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How Does Mastodon Work?

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Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#131

Post by Vinnl »

apatters wrote: post #94
Vinnl wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling it already is one. In my timeline there are a lot of LGBQT activists (which I think is the case for much of Mastodon at the moment?), and since I generally agree with how they'd like to see the world and am otherwise not really involved with that movement, I don't really interact with those posts. However, I see a lot of "I simply blocked this hateful person lalalalalala" which makes me, as an outsid…

If you look at the adoption pattern and growth rate of Mastodon, it has around 1.5M users, the majority of which have arrived via three big waves. The first wave was people with left wing identities who were tired of being harassed on mainstream platforms like Twitter. The second wave was Japanese lolicon enthusiasts (without diving too deep down this rabbit hole, lolicon is a popular but weird and nerdy thing to be…

I don't see how the story about the waves and about users not fitting in would lead to less outrage. Sure, by being able to block (groups of) people, they might not come in contact with the people they are outraged about as much. However, the main thing that seems to turn Twitter/Facebook and now Mastodon into an outrage machine is exactly only seeing their own circles. That's what I'm currently observing at Mastodon: there's a lot of outrage in its LGBQT communities over things that I perceive as small, and the outrage is such that I wouldn't even dare to get involved in the things they are discussing, even though that is the only way to get closer together.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#132

Post by Vinnl »

intothemild wrote: post #115
apatters wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the adoption pattern and growth rate of Mastodon, it has around 1.5M users, the majority of which have arrived via three big waves. The first wave was people with left wing identities who were tired of being harassed on mainstream platforms like Twitter. The second wave was Japanese lolicon enthusiasts (without diving too deep down this rabbit hole, lolicon is a popular but weird and nerdy thing to be…

Yeah that first wave are huge with using content warnings for the silliest of things. [cw: food] I ate a burrito I've since disabled content warnings, because I think it gets in the way.. But then it fails the second and third waves, because they post childporn and sex ads.. So I've ended up blocking pawoo.net and switter.at Which is kinda the problem on mastodon, there's nothing in between silly content warnings wri…

I think the Content Warning thing is a different "problem". People in my timeline say they're using it in order to not clutter your timeline, i.e. you can quickly scan the headline ("I ate a burrito") to determine whether you want to read the rest. Ironically, that might be because Mastodon allows longer posts :P

Perhaps they'd need to implement a summary tag or something, so that people can configure their clients to only show the summaries for those who want to, and allows you to always expand them and still hide everything behind a CW.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#134

Post by codesections »

vageli wrote: post #127
codesections wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly see value in HackerNews—my use case for Mastodon isn't that different from my use case for HN. My instance (https:/fosstodon.org) is mostly focused on free and open source software (hence the name). Conversations there tend to be a lot like conversations on HN, but with the benifit of a local community where you get to know the regulars. (I'm not saying that there's no purely personal talk—but think "offi…

Just a friendly heads up, I'm getting a certificate error on your site (cert expired 30 April).

Thanks! That was because I put the wrong link; fixed now.

(And it's my instance only in the "my country" sense—I'm a user there, but I don't run it or anything.)

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#135

Post by colanderman »

colanderman wrote: post #22
mirimir wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I know that. But email was just the analogy ;) For Mastodon, that would be running your own instance, I guess.

Which is unfortunate. I consider myself a highly skilled technical user, and the burden of running and maintaining my own Mastodon server, or even my own Nginx server to redirect WebFinger requests somewhere else, exceeds the free time I have to devote to the problem. (Keeping another VM alive, updated, and configured through the years costs mental energy, time, and money.) Whereas, adding an SRV record to my existin…

Hm, I had a dream last night and the wild idea that the URI application of DDDS [1] could be used to replace or augment WebFinger for the process of associating Mastodon IDs with URLs. DDDS is already used for telephone number portability for both ENUM and SIP, so it would be an appropriate use case.

Of course, this (and SRV records, for that matter) would preclude pure web clients from being able to look up IDs, but that's not a problem an HTTP DNS proxy couldn't solve.

[1] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3404.txt

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#136

Post by codesections »

bopbop wrote: post #117

Apologies for the vulgarity, but I am presuming someone has informed the initial design team that toot is slang for a fart (at least in England) - which leads to the phrase "a mastadon toot" being quite a double entendre. How well ingrained is the name? Is it as commonly used in the community as a tweet in twitter? As in do the users identify the messages they send as toots, and are likely to say as such? https://www…

This was apparently unintentional—the founder wasn't aware of the slang term when they decided on the terminology.

That said, I view it as a happy accident, since it keeps the tone a bit silly/irreverent and reminds users that their thoughts aren't that valuable.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#137

Post by Mindwipe »

kowdermeister wrote: post #103

I found a survey about Mastodon: https://medium.com/@cassolotl/a-mastodon-survey-ac74948765c7 It says the main reason for not joining / abandoning is lack of friends. And also hard to use which doesn't help pulling in more people, so no friends, then a downward spiral. Is there a way out?

I feel like a simple plugin that pulled in your public Twitter friends usernames and offered to follow anyone with the same username @mastodon.social would really help here.

Pretty hard for Twitter to stop it if it were a client that scraped the list too.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#138

Post by okatsu »

elboru wrote: post #72
codesections wrote: post #36

I wrote a companion piece that explains what makes Mastodon better than Twitter. It starts like this: > Mastodon is a newcomer social media platform that is a lot like Twitter—short messages, followers, hashtags, all that. But Mastodon is much better than Twitter, and not just because being totally ad-free and keeping chronological timelines make it far more enjoyable to use (though that certainly helps!). All that i…

Wouldn’t a decentralized social network be more prone to delvelop more extremist groups? I mean if anyone can create an instance, then extremists from all the political spectrum will be able to moderate their own instances, in other words they will censor those who think differently and encourage their own views creating a loop that could potentially create more myopic-extremist views, or is there something I’m missi…

I'm not really sure what your point is. With or without Mastodon people have already created forums/social media groups/online communities for like-minded people and will censor or not censor it to their liking. That's the freedom of the internet.

And honestly I'd rather have that than the current state of social media where everyone is on the same platform and yelling at each other and using retweets to shame one another. My experience is anecdotal of course but whenever I see people trying to engage in discourse with the other side, everyone just doubles down on their opinion and the conversation goes nowhere.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#139

Post by Avamander »

codesections wrote: post #134
vageli wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a friendly heads up, I'm getting a certificate error on your site (cert expired 30 April).

Thanks! That was because I put the wrong link; fixed now. (And it's my instance only in the "my country" sense—I'm a user there, but I don't run it or anything.)

You missed a slash, the link doesn't work.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#140

Post by Dayshine »

piotrkubisa wrote: post #126
needle0 wrote: post #120

I'm not sure if this will be relevant to its longer-term success, but I notice that the word "Mastodon" seems to be very easy to misspell -- In the comments here alone I already find "Mastadon", "Mastadoon", etc.

I am curious why they have misspelled the Mastodon? In many languages it is written and spelled in the same way. I am not native speaker but I would pronounce mastadon and mastodon in the same way (ˈmæstədɑn), but hardly I can imagine to write down as mastadon. > First attested 1813, from the New Latin genus name Mastodon (1806), coined by French naturalist Georges Cuvier, from Ancient Greek μαστός (mastós, “breast”)…

It doesn't have to be misspelling. More likely it's forgetting which word it's supposed to be. I've only seen the word written/used in museums, so I'm unlikely to remember whether it's a mastadon, mastodon, matadon, etc.
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