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How Does Mastodon Work?

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Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#91

Post by s_kilk »

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…

> 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.

Not in my experience. Mastodon doesn't really have any (good) cross-instance discovery mechanisms aside from just watching the global fire-hose, so your initial experience is formed by the other users on your instance. And the experience varies wildly from "This instance is very quiet" to "This instance is full of furries".

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#92

Post by JulianMorrison »

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?

There has historically always only been one sensible email provider. It was your ISP, and then it was gmail.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#94

Post by apatters »

Vinnl wrote: post #71
nafey wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if in the long run Mastodon will still not be an "outrage machine". Twitter also didn't start out as a vent for political outrage, but as a platform grows it gets more bad apples. In the case of Mastodon it's decentralized nature actually provides them more security. It will be interesting to see it play out.

I have a feeling it already is one. In my timeline there are a lot of LGBQT activists (which I think is the case for much of Mastodon at the moment?), and since I generally agree with how they'd like to see the world and am otherwise not really involved with that movement, I don't really interact with those posts. However, I see a lot of "I simply blocked this hateful person lalalalalala" which makes me, as an outsid…

If you look at the adoption pattern and growth rate of Mastodon, it has around 1.5M users, the majority of which have arrived via three big waves.

The first wave was people with left wing identities who were tired of being harassed on mainstream platforms like Twitter.

The second wave was Japanese lolicon enthusiasts (without diving too deep down this rabbit hole, lolicon is a popular but weird and nerdy thing to be into in Japan).

The third wave was sex workers in response to SESTA/FOSTA eliminating platforms they used in the past.

All these waves set up their own instances, and they don't communicate much with the other waves.

If you look at what these waves all have in common (aside from using the software), there's just one thing. They were all posting stuff that didn't fit in on a mainstream platform. In the first case it was due to harassment, in the second it was embarrassment, in the third it was legality.

The users are already bifurcating the network, admins routinely share blocklists of sites that they don't want included in their version of the fediverse. Being able to block instances and people you don't like is one of Mastodon's killer features.

I don't think it will become the next outrage machine, people will just block and bifurcate. I do think users will keep setting up Mastodon instances in waves similar to the first three. I'd be surprised if Mastodon ever powered a better version of the commons we currently have on FB, Twitter etc. [1] The feature Mastodon added to federation (and that made it more popular than similar software) is the ability to not federate with people who are different from you.

[1] The "fediverse" at large has some potential to do this if it receives mass adoption. Think of a scenario like WordPress integrating federation features into the Core. This would bring federation to the mainstream.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#96

Post by RX14 »

zaarn wrote: post #85
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).

You can see the list of favourites just like you can on twitter

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#97

Post by TuringTest »

mattmanser wrote: post #90
gemlog wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

People can learn about service providers after they've been using the service for a while, when they understand how it works and what value it provides; it is then a good time to decide whether they want to migrate to a more stable or close provider.

The sign-up form during the first experience with the service is not the point to educate the newcomer about those issues, beyond maybe a friendly reminder of who is the one providing service to them at that point.

The sign-up process should be streamlined to make sure users arrive to a server that provides a good experience based on their interest; not on educating them about the technicalities of the service.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#98

Post by msravi »

codewiz wrote: post #86
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.

Looks like it has everything that I wanted. Thank you.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#99

Post by fwn »

baq wrote: post #95

so how do i ban russian trolls on a federated p2p social network...?

The same way you would ban Swedish trolls on Twitter.

Fun and russiophobia aside, there is an article by Eugen Rochko (maintainer of mastodon) somewhat covering that topic:

https://medium.com/tootsuite/learning-from-twitters-mistakes...

AFAIK they also utilize crowdsourced block lists to automate part of the sorting in the fediverse.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#100

Post by zaarn »

RX14 wrote: post #96
zaarn wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You can see the list of favourites just like you can on twitter

Ah yes then I remembered that wrong. Might be worth an issue opening on github :)

edit: Found this one: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/7107

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