Honestly, I feel like Mastodon just reinvented FidoNet, but over TCP/IP.
Exploring Mastodon
231–240 of 248 posts
Re: Exploring Mastodon
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can just put that full name in the search bar on your own instance and follow them from it. You don't have to go to their instance at all. I mean, I'm not saying that mastodon is super duper easy to use for everyone but in this particular example you seem to be going out of your way to make it more complicated than it is. If the thing you found on hn was a link to their profile your flow would make sense, but if…
I was replying in context to the comment above about typing in the handle, and I would put copy/paste in the same category. With email addresses, you have the mailto: link, which works pretty well so you don't have to copy paste. Maybe we need a follow: url scheme that browsers know what to do with.
I wouldn't be surprised to see that come into existence now honestly.
Re: Exploring Mastodon
#233Are there any servers with transparent open governance? Debian provides a great example
Re: Exploring Mastodon
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who learned how to use Discord can sure as heck deal with Mastodon. They just need a real motivation beyond curiosity.
Okay, I know that to see content about X, I connect to the X discord server, and to see content about Y, I connect to the Y discord server, and so on. But to message someone, I don't need to know or care what server they're on, or where I know them from. I just message username#uid, and that's it. Discord is different enough from other tools that many people are confused by it. But even then, Mastodon is different en…
How is "I just message username#uid" different from "I just message username@instance"?
Re: Exploring Mastodon
#235Re: Exploring Mastodon
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you not do that?
Imagine I'm on hacker news and there's someone on mastodon I think someone should follow and their mastodon handle is @cooldude@cooldude.example.com (because they are so cool they run their own instance). You definitely can't click that handle and add follow them, I could put https://cooldude.example.com/@cooldude and you could click to their profile on their instance, but there would be no way to follow them directl…
Is this something that is just crappy with the workflow, so other clients could be better or a limitation of the current mastadon server implementation not providing enough information?
Re: Exploring Mastodon
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's not central. Discoverability of the entire universe is not a goal of any fediverse tool; the goal is to put back communities in the hands of users. Diackverability happens by talking to people, asking your way around, following interesting accounts from afar, being part of the discussion and organically grow your network. If you search for Twitter2, the fediverse is not it.
Every IRC server or Discord server I ever joined, I joined because there was something there to which I wanted access, or an existing community I discovered another way, and was directed there to fill things out. If either of those things exist for mastodon, I'm not seeing them, and half the people on here are saying, "this isn't twitter go away" while the other half is raving about how exciting it is to be the recip…
Maybe the things you are interested in do not exist on the fediverse; it's not a problem in itself. It's better to be there than on Twitter, but so be it.
Both replies absolutely coexist because of something simple: the fediverse is not Twitter. If you're looking for Twitter2, that's not it. If you're looking to build the fediverse by being a member and contributing to the discussion. You're going in a different universe, learn the rules :)
Re: Exploring Mastodon
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has some (very basic) info: https://joinfediverse.wiki/Fediverse_relays As far as I understand it (and with the caveat I've only recently started digging into the protocols) the general concept is that ActivityPub basically has inboxes you post to, and outboxes containing the public feed, which you can follow (asking them to post you stuff), so a relay just needs an outbox that contains the full public feed of a…
Thanks. And yeah, that's ... very roughly ... my understanding. Though a relay would have multiple instance's feeds, ideally. One question I have is whether or not larger instances might serve as gating relays for smaller ones. Sort of a hub-and-spoke / leafnode (w/ reference to the Usenet utility intentional) concept. Reading now ... And yes, relays do of course serve multiple instances. I find the "instances wantin…
Yeah, hub and spoke absolutely makes sense. I think in general, though, the relays are a bit of a hack in the sense that they're papering over poor discoverability and search mostly. It makes sense to have some nodes on the network with the ability to serve up search results for a reasonable fraction of the network, but most small instances have only very limited use for taking a large feed once people have followed what they want.
There's the option of doing more with relays, such as ones offered filtered subsets out.
Re: Exploring Mastodon
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's much worse now, partially due to the fact that young people's first computing device is a phone, instead of a family computer. Here's a story about an engineering professor lamenting that their first-year students do not understand folder structures, because they have been using Google Docs for a decade, and don't use use anything besides the search bar. https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-dir…
Let's be real though, nested directories aren't necessarily the best way to organize or find documents. In an era where systems support tagging, full text search, and other graph connections between files nested folder structures aren't necessary for everyone. They're a conceptual holdover from a different time with much more limited means to persist data. That's not to say they're obsolete but it's not necessary for…
For me, folder structures in Windows and MS-DOS helped me grasp the basics of information architecture. That is still how most website URLs work. Even if websites are now database-driven CMSes, and not actual folders on a web server, URLs are still written in that way to give both humans and search engines an idea of the structure of the site.
I would posit that it's easier to understand things like objects, arrays and API endpoints if you have that basic familiarity with folders.
Re: Exploring Mastodon
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Septembers demolish communities.
Some more than others, but most certainly not all. Where this one falls for Mastodon remains to be seen. It's more AOLish than Academic, in the sense that it's the result of a capricious event on a large outside-the-destination-system network (Twitter, in this case) rather than a regular seasonal influx (as with uni students discovering Usenet). It isn't however a wholesale dumping of an entire community onto another…
Yep, I hope it continues working.