Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

time.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 289 posts

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#251

Post by mmplxx »

beardedman wrote: post #139
imhoguy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no free lunch. Somebody has to pay electricity bills and spend resources (time) on administration. But you have a choice: so you trust the dude in rural Canada who pays the server bills with his harvest earnings, or you agree with monetization T&C by giving up your privacy to ads corporation, or you pay a hosting company who manages your instance on VPS, or you setup your own instance, or you participate in…

I think I will trust/use/invest in the company whose business model depends on me using the platform.

I'm still trying to make up my mind about all this, but it's likely that the fact that many servers are running subject to the same set of rules may increase competition since servers are highly substitutable, so a paid server business model may actually be more customer oriented because of the "Mastodon market" pressure it faces, isn't it?

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#252

Post by moistly »

kragen wrote: post #88
kaba0 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to not forget the “past”: Trump was banned from twitter due to inciting violence, see https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio... There is an objective truth out there, no reason to return to our echo chambers. Some people are angry at Elon buying twitter because a subjectively good platform might just die in a short time, because everyone who had even an ounce of try at managing a platform k…

The objective truth is that states are founded on violence — both punishment for crimes and warfare — so every politician spends their entire career inciting violence. "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists" is inciting violence against whatever country refuses to fall in line. "Three strikes and you're out" is inciting violence against junkies, hundreds of thousands of whom are imprisoned in the US tod…

> Though you're probably too young to remember it, Usenet had unmoderated free speech for about 25 years.

To the point that it became dangerous to use a Usenet browser that would automatically download & display attachments because extremely illegal content would be displayed. God forbid you were running a server, because that was getting pretty close to “possessing” that shit in your data storage. Unmoderated Usenet became a hell hole.

Regulation is, IMO, preferable to seeing unsolicited illegal pornography in one’s social media firehouse.

I will argue that no civil society has ever had a truly free press. To my knowledge, there has never been legal press publication of the images Usenet propagated.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#253

Post by kragen »

moistly wrote: post #252
kragen wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The objective truth is that states are founded on violence — both punishment for crimes and warfare — so every politician spends their entire career inciting violence. "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists" is inciting violence against whatever country refuses to fall in line. "Three strikes and you're out" is inciting violence against junkies, hundreds of thousands of whom are imprisoned in the US tod…

> Though you're probably too young to remember it, Usenet had unmoderated free speech for about 25 years. To the point that it became dangerous to use a Usenet browser that would automatically download & display attachments because extremely illegal content would be displayed. God forbid you were running a server, because that was getting pretty close to “possessing” that shit in your data storage. Unmoderated Usenet…

maybe the problem is that you live in a place where 'extremely illegal content' is a phrase that makes sense to you. if you live somewhere that criminalizes possession of certain information of course you are not going to want access to free speech; at any moment you could come into accidental possession of photos of tiananmen square. but that's a problem created by your local laws, not by unmoderated free speech

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#254

Post by unconed »

_djo_ wrote: post #211
unconed wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't see the risk of outsourcing your reach to a rando admin, who may have started their instance out of protest reasons, in a highly contentious, politicized climate? There are people right now having tantrums because they want their one-sided censorship back, and indeed, that's what's behind this latest drive to promote mastodon all over the place. Nothing has actually changed on Twitter except the bluechecks'…

There are risks in trusting your instance admin, but you can move. Tons has changed on Twitter, including the laying off of half the company including substantial numbers in the Trust & Safety team. I'm seeing people who couldn't have cared less about the US's culture wars talking about leaving Twitter and setting up Mastodon accounts because they're expecting the platform to become nastier, more spammy, less reliabl…

Bluechecks stopped being about verification a long time ago, when it became clear Twitter wouldn't verify people with the wrong kind of opinions, and when they vindictively started to deverify accounts as punishment. That proves it was not about identity verification at all but about the in-group.

