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Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

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Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#51

Post by twmiller »

woah wrote: post #11

The uptick of interest in Mastodon due to Musk buying Twitter doesn’t make sense. Only the left is angry about the acquisition. The right is gleeful. What the left is angry and the right is gleeful about is the idea that Musk is a “free speech absolutist” and might unban Donald Trump and other right wing / fascist media personalities. Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the…

"Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the first place. Sure, leftist servers could have stop syndicating his posts, but this would not have had much more of an effect than individuals blocking him on Twitter if he had never been banned there."

My observation is that the modern right wing social media user only thrives when there are 'liberal snowflakes' around that they can piss off. Hence Gab, Truth, Parler, etc. being largely failures. They all miss the key ingredient that the right wingers need to really get their endorphin hit: people to offend.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#52

Post by easrng »

paulgb wrote: post #25
cratermoon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A list of the servers is data, but where does one go to find out about the people or organizations running them? How do we know that that a couple of thousand of them aren't all run by one group?

Mastadon provides a way for servers to have an “about” page, which often has more details about who runs the server. In some cases they prefer to be pseudonymous, but in some it’s possible to attach the instance to a human.

Some are on managed hosting from companies like https://masto.host/

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#53

Post by easrng »

zimpenfish wrote: post #31
woah wrote: post #11

The uptick of interest in Mastodon due to Musk buying Twitter doesn’t make sense. Only the left is angry about the acquisition. The right is gleeful. What the left is angry and the right is gleeful about is the idea that Musk is a “free speech absolutist” and might unban Donald Trump and other right wing / fascist media personalities. Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the…

> He would run his own instance, and it would syndicated to all his fans. He technically does, doesn't he? Truth Social is a Mastodon instance, IIRC.

It doesn't federate though.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#54

Post by easrng »

kzrdude wrote: post #38
Ericson2314 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not god that Elon can see ones DMs. I'm on the left and it's also just a fine time to promote things like federation that are otherwise hard to get non-technical people to care about, regardless of what Twitter ends up doing. Never let a crisis go to waste!

It might be good for everyone to know that "DMs" on mastodon are not even secret, anyone can sniff them if they read the traffic between two instances.

That's not true. The two instances (and potentially their admins, though there isn't a UI for it) see the DMs, but the connection between instances is HTTPS.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#55

Post by OscarCunningham »

tomrod wrote: post #48
coffeefirst wrote: post #43

In theory federated social media seems like a great idea. You can hand-wave a lot of impossible moderation problems away just by not being so damn big. It seems like I could join for music and geeky history without being inundated with The Current Thing ragebait culture. I'd try that out! In practice it's still a desert. The problem isn't how to sign up, it's that with the exception of a few active communities, there…

I finally joined yesterday to a niche (academic) community that is moving from Twitter. 18k migrants in the 30 hours since it opened up with virtually linear growth. I can search other similar niche communities and they are seeing similar growth. It's not seeming like much of a desert, and is just starting to benefit from network effects as some of the more known members of the community announce their moves.

Right. I'm on the mathematics server https://mathstodon.xyz/ and it's already feeling like a big community.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#56

Post by OscarCunningham »

samsepi0l wrote: post #46

I dont think Mastodon will gain mainstream adoption because of the naming, and they call messages "Toots". Normal people will baulk at the branding of it all.

Posts are just call 'posts' in the latest versions of the software.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#58

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

I really want to like Mastodon, and every few years I make an attempt to join. But then, I am faced with the decision of choosing a server - if I like cooking and golf, do I join the cooking server or the golf server? What if I choose wrong? - and the choice overload makes me just give up.

And even if I really joined, then apparently my server's administrator would be able to silently prevent me from seeing other "enemy" servers' messages, and they could even read my DMs.

I think I see the point of Mastodon, and I think it can be really advantageous for certain uses (e.g. for relatively tight communities, that want to have bonds within the community but also connections to the outside) but I just don't see its fit for the average user and especially as a replacement for the generalistic, unstructured network that is Twitter.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#59

Post by ceejayoz »

samsepi0l wrote: post #46

I dont think Mastodon will gain mainstream adoption because of the naming, and they call messages "Toots". Normal people will baulk at the branding of it all.

I remember complaining the “iPad” sounded like a menstrual product. Seemed to do fine.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#60

Post by [deleted] »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #58

I really want to like Mastodon, and every few years I make an attempt to join. But then, I am faced with the decision of choosing a server - if I like cooking and golf, do I join the cooking server or the golf server? What if I choose wrong ? - and the choice overload makes me just give up. And even if I really joined, then apparently my server's administrator would be able to silently prevent me from seeing other "e…

[deleted]
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