at least confused users will be able to find you in the interim.

On the flip side, letting you use "somebody@gmail.com" as your ID just gives Google control over your identity, which I would consider a downgrade.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#127

Post by Bubble_Pop_22 » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 11:00 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #106

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 Mas…

> 99.9% of users do not care about federation as a principle

Decentralization as a principle is currently responsible for at least some part of the enormous market capitalization of cryptocurrencies.

Nowadays everything is politics and identity politics. Especially on twitter which is the favorite hangout spot for the crypto crowd, journalists and political junkies....I mean twitter for sure is not the social media for pushing commerce and e-commerce, that ship has sailed long ago. They only have politics.

Given the preponderance of politics on twitter, Musk is the worst owner for the platform as he's alienating all left wing people in the US (and potentially abroad) and also right wing people who don't fall for cults and are still against subsidies.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#128

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 11:01 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#129

Post by RobotToaster » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 11:01 PM UTC

michaelwww wrote: post #65

RobotToaster wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it the job of the police/FBI to do something in that situation? Why are we expecting corporations to be a private police force, judge, jury, and executioner?

If you owned Twitter and the site was suddenly flooded with calls to attack election officials and raid election offices what would you do? You'd probably meet with your lawyers and find out what kind of liability you had, then you'd field calls from advertisers saying they are all leaving unless you stop it. You'd also field calls from all your friends telling you that you need to stop it. Then you'd go for a walk a…

I'd do exactly what I would do if I saw someone threatening someone in real life, call the police and give them all the information I had. Twitter has dates and IP's, in a lot of cases that's as good as an address.

Pulling the plug would be the easy way out, and would stop people incriminating themselves. Worse case scenario it drives people stupid enough to use a public un-encrypted network to plan a crime onto a secure encrypted network.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#130

Post by saurik » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 11:04 PM UTC

jdeibele wrote: post #120

anigbrowl wrote: post #106

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 Mas…

I actively dislike the federation that Mastodon is using. If they would let me use somebody@gnail.com or somebody@hotmail.com, fine. Or somebody@mastodon.master-name-server. Instead, you have somebody@mastodon.technology. Guess what? mastodon.technology is closing down. Any connections using that address are going to be lost. It's really too bad that the idea of where you connect became conflated with what your name…

I'm not sure if, by "the federation that Mastadon is using", you mean the concept of federation (in which case, I agree) or Mastadon's specific flavor of it; but, if you mean the latter, I want to say that's just a fundamental property of the concept of federated systems (as opposed to distributed ones): e-mail is also federated, and "where you connect" is the hostname on your e-mail server... if Gmail shuts down, so to will all of the connected links of people who decided to use Gmail as their host instead of running their own. I use saurik@saurik.com for my e-mail address, and (if I were to use Mastadon) would presumably also set up my own Mastadon setup, so I wouldn't be reliant on a large Mastadon host.

(Not said enough, though, is that DNS is itself federated: .com could one day decide to shut down, or simply take away saurik.com from me for whatever reason. Given the tradeoffs involved, I feel like that's the best place for me to stake my claim--particularly as custom TLDs didn't even exist back in the late 90s, but even now with them there are too many dangerous-seeming restrictions and the cost is too high that I'd still go with a .com--and yet it means that I'm not in some ways fundamentally different than the people who attach their identities to Google, even if I would claim Google isn't trustworthy, as that's just my opinion. I will say that gmail.com is also reliant on .com, and so there is an argument of my solution being strictly better, and yet I can make counter-arguments involving Google's political influence and the such.)

The issue, though--and maybe this is what you are focusing on?--is that, as far as I've ever been able to tell (just from perusing these random conversations: I do not myself use Mastadon currently), there seem to be features of Mastadon that simply work better if you are using a large shared host (which, to me, is kind of a fundamental design trajectory of federated systems: to obtain better discoverability, security, and ease-of-use, people slowly centralize onto a handful of larger players and over time the protocol becomes corrupted or limited by these large players who want to collude "for the good of the user" rather than remaining limited by the shared protocol).