I have no doubt there is some hysteria going around, but it is entirely unfounded. If anything, you can expect fanatic lefties to false flag abuse to create that impression because that's exactly their style.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#255

Post by crossroadsguy »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #58

I really want to like Mastodon, and every few years I make an attempt to join. But then, I am faced with the decision of choosing a server - if I like cooking and golf, do I join the cooking server or the golf server? What if I choose wrong ? - and the choice overload makes me just give up. And even if I really joined, then apparently my server's administrator would be able to silently prevent me from seeing other "e…

> and they could even read my DMs.

Child patents are strangely completely ignoring this point for some reason. Some have added an absurd “but what about email” though. I never thought about it. This ought to be DoA for many in today’s world.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#256

Post by Zak »

notpushkin wrote: post #121
beardedman wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social accounts are monetizable & part of peoples brands now - “well if it blows up ah well” might be fine for you or for me, but might not be for others.

Then don't use free instances? There's a bunch of companies that would run a dedicated instance for you for a couple dozen $/mo.

Less than that. Weingärtner is 4€/month for an instance they say is suitable for up to 5 users. Masto.host is $6 for the same. This is a major advantage over centralized social media in terms of platform risk.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#257

Post by Zak »

yanderekko wrote: post #133
kstrauser wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a strange take. If another server hosts content I, as a Mastodon admin, dislike, then I can simply choose not to talk to them. I do not owe them a platform. I’m not preventing my users from creating a second account on that server so that they can interact with it. That server has perfect freedom to host whatever they see fit, and I have perfect freedom not to see it. And if I’m too quick to block servers, my…

I'm not saying that it's a Mastadon technology problem. I'm saying it's a social problem, that the "federation model" only truly works down to the layer of the tech stack which is not federated, which is still most layers. Activists will not be content to merely defederate, they will coordinate to have disfavored Mastadon instances brought down by their hosts and funders.

You could replace "Mastodon instances" with "websites" and see the same effect. Several sites used by hate groups and similar have gone offline indefinitely after Cloudflare refused to provide them DDoS protection.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#258

Post by Zak »

kragen wrote: post #253
moistly wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Though you're probably too young to remember it, Usenet had unmoderated free speech for about 25 years. To the point that it became dangerous to use a Usenet browser that would automatically download & display attachments because extremely illegal content would be displayed. God forbid you were running a server, because that was getting pretty close to “possessing” that shit in your data storage. Unmoderated Usenet…

maybe the problem is that you live in a place where 'extremely illegal content' is a phrase that makes sense to you. if you live somewhere that criminalizes possession of certain information of course you are not going to want access to free speech; at any moment you could come into accidental possession of photos of tiananmen square. but that's a problem created by your local laws, not by unmoderated free speech

Let's not be abstract here. The content in question was child sexual abuse photographs. Those are illegal almost everywhere (I do not know of any exceptions).

Most people think those should be illegal to distribute or intentionally possess. I think that; there is a victim who suffered real harm, which is compounded by distribution of images of their abuse. Perhaps you do not, but you'll probably find that opinion falls under PG's "What You Can't Say".

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#259

Post by lrvick »

dymk wrote: post #194
lrvick wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You chose an area code for your phone number. Often people choose area codes from a home state as a bit of nostalgia or affinity, but in the end you can use any number to talk to any number, so it really does not matter much. In Mastodon you can choose a french server if you are french and agree with generally accepted french values of moderation, or you can choose a general purpose server, or host your own. There ar…

I’ve never been given a choice for my area code, and if I was, there’s the obvious default to “where I live”. What’s the Mastodon equivalent?

There are many country and geographic specific mastodons.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#260

Post by hairofadog »

baq wrote: post #149
detaro wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not sure what you mean by "follow a server"? You can interact with/follow people on other servers from yours.

That’s the thing, I don’t really want to find people to follow, I guess? Not out of band at least. First I need to find a few of their posts. How do I do that?

Follow a hashtag. Posts from various different servers will show up in your feed, and you can follow people by just clicking “follow”.
Post reply on HN