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Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

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Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#161

Post by kixiQu »

colesantiago wrote: post #90
shafyy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yet gmail is the biggest and email isn't a social network, choice is the problem. People cannot find their friends on Mastodon because: + They can't search all instances across Mastodon. + There is almost little to no one on Mastodon to talk to. So they just go back to a centralised service like Twitter and they definitely not use email as a social network.

> + There is almost little to no one on Mastodon to talk to.

I have found that this is an accurate description of the first impression one gets; this is not true, but we're all so used to recommendation algorithms easing discovery that the impression is equivalent.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#162

Post by colinsane »

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…

> 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

this is largely the same for the public instances. Mastodon/Pleroma/etc servers default to open/automatic federation when you install them. unless you're joining a community with a very specific theme -- say freespeechextremist -- you're likely to be able to @ >95% of other users who signed up to a public server. if you joined a public server that's been blacklisted by a significant portion of the network, you'll find out about that soon enough that ditching that instance and registering at a more "neutral" site isn't any cost. Poast is maybe the most edge-case to this, where a new user might be attracted to the internal meme-driven aspects, and not notice until a couple days of use the relatively smaller patterns of harassment which would lead other (large) instances to de-federate with them.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#163

Post by robswc »

fleddr wrote: post #141

Twitter's appeal is outrage and controversy. Their users are addicted to it, even if they don't care to admit it. That's why no significant migration to Mastodon will take place. Even if you do manage to lift and shift your bubble (you won't), you'll then find yourself in a calm and slow place where nothing happens. For a bubble to exist and thrive, it needs a common enemy. With the enemy removed, it collapses. Every…

>Twitter's appeal is outrage and controversy

I feel like this is what a lot of people miss. I try very hard to avoid it but it eventually finds its way into my feed. People want to be angry.

Just look at political accounts of similar stature but of opposite parties. The replies are rarely people supporting, rather people complaining.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#164

Post by sbarre »

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.

I work for a 100-year-old company with 30k employees. Last year we moved from self-hosted Exchange to GSuite, because it's just easier to spend money on that than to spend money on an increasingly complex and hard-to-staff-properly internal service.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#165

Post by BeetleB »

RobotToaster wrote: post #48
michaelwww wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What exactly is he supposed to do? When Twitter is flooded with threats of violence and calls to form mobs will he just do nothing? Is that what you are suggesting? He can take the site dark if he wants and he may have to.

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?

Yes - they can clamp down on channels that are used to incite violence.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#166

Post by robswc »

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…

stupid question but I guess having a central ID would go against the whole idea of Mastodon? I like the idea of "self hosted discord servers" but it seems weird to have a different identity for each "server" at that point. Is there any difference between Mastodon and forums at that point? Consistent UX?

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#167

Post by remram »

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…

This tool would look the same if you were moving from a centralized platform to another centralized platform.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#168

Post by remram »

GeckoEidechse wrote: post #71

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.…

Terms of use? Do you think you can just import content en-masse from any site to your platform and they won't care?

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#169

Post by mahathu »

ttepasse wrote: post #76
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)

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 whole comment chain has been an interesting discussion for me, I just checked out of curiosity: Blogspot vs Twitter popularity on google trends 2004-today

https://trends.google.de/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=bl...

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#170

Post by macintux »

fazfq wrote: post #84
mjmsmith wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be reassured just knowing that he won't use his megacorp megaphone to amplify obvious misinformation about the results of the election, but given the last 24 hours, even that appears to be too much to hope for.

Well you can just not follow him - I don't.

You don’t even have to be on Twitter to be impacted if the people who are likely to believe and act on misinformation do follow him.
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