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How Does Mastodon Work?

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Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#81

Post by gemlog »

pawal wrote: post #76
jancsika wrote: post #60

> Well, finding the right one is very difficult 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-aggress…

Would you say the same thing about e-mail and SMTP?

this. It doesn't matter one whit about the instance, except perhaps initially. Maybe. You choose who to read and follow and the instance doesn't matter. I already 'follow' about 80 like-minded geeks I'm interested to read each day and that's all I can keep up with. I never look at either the local timeline or the federated timeline: they are too much information; firehose. edit: and those 80-odd ppl are all over the planet on various instances in various languages.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#82

Post by lambada »

Something unclear from the article

>You can also Favourite a Toot. Which basically means that you support or agree with a Toot.

Are favourites toots private? Can someone else view them? Are they automatically shown up in timelines (as liked tweets do).

Also, does favourite really imply agreement? To me atleast, I favourited tweets that I didn’t agree with just because they pointed to a well constructed argument, or for future reference.

Since twitter changed terminology to like I’ve stopped doing that.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#83

Post by edhelas »

I am really impressed by Mastodon all the efforts that the community is doing to explain the project and the decentralization to the "common people".

It's something that I'm doing for years now when trying to show how Movim works (it's a federated social platform based on XMPP, https://movim.eu). I always have difficulties when showing how a social platform can work in a decentralized (or in those two cases federated) way.

The path that I'm taking for Movim at the moment is to start from the emails (in Movim the accounts and platforms are decoupled, you can connect using the same account on different instances and clients) and apply it to a social network and chat service (Movim is mixing social network and chat platform in the same UI) but I see often that it's not "easy" when people are used to centralized solutions.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#84

Post by msravi »

It isn't clear from the article - does Mastodon have the equivalent of Twitter lists in which I can group sets of handles into separate timelines that I can follow independently/parallelly?

The one timeline thing doesn't work for me too well... I prefer a few separate parallel timelines and tweetdeck is great to organize and follow such parallel timelines.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#85

Post by zaarn »

lambada wrote: post #82

Something unclear from the article >You can also Favourite a Toot. Which basically means that you support or agree with a Toot. Are favourites toots private? Can someone else view them? Are they automatically shown up in timelines (as liked tweets do). Also, does favourite really imply agreement? To me atleast, I favourited tweets that I didn’t agree with just because they pointed to a well constructed argument, or f…

Favorites don't show up in any timeline other than your own favorite list. To my knowledge, others cannot see favorites but I might be wrong, I can't access my own instance atm due to a network filter.

The canonical way is to retweet (boost) a toot which shows up in the timeline of your followers and your profile (the boosted tweet will also show up on the federated timeline but not associated with you).

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#86

Post by codewiz »

msravi wrote: post #84

It isn't clear from the article - does Mastodon have the equivalent of Twitter lists in which I can group sets of handles into separate timelines that I can follow independently/parallelly? The one timeline thing doesn't work for me too well... I prefer a few separate parallel timelines and tweetdeck is great to organize and follow such parallel timelines.

You can create multiple named lists and you can add people you follow to them.

I mostly post publicly, but I used this feature to create a list of friends who live in Japan.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#88

Post by fwn »

elboru wrote: post #72
codesections wrote: post #36

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…

Wouldn’t a decentralized social network be more prone to delvelop more extremist groups? I mean if anyone can create an instance, then extremists from all the political spectrum will be able to moderate their own instances, in other words they will censor those who think differently and encourage their own views creating a loop that could potentially create more myopic-extremist views, or is there something I’m missi…

Compared to the current mode of a few centralized services, a federated social networking landscape will be harder for companies or institutions to control and contain, yes.

Depending on the world view that can be perceived as a bug or a feature.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#89

Post by TeMPOraL »

elboru wrote: post #72
codesections wrote: post #36

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…

Wouldn’t a decentralized social network be more prone to delvelop more extremist groups? I mean if anyone can create an instance, then extremists from all the political spectrum will be able to moderate their own instances, in other words they will censor those who think differently and encourage their own views creating a loop that could potentially create more myopic-extremist views, or is there something I’m missi…

> I mean if anyone can create an instance, then extremists from all the political spectrum will be able to moderate their own instances, in other words they will censor those who think differently and encourage their own views creating a loop that could potentially create more myopic-extremist views, or is there something I’m missing?

Does this even matter? I mean, if you really wanted to stop people with weird views from grouping and then getting extremist through evaporative cooling[0], you'd have to roll the world back to preindustrial times (and even then you wouldn't stop it completely). Mastodon is but one platform; fringe groups will happily keep relocating when their old meeting places want them no longer, or they'll even set up their own platforms. Now that physical proximity is no longer a limiting factor, people of like beliefs will always find each other (if they bother to look).

(I think a good analogy is this: a Mastodon community is in the same relation to the Internet as Facebook Groups are to Facebook, or subreddits are to Reddit - a federated system inside a larger whole. The way fringe groups use subreddits/Facebook groups is analogous to how they will use Mastodon.)

If you're worried about extremists getting endangering public safety, I feel it's the job of the police to infiltrate such groups and stop individuals as they cross from talking to doing. If you're worried about large chunk of population catching some insane beliefs; I offer no remedy for that.

--

[0] - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#90

Post by mattmanser »

gemlog wrote: post #81
pawal wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say the same thing about e-mail and SMTP?

this. It doesn't matter one whit about the instance, except perhaps initially. Maybe. You choose who to read and follow and the instance doesn't matter. I already 'follow' about 80 like-minded geeks I'm interested to read each day and that's all I can keep up with. I never look at either the local timeline or the federated timeline: they are too much information; firehose. edit: and those 80-odd ppl are all over the…

Is it not like an email server then? What happens when they decide shut down their mastodon server without warning?
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