Pretty much zero sum game when you go mastodon or twitter and that’s hard to surmount
Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
121–130 of 276 posts
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#122I'm looking forward to clients and services built around the at protocol https://atproto.com/
Why?
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is very confusing. Why do they largely interconnect? (Why do they connect at all / why don't they always connect?) What's the point of multiple sites if they connect to each other?
Think of it like email servers. My emails go through mine, and yours go through yours, but if I know your address I can still send you a message. It doesn't matter that I'm on Gmail and you're on Protonmail. Just like it doesn't matter that I'm on ruby.social and you're on mastodon.online. It's email servers for social posts.
What about ones that don't interconnect? Is that a thing? Do users know where they should go in order to be connected to everyone?
With a mobile app that picks a 'server' for you without interaction, no problem.
With a browser where you see an address and it's not what you expect - like 'twitter.com' is what people expect - how does a user know if they're going the right way?
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Different between Mastodon and the other platforms you linked is that Mastodon facilitates communication between the various instances (if they agree to that). So you can join instance X and still communicate with people on instance Y, and it's easy for the administrators to set that up. It's possible with IRC/Discord as well but it's hacky and requires "bridges" while that functionality is "native" in Mastodon.
Right but the users on discord can chat with eachother just fine, while in case of Mastodon if 2 server admins don't like eachother no dice ? Or I'm understanding how it works wrong ? It seems counter-intuitive to moderate based on "which server user is from" too.
It makes sense to moderate email based on what server it's from. Alice@spammer.com wants to sell me a mortgage and bob@spammer.com wants to sell me "natural male enhancement". I don't want to hear from anyone @spammer.com because that server permits or exists for the purpose of sending spam.
There are Mastodon servers that exist for things that most people don't want to interact with, such as racist hate speech, as well as servers that are essentially unmoderated. It makes sense for a server with a mainstream audience to block those.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#125[deleted]
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's a mistake to think that Mastodon would necessarily be the beneficiary of any Twitter exodus. I think it's more likely that the beneficiaries would be established, centralized services like Discord or Reddit. The underlying media models may be different, but I suspect people care less about the model than about seeing things they're interested in, and plenty of these people will already have accounts on t…
The biggest beneficiary of a Twitter exodus may be... our free time. There's no reason we have to go anywhere after Twitter. Global social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc., didn't even exist 20 years ago. We're probably better off without them IMO. The best Twitter replacement may be nothing.
This. I'm taking a break from Twitter for a while, in part due to people in one of my communities trying to convince the rest of the community to decamp for mastodon. I've argued that it will do nothing of value for the community as a whole, and will rather negatively impact it.
I'm just frankly sick and tired of all the posturing, virtue signalling, and other wasteful garbage I saw on there. Oh, and the massive upswing in antisemitism over the last month (started pre-Musk). That had something to do with it as well.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#127Can someone explain how Mastodon works? Right now I can sign up at twitter.com and get to see and talk to everyone else who has signed up - where do I sign up for Mastodon and do I get to interact with everyone else who has done the same? (the fact that this needs to be explained at all should already be a hint that it will never be mainstream)
It struck me this is an entirely arbitrary level of knowledge and people have, culturally, learned quite a lot about online computing in the past few decades. You can easily imagine seeing this posted 20 years ago:
"Right now I can sign up at AOL.com and get to email everyone else who has signed up - where do I sign up for social networking and do I get to interact with everyone else who has done the same?"
There's no reason to think people can't come to grips with a federated model just because they're used to a centralized one.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Bad" actors don't need to be dealt with, just block them. Content creators get discovered just like on Twitter, a link.
Block each of a million individual spam bots manually. I'll wait. The obvious retort is "I just block everything by default." You have now closed yourself off and the spambots have won.
On Mastodon there's a setting "Require follow requests :
Manually control who can follow you by approving follow requests" so you get to whitelist Real People.
Not as onerous as you suggest.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#129People used to think the network effect for MySpace and Friendster were insurmountable. I played around with Mastodon last night and I think it has some bad but not insurmountable ergonomic wrinkles, but I worry its decentralization will prevent it from ever becoming mainstream. Centralization makes it easier to deal with "bad" actors. Also Discovery is a huge problem: how do I discover people I know? How do content…
I agree, discovery was my biggest problem for a long time with Mastodon. Fortunately, most of the recent Twitter emigrés have been doing #introduction posts with tags about their interests, which makes them easy to find. Via the internal search, and with sites like https://fediverse.info/explore/people if they register for it. And people have also been sharing services like * https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ and https:/…
> Instead, the problem gets solved through collaborative effort, as it's meant to be.
Exactly. It's the world wide web, people. It's about discovery and distribution and linkage. Centralization on this medium is not necessary; just convenient.
This is what the early net was like when I got on it in 1990/1991. I ran a personal UUCP node on my Atari ST. When I got a telnet connection, I went and found lists of MUDs and MOOs and IRC servers to connect to. I used Archie and Veronica and Gopher. When the WWW first came along, I used directory services like Yahoo, etc.
And then things got more convenient as Google, etc. came to dominate. And for a while the compromises that came with that were fine.
But systems like Facebook and Twitter are really counter to the networked spirit that drove the excitement in the first place. They want all the marbles in one place. I don't want to play that game, seeing how it's gone. I think others are seeing now just how bad it can get.
Mastodon isn't my dream system. I'd rather see something synchronous and dynamic and programmable... like LambdaMOO, but federated. But that ship sailed in the early 90s. I'm enjoying the bump in activity in Mastodon right now.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#130People used to think the network effect for MySpace and Friendster were insurmountable. I played around with Mastodon last night and I think it has some bad but not insurmountable ergonomic wrinkles, but I worry its decentralization will prevent it from ever becoming mainstream. Centralization makes it easier to deal with "bad" actors. Also Discovery is a huge problem: how do I discover people I know? How do content…
I don't think these are just ergonomic wrinkles. I was surprised to learn that it seems to matter which instance you join. I assumed "decentralized" means "it doesn't matter where you're located". To me this is rather a basic, philosophical flaw. I would also expect a decentralized network to easily support multiple identities. At least the default client seemingly does not. Twitter on the other hand allows switching…
> At least the default client seemingly does not.
Mastodon for Android seems to support that (long press your profile icon in the bottom right corner).