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Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

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Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#131

Post by RobotToaster »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #60
leereeves wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IIRC both Gab and TS disabled federation, so that isn't a good indicator either way.

It is, IMO a good indicator that neither actually care about free speech, since they are basically "censoring" the rest of the fediverse.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#132

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#133

Post by kodah »

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)

I would call the GMail situation pseudo-centralization. As it has more actual competitors who aren't just hosting but also actively developing their own platform it'd go back to decentralization.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#134

Post by EnKopVand »

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…

I think it has more to do with the way Mastodon decentralised and I imagine the people who figure out to do e-mail as a platform first, will be the next twitter.

The big issue with Mastodon is that your "twitter handle" depends on the server you join, which makes it hard to find you. If it was just your e-mail address, however, then everyone would be able to find you, and keep finding you even if you decided to change servers.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#135

Post by Macha »

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…

Is this not the same as email? If you ran your own you could use your own domain. If gmail ran an instance you could use @gmail.com . Otherwise you're at the whims of your host shutting down, like when google nearly pulled free google apps, or when microsoft used to reclaim accounts that didn't use the web UI often enough.

I guess what's needed here is an ecosystem of "point your DNS at us and use your own domain with your hosted service" ala fastmail and other providers for email.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#137

Post by varenc »

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…

This is a digression, but in reply to:

> 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

Twitter originally was even simpler than that! Replies were just new tweets prefixed with “@user” and retweets were just copies of the source tweet prefixed with “RT: “. As these conventions arose Twitter eventually turned them into first class features. Also it was originally named “Twttr”, though that didn’t last too long.

Edit: and you mainly searched on hash tags (#tags) since full-text search wasn't very far along. Amusingly their search index on hash tags worked a bit like hash tables! Though I assume that’s entirely a coincidence.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#138

Post by qchris »

masukomi wrote: post #40
kemenaran wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you expand on b)? I'm not sure I understand why this would be difficult. If you already had a list of instances, as it seems like asynchronous clients could probably handle the scale of instances (source below list about 4k, which isn't out of scope for simultaneous async tasks), and processing the results is probably fairly simple. Especially if you were to cache that list and just do an updated request every few minutes (so not a new full-network request set every query) it seems like this wouldn't be too crazy complicated. Have I missed something?

[1] https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon/

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#140

Post by rvz »

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!!

Even worse when Mastodons are extinct creatures. Probably tells us about the platform itself being used by little to no one, other than just techies that won't admit that they still lurk on Twitter.
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