191–200 of 289 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have proof of this?
I sure do. One day I might write up a full article on it, but this is the summary you asked for. In the meantime I would ask you to remember that HN is not a journal, a debate stage, or an encyclopedia article, instead it is an informal discussion on the internet. As such, participants are allowed to recount things from memory.
Centralized systems are very dangerous, moderation is a huge problem and has a massive chilling effect. I support civil discourse and disagreements, I actively want to see both sides and not just an echo chamber. We all have different beliefs and the only way to move forward as society is to foster open and honest conversation. This is especially applicable to politically correct language and culture. Some things are…
> We all have different beliefs and the only way to move forward as society is to foster open and honest conversation. This presupposes every "belief" and discussion is in good faith. It also presupposes that there's no second order effects from the amplification of "beliefs". A bigot is not interested in learning about whatever it is they're bigoted against. They just want to amplify their message. Trolls and shit p…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just a small note, you can't really choose wrong because you can participate across the fediverse, with other "servers", and even non-mastodon federated social media. However if it irks one to join a specific community, there does exist general purpose instances.
I haven't figured out this part. I joined the default server years ago. All of the other servers want a unique account, as I cannot login using my existing account. How do I "participate across the fediverse" without creating one account per server? Is there a part of the UI I just haven't stumbled on yet?
Similarly servers do not share credentials, but you can follow people no matter what server they are on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I can’t choose wrong then why am I forced to choose at all? The user experience doesn’t add up.
You chose an area code for your phone number. Often people choose area codes from a home state as a bit of nostalgia or affinity, but in the end you can use any number to talk to any number, so it really does not matter much. In Mastodon you can choose a french server if you are french and agree with generally accepted french values of moderation, or you can choose a general purpose server, or host your own. There ar…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, besides choosing a server, how do you figure out which other servers that server "federates" with or blocks entirely?
Generally they seem to have lists of blocked servers (often with the full domain censored with ****) on the about page. I don't know if the list is generated or manually updated.
and they aren't taking new signups. Soooo.... no idea.
Reddit should just clone Twitter and solve everyone’s problems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't figured out this part. I joined the default server years ago. All of the other servers want a unique account, as I cannot login using my existing account. How do I "participate across the fediverse" without creating one account per server? Is there a part of the UI I just haven't stumbled on yet?
You cannot use your gmail credentials to login to yahoo, but you can communicate with anyone from yahoo with your gmail account. Similarly servers do not share credentials, but you can follow people no matter what server they are on.
there's a lot of chicken & egg issues still going on. I think it'll get better as more people put their info on their web pages, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter makes -200m a year hosting their solution. Mastodon by contrast spreads out this load to servers paid for by users, not by ads. If you cannot join any servers, pay for a managed hosting provider to spin one up, or host yourself on a vps or a home server.
That may be well and true, but seems unrelated to the point i am making, which is that I would expect a single instance to be able to handle a few thousand users.
Most servers will be small, or you can host your own.