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Exploring Mastodon

martinfowler.com

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Re: Exploring Mastodon

#81

Post by falkd »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #58
nr2x wrote: post #10

The fact that one has to pick from many different places to set up an account is a massive barrier to entry. Let alone the complexity of moving an account from one host to another is also woefully complex, so if you choose wrong, you’re in for more pain. I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus. I’m putting my hopes on blue sky/AT which appears to solve the above pain points: https://bl…

Kind of like picking gmail or hotmail is a barrier to entry to using email?

This is an interesting point, but many have heard of those providers and they're very popular, very established, and you can generally count on a very professional and reliable service.

What I see though is that there are dozens of servers, none of which I know anything about. So it's more like if you had to select an e-mail provider from a list of domains you've never heard of before. Not impossible, but not as easy as signing up on twitter.com.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#82

Post by unpopularopp »

I don't know why the server choice is so downplayed when instances can block each other and if you end up on a "wrong one" (the peer pressure to avoid guilt by association is really really strong if you look around) then you have to move around, your name changes etc. Feels like the single user self-hosting is the only way to go but I'm not sure most people would do that (let alone realize how the whole system works)

And personally whole thing feels like a weird combination of reddit and Discord where you choose your sub/server then Twitter tbh

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#84

Post by nr2x »

KindAndFriendly wrote: post #28
nr2x wrote: post #10

The fact that one has to pick from many different places to set up an account is a massive barrier to entry. Let alone the complexity of moving an account from one host to another is also woefully complex, so if you choose wrong, you’re in for more pain. I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus. I’m putting my hopes on blue sky/AT which appears to solve the above pain points: https://bl…

I politely disagree: you just pick an "entry node", similar to picking an ISP or an email provider. You can interact with everyone in the Fediverse just fine. Having a newsfeed for your chosen "entry node" is an additional nice-to-have imho but not the defining criteria.

If I own a domain I can host my email anywhere. I own the name, and every possible address. Mastodon does not have nearly the same level of portability and ownership. This is why I think AT is more promising.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#85

Post by tootie »

nr2x wrote: post #10

The fact that one has to pick from many different places to set up an account is a massive barrier to entry. Let alone the complexity of moving an account from one host to another is also woefully complex, so if you choose wrong, you’re in for more pain. I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus. I’m putting my hopes on blue sky/AT which appears to solve the above pain points: https://bl…

Barrier to entry is just one problem. The main one is reach. 99% of the value of Twitter is its reach. Posting messages is easy. I'm sure a thousand entrepreneurs have figured out how to collect 140-character messages, follow and reply. But they will collect dust unless they get seen by 100M people. That means having that many users on one platform, one platform for content creators to promote, and a single place for advertisers to spend to support operation.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#87

Post by moelf »

radarsat1 wrote: post #56

The thing that surprised me a bit about federation is that it puts instances front and center. You have an account at your "home instance", and that's the first thing you see. When I first read about federation I had thought that the idea was to have one big network of independent but equal instances that just transparently share data under common topics. But instead I discovered that you are identified with your ins…

because that's way too expensive? if you follow every Programming@ on every public instance and nobody is doing the centralized data distribution, you have a all-to-all situation?

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#88

Post by giantrobot »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #18
chris_st wrote: post #12

I'm on a discord server with a lot of non-nerds, and various ones are interested in Mastodon, due to Twitter issues. It's amazing to see how much trouble they're having... "Do I have to create a log in on every Mastodon?" ("No, and it's pretty much impossible"), "Can I follow someone on another server?" ("Yes, but it's incredibly hard -- try to follow them on whatever server you're on, maybe someone else is following…

People just have lost the ability to comprehend the concept of federation because everything in the current internet is walled gardens. There is nothing Mastodon can do to "fix this" without giving up on federation. But people understand how federation works. They see it happen everyday with e-mail. You just need to tell them it works like that and they'll get it.

> People just have lost the ability to comprehend the concept of federation because everything in the current internet is walled gardens.

Non-technical users have never understood these things. They browse the web by accident and sending e-mail is incomprehensible magic. Most people don't care at all how such things work, they only care when they don't work.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#89

Post by nr2x »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #55
nr2x wrote: post #10

The fact that one has to pick from many different places to set up an account is a massive barrier to entry. Let alone the complexity of moving an account from one host to another is also woefully complex, so if you choose wrong, you’re in for more pain. I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus. I’m putting my hopes on blue sky/AT which appears to solve the above pain points: https://bl…

> I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus. What you might say is 'I don't think Mastodon is going to replace Twitter', but I don't think you can argue that Mastodon won't benefit from the Twitter exodus because it has already gained a million users. Looking at the charts on https://the-federation.info/mastodon you can see that in May there was an influx of about 500 thousand new users…

Ok, in that case I’ll clarify: I don’t think the vast majority of Twitter users will benefit from Mastodon.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#90

Post by riffic »

dewey wrote: post #83
riffic wrote: post #4

Thoughtworks runs their own instance. They adopted Mastodon a very long time ago. https://toot.thoughtworks.com/about

Getting a 502 Bad Gateway from that.

well when you throw a ton of HN traffic at it it'll probably cook the underlying components.
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