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

71–80 of 289 posts

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

#71

Post by tomrod »

pera wrote: post #66
coffeefirst wrote: post #43

In theory federated social media seems like a great idea. You can hand-wave a lot of impossible moderation problems away just by not being so damn big. It seems like I could join for music and geeky history without being inundated with The Current Thing ragebait culture. I'd try that out! In practice it's still a desert. The problem isn't how to sign up, it's that with the exception of a few active communities, there…

> In practice it's still a desert. That's not true anymore: I am currently following over 100 academics and scientists who decided to migrate over the past week, they are very active and as a result my timeline is much more interesting and engaging than Twitter. I have never seen such a big exodus in my 25+ years online, this is historic.

Digg to Reddit comes to mind, but the quality of new material in Mastodon eclipses Twitter.

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

#72

Post by qualudeheart »

cratermoon wrote: post #18
dmitriid wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And most of those servers stopped registrations when the exodus from Twitter began. One reason, so that communities wouldn't get diluted. The other, it's expensive to run this.

I wouldn't say "most". According to that site, of the 4880 instances list, 1909 are close and another ~300 are invite-only. > it's expensive to run this As the hype about Mastodon spiked after Musk bought twitter, I looked at it to see if I could set up an instance, just to experiment. I'm an experienced programmer and systems administrator. After perusing the requirements and installation process, I decided that it…

Instances will be run by small groups of people motivated by personal or political reasons.

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

#74

Post by bergenty »

Robotbeat wrote: post #70
bergenty wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a lot of incredibly racist commentary now. The toxicity is at a whole other level at this point.

The content moderation policy hasn’t changed. I mean, I guess some far right folk think Elon’s their man. They’re sorely mistaken (as can be seen by the outrage/despair of Nazis when Elon said he’s talking with ADL representatives).

Hopefully. Elon never felt like a racist to me plus he’s been my hero for a very long time so I hope I don’t have to start disliking him.

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

#75

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Ben Thompson put well why “Twitter, more than any social network, is sui generis:

First, the service emerged at a time and place where a text-based network was cutting edge…

Second, Twitter grew up in an environment where it was normal to publicly broadcast whatever it was you had to say…

Third, because Twitter was first, it became ground zero for everyone who was textual and had something to say, even if those folks had diametrically opposing viewpoints on everything from Donald Trump to LeBron James.”

https://stratechery.com/2022/musks-twitter-blue-a-twitter-su...

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

#77

Post by earthscienceman »

tomrod wrote: post #48
coffeefirst wrote: post #43

In theory federated social media seems like a great idea. You can hand-wave a lot of impossible moderation problems away just by not being so damn big. It seems like I could join for music and geeky history without being inundated with The Current Thing ragebait culture. I'd try that out! In practice it's still a desert. The problem isn't how to sign up, it's that with the exception of a few active communities, there…

I finally joined yesterday to a niche (academic) community that is moving from Twitter. 18k migrants in the 30 hours since it opened up with virtually linear growth. I can search other similar niche communities and they are seeing similar growth. It's not seeming like much of a desert, and is just starting to benefit from network effects as some of the more known members of the community announce their moves.

What's the community of academics? I haven't joined Twitter specifically because I think it's a horrible medium for communicating science or meeting with academics. Can you point me there?

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

#78

Post by dhruvdh »

tomrod wrote: post #48
coffeefirst wrote: post #43

In theory federated social media seems like a great idea. You can hand-wave a lot of impossible moderation problems away just by not being so damn big. It seems like I could join for music and geeky history without being inundated with The Current Thing ragebait culture. I'd try that out! In practice it's still a desert. The problem isn't how to sign up, it's that with the exception of a few active communities, there…

I finally joined yesterday to a niche (academic) community that is moving from Twitter. 18k migrants in the 30 hours since it opened up with virtually linear growth. I can search other similar niche communities and they are seeing similar growth. It's not seeming like much of a desert, and is just starting to benefit from network effects as some of the more known members of the community announce their moves.

Could you share the name of the server?

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

#79

Post by allan-a »

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…

Just a small note, you can't really choose wrong because you can participate across the fediverse, with other "servers", and even non-mastodon federated social media. However if it irks one to join a specific community, there does exist general purpose instances.

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

#80

Post by SQueeeeeL »

qualudeheart wrote: post #68

Predictions: Mastodon becomes platform for technically minded center left. Tribel Social becomes lower brow left version of Parler. Twitter loses customers to aforementioned platforms but survives.

I feel like most people I know on the left have essentially abandoned social media as inherently unproductive and instead gather in local group chats which can only be found by being active in a community. So the only people who will really be hanging around are probably techno optimists
Post reply on HN