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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

#201

Post by Joeboy »

whimsicalism wrote: post #127
Joeboy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two big, vanilla instances are https://mastodon.social and https://mas.to . Unfortunately they've both been struggling to keep up with demand lately. If you're paralyzed by choice, I'd say just go for one of those if / when they're accepting new users. I think Mastodon would get more signups if interested people were just pointed at like ten working, non-specialized, non-tiny instances, rather than being confronted w…

They're wasting a massive opportunity. Mastodon should have been built to scale from the start because huge viral growth is exactly how social networks like this make it big. As it stands right now, I am struggling to join because every mastodon instance I've checked is struggling with scaling.

The other opportunity "they" are missing is that normally when a new social network struggles under the weight of new users, that's good publicity. Instead of going that route, people get offered a huge list of niche or unavailable options, or told they should run their own server. And unsurprisingly a lot of people are saying, fuck that.

It's frustrating to watch. I guess a lot of fediverse people don't actually want twitter normies on board though.

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

#202

Post by whimsicalism »

lrvick wrote: post #200
whimsicalism wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure one instance could support that if you pay amazon $2k/mo for a monster instance, but most do not have that kind of money to donate. Most servers will be small, or you can host your own.

I think we are talking past each other.

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

#203

Post by cactusplant7374 »

Karunamon wrote: post #22
metadat wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He stated his true plans privately, these comms were unveiled by the discovery process from the Twitter lawsuit. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33475031 for more details and sources. p.s. thanks to Dan Luu for putting it all online!

Nothing even remotely objectionable there? It's no secret that twitter has been a money-losing toxic cesspit for years. Making the moderation fair and transparent will go miles all on its own.

Elon’s improved blue checkmark is basically a shadow ban system for the average person that doesn’t pay $8. If the average person is talking to a wall and the influencers are getting all the engagement why would they stick around?

I also feel like all these discussions are a distraction from the real issue. The average person doesn’t like using Twitter and never will.

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

#204

Post by OscarCunningham »

arjvik wrote: post #155
OscarCunningham wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How do you get invited?

Existing users can generate an invite link:

https://mathstodon.xyz/invite/5nKykTB6

If it doesn't work then check back in a day or two, many servers are struggling at the moment but the mathstodon admins are scaling up now.

Or you can join any other instance since any account can follow any other account regardless of instance. The main advantage of mathstodon is LaTeX support.

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

#205

Post by allenu »

tedunangst wrote: post #169
elcapitan wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, besides choosing a server, how do you figure out which other servers that server "federates" with or blocks entirely?

Live and learn? It astonishes me that people would get so worked up about the possibility that somebody somewhere is posting and you might not see it. Guess what? They're already posting today and you're not seeing their posts.

You have a point, but think about it from the newbies perspective. They have no idea how many posts they won't see. Everybody is used to centralized where they see everything and now they're being told to check out this alternative where you might not see everything. Okay, does that mean 50% of what gets posted won't be seen? 25%? 5%? Will I be able to see what my favorite celeb posts? There's zero context for a newbie to understand what they're missing out on. Much easier to say "too complicated" than to give it a try.

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

#206

Post by bboygravity »

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…

Am I the only one who doesn't get why chosing a server is necesary? I just don't get it at all from a user experience perspective.

Do we need to pick servers with Bittorrent? no. Just tell it what file you want (magnet link).

Do we need to pick servers with Tox? no. Just tell it what friend you want to talk to (contact ID).

Or to pick a centralized example: do we need to pick a server on Twitter? no. duh.

Then why is there any necesity or excuse ever to have to pick servers for "social" apps? Is this the 80's?!

How do these "decentralized" advocates think they can get away with a "harder to use app with more steps"? Especially when it's not a technical necesity?

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

#207

Post by giantrobot »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #192
giantrobot wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Mastodon is not a platform and does have moderation.

Individual instances do which is what the GP was talking about. Also individual instances are where an outside link is going to point at.

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

#208

Post by unconed »

tedunangst wrote: post #169
elcapitan wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, besides choosing a server, how do you figure out which other servers that server "federates" with or blocks entirely?

Live and learn? It astonishes me that people would get so worked up about the possibility that somebody somewhere is posting and you might not see it. Guess what? They're already posting today and you're not seeing their posts.

You don't see the risk of outsourcing your reach to a rando admin, who may have started their instance out of protest reasons, in a highly contentious, politicized climate?

There are people right now having tantrums because they want their one-sided censorship back, and indeed, that's what's behind this latest drive to promote mastodon all over the place.

Nothing has actually changed on Twitter except the bluechecks' sense that they're no longer a privileged class.

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

#209

Post by _djo_ »

whimsicalism wrote: post #127
Joeboy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two big, vanilla instances are https://mastodon.social and https://mas.to . Unfortunately they've both been struggling to keep up with demand lately. If you're paralyzed by choice, I'd say just go for one of those if / when they're accepting new users. I think Mastodon would get more signups if interested people were just pointed at like ten working, non-specialized, non-tiny instances, rather than being confronted w…

They're wasting a massive opportunity. Mastodon should have been built to scale from the start because huge viral growth is exactly how social networks like this make it big. As it stands right now, I am struggling to join because every mastodon instance I've checked is struggling with scaling.

Mastodon isn't a commercial entity, so what's the opportunity that's being wasted? Its entire purpose is to provide an alternative model for social media on a non-profit basis. If that doesn't scale to Twitter or Meta levels so what? That's not the goal and it's certainly far beyond what those behind it could afford. Mastodon gGmbH has just two core developers.

Frankly, it's impressive that it's scaling as well as it has so far given the tiny size of the team and that all the servers are run on a volunteer basis.

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

#210

Post by _djo_ »

Joeboy wrote: post #201
whimsicalism wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're wasting a massive opportunity. Mastodon should have been built to scale from the start because huge viral growth is exactly how social networks like this make it big. As it stands right now, I am struggling to join because every mastodon instance I've checked is struggling with scaling.

The other opportunity "they" are missing is that normally when a new social network struggles under the weight of new users, that's good publicity. Instead of going that route, people get offered a huge list of niche or unavailable options, or told they should run their own server. And unsurprisingly a lot of people are saying, fuck that. It's frustrating to watch. I guess a lot of fediverse people don't actually wan…

The point of the fediverse was never to match the scale of Twitter on a single instance. In fact, that's something of an anti-pattern.

These are the inherent trade offs of a distributed social network.

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