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Mastodon hit 10M users

mastodon.social

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Re: Mastodon hit 10M users

#171

Post by Hamuko »

MisterSandman wrote: post #47
jacooper wrote: post #44

Honestly I really tried to use the fediverse, but its not good enough. Search is hot garbage, can't find anything useful, or what people are actually talking about, not that Twitters search is great by any measure. Missing content when visiting external content, cuz why would anyone ever want to see or search old content. Also most clients I have seen show replies in a really stupid way, you have to actively click to…

Is search really that big of a deal? > Outside of the English speaking indie-privacy-tech bubble (and germans seem to be very active on it too) its a ghost land. "Outside of the super-active communities using Mastodon everyday, it is a ghostland."

>Is search really that big of a deal?

I used Twitter search constantly.

Re: Mastodon hit 10M users

#172

Post by red_trumpet »

jokoon wrote: post #155

Who moderates this when content is reported? Can mastodon detect porn automatically and hide it? Anybody can build a social network today, the most difficult task is and always will be moderation.

Every instance has its own moderation, there is no central moderation.

Porn is not detected automatically, but most instances require you to put it behind a content warning. Then it will not be shown automatically, you have to click to view it.

Re: Mastodon hit 10M users

#173

Post by brabel »

devjab wrote: post #154
sbuttgereit wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Zero toxicity and probably several magnitudes more meaningful conversations with people from all around the world. This apparently comes from the kinds of people I could find and connect with. " So long as you lean to progressive worldviews and see insult slinging at those that don't see your way not as being toxic, but rather just expressions of righteous indignation... sure, I could buy that line. A quick perusal…

> So long as you lean to progressive worldviews and see insult slinging at those that don't see your way not as being toxic, but rather just expressions of righteous indignation. I'm not sure which mastodon server you are on, or which ones you're linked with, but I'm on Universeodon and I've frankly seen nothing of the sort. You do have a point of course, but I haven't seen any sort of toxic behaviour. Toxic and hate…

> Toxic and hateful people simply get banned

I don't know if that's supposed to sound like a good thing, but to me this sounds like a distopian place where anyone that does not align with the "correct worldview" is made to disappear and never be heard of again.

If you think "only bad people are toxic", you probably haven't been to many debates where your viewpoint happens to be the minority viewpoint.

Re: Mastodon hit 10M users

#174

Post by sbuttgereit »

nforgerit wrote: post #60
sbuttgereit wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about the same toxicity. I do agree there is less shitposting, but there's a fair amount of it nonetheless. Many other of those activist posts are toned down here... because I expect their expectations are they are largely preaching to the choir. But just scrolling through the "toots" (again, at mastodon.social) on the main landing page I get...: " New Yorkers yelling at nazis is fun. Proud Boys bloodie…

Interesting! I guess then my usage of Mastodon is making it the "zero toxic" thing it is for me. - As said, I'm hosting my own instance, and I understood in the beginning that I don't just want to see the federated stuff (mostly weird sexualized anime images with way-too-young characters). - So I manually searched through catalogs of instances listed at the website. - I went through most of those instances, searched…

I think my main issue with your original post is that you expressed what you've achieved as a generality and not as the result of your specific, active curation of your Mastodon experience. That you can achieve warm, cozy, and non-toxic with active curation is not something I'd dispute. But I'd maintain that experience is not the default experience and I'm not sure that's so different to what you could also achieve with Twitter either (I could be wrong here, been along time since I used Twitter). To be fair, I'm not sure that anything trying to have the reach and be of similar purpose to Twitter can escape some flavor of Twitter's fate... whether that is leftist or rightist dystopia being irrelevant to the point.

And to be fair I've even toyed with the idea of setting up Mastodon instances (though probably using different server software) focused on strictly civil/professional discussions as part of the rule set. But of course this leaves most of the "federating" part of the equation off the table and leads me to my next observation. The only social networking that I've found that is genuinely warm and cozy, by default, are some of the Discourse communities. They are absolutely small, disconnected islands of community, but by being topical and smaller I think they avoid the toxic by default characteristics that broadly generalized communities devolve into. Of course, Discourse communities can be built around toxic content, too, but you just don't sign up: what you see is what you get. I think this more topically focused social media is really the best way to avoid the cruft compared to the open community approach.

Re: Mastodon hit 10M users

#175

Post by thejohnconway »

cogwheels wrote: post #52

That ten million figure includes the many of us who created an account on some instance, had a browse around for a few minutes, realised it was a boring wasteland of a service, and never logged on again. Let's see the data for active users, not just registrations.

Active users is probably around 1.6-2m for Mastodon, and maybe another million on top of that for Mastodon-compatible Fediverse software like Pleroma and Misskey (they don’t report active users).

Re: Mastodon hit 10M users

#176

Post by jeroenhd »

ilyt wrote: post #165
jeroenhd wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The neutral layer approach which some decentralised alternatives seem to favour isn't all that great in my opinion. Browsing the commonly blacklisted Mastodon instances has given me more than enough reason to not want to moderate that crap. From AI generated child porn to calls for various genocides, there's plenty of disgusting material posted online that I'm not willing to sift through. When a server's front page i…

> My experience is that most digital free speech absolutionists just seem to be upset that they were banned from Twitter for promoting some kind of QAnon conspiracy or for hate speech. Well, they are the loud and annoying ones but it's easy to miss others for the noise the unreasonable people are causing > I personally think the ActivityPub/Mastodon approach of "let server moderators decide which servers can't intera…

Moderators blocking other servers is an essential part of the federated ecosystem in my opinion. When another account (or, with many accounts, another server) is causing tons of moderation reports, blocking that server is essential. Allowing the content to appear anyway will cause boosts, reactions, and then more moderation reports. Moderators are the ones who have to deal with all of the crap being flung into the ether so it makes sense to give them the power to choose what servers they want to bother moderating for.

