I wish they changed the name to something better. Would probably increase adoption greatly if they can come up with a name that doesn’t sound like a porn site specializing in bondage.
How does "Mastodon" evoke that for you!?
Mastodon hit 10M users
51–60 of 410 posts
Re: Mastodon hit 10M users
#52That ten million figure includes the many of us who created an account on some instance, had a browse around for a few minutes, realised it was a boring wasteland of a service, and never logged on again.
Let's see the data for active users, not just registrations.
Re: Mastodon hit 10M users
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
You sampled one instance in a fediverse with thousands upon thousands of instances. Do you think none of them have a community more aligned with your worldview?
Most likely, yes. Those with a different worldview are cut off from the fediverse and many client apps blacklist those instances that gain momentum from being usable in the client app. For example, Gab.
Do you have a link to the instance(s) that were blacklisted you're referring to?
Re: Mastodon hit 10M users
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
but c'mon jabberd has been around forever and it's not making waves like Mastodon. Why?
XMPP (née Jabber) isn't a broadcast messaging platform like Twitter or Mastodon, it's a one-on-one or small group instant messaging protocol. It absolutely failed to take off as a broadly decentralised instant messaging service, for a bunch of reasons, but it absolutely succeeded in becoming a widely used instant messaging protocol, at least for a while. Jabber was born in 1998, in a world where there was a handful o…
WhatsApp is built upon XMPP, and it's by far the most successful deployment of this protocol, with over 2.2 billion users.
Re: Mastodon hit 10M users
#55After about 6 months hosting my own little private Mastodon instance, I can say the following things: (1) Whoever cares about that but the atmosphere is nice, cozy, exciting and creative. Zero toxicity and probably several magnitudes more meaningful conversations with people from all around the world. This apparently comes from the kinds of people I could find and connect with. (2) Hosting is relatively easy. I think…
Everyone online community can be perfect if group membership is small enough. Up until that point the underlying tech does not matter. I have been part of great hobby groups and discussions on niche subreddits, random Whatsapp groups, Usenet/IRC, even plain old email threads. So in that sense, yes, Mastadon can be great as well.
The real test is – can your community handle an influx of a billion of the worst users on the internet? People baiting for flame wars, bots, scammers, pedophiles. They are all out there, and will show up the second your service has a whiff of popularity.
Re: Mastodon hit 10M users
#5610 million 'registered users' not 'daily active users' in 7 years. Even in some of the comments in the post are skeptical about the usage of those registered accounts. In comparison to Twitter (Since Mastodon zealots often pitch it as a 'Twitter alternative' somehow) 7 years after it launched, it had well over 250M+ total users with well over 150M daily actives. [0] Even Nostr has 6M total users in less than 7 years.…
The years Mastodon operated before Musk chased millions of people off Twitter don't count. In the status quo ante of Musk's takeover, Mastodon may never have been viable, but Musk did take over Twitter.
Twitter's daily active user count has gone up since Musk took over. If people were chased off, they either came back or others filled up the numbers.
Anecdotally, I've enjoyed Twitter a lot more since his takeover. They've relaxed their rules and unbanned a lot of people who I'd missed seeing on the platform. Musk does seem to be at least partially keeping his promise of improving the free speech aspect of the site.
Re: Mastodon hit 10M users
#57After about 6 months hosting my own little private Mastodon instance, I can say the following things: (1) Whoever cares about that but the atmosphere is nice, cozy, exciting and creative. Zero toxicity and probably several magnitudes more meaningful conversations with people from all around the world. This apparently comes from the kinds of people I could find and connect with. (2) Hosting is relatively easy. I think…
Its just takes the one person to ruin it all. Doesn't matter if he is fighting the good fight, just an ass, just a karen, or just a troll. If you find similar minded people, all the "negatives" are just accepted. Like in EU. Its 100% fine to be openly racist against the Turks, the Russinas, the Gypsies. Does that make it right? No. But is it a cozy atmosphere where everyone can agree that they can openly bash these people? Sure does.
Re: Mastodon hit 10M users
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
" Zero toxicity and probably several magnitudes more meaningful conversations with people from all around the world. This apparently comes from the kinds of people I could find and connect with. " So long as you lean to progressive worldviews and see insult slinging at those that don't see your way not as being toxic, but rather just expressions of righteous indignation... sure, I could buy that line. A quick perusal…
I do understand (and suffer from it from time to time, too) the reflex to put labels on bubbles. But in this case, I'm probably the wrong addressee since I'm regularly confronting myself with world views spanning over allover the political spectrum. I'm actively researching for data and arguments from other bubbles than mine and regularly learn something new through that. With toxicity I was referring to the ill-fate…
We're talking about the same toxicity.
I do agree there is less shitposting, but there's a fair amount of it nonetheless. Many other of those activist posts are toned down here... because I expect their expectations are they are largely preaching to the choir.
But just scrolling through the "toots" (again, at mastodon.social) on the main landing page I get...:
"New Yorkers yelling at nazis is fun.
Proud Boys bloodied and jailed during NYC drag queen story hour protest"
(https://mastodon.world/@StillIRise1963/110051510087068465)
"Nate Silver's brain seems to be broken. The "data guy" is literally citing a Twitter poll as if it's meaningful in a political context.
No wonder ABC News is trying to sell off FiveThirtyEight."
