11–20 of 23 posts
I think Mastodon (and any decentralized social media) needs to be easier to host. The thing is relatively a beast to get working, whether you try and install the dependencies separately on a distribution that's not Ubuntu (IIRC) or if you're not familiar with Docker. I host quite a few instances of things for myself but I gave up on Mastodon (I wasn't trying that hard, to be fair) after trouble getting it working beh…
I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what problem it is trying to solve. * Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers…
Your first point on Twitter's appeal is valid, but I don't think this is necessarily restricted to centralised systems. Discoverability is something decentralised networks struggle with - look at the role the very centralised (albeit endlessly mirrored) pirate bay plays, despite efforts like btdigg - but I think it's very solvable. Somehow. With some effort and ingenuity. On your second point, the IRC comparison make…
I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what problem it is trying to solve. * Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers…
there are some awesome mastodon communities that have moved off twitter because they are trolled too frequently on there, and aren't empowered to make their own rules to prevent that. If you're discussing somethign PTSD-inducing, for example, this struggle is so real and hard. There are communities, for example, that block other communities that are 'freespeechers'. i.e. communities that don't ban people for sayign t…
I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what problem it is trying to solve. * Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers…
> Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers against something Twitter does really well. Mastadon is a federated platform using the OStatus protocol, so…
I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what problem it is trying to solve. * Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers…
I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what problem it is trying to solve. * Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers…
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What's Mastodon? Mastodon is basically Twitter, except with less trolls and Nazis. And longer tweets.
It’s also Twitter without a whole bunch of VC investment that it needs to try and pay back by monetizing your eyeballs and keeping you on the site for as long as possible, regardless of whether that's by making you happy or enraging you.
And finally, the last big difference is that instead of living on a bunch of computers run by people working for Twitter, Mastodon lives on a bunch of computers run by whoever feels like running an “instance”.
Each instance can set its own policies. If you really want to be a jerk to people, you can find or start an instance that’ll let you! But people on other instances can very easily filter out not just you, but your entire instance. The hope is that this will keep things more civil than what Twitter has turned into. The reality is that there are probably exciting new failure modes somewhere in the future.
The policies of this particular instance can be found here. The TL;DR version of them is "Imagine you have a cool queer aunt. Don't do anything that'd probably piss her off."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers against something Twitter does really well. Mastadon is a federated platform using the OStatus protocol, so…
Correction, Mastodon has used ActivityPub instead of OStatus since version 1.6, only using OStatus to communicate with software such as GNU Social that doesn't support ActivityPub.
> With around 100,000 users on mastodon.social — the biggest instance — it is just 0.03% the size of Twitter, and only growing at a rate of 1,000 users per week. > To give you an idea of the scale compared to Twitter: Mastodon is 13 months old and at that same age, Twitter was around 10 times bigger.
The Mastodon Monitoring Project (https://mnm.social) estimates 1,019,544 accounts across the nearly 2300 instances it knows about. Around ten times bigger than the number this person was comparing to Twitter.
I guess that means Mastodon is growing about as fast as Twitter did!
I think Mastodon (and any decentralized social media) needs to be easier to host. The thing is relatively a beast to get working, whether you try and install the dependencies separately on a distribution that's not Ubuntu (IIRC) or if you're not familiar with Docker. I host quite a few instances of things for myself but I gave up on Mastodon (I wasn't trying that hard, to be fair) after trouble getting it working beh…
Sorting out the account creation email took about a week longer, IIRC. I don't feel like digging through the earliest toots I made on my instance to be sure of that right now.
I'm curious: would having your data be controlled by someone only one or two steps of friendship away feel different from a total stranger, or a corporation?