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> I would also expect a decentralized network to easily support multiple identities. At least the default client seemingly does not. The official iOS client certainly does. Long press on the profile icon at the bottom right to switch/add.
oh well. speak about discoverability. many thanks for this hint.
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The term "Blue Check" or "Blue Checkmark" is not exactly a term of endearment so seeing those move to other networks certainly will have an effect. As to whether that effect is a positive or negative for Mastodon remains to be seen.
Twitter's main value proposition is that there are VIPs and lesser Internet Famous people to follow on there. There are far better platforms for conversations, but most of those don't give you access to journalists, creators, politicians, etc right down to your local community. A huge number of those VIPs have blue checkmarks.
The problem does not lie with the verified identity identified by the blue checkmark but with the fact that many if not most of those "Blue Checks" are hell-bent on "following the narrative" wherever that may lead us. It lies with their vacuous virtue signalling and their "let them eat cake" discourse. They will fly the flags needed to show they are loyal, they will modify their bio to add the required shibboleths while living the good life in their personal enclaves of prosperity, guarded and manicured and pampered.
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Have you looked at Mastodon? Have you not noticed they're called "Toots?"
Personally I hate the "toot" nomenclature. That's something you teach a toddler to say instead of "fart". "Posts" forever and always.
I've been pondering: If 1% of Twitter users move to Mastodon, can it even handle it? 1% is ~4.5M users, currently the entire Fediverse is around 5.5M users, so that'd be nearly doubling. In looking at the server lists when I tried to sign up, many of them were closed for invites and mastodon.social where I had previously signed up wouldn't load the homepage. Sounds like the mastodon.social admin is ordering new hardw…
With Mastodon, it looks like Ruby on Rails, Node.js, PostgreSQL, and Redis for the backend stuff. For me, the only realistic way I'd run a node would be via Docker (Compose) which means I'm limited to something non-redundant (ie: no HA) that only scales vertically, at least easily.
> The article mentions an admin of 80K users spending 300+euro/mo
I think it's well understood that centralized systems win because normal, non-technical people don't want to deal with the complexity of managing their own servers and that devolves into the situation like the one you pointed out where normal users consolidate on a single node and the owner of that node ends up stuck with all the cost, moderation, maintenance, etc.
The thing that I think isn't considered enough, or at all, is that decentralization of control doesn't need to mean decentralization of infrastructure. Imagine something like Mastodon but built with newer tech that makes it deployable to Cloudflare, Netlify, Vercel, etc. Think along the lines of using something like SvelteKit + adapters. I can see all of those infrastructure platforms getting to the point where a custom deployment could be distilled down to something as simple as installing an app on a phone where the only thing you need to do is feed it a domain.
As long as it's federated using a custom domain, making it simple enough for a normal person to run an instance increases the decentralization of control which is more important than decentralizing the infrastructure in my opinion.
I think one of the main things that we need to make that more realistic is for someone like Cloudflare to provide a local runtime for their core services (Pages, Workers, Functions, KV, R2, etc.). Having something vertically scalable is adequate because that's no worse than what most of us get with a Docker based deployment which is the maximum complexity most people will be willing to deal with, at least the people I know.
The other thing that would help a lot would be if those companies I mentioned collaborated to have deployment compatibility. IE: I should be able to write one app and deploy it to any one of them as long as I use a standard set of features. I think that would be amazing from the perspective of being a customer / dev, but I don't know how realistic it is on the business side of things.
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> Also Discovery is a huge problem: how do I discover people I know? How do content creators who want to build an audience (and so create content that would attract users to the platform) get discovered? Hashtags play a huge role on Mastodon - discover people by following hashtags and include hashtags in your posts so that people can discover you.
I don't think the hashtags are a great experience. Common hashtags get overloaded with junk, how do you know which hashtags to use, you need to register with some external service (and find out about it) like fediverse.info which I've found to be a pretty clunky experience. These are the kind of ergonomic wrinkles I was thinking about.
Now I'm seeing posts from people discussing Python stuff which gives me a pool of people to choose to follow. Now that I've got some people populating my timeline I can unfollow the tag if I decide it gets too noisy.
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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 sounds like the exact answer to me.
just like massive chunks of our infrastructure blacklists entire domains because their admins are overly friendly to ddos, spam, illegal porn, etc… mastodon simply makes it easy to do the same thing.
this isn’t new, our entire internet runs on this principle.
the difference between centralized social like twitter/facebook and this is, the choice is ours to make. if we don’t like how a server is run, move or spin up our own. we curate it, not advertisers, not executive boards, not faceless shareholders, etc…
with decentralized, freedom of speech and more importantly, freedom of association is back in our hands again.
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That doesn’t make sense. ”Mastodon” isn’t a single entity. My just-for-me self-hosted instance certainly doesn’t have censorship.
You are literally one search query away from it making sense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495086 http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2737/FP_6.pdf There was a huge uproar about it a couple of years back. EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/jkiw1y/can_someon... Gab was "banned" in that the vast majority of instances blocked it and blocked any other instance that didn't do the same . If that's not censorship…
No, that doesn't make it make more sense. You're saying Pleroma instances cannot decide to de-federate with a specific instance, and can't remove/moderate posts? That seems... unlikely.
Give no option to make new handles on the twitter clone, you must be on twitter first.
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It doesn't need to be mainstream, nor do I want to be mainstream. I just use it to follow a number of interesting people and to write my thoughts here and there. A bit like how Twitter was in its early days. (Except without the stupid short word limits which encouraged pithy one liners.) I don't need it to have celebrities or big media organizations. That is literally the worst part of Twitter. I don't need my mom on…
"I don't need X -> existence of X is a problem -> X should be removed" - this implication of yours seems a lil bit narcissistic to me.
did you respond to the wrong comment?
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The people I know that use Twitter a lot are doing it mostly for conversation with a semi-known group of people around a niche topic (usually politics). Reddit is too anonymous and it doesn't allow you to hold grudges and be rude and mean to people with a known set of beliefs.
So I translate that as "Twitter is a toxic cesspool" :~)