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Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

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211–220 of 289 posts

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

There are risks in trusting your instance admin, but you can move.

Tons has changed on Twitter, including the laying off of half the company including substantial numbers in the Trust & Safety team. I'm seeing people who couldn't have cared less about the US's culture wars talking about leaving Twitter and setting up Mastodon accounts because they're expecting the platform to become nastier, more spammy, less reliable, and overall less pleasant to be on. Perhaps they're wrong, but it's wrong to pretend they're all doing it because they're having 'tantrums' and want their 'one-sided censorship back'.

The major concern I've seen regarding the blue checks is that it's going from being a system of verification (this person really is who they claim to be) to one where it just represents having paid a subscription fee without any real identity verification at all.

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

#212
Things we are currently seeing going on is social debt, not technical debt. Therefore another technical solution won't fix the issue. It will just relay the social issues to a new platform which will start over again very soon.

You can't fix people by giving them new software.

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

#213

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…

> You can hand-wave a lot of impossible moderation problems away just by not being so damn big

Instance admins can certainly be more decisive and just ban anyone they want without causing a media storm. Not sure if that's what people meant when they asked for a Twitter alternative.

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

#214
post #160
post #150

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That makes sense, but my case is before I know who to follow. Is there any way to explore what’s going on on a server? Like browsing a news group on Usenet or checking a subreddit before subscribing?

> Like browsing a news group on Usenet or checking a subreddit before How would you do that on Twitter? Follow the hashtags. Why do you insist on limiting it to a server? That's not really how it is supposed to work anyway, it's not those things you mentioned.

But how do I know what hashtags are there? I don't know what to follow is my issue. I need to bootstrap my set of followed things and people and how do I do that?

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

#215
My anti-tech wife looked at this for 5 minutes and was horribly confused. Her friends all feel the same way - why can’t they just sign in and see all the people they want to see? What is an instance, why cant the instance be just one? Which one do they join? They all went back to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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

#216
post #117

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not sure what you mean by "follow a server"? You can interact with/follow people on other servers from yours.

Each server has a local timeline. Some are visible to non-subscribers, some are not. I’m on fosstodon which has this as the local timeline. https://fosstodon.org/web/public/local On many servers I can do the obvious substitution to see that server’s local timeline. I don’t think I’ve seen any servers that link that from their top level page.

> https://fosstodon.org/web/public/local

This presents me with a log in form.

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

#217

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.

In an informal discussion citing sources for disputed information is normal. I also don't need a longer version of your claims, I want credible sources to back up them up.

How do I know you're not lying?

I think you've been lied to so many times about this that you think it's true. A common tactic with right wing media.

See hunter biden crimes in china, election fraud, etc

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

#218
post #210
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The point of the fediverse was never to match the scale of Twitter on a single instance.

Of course. I don't understand why you are telling me this.

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

#219
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 newb…

Honestly, I think it's concern trolling. Newbies don't know federation is incomplete, so it's not a problem for them. It's only on the HN threads full of mastodon haters that the topic even gets mentioned, but these are not newbies. They're people looking for reasons to be unhappy.

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

#220
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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