Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary • Hacker News Board

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#81

Post by wpietri » Sun, Oct 14, 2018, 10:08 PM UTC

loceng wrote: post #67

wpietri wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and that influences the choice of metrics. I think chasing things like user active minutes (UAM) can lead to pathological development. But for a social product, "real ambitions" must include people a) using it, and b) being happy they are using it. But my point is that features and signups can't be ends in themselves, as those are not real ambitions.

I understand what you're saying. The only counter point I'd put forward is it's purposefully playing to the ego mind for attention - arguably deserved or otherwise - to draw more people to trying it out. Likewise, you have to start somewhere. Hopefully over time they can start measuring and reporting on metrics with more meaning to them, which will require them also explaining that meaning to educate people - which w…

Sure. Vanity metrics can be great for marketing or generating reasons to celebrate. There's nothing wrong with saying, "Wow, we have a million registered users!" as long as they also recognize that registration is only the first step. In a retrospective like this, I want to see them doing both.

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#82

Post by kragen » Sun, Oct 14, 2018, 11:34 PM UTC

iuwhagtr wrote: post #77

kragen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried following https://pl.smuglo.li/users/roka (an anti-Semite who posts porn) and got a nondescript error. How can I tell if this is due to a blacklist, and if so, if it's on my instance or theirs?

Hmm... I don't see any antisemitism in there? In any case, you should contact the admins of your instance, but most probably they have blocked that instance, as it appears on blocklists for being a free speech zone.

https://pl.smuglo.li/notice/5986711 is pretty vicious antisemitism. Apparently I have succeeded in following this person now though. I'll see if I end up seeing their posts.

Update: I'm seeing them fave my posts.

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#83

Post by sdrothrock » Mon, Oct 15, 2018, 1:47 AM UTC

detaro wrote: post #72

sdrothrock wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not only thinking about political bubbles here, but linguistic or cultural ones. For example, when I joined a server here, it was federated only with a few other small Japanese servers, resulting in a fairly miserable experience. Another set had multiple languages but was just devoted to art. It's incredibly difficult (or was a year ago) to find servers that are general purpose and federated with both Japanese an…

I think you use "federated with" in a different sense than most people do in these discussions. A newly created Mastodon instance by default federates with everyone in that allows messages and following from and to every other instance. But it's federated timeline has no posts from other instances, because that view only shows posts that the instance actually sees. It only shows what people on the same instance actua…

That would explain a lot of things and also clears up a lot of things for me, too! Thank you. I guess a better phrase for what I'm trying to describe is a lack of discoverability, then.

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#84

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 15, 2018, 2:13 AM UTC

wyoh wrote: post #49

gemma wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://mastodon.technology is chock full of geeks, so the local timeline is all people's hacks and bugs and side projects. It's one of the older instances, and it's maintained by this guy: https://ashfurrow.com/

They block too many instances for weird reasons like libertarian ones.

[deleted]

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#85

Post by _7gt4 » Mon, Oct 15, 2018, 1:56 PM UTC

comesee wrote: post #62

kragen wrote: post #30

I'm finding Mastodon (I'm at https://nerdculture.de/@kragen at the moment) to be much more pleasant than Twitter, and much richer than IRC. The vicious culture war stuff on Twitter almost doesn't show up in my Mastodon timeline at all.

Your anecdote is valid but so is wil Wheaton's http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-...

Wil is inside a reality distortion field. Someone got him with a low blow joke and he started reporting everyone from that instance (which was named after another joke of the type, bofa.lol)