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Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

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Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#411

Post by cmrdporcupine »

tkk23 wrote: post #295
rvz wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To add to that, toots sound like farts. The different connotations for birds and mastodons suggest that the platforms will reach entirely different user groups. If Musk doesn't push video and other technologies then Twitter has already reached its full potential market share. This leaves many opportunities to Mastodon. If the social climate gets colder, mastodons are better equipped than most birds. In a world of gen…

:-)

Ok but Mastodons were not arctic/northern animals like Mammoths. They were a temperate (& subtropical? i think) climate creature.

Apart from their bones another piece of evidence of their existence is the way many of the plants in the eastern Nort American forest adapted to have spikes/thorns that seem ineffective against deer & moose etc but would be deadly against browsing with a trunk. Black locust is like this.

I would have loved to have met one.

Now, for silly analogies, I dunno, it's likely that the ancestors of today's native Americans hunted them to extinction. (They were probably delicious). Can someone build an analogy from that? :-)

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#412

Post by akho »

EarlKing wrote: post #367
akho wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon has moderation facilities and is famous for instances having CoCs, refusing federation with instances with conflicting views, &c.

This. Mastodon is a federation in name only. If the protocol is not the policy then you really don't have a federation at all, rhetoric notwithstanding. I note that this is not a problem particular to Mastodon/The Fediverse, though, as its the exact problem that led to people forking their own networks off of FidoNet.

You can run your own and federate with whomever. It’s unlikely that this scenario will be common. It’s more likely that the large instances switch to whitelisting eventually.

Maybe self-hosting could be made more common through selling a (cheap) appliance with self-hosted services pre-installed. It is not clear how to solve the chicken-and-egg problem with such a setup. Also, someone will need to maintain the tunnels these things will need to be accessible. That entity can again be pressured into moderation.

It’s not at all clear if effective freedom of speech is attainable at scale.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#413

Post by mattacular »

qwertox wrote: post #359
mattacular wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would he do that. What about anything he's ever done makes you think that is even a remote possibility

He did make Tesla's patens available for anyone to use for free. Also, with its weight, Twitter would become the first popular open social network, a beacon among them. It would still be a very valuable brand.

He was sued into buying it for way more than it was worth. The first changed announced so far (in addition to printed code reviews by senior Tesla engineers) is to charge a subscription fee for verification.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#414

Post by Kye »

neither_color wrote: post #383
AnonCoward42 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what I see from Twitter, I'd say Twitter is the vocal minority.

Around one-in-five U.S. adults (23%) say they use Twitter. The share of Americans who use the platform has remained consistent over the past several years and is similar to the share who use Snapchat (25%) and WhatsApp (23%). But a much larger share of U.S. adults use YouTube (81%), Facebook (69%) and Instagram (40%). Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/05/05/10-facts-ab... Considering all the attentio…

It's indirect. Many of the people who influence what the average Joe talks about use Twitter, and few of them are self-aware enough to recognize Twitter is a fishbowl at a cafe by the ocean.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#415

Post by Kye »

tomashubelbauer wrote: post #360

Is there a way to find the Mastodon instance you yourself signed up on? I am pretty sure I already made a Mastodon account, but not on mastodon.social and based on the list of instances, nothing rings a bell. :-/ Edit: it was mastodon.social, the password reset email just took 15 minutes to arrive… Good tip in the comments though, thanks!

>> "Edit: it was mastodon.social, the password reset email just took 15 minutes to arrive…"

They're waiting on a new database server to handle the load.

https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109262705755044079

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#416

Post by EarlKing »

akho wrote: post #412
EarlKing wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Mastodon is a federation in name only. If the protocol is not the policy then you really don't have a federation at all, rhetoric notwithstanding. I note that this is not a problem particular to Mastodon/The Fediverse, though, as its the exact problem that led to people forking their own networks off of FidoNet.

You can run your own and federate with whomever. It’s unlikely that this scenario will be common. It’s more likely that the large instances switch to whitelisting eventually. Maybe self-hosting could be made more common through selling a (cheap) appliance with self-hosted services pre-installed. It is not clear how to solve the chicken-and-egg problem with such a setup. Also, someone will need to maintain the tunnels…

> It’s not at all clear if effective freedom of speech is attainable at scale.

It runs into basically the same problem as torrenting: How do you punish people who try to leech? It more or less requires the majority of participants to apply the same policy consistently so that defectors are punished for their defection.

Ultimately, the solution is more or less the same as it was for FidoNet: Defederate and form your own network with stringent requirements so that jackasses that want to ignore the rules when it suits them will be shown the door. Networks then grow to encompass precisely the number of people who can be trusted to keep to the policy and no further. Thus, you wind up with a patchwork of disconnected networks. I for one am fine with this sort of future since it worked just fine before. The only people who'd really not like it are those who prefer centralization in order to easily engage in influence operations... and of course their opinions don't count.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#418

Post by Kye »

wraptile wrote: post #313
davidw wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but which one is hotmail and which one is gmail?

It's different because feature-wise all Mastodon instances are quite similar (some might have bigger character limit etc.) Generally it's best to choose a niche instance so you inherit a community of people with common interests instantly which makes onboarding much easier. For example, I'm on fosstodon.org for free software and photog.social for photography.

photog.social is an example of where it being independent is both good and bad. Good, because independent. Bad, because it's just someone else's expensive computer.

https://photog.social/@ambassador/109080532230127913

When you settle on an instance, make sure to contribute to its upkeep if you can.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#419

Post by Kye »

augustuspolius wrote: post #278
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like there must be some sort of possibility for someone to create some sort of "lightweight hosting" option here. Where you get your own bespoke "host" where you own all the data and identity, etc. but it is actually physically managed on someone else's infra (something higher level than a vhost). Pay a small fee, get a subdomain, get your own masto node, get your own data, all encrypted, but someone else handl…

Yes, you are describing a hosted instance. Masto.host looks good, and the cheapest option is only $6/month. The problem with this federated approach is that the actual federation features can become pretty expensive. Hosting is cheap but if you have thousands of followers from different instances federation processes will become very expensive.

As far as I know, this is all cached at an instance level. So only the first person to pull something from your instance actually hits your instance's resources. I can still see posts and users from dead instances because it's all cached on my instance. There's a rake task to wipe it, but people are advised not to since those caches have been what saved at least one instance whose name I can't remember.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#420

Post by hn2017 »

llamaimperative wrote: post #387
kukx wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rephrase it to "political propaganda machine dislikes and distrusts Musk". It is telling that Tesla was not invited to the EV summit or that or was removed from S&P 500 ESG.

Some people don’t like elevating leaders who openly flout and degrade our culture’s expectations of how leaders behave. Some of those are silly, of course, but some of them are not. For example, a leader should be knocked down a few notches if they’re calling rescue workers pedophiles for no reason. They should be knocked down a few more for impregnating their employees. They should be knocked down for throwing child…

How Musk has tumbled so quickly will go down in history books. Now he's spouting conspiracy theories.
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