Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are they including Gab users in the MAU count?
Gab is separate, and significantly larger than the entire fediverse combined.
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Mastodon: AGPLv3 FOSS social network server
151–160 of 165 posts
Re: Mastodon: AGPLv3 FOSS social network server
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
We definitely want to improve content/people discovery. One recent addition was the follow suggestions you get when you first sign up. It pulls up the most popular/proactive accounts in your language. Trending tags should also help, but we want to explore more options for discovery and are open to ideas.
I think a lot depends on having an onboarding experience that sets the expectations right. Good guidance text may come a long way already. For those who don't know: Mastodon works differently in how you build your social graph than Twitter, where much is automated by the recommendation algorithms kicking in. I think that once one properly grasps how to go from 'empty timelines' to having some first fine people in 'fo…
> so people can directly follow others that have explicitly expressed an interest in a particular topic
Rapnie: yes, that's what's missing for me. If I'm looking for people interested in fiction books, anime or sitcoms, it could be useful to just explore those topics. That's how I end up discovering people on Twitter right? See there's a discussion on the latest episode of XYZ show, and them see their profiles and follow
Gargron: Thanks so much for the response, and all your work so far :)
On a good note, I absolutely LOVE that we can tag one specific post as NSFW, and that we can add the spoiler/TW to hide the rest of the post, So damn useful
Re: Mastodon: AGPLv3 FOSS social network server
#153I admin and use a Mastodon instance. It takes a while to get used to the differences from Twitter, but it's far more polished than people seem to expect. The reading I tend to recommend if people have questions is Darius Kazemi's https://runyourown.social/
Another admin here, and yes I agree. But one major aspect of fediverse, that people rarely talk about when promoting it, is the spam. To summarize my impressions over the last 5 years I'd say there is no way to run a big open instance without funding. The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account. And even then I'd suggest using Geo blocking to fence off…
> The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account.
Yup! That's exactly the approach Kazemi is advocating, too. It makes sense if you think about the trust that there needs to be both ways in a admin/account-holder relationship.
Re: Mastodon: AGPLv3 FOSS social network server
#154I really wanted to like it, but it's just so difficult to actually find people and content, considering you can only search for hashtags and all...
Most instances have an open directory which lets you browse through the most active/recent profiles, but yeah, bootstrapping any new network is difficult. Even more so due to the fragmentation of the fediverse. In any case, I have running and managing a instance of Mastodon (and Matrix, and XMPP) as a side-project for some time. Some of my users asked about having a twitter bridge, where they could at least follow wh…
> Most instances have an open directory which lets you browse through the most active/recent profiles
which is useless, unless it's a niche instance. mastodon.social is generalist, so most people there are not posting anything I want to see.
But finding a good niche instance is really hard - in terms of the niche, rules, and actually being fast and working well.
Re: Mastodon: AGPLv3 FOSS social network server
#155I really wanted to like it, but it's just so difficult to actually find people and content, considering you can only search for hashtags and all...
Check out https://communitywiki.org/trunk/ and https://sizeof.cat/post/mastodon-accounts/ .
The second link is useless: 'interesting accounts' with no information on what they post, or what makes them interesting.
But the first is very nice, and that's kinda what I was looking for, thanks!!!
Re: Mastodon: AGPLv3 FOSS social network server
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most instances have an open directory which lets you browse through the most active/recent profiles, but yeah, bootstrapping any new network is difficult. Even more so due to the fragmentation of the fediverse. In any case, I have running and managing a instance of Mastodon (and Matrix, and XMPP) as a side-project for some time. Some of my users asked about having a twitter bridge, where they could at least follow wh…
> Most instances have an open directory which lets you browse through the most active/recent profiles which is useless, unless it's a niche instance. mastodon.social is generalist, so most people there are not posting anything I want to see. But finding a good niche instance is really hard - in terms of the niche, rules, and actually being fast and working well.
You don't need to join the instance to see its directory.
When I started my own instance, I went to a handful of different instances and looked at the directory. Then I started following the ones that seemed interesting. That was enough for me to bootstrap my feed to the point of something useful.
Re: Mastodon: AGPLv3 FOSS social network server
#157How do things stand on account portability? If I sign up at a mastodon server, build an audience and network there, but later if the server admin changes its policies in unfavorable directions, can I migrate to a new server with all my contacts and reputation intact - even without the old admin's cooperation?
Mastodon has a "profile move" feature that moves all of your followers (on instances that support the protocol) to your new account. However, it will not move your toots (posts). All of your account data can be exported, and everything except for toots (and media) can be imported. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
> However, it will not move your toots (posts).
I would say that moving the posts is what worries me more about moving the account. I can refollow everyone, but I can't post hundreds (or thousands) of posts in their original datetime
Re: Mastodon: AGPLv3 FOSS social network server
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Post is called a toot? Tf
Long story short: Eugen didn't know toot had another meaning in some places. Toot is the sound a mastodon makes.
I only discovered the other meaning on the post they made about the renaming. For me it always was mastodon and trumpet sound
Re: Mastodon: AGPLv3 FOSS social network server
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the most difficult part is finding who to follow (likely strangers) when you first start. You could watch the global timeline or search some #hashtags for things you are interested in or try to pick the right server with a like-minded userbase from the get-go. However, these issues aren't too different than any other social media tbf. And eventually you find interesting people exclusive to the Fediverse or pos…
Should we follow people, or topics?
I guess both work. On Instagram and Tumblr I can follow people and hashtags, on Twitter I can follow people and topics. On forums, you basically navigated by topic, without following any specific person.
Re: Mastodon: AGPLv3 FOSS social network server
#160People interested in this stuff should check out alternate software as well. Hometown is a fork of mastodon that has a few extra features but one very interesting one in particular: you can post to the local server only, which is an excellent community building feature. There's also pleroma, which I've run and is pretty great and low on resource requirements. And there are tons of other social UX paradigms like link…
> ...you can post to the local server only, which is an excellent community building feature. The idea of building a local community that you have to have an account and associated identity on a specific server to access is the kind of mal-aligned incentive that tends to cause federated systems to become de-facto centralized silos and, eventually, return to the status quo of a controlling oligopoly :(.
That's one take on it, and I've heard the maintainer of mastodon share similar sentiments. I disagree because as long as the servers are all interoperable and people can communicate across them they can never actually become silos.
An architectural feature of a federated system is that people congregate on servers together for whatever reasons they have. Communities are an emergent part of this architecture whether we like it or not, and this can be used to create a positive user experience that you cannot truly get on centralized services. What we wind up with is a network of communities that interact with one another, not as some people envision a network of superfluous servers that humans use simply to interact with one another, and this is unavoidable in a federated system like this. If we do want a network where the servers are meaningless to the social interaction it has to be fully peer to peer.