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Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

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Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#451

Post by Cyberdog »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #304
Cyberdog wrote: post #50

Obligatory reminder that Mastodon is a user interface for a defederated network commonly called the Fediverse, and that referring to the Fediverse as "Mastodon" is like referring to the web as Chrome. Spitting into the wind at this point, I know, but it still bothers me.

Is that true? I thought that e.g. PeerTube was part of the Fediverse, but Mastodon doesn't work as an interface to PeerTube.

I'm not an expert on the details of the protocol, so I can't give you a good answer to that. I believe it's just a matter of Mastodon not accepting messages that it knows it won't be able to display correctly. But other "microblog"-oriented Fediverse instances can exchange messages with Mastodon instances just fine.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#452

Post by pron »

sneed-oil wrote: post #447
pron wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always been curious about that. Does Twitter forbid discussing lowering taxes? Maybe demanding harsher immigration policies? Higher prison sentences? Bans on abortion? Shutting down the department of education? Reinstating a monarchy? Who is more conservative than The Federalist? Quillette posts "race science" articles, and even the Claremont Institute, which is so reactionary that it balks at the term "conserva…

Twitter suppressed the NY Post's story on Hunter Biden's laptop right before the 2020 presidential election. Calling a surgeon who performed sex reassignment surgery a criminal is what got Jordan Peterson suspended until he'll remove that tweet. Trump was banned despite never telling anybody to go inside the Capitol building and even posting a video telling his supporters to go home. Milo Yiannopoulos was banned for…

All of these ideas/notions/opinions/stories were very widely disseminated on Twitter to an audience of millions (BTW, the legality of Trump's behaviour, including what exactly he urged his followers to do, is under ongoing investigation). The suppression of the Post's story on Hunter Biden might have been an overreaction, that story itself was all over Twitter (that's how I heard about it). It's possible some tweets "calling for mass reeducation of white people or the eradication of whiteness" were not removed, but neither were tweets with vile racism/misogyny/antisemitism that constantly flood the platform.

I assume a claim could be made (although it would be hard to support) that, on average, more conservatives are suspended than progressives for similar behaviour but that still amounts to zero conservative ideas suppressed. On the other hand, there's also a bias in violent acts between conservatives and progressives. If there's any conservative content banned or suppressed, I've yet to see a single example.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#453

Post by zaik »

jeroenhd wrote: post #99
klyrs wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had Trillian back in the day, but then the messaging services locked down their protocols. I don't expect such an app would survive the cat&mouse with major players for long.

I'm not sure about your standard social media, but for direct messaging, several Matrix-based companies have popped up that allow for service interoperability. The European Union is also working on breaking open the messenger space, forcing tech companies to either leave the EU or work on an interoperable standard. I believe an IEEE working group is already developing a protocol to serve this purpose, even with encry…

Is there any information on this working group? I had hopes for the IETF standard XMPP, since the largest IM provider WhatsApp uses it internally.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#455

Post by agensaequivocum »

incahoots wrote: post #421
treeman79 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. People don’t want Conservatives to have a voice.

Chowderhead, Tim Pool, Shapiro, Owens, FoxNews, & and to some extent Rogan. Last I checked all of them have a heavy amount of followers and their accounts have not been banned from Twitter or FB? Can you give examples where this takes place?

Donald Trump

Project Veritas

James Lindsay

Babylon Bee (locked out for not deleting a tweet.)

Jordan Peterson (locked out for not deleting a tweet.)

Marjorie Taylor Greene's personal account

Steve Bannon

among others

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#456

Post by agensaequivocum »

pron wrote: post #370
treeman79 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. People don’t want Conservatives to have a voice.

I've always been curious about that. Does Twitter forbid discussing lowering taxes? Maybe demanding harsher immigration policies? Higher prison sentences? Bans on abortion? Shutting down the department of education? Reinstating a monarchy? Who is more conservative than The Federalist? Quillette posts "race science" articles, and even the Claremont Institute, which is so reactionary that it balks at the term "conserva…

Multiple people have been locked out for saying that a man cannot get pregnant. Saying that cutting the healthy breasts of a young girl is child abuse, or saying that giving a child puberty blockers is also child abuse. Stop being so obtuse

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#457

Post by WorldMaker »

anderspitman wrote: post #442
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!

What we really need is for selfhosting to be as easy and secure as installing an app on your phone. Somewhat related: there should be a way to have a Mastodon ID based on a domain you control, regardless of what instance it's hosted on.

Webfinger technically supports that sort of delegation today in its spec: you can drop a /.well-known/webfinger JSON file on the domain's web server (or a cgi-bin app of some sort if you need to support more than one user because the protocol uses GET request parameters to differentiate) and tell ActivityPub servers "if you are looking for user anexample@thisdomain.com please forward to the inbox or check the outbox for anexample@mastodon.social". That works today for things like @ mentions or DMs of an account sending the right notifications. Unfortunately, this isn't yet the best experience because in many places including follows/follow requests Mastodon users will always see the forwarded address everywhere "anexample@mastodon.social" instead of the delegating address and so far as I'm aware there's no easy way to send messages addressed as the delegating address.

It would be nice to see this improved.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#458

Post by stefandesu »

michaelbrooks wrote: post #374
langsoul-com wrote: post #342

I wonder if there's something like Twitter but a feed (RSS or otherwise) of interesting people's blog, YouTube, podcast or creative work? I feel the value of Twitter would be a feed of interesting people. But 280 characters is just knee jerk thoughts. Something to easily discover people, like Twitter, whist showing their content, seems more valuable. Right now, the discovery part sucks. It's possible to find interest…

People can add ActivityPub to their websites/blogs, and it will be a part of the fediverse. WordPress has a plugin for this, and you can add your own implementation as well.

I wish there was a way to integrate ActivityPub into static sites. As far as I know, you can't just add ActivityPub to your site hosted on GitHub Pages, for example.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#459

Post by WorldMaker »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #430
ivanhoe wrote: post #389

What happens if/when Mastodon gets mainstream and gets plagued by all the same problems as twitter? It being the distributed platform there's a very little options to fight fake news, hate speech, bots, etc. on Internet-wide level. Is there any option other than users gravitating to servers hosted by like-minded people, creating a clear separation into social bubbles?

I think social bubbles is sort of built-in to the fediverse concept. There's some hope that a decentralized moderation problem will be more tractable than a centralized-for-profit-company moderation problem.

Good moderation is labor (and likely forever will be) and Mastodon by its very nature has a lot higher moderators per consuming users ratio than Twitter ever had (even on messages originating on and "not leaving" Mastodon's biggest instances). (Just like if you are evaluating school districts you want a higher teachers per students ratio.)
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