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As someone whose first “social media” was USENET of the early 90s, and I suppose FidoNet before then, I don’t really consider the bulk of mainstream Internet users today to be in any way “my people”. The herd is endlessly mindless, shallow, bought with bread, and hungry for the circus.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I host a personal instance. The overheard for moderation and costs is much lower. It also means if I tire of this, migrating my content is easier.
this is why nostr beats mastodon. when the operator pitches a fit and shuts down, your community survives.
Users must selfhost data for decentralized socials to work. One big problem with running a Twitter-like social media, Twitter itself included, is that hosting UGC is just risk without rewards. Users don't pay for the bandwidth, advertisers don't like competing quality UGC(they're possibly even angry about social media that it keeps undermining their "creatives" investment), just no one pays for it.
So, a Mastodon alternative has to be selfhosted by default, and infinitely easy to set up for selfhost. "First, connect to your spare Pi with a global IPv4 address" is out of question. Multihop P2P likely won't work either.
>Please note that Mastodon can move your followers, but it can’t transfer your old posts or uploaded media to your new account. If you want to keep a copy, download an archive I'm sure there is some technical excuse to why this is the case but just seems entirely broken that it can't just have the owner of the account provably broadcast they control both the original and the destinations and to redirect all posts. I…
The posts, when posted live on the host. The user can download their posts. When a host goes away, where do you propose the posts previously hosted there now get hosted? One option is for the poster's new host to have all the old posts uploaded ... how then to previous other posts that point at them, or reply to them, get updated? I'd genuinely be interested to hear your suggestions for how these technical issues cou…
When a reference to a post becomes invalid because it's underlying host is gone, the other host holding those references tries to find new duplicate posts with the correct signature, and if it finds them, updates the broken old references to point to these new duplicates. If it doesn't find any duplicates with a matching signature, it leaves the references broken and has some cooldown before it tries to fix them again.
As someone whose first “social media” was USENET of the early 90s, and I suppose FidoNet before then, I don’t really consider the bulk of mainstream Internet users today to be in any way “my people”. The herd is endlessly mindless, shallow, bought with bread, and hungry for the circus.
Well that's kind of understandable, isn't it? In the USENET era, internet users were a subculture. In 2026, almost everyone is an internet user. It's kind of like saying "As someone whose first car was a Model T, I don't really consider the bulk of mainstream drivers today to be in any way 'my people'".
I will say though the GP's comment:
> The herd is endlessly mindless, shallow, bought with bread, and hungry for the circus.
That's just everybody, including them even if they refuse to admit it. I have fond memories of many a circus on USENET, on ICQ, on AOL chat rooms, on 4chan, on Digg, everything. They all have circuses with different sorts of clowns putting on different sorts of shows. But they're all equally value-free. Pretending otherwise is just wanking yourself.
> Please note that Mastodon can move your followers, but it can’t transfer your old posts or uploaded media to your new account. If you want to keep a copy, download an archive. Sadly that's still an open issue that from time to time gets new input, but doesn't have a lot of traction. I feel like that's a big blind spot of Mastodon to this day and also basically forces people to stick to the largest instances that ar…
Question: Is there some kind of official protocol for Mastodon? Reason I ask, is if whoever is in charge have considered to support moving posts and interactions from one server to another.
I'm really just not convinced social media is very useful. The main use I can see is very fast dispersal of information, but anything truly important will be distributed by mainstream media, and less important things will travel between small communities at a slower rate. So what are we left with exactly?
I think small communities where people actually have to maintain a reputation are the future, and the past.
> More importantly, I don’t enjoy how people interact on social media anymore I'm really just not convinced social media is very useful. The main use I can see is very fast dispersal of information, but anything truly important will be distributed by mainstream media, and less important things will travel between small communities at a slower rate. So what are we left with exactly? I think small communities where peo…
> I don’t enjoy how people interact on social media anymore I can't figure out if this is me or if things really have changed. I was on early Reddit (before there were comments) and HN. There were always jerks and flamewars and pedants but it just feels like any thread I read on HN or Reddit is just full of the worst behavior. People think nothing of just being incredibly, incredibly rude to strangers and ther insigh…
Reddit grew up as a community of edgelords. Trying to be funny by exaggeratedly insulting others is just how it was. Think a community of Ben Shapiros. Coming to the site as an outsider could be brutal until you got used to ignoring it (or engaging, if you're into it).
Eventually normal-adjacent people took over the site, which caused a boon of interesting topics and diverse opinions for a long while. The rude-to-be-funny thing never quite stopped, but when it went too far it was moderated or downvoted away.
I'd agree that things have been going downhill for many years now. The peak of genuine and quality engagement is long behind us. LLM-assisted comments are certainly not helping (I'm not talking about bots, I mean people who direct LLMs to write their comments).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this desirable? This wipes other people's copies of their boosts, favourites, and bookmarked posts. If users want this behaviour, they can delete their own accounts.
They can't delete their accounts after the server hosting the account shuts down.