The idea seems very interesting to me, but I have to ask, people talk a lot about the social aspect and how I can follow people, this honestly doesn't interest me at all, what I'm interested at is aggregation, could I actually replace say twitter and my RSS reader with self-hosted Mastodon instance?
How Does Mastodon Work?
141–150 of 186 posts
Re: How Does Mastodon Work?
#142I joined a server. It was alright. Then I looked at the federated timeline and decided I did not wish to be a part of Mastadon. Too much hate and virtue signalling. It was like what Twitter already was.
I don't understand this. The Federated timeline is always going to be full of the same kind of crap that Twitter (and other social media) has. The whole point of Mastodon is that you can avoid that by joining an instance that matches your interests, and then only look at your notifications and the local timeline. By doing that you can see only things said by, or boosted by, people who you have chosen to associate wit…
Can you join multiple "local" timelines? Ie, lets say you join an OSS dev focused federation and you like it. Down the line, it grows and becomes less HN, more Reddit. Okay, you say to yourself, time to move to the next HN-like you find. So you do that, but it's small, and feels dead.
Seeing feeds from both the old, somewhat bad and the new, better but still too small would ease migration woes. Is that possible?
Re: How Does Mastodon Work?
#143I joined a server. It was alright. Then I looked at the federated timeline and decided I did not wish to be a part of Mastadon. Too much hate and virtue signalling. It was like what Twitter already was.
> Too much hate and virtue signalling. It was like what Twitter already was.
Thanks for virtue signalling. Ironic.
Re: How Does Mastodon Work?
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand this. The Federated timeline is always going to be full of the same kind of crap that Twitter (and other social media) has. The whole point of Mastodon is that you can avoid that by joining an instance that matches your interests, and then only look at your notifications and the local timeline. By doing that you can see only things said by, or boosted by, people who you have chosen to associate wit…
Can you join multiple "local" timelines? Ie, lets say you join an OSS dev focused federation and you like it. Down the line, it grows and becomes less HN, more Reddit. Okay, you say to yourself, time to move to the next HN-like you find. So you do that, but it's small, and feels dead. Seeing feeds from both the old, somewhat bad and the new, better but still too small would ease migration woes. Is that possible?
You can start a new account on a new instance, watch the old account on the old instance, see which people are still worth following, then follow them from the new instance account. I've done that and it worked a treat. You can also export the list of people you follow and import that into the new instance, then unfollow anyone who says stupid things.
My experience is that all platforms reward putting in a small amount of effort to curate those I follow and engage with. Unless you do that you end up with the shower of complete crap hiding the nuggets worth having. With a comparatively small amount of effort you can get a high-quality stream with very little crap, and then you can block or filter that.
Re: How Does Mastodon Work?
#145I really wish I could join several instances with the same account. This is a feature currently missing, but someone told me they're working on it. Go mastodon, go !
You can just join the instances using the same handle. Then from each in turn export the people you follow and import that into each of the others. Now each of your accounts follows the same collection of people.
Then on each instance cull those you don't want to follow on this instance. Now each account has the flavour of the instance you're on.
You can do all that now, although it requires a little work.
Re: How Does Mastodon Work?
#146[deleted]
Re: How Does Mastodon Work?
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the migrate account thing at the bottom of edit profile then? Move to a different account If you wish to redirect this account to a different one, you can configure it here.
There are multiple account migration issues, the hardest is what happens when the hobbyist/volunteer instance you use inevitably goes down for good - you lose your address, your social network connections, your posts/history etc. That's unlikely to happen if you use the main Mastodon instance, but an aim of Mastodon is that you don't. In that situation you can't log into the old site to edit your profile to have it r…
This sounds kind of like OPML export, and taking your RSS feeds with you when you go to another feed reader.
Is that a meaningful analogy?
Re: How Does Mastodon Work?
#148Is there a straightforward way to change Instances without losing connections with other users? Does it make more sense to host your own, so that you'll always be @isl@isl.tld ?
You can export/import the list of users you follow, but the people who follow you will have to re-follow you manually
Re: How Does Mastodon Work?
#149> Well, finding the right one is very difficult That sounds like a rather critical UX bug. Just give me the instance I should sign up on in the "sign up" area of mastodon.social. Use what you think is the most suitable algorithm to cycle through a list of "appropriate" instances, where you-- the people with domain experience-- define "appropriate" for the potential user. Otherwise you end up with this passive-aggress…
That's because you don't really join "Mastodon" like you don't really join "XMPP". You pick an instance that has people that you want to talk to and that lets you federate usefully with other servers. You can join multiple instances for different uses if you want, although they do mostly federate with others.
Re: How Does Mastodon Work?
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
The potential for division in the fediverse as a whole is worse. On twitter, there were McCarthyesque, opaquely curated user blacklists to worry about. A conglomerated instance could enforce this kind of arbitrary censorship across entire communities by imposing rules on who their federation partners can federate with, and control network disruption by refusing to federate with new, <100 user instances under the excu…
The blocklists are equally as McCarthyesque.. I remember being on mastodon when the second wave of users hit (pawoo.net). Suddenly overnight we had to worry about what was on our servers cache.. suddenly there was lolicon porn, which might be legal in japan, but outside it could be illegal. So naturally blocklist's appeared, blocking all the new wave of Japanese servers. I remember there was a disagreement between th…
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