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Seems like a bad design decision trying to force people to use the platform in an unnatural way. They will just take screenshots and add their own comments instead, making the "retoots with comments" inferior to what it could be with native comments.
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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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
correct me if I'm wrong but i don't think there is one single place developers can create APIs for. if anything, developers will be picking and choosing which "instance" they want to write for if willing. this is like having thousands of "twitter" clones all acting as their own environment. kind of like how we have thousands of wordpress sites out there.
That doesn't seem right. The API for an instance is going to be the Mastodon API, which will be the same for all instances. Each instance isn't going to be creating their own API - really, all Mastodon is is an API spec.
but please correct me if im wrong. i havent really dived too much into it.
I wish the author had expanded on migration from one instance to another and what it entails (similar to the questions and responses here). Another point I would've liked to see is on encryption and privacy — who, other than the people I choose as an audience, can see my Toots (the admins of the instances, someone sniffing the network, etc.). If these platforms are being sold as "awesome", there need to be more reaso…
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…
> This is by design so that a person’s Toot is only Boosted in a way that gets the message they intended across. Seems like a bad design decision trying to force people to use the platform in an unnatural way. They will just take screenshots and add their own comments instead, making the "retoots with comments" inferior to what it could be with native comments.
I wish the author had expanded on migration from one instance to another and what it entails (similar to the questions and responses here). Another point I would've liked to see is on encryption and privacy — who, other than the people I choose as an audience, can see my Toots (the admins of the instances, someone sniffing the network, etc.). If these platforms are being sold as "awesome", there need to be more reaso…
> I wish the author had expanded on migration from one instance to another and what it entails (similar to the questions and responses here). Account migration is not a thing yet, and conceptually requires a new namespace for referencing accounts (such as public keys). There is a multi-year-long actively-discussed open issue thread about this problem. https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177
Move to a different account
If you wish to redirect this account to a different one, you can configure it here.The thing I never really see from these is about setting up on an existing instance vs running my own. And if I set up my own, does it need to be a community? Am I shutting myself out of an experience by creating, say, a Mastodon instance for my family? I'm bought in to the idea of Mastodon, but getting started is like being handed an atlas of the US and being told, "Please pick a neighborhood to live in."
1. And if I set up my own, does it need to be a community? No. Mastadon and other compatible servers like GNUSocial do have single-user environments. [0] 2. Am I shutting myself out of an experience by creating, say, a Mastodon instance for my family? No. The entire thing is federated, users from all servers can speak to each other. [0] https://github.com/ummjackson/mastodon-guide/blob/master/sin...
Well that's the easy answer.
I run my own instance and it's near impossible to find interesting people to follow. I started making alternate accounts on various other servers and it was immediately much better.
Also, (from my experience) people actually do pay attention to the local feed. People are more likely to find about (and talk to) you when they see you on their local feed. It's very hard for people to find you when you have your own instance.
So for Mastodon, at least, you most likely will want a community server - not a single user one.
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-aggressive situation where everybody does the obvious thing of signing up on mastodon.social, but your devs and fans take it on themselves to "teach" people not to do that because federation.
Case in point: the very first step of signing up is described as "very difficult" in this newbie guide.