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Exploring Mastodon

martinfowler.com

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Re: Exploring Mastodon

#171

Post by MivLives »

saurik wrote: post #103
camjohnson26 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people choose Gmail as their email provider specifically because understanding federation is too much mental overhead. There is no gmail equivalent in the Mastodon space, instead there’s many small instances that are difficult to compare.

People who use Gmail still have to know how to send e-mail to support@apple.com and when asked what their e-mail address is know to tell people someone@gmail.com instead of someone@hotmail.com. You don't get to not understand how e-mail addresses work just because you are using Gmail. There is clearly something else broken about how Mastadon tries to do federation if people are having a hard time with this, but you c…

I think part of the issue is just... habit. We know how email works because email has always worked like that. But twitter is not that environment currently works like that so people getting confused is sort of understandable.

Honestly which instance is hard because instances can be small. Which means that an instance runner can get petty with federation. One instance I looked at clearly had the owner in some sort of drama with the owner of another instance.

Sure while it may be possible to avoid now, imagine that drama had happened after I'd been on the instance for a year. I wouldn't likely know until I suddenly stopped seeing my friends posts in my feed. Or what if my previous one had shut down with no warning instead of giving me months to migrate. Should a normal person have to back up their data weekly from the site in case it's owner does something stupid?

In reality Federation is cool and all but most people are going to end up on Mastadon.social

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#172

Post by Kye »

roywiggins wrote: post #70
ljosifov wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm - following someone on another server is incredibly easy for me? I look at the Fediverse feed now, see a message that looks interesting to me, click on the author's username, and then click "Follow". What am I missing?

If someone hands you (outside of Mastodon) a Mastodon handle on a different instance or a link to their profile, it's not obvious how to follow them. (the way to do it is to paste it into the Search box of your mastodon instance)

Why wouldn't you just ask the person who gave it to you how to use it? I've always been there to answer questions when introducing people to new technology. I know I had to walk people through emailing me back in the 90s. It's no different. What kind of Johnny Appleseed jackass is strolling around telling people their handle and skipping out before telling them how to use it?

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#173

Post by rakoo »

pwinnski wrote: post #112
cyborgx7 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 keep using email as the prime example of federation, but email is pretty terrible! I can't communicate with anyone whose address I don't already know. There's no real "discoverability." Many people have multiple email addresses, and I don't know whether I'm communicating with the correct one, or even whether more exist that I don't know about. If an email address stops working, it just... stops working. Emails…

The whole point of federation is that you don't need a central authorization to do what you want. Discoverability is only easy with centralization. Of course it won't work as well.

The fediverse is young. Don't expect a finished product when there has been so few man-hours and so little funidng put into it.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#174

Post by skrowl »

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…

The "Twitter issues" that people are discussing currently come down to just wanting more censorship (they perceive that Elon's Twitter won't silence all the conservative voices as well as pre-Elon Twitter did). A federated solution isn't right a great fix for this, as a single instance that doesn't moderate the way you want can still show up in your federated timeline.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#175

Post by pwinnski »

simfree wrote: post #122
pwinnski wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep using email as the prime example of federation, but email is pretty terrible! I can't communicate with anyone whose address I don't already know. There's no real "discoverability." Many people have multiple email addresses, and I don't know whether I'm communicating with the correct one, or even whether more exist that I don't know about. If an email address stops working, it just... stops working. Emails…

Browsing the federated timeline, searching by hashtag and looking at who other people you know are following is the discoveability mechanism. Unlike Twitter, ActivityPub sites generally don't beat you over the head with follow recommendations. The goal is not to get you mentally addicted to spending hours a day on Social Media.

I was actually describing issues with email, but yes, many of the same issues apply to mastodon as well.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#176

Post by toofy »

pwinnski wrote: post #169
toofy wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 differ…

Today, I cannot sign up at "your friend's server" nor mastodon.social, so neither of those things help me. The phrase is key because it reflects a familiarity which new users do not have. Have you never in your life been introduced to an environment you didn't understand and felt put off by everybody using words you didn't know, or words you did know in ways you didn't understand? Never, in any situation? Because tha…

yes. of course i have. maybe we're talking past each other, i dont know, but...

what im trying to say, again, is that their panicking is entirely unfounded.

whether you create your account at mastodon.social, fosstodon.org, mastodon.online, vis.social, toot.cat, or your friends totallyraddomainname.com--its not a life or death decision.

particularly because you can simply migrate to another server if you're picky about some minutia that most people don't care about. it feels like overblown fearmongering.

sure, maybe they're experience analysis paralysis, which is definitely a problem sometimes for those who are terrified of technology, but at the end of the day it is over analyzing. one of the reasons mastodon so drastically overtook other federated attempts is because it made it possible to migrate without losing your followers, you just move and poof, you're done. it removes the importance to which server you choose.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#177

Post by rakoo »

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #2

> but the protocol they use to communicate (ActivityPub) I stopped reading here. Most people who aren't tech savvy (much less professionally famous engineers) aren't going to want to learn this nonsense, much less see cased words like this that reek of geekdom. Everything about Mastodon (and the Fediverse) seems like it's catered to people who are already are (or who think they are) mentally all in on the concept. I…

The author explains a bit of how things work, but no one ever said you need to read the full spec to use it. Just like it's better to know your car has an engine, but you don't need to know the details of how the engine works to drive your car. Sharing knowledge, and the reader can decide what level of detail they want to keep.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#178

Post by _ph_ »

Kye wrote: post #164
_ph_ wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider myself quite a nerd, but honestly, I am struggling with exactly those questions. I do think better introductions for newcomers are needed so the explanations are understandable for people who are thinking in "twitter" terms. There should be just a page with a quick checklist/cheat sheet for twitter users.

I think nerds often have an overthinking problem with it on both the learning and explanation sides. For example: extremely normie comedian Kathy Griffin got on via a short primer in an aggressively mainstream publication and started teaching her friends how things work. Lots of recent happy users are non-tech journalists and other professionals who got it from similar publications or had a friend helping. Meanwhile,…

Do you have a link to that guide, I would be quite interested to read it, as I am still trying to figure out mastodon.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#179

Post by pwinnski »

rakoo wrote: post #173
pwinnski wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep using email as the prime example of federation, but email is pretty terrible! I can't communicate with anyone whose address I don't already know. There's no real "discoverability." Many people have multiple email addresses, and I don't know whether I'm communicating with the correct one, or even whether more exist that I don't know about. If an email address stops working, it just... stops working. Emails…

The whole point of federation is that you don't need a central authorization to do what you want. Discoverability is only easy with centralization. Of course it won't work as well. The fediverse is young. Don't expect a finished product when there has been so few man-hours and so little funidng put into it.

Mastodon has been around for six years, which is young but not infant-young, and what I'm getting at is pretty central to the entire concept. If it is still this poor of an experience six years in, one might wonder what is going to change in the next six.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#180

Post by rakoo »

pwinnski wrote: post #153
riffic wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good, because Mastodon never was and never will be a Twitter replacement. It's a different world, with different rules.
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