(https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/110052597467670093)
"Yet another wealthy #GOP donor turns out to be an accused pedophile, groomer, and sex trafficker. You'd almost think the party's obsessive focus on demonizing drag queens and library books was a crude act of misdirection. #USpolitics https://apnews.com/article/lazzaro-rep"
(https://newsie.social/@stevesilberman/110050892922689946 ... mastodon.social showed this to me while scrolling, but clearly this is an example of federated content)
"The neo-Nazis are creeping around, kids.
Remember, every neo-Nazi/MAGA chud/Jordan Peterson fan is a real person with feelings and gross insecurities who is also a loathsome cnt undeserving of a second of your time or attention unless you are a law enforcement agent working in counter-terrorism. Block immediately, report often.*"
(https://beige.party/@GrimmReality/110051420547135356 again, federation at work).
And the replies are, as far as I could tell while casually browsing, all reinforcing.... none at all trying to moderate the severity or civility of the points being made.
This isn't that different than what I saw I Twitter over the years, except there you saw it from many different sides of various debates. And note that my comments aren't about the issues being discussed: it's chiefly about the way they are discussed: toxically.
So I'm sorry, I don't doubt your intentions and that you really do feel more at home and welcome on Mastodon. But it's not because federation has solved the problem of Twitter-like toxicity: it hasn't, not at all. It's maybe reduced it a bit because the filters for ideology are greater (whether those filters are implemented by administrators refusing users or federating to certain servers or because Mastodon is only attracting people of a certain mindset).
Re: Mastodon hit 10M users
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
" Zero toxicity and probably several magnitudes more meaningful conversations with people from all around the world. This apparently comes from the kinds of people I could find and connect with. " So long as you lean to progressive worldviews and see insult slinging at those that don't see your way not as being toxic, but rather just expressions of righteous indignation... sure, I could buy that line. A quick perusal…
You sampled one instance in a fediverse with thousands upon thousands of instances. Do you think none of them have a community more aligned with your worldview?
If I'm a casual user without any great motivation for learning the arcane ways of "The Fediverse"... someone just looking for someway to get into this Mastodon thing I keep hearing about: a normal, everyday user. I'm going to probably go to some search engine and type in "Mastodon" or "Mastodon social network". Using DuckDuckGo, many of the first links show up pointing to mastodon.social or server lookups operated from there (assiming joinmastodon.org is affiliated). The point is that someone that is relatively disinterested in "The Fediverse" or the technology per se and just wants to participate in social interactions... the fine tuning you're suggesting may be required is probably on the wrong side of the cost/benefit ratio.
But, wanting to give your point a chance... I went to the first 10 servers that were suggested by joinmastodon. There was very little difference just scrolling their landing pages in terms of content than that of mastodon.social. Not surprising: Federation is suppose to allow this sort of decentralized sharing of the exact same content across instances. Of those, only really the instance run by the makers of the Vivaldi Browser seems to be notably toned down on the political muck.. and they probably for business reasons.
Then I went different interest specific group servers and scrolled through their landing page content. And they were also very reflective of my mastodon.social experience... many of the same Toots. The kind of community didn't really matter so much for the most part (I'm guessing a fair amount of lazy configuration to be honest).
Here's an example: birds.town which bills itself as...
"A server primarily meant for people who like birds, birding and nature in general, but obviously everyone is equally welcome here! Have fun cawing about "
And I almost was happily surprised. The top Toots of the feed (or whatever it's called in Mastodon-land) were, in fact, about birding! Unfortunately I kept scrolling. Oh dear.
"I'd find conservatives attacks on “woke” funny if they weren't so dangerous.
Woke people fought and won the battle against slavery.
Woke people went to war and defeated fascism in WWII.
Woke people fought for and won equal rights for women and people of color.
Woke people battled for rights for workers like 40-hour workweeks and safety protections."
https://birds.town/@augieray@mastodon.social/110049850172355...
Yes, because that's what I want to know when participating in a social network focusing on bird watching.
Re: Mastodon hit 10M users
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do understand (and suffer from it from time to time, too) the reflex to put labels on bubbles. But in this case, I'm probably the wrong addressee since I'm regularly confronting myself with world views spanning over allover the political spectrum. I'm actively researching for data and arguments from other bubbles than mine and regularly learn something new through that. With toxicity I was referring to the ill-fate…
We're talking about the same toxicity. I do agree there is less shitposting, but there's a fair amount of it nonetheless. Many other of those activist posts are toned down here... because I expect their expectations are they are largely preaching to the choir. But just scrolling through the "toots" (again, at mastodon.social) on the main landing page I get...: " New Yorkers yelling at nazis is fun. Proud Boys bloodie…
Interesting! I guess then my usage of Mastodon is making it the "zero toxic" thing it is for me.
- As said, I'm hosting my own instance, and I understood in the beginning that I don't just want to see the federated stuff (mostly weird sexualized anime images with way-too-young characters).
- So I manually searched through catalogs of instances listed at the website.
- I went through most of those instances, searched for users with followers and read their first couple of posts to see if they're human and interesting by any means (e.g. I happened to stumble upon a librarian instance and have learned so much about their day-to-day worklife and tools).
- Now I'm following like 900 people and have ~270 followers. That's more than enough to fill the no-algo timeline with interesting stuff.
- I'm only using the Home timeline and almost never the federated one, sometimes searching, hashtags etc.