This is why server selection is part of Mastodon. It's also why Mastodon servers either fall in the category of "heavily moderated" or "free for all shouting match that ends up blacklisted everywhere": servers where moderators don't bother will attract the worst people and end up being too toxic for moderated servers to deal with. Most servers are run as volunteer projects.

As for moving accounts: when you move servers, your followers will actually follow your account. It takes a while for everyone's accounts to receive the redirects, but followers are transferred. You do lose old posts, though.

Nostr seems to use the model you're describing. Your digital identity on there is independent from any kind of instance. You (or your relay of choice) is also supposed to do all the moderation necessary. Nostr also allows verification based on your domain, for better or worse.

Re: Mastodon hit 10M users

#177

Post by bluescrn »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #167
roenxi wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to set yourself an interesting challenge, try to figure out why it is you think being on the right wing of politics is incompatible with those opinions. The right wing is large and has lots of factions, with the only thing uniting them being resistance to the left's attempts to reform the system. The big divide isn't over specific beliefs and policies as much as whether you believe the current system tend…

Global warming will be by far the biggest challenge going forward. As long as parties on "the right" don't believe in it, or take it seriously or don't address it appropriately there is no way in hell for me to ever consider voting for anything on that spectrum. I can deal with a little over the top wokeness. I cannot deal with the destruction of the planet.

But the catastrophising of climate change is also harmful, and results in people proposing 'solutions' that seem likely to bring about an even faster collapse of civilisation.

One 2019 UK report (https://www.icax.co.uk/pdf/Absolute_Zero_Report.pdf) proposes a timeline that's been circulating on Twitter, involving the closure of all airports and shutting down all international shipping by 2050, while pricing 40% of traffic off the roads and banning beef+lamb. That (along with many more less-drastic but still significant restrictions) is what it would take to reach 'net zero' with current technology.

And that was written in 2019, when people were generally a lot more reasonable than they are in the post-Covid world.

(Do they even realise what they're proposing by 'no international shipping'... Amongst many other things, that means zero microchips for the UK, let alone complete technology products such as phones, TVs, or EVs)

Meanwhile in the real world (here in the UK), we've got a massive cost-of-living crisis, a collapsing healthcare system, a disaster of a property market, and a rising population that we're failing to build infrastructure to cope with. We have a a terribly incompetent government, and an opposition that seems no better. And we're living with the threat of WW3, the tail end of the pandemic, and now a banking crisis too.

Re: Mastodon hit 10M users

#178

Post by thejohnconway »

jghn wrote: post #27
Method-X wrote: post #6

Doesn't look like there are many active users.

I almost never log on to my Mastodon account. When I do, I always say I should do so more as the vast majority of the people I really enjoyed following on Twitter are on there. But the thing is, I just hate the Mastodon UI. It's so clunky. And the lack of things like centralized search are a big issue for me. I dislike the federated nature of it. In short, it's just not to me. Which sucks, as that's where a lot of th…

If you’re after something a bit more like Twitter, try Elk which is an alternative web UI (it works with your existing account): https://elk.zone

Re: Mastodon hit 10M users

#179

Post by ComposedPattern »

makomk wrote: post #148
wolverine876 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What forum are you talking about. All of Mastadon? Doesn't each instance have its own rules? > As someone who'd consider themselves progressive by the yardstick of 10 years ago but not measured to the new progressives of today ... > The New Left has become unrecognizable to me That's an expected phenomenon. What was progressive yesterday becomes conservative today - think of women's rights, interracial marriage, etc.…

> What was progressive yesterday becomes conservative today - think of women's rights, interracial marriage, etc. The same goes for 'who' was progressive. That's really not what's been happening here, though, and the extremely online activists are not simply people who are ahead of the curve on pushing to fix society's flaws. For example, take trans rights, the main weapon currently used to demand people get in line…

I find this version of the story very odd. I'm in my mid-20s and figured out that I was trans about 10 years ago. The main reason I didn't get swept up in the anti-SJW craze of the time was because "SJWs" were firmly supportive of trans and non-binary people, while many of their opponents were either indifferent or comparing us to attack helicopters. Are you talking about more than ten years ago?

Re: Mastodon hit 10M users

#180

Post by krapp »

brabel wrote: post #173
devjab wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So long as you lean to progressive worldviews and see insult slinging at those that don't see your way not as being toxic, but rather just expressions of righteous indignation. I'm not sure which mastodon server you are on, or which ones you're linked with, but I'm on Universeodon and I've frankly seen nothing of the sort. You do have a point of course, but I haven't seen any sort of toxic behaviour. Toxic and hate…

> Toxic and hateful people simply get banned I don't know if that's supposed to sound like a good thing, but to me this sounds like a distopian place where anyone that does not align with the "correct worldview" is made to disappear and never be heard of again. If you think "only bad people are toxic", you probably haven't been to many debates where your viewpoint happens to be the minority viewpoint.

>but to me this sounds like a distopian place where anyone that does not align with the "correct worldview" is made to disappear and never be heard of again.

You misunderstand. Being banned from a Mastodon instance doesn't mean you disappear never to be heard from again. No one is going to try to murder you. You're still allowed to participate in society and communicate. Also, the "correct worldview" in this context means not being a racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic asshole. If you find that too much of a straitjacket on your personal liberties or radically free-thinking beliefs, there are Mastodon instances that will happily accept you.

Of course, not everyone, everywhere is compelled to accept you and your speech with open arms, nor should they be. Freedom of speech and freedom of association are equal and opposite.

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