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Exploring Mastodon

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Re: Exploring Mastodon

#151

Post by culi »

bioemerl wrote: post #31
culi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, but it's incredibly hard -- try to follow them on whatever server you're on Confused about this. In my experience it's always just been a matter of adding @personiwannafollow@otherinstance.com Is this not always so simple?

The moment you're manually typing a username it's game over. It should be rare to never that you need a specific user id, let alone a specific server. You should just have to see a user and click follow.

Actually someone pointed out you don't even need to do that much

There's a big (and only) search bar at the top of the homepage. You can simply search the username and they'll pop up across instances. There's a little follow button next to their name you can click and you're done

Exactly like Venmo or Snapchat or Instagram. It's already in the cultural norms to ask "what's your insta" or "what's your venmo".

What's your mastodon?

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#152

Post by wrycoder »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #120
stewbrew wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use mastodon this way of course and ignore the local feed.

I mean coming from Twitter the entire idea of a "local feed" is already so weird. Why would I want to follow random people?

Because you happened to notice they were interesting?

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#153

Post by pwinnski »

riffic wrote: post #135
pwinnski wrote: post #133

I am not sure I can express this enough: the onboarding experience is overwhelmingly confusing. I've already ended up dumped on a page with a long list of servers, and it's not clear whether this choice matters or not. Half the comments here say it does, half say it doesn't! But let's see my choices today: ruby.social, todon.eu, hostux.social, Glasgow.social, metalhead.net, socel.net, machteburch.social, activism.ope…

edited: make a monetary contribution to the project along with your PR

> submit a pull request then.

Thanks for this! I now have a go-to example of why mastodon is not a viable replacement for twitter, one literally everybody should understand.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#154

Post by timmytokyo »

riffic wrote: post #135
pwinnski wrote: post #133

I am not sure I can express this enough: the onboarding experience is overwhelmingly confusing. I've already ended up dumped on a page with a long list of servers, and it's not clear whether this choice matters or not. Half the comments here say it does, half say it doesn't! But let's see my choices today: ruby.social, todon.eu, hostux.social, Glasgow.social, metalhead.net, socel.net, machteburch.social, activism.ope…

edited: make a monetary contribution to the project along with your PR

I can't tell if this is meant to be sarcasm. I feel like it should be sarcasm.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#155

Post by metacritic12 »

I'm reminded of something that Yishan said, which is that the #1 problem with social networks isn't free speech. Rather it's spam, which passes every "free speech" test to be undangerous yet unpleasant.

Good luck with that Mastodon. I too would like a Twitter+, but in aiming for the + you're actually losing a ton of base features that users in fact care about, like antispam and "one big universe" with good signal to noise.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#156

Post by nightski »

jmathai wrote: post #92
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…

I think the opportunity is to foster a new kind of social interaction and smaller niche groups seems like a really interesting angle that centralized services gravitate away from. I haven't used Mastadon but I could see this being a positive if you replace "home instance" with "local community" or "interest group foo". The truth is that you only need to find a small group of people with similar interests. You don't n…

I'm not sure I agree. I mean, yeah it's great once you have found them. But I would of never of discovered stats twitter or other great communities if they were off in some isolated silo/mastadon instance. It lacks discoverability.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#157

Post by pwinnski »

mroche wrote: post #63
andsoitis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know much about Mastodon, so wondering: can I see chatter without logging in? Where do I go to see it (discovery)?

You can visit any available instance and view their public feeds. For example, I use Fosstodon, so you visit the site[0] and click on "See what's happening" to preview the local feed, or navigate to the /public page. It's up to the instance to expose the "Explore", "Local", and "Federated" feeds. Fosstodon only exposes the local one to unauthenticated users. [0] https://fosstodon.org

I clicked your link and found a "Why is Fosstodon currently down?" page.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#158

Post by aorth »

Regarding profile verification, Mastadon suggests doing it by putting an anchor tag with a link to your profile on a website. In this article the author suggests you can do it with a `` tag instead. I prefer the link tag to an anchor tag so I'm going to try that right now...

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#159

Post by nonfamous »

RunSet wrote: post #45
bioemerl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment you're manually typing a username it's game over. It should be rare to never that you need a specific user id, let alone a specific server. You should just have to see a user and click follow.

> The moment you're manually typing a username it's game over. Is copy/paste also too much to ask of technology's current generation?

Yes. As it happens, it’s really hard to copy a Mastadon ID (or whatever it’s called) on Mobile. iOS at least interprets it as an email address and launches a mail client, and actively prevents copying it to the clipboard.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#160

Post by toofy »

pwinnski wrote: post #145
toofy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, the panic people are putting forward about server choice is really strange. my account is on a friends invite server and 99% of the people i follow and interact with are on all kinds of other servers. my timeline is almost entirely people from dozens of other servers. im not at all sure why people are panicked about this.

The key phrase in your statement is "on a friends invite server." Okay, so if you don't already have a friend on Mastodon, then what? Have you actually looked at the list on https://joinmastodon.org/servers recently? Half the comments here say it doesn't matter what server you choose, and half are saying to be sure to choose the one that aligns with your interests, which... see the list above for why that's an issue.…

> The key phrase in your statement is "on a friends invite server."

why is this a key statement? my point is that being on a friends server hasn't altered the experience at all.

i migrated to my friends server a couple days ago from mastodon.social--i literally haven't noticed any difference at all, the experience from everything i can tell has been identical as it was prior. the server im on made literally no difference.

i still follow the same people.

i still have the exact same followers.

my timeline is identical.

i still see all of tehir posts.

they still see mine.

i still see posts they repost.

again, i have noticed absolutely nothing meaningfully different. other than maybe the address i type into the address bar to reach the site, but i dont think thats "meaningful" in any meaningful ;) way.

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