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Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

theguardian.com

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Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#171

Post by rsynnott »

tokamak-teapot wrote: post #123
multiplegeorges wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are a few that don't interconnect at all (I think Parler or Gab or one of those is an unfederated Mastodon service, all alone in the world), but it would be more common for some of them to block others.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#173

Post by VectorLock »

jeena wrote: post #145
VectorLock wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FidoNET (got I loved FidoNET) had a central coordinating authority, you had to get on a nodelist. With Mastodon it gets incrementally harder to just add someone. Are they on the same Mastodon instance as me? Does my Mastodon instance federate the Mastodon instance they're on? Is this handled client side with multiple identities? Now how do I handle these multiple identities, so I broadcast "toots" (cringe) to all of…

I'm also confused about your description. I host my own single user mastodon instance and have no problems to follow anyone, just put their username into the searchbar and click follow. This way I can follow anything on the fediverse, not only Mastodon accounts but PeerTube, Friendica, PixelFed, FunkWhale, etc. all from my Mastodon account.

If you don't own the instance can you follow things on instances you're not federated with?

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#174

Post by anotherrandom »

jstx1 wrote: post #77

Can 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)

Mastodon is a bunch of separate federated Mastodon instances. In order to see content from several you need to connect to each of them (if memory serves, your identity and social graph are not portable between instances due to the limitations of ActivityPub. This is a problem Dorsey's @ Protocol attempts to solve). That does let you see the illusion of centralization though, sort of like email which is also federated

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#175

Post by VectorLock »

anotherrandom wrote: post #169
VectorLock wrote: post #26

People 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…

The technical barrier to entry ensures "normies" will not be able to use or understand (or at least enjoy) Mastodon. This will prevent it from becoming as huge as Twitter

One man's bug is another man's feature I suppose.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#176

Post by VectorLock »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #129
sundarurfriend wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Widespread adoption came from easier to use systems that didn't require you to go out and piece things together.

High barrier to entry systems to keep out the "normies" is already a solved, and incredibly uninteresting problem.

Although I loved LambdaMOO and thought we could see an evolution of smart contracts in that direction but cryptobro greed might have ruined or soured that potential future.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#177

Post by anotherrandom »

remram wrote: post #116
jstx1 wrote: post #77

Can 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)

> the fact that this needs to be explained at all should already be a hint that it will never be mainstream Ah yes, because users are incapable of learning anything at all

The average Twitter user likely does not know what a file is (see: that one iPad commercial where the kid says "what's a file?" or something), and likely uses a mobile device of some kind (tablet or phone) as their daily driver.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#178

Post by asim »

Federation isn't going to be everyone moving to a decentralised platform like Mastadon. It's going to be groups segregating to different platforms based on their interests and values. Whether or not that network of things becomes interconnected, not clear, maybe not. We'll see some churn from Twitter but the majority of people with 10k+ followers will stay.

Every engineer feels they could build a Twitter alternative, purely on a technical basis, but to actually draw a community there, that's the harder part. What Jack is trying to do with Bluesky is more interesting, an actual protocol as opposed to another platform, but again not clear that will work out either.

SMTP was truly the greatest communication protocol of all time, and then HTTP being an information protocol somehow subsumed that for social purposes. If we just assume public social is Twitter, Facebook, etc, then private social might end up being some smaller niche systems and then we may end up with some alternative new protocol for real time communication. Something dead simple is likely to beat out the wholly thought through in the beginning because clients could be easily implemented for it.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#179

Post by anotherrandom »

throwayyy479087 wrote: post #166
whoooooo123 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably moved to the same place as all the people who said they'd leave the US if Trump got elected.

Austin?

Most of those people were there before 2016

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#180

Post by macinjosh »

Twitter has some pretty terrible content on it but I rarely encounter it. When I tried Mastodon most of the posts I was exposed to were in a language I could not identify, some sort of anime based post (often pornographic), spam, or just random people I've never heard of talking about there last jog or meal. Not a great experience yet.
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