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Exploring Mastodon

martinfowler.com

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Re: Exploring Mastodon

#91

Post by KerrAvon »

kragen wrote: post #67
OscarCunningham wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus. What you might say is 'I don't think Mastodon is going to replace Twitter', but I don't think you can argue that Mastodon won't benefit from the Twitter exodus because it has already gained a million users. Looking at the charts on https://the-federation.info/mastodon you can see that in May there was an influx of about 500 thousand new users…

i fear that Mastodon will suffer enormously from the Twitter exodus because it has already had to accommodate a million new users. a million new customers is great, a million new members of a community is a giant acculturation problem

What’s interesting is that it’s doing fine so far; existing users are being really helpful and welcoming to the newbs. It’s actually a really pleasant place to be compared to Twitter. (It might be helping that everybody leaving Twitter is leaving Twitter for the same reason.)

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#92

Post by jmathai »

radarsat1 wrote: post #56

The thing that surprised me a bit about federation is that it puts instances front and center. You have an account at your "home instance", and that's the first thing you see. When I first read about federation I had thought that the idea was to have one big network of independent but equal instances that just transparently share data under common topics. But instead I discovered that you are identified with your ins…

I think the opportunity is to foster a new kind of social interaction and smaller niche groups seems like a really interesting angle that centralized services gravitate away from.

I haven't used Mastadon but I could see this being a positive if you replace "home instance" with "local community" or "interest group foo".

The truth is that you only need to find a small group of people with similar interests. You don't need access to the entire world.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#93

Post by KerrAvon »

falkd wrote: post #75
nimbius wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand coming from Twitter --where artificial choices are manufactured in order to extract value from things like outrage and fear-- it might be overwhelming to experience real choice for the first time. We made a tool for that, so lets help find you an instance youll enjoy :) dont worry, you can shop around for the right one, your choice isnt set in stone at all. https://instances.social/

It's nice, but I find myself saying "Don't care" to most of the questions, and I've got a huge list of instances as a result. I still can't really say for sure I'd be picking one I wouldn't regret picking later. I think the biggest questions I'd have are: - How do I know an instance is trustworthy and the mods behave professionally? - How do I know an instance isn't going to go down and lose my account? It seems like…

I really think this a less impactful decision than people seem to think unless your interests are extremely narrow. If you can’t decide, pick mastodon.social for a start. It’s extremely well moderated (from Germany) and has a diverse set of users. And you get to interact with people from other instances anyway.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#94

Post by sp332 »

mxuribe wrote: post #38
nr2x wrote: post #10

The fact that one has to pick from many different places to set up an account is a massive barrier to entry. Let alone the complexity of moving an account from one host to another is also woefully complex, so if you choose wrong, you’re in for more pain. I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus. I’m putting my hopes on blue sky/AT which appears to solve the above pain points: https://bl…

> The fact that one has to pick from many different places to set up an account is a massive barrier to entry... I wonder if a statement exactly like the above one was said about alternative email providers being coinsidered by many AOL.com account holder so many years ago? > ...I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus... I suppoose it depends on how "benefit" is defined. But, also, Mas…

Yeah, and what happened with email is everyone moved to gmail and corporate servers. Having a choice of hosts is not something most people are looking for.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#95

Post by nperez »

nr2x wrote: post #10

The fact that one has to pick from many different places to set up an account is a massive barrier to entry. Let alone the complexity of moving an account from one host to another is also woefully complex, so if you choose wrong, you’re in for more pain. I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus. I’m putting my hopes on blue sky/AT which appears to solve the above pain points: https://bl…

Agree. The moment you get into "Well, Mastodon is distributed networking software with different nodes, and you've got to ..." you have already lost a large percent of users. People expect to fill out a familiar registration form, and immediately be able to see/write posts.

I think a lot of the complexity of it could be hidden away so that the average user has a similar experience to a Twitter signup, but idk how much friction it would cause to make something like this appear centralized.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#96

Post by gtr »

happymellon wrote: post #40
bioemerl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment you're manually typing a username it's game over. It should be rare to never that you need a specific user id, let alone a specific server. You should just have to see a user and click follow.

Can you not do that?

Not sure what you mean, I think that is a valid point.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#97

Post by camjohnson26 »

chris_st wrote: post #12

I'm on a discord server with a lot of non-nerds, and various ones are interested in Mastodon, due to Twitter issues. It's amazing to see how much trouble they're having... "Do I have to create a log in on every Mastodon?" ("No, and it's pretty much impossible"), "Can I follow someone on another server?" ("Yes, but it's incredibly hard -- try to follow them on whatever server you're on, maybe someone else is following…

Mastodon is built for the world some people wish we lived in, not the world we actually have. It has way too many issues that are disqualifying on their face to most people, starting with there’s no way to preview the community without signing up, but the list goes on and on.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#98

Post by KerrAvon »

chris_st wrote: post #12

I'm on a discord server with a lot of non-nerds, and various ones are interested in Mastodon, due to Twitter issues. It's amazing to see how much trouble they're having... "Do I have to create a log in on every Mastodon?" ("No, and it's pretty much impossible"), "Can I follow someone on another server?" ("Yes, but it's incredibly hard -- try to follow them on whatever server you're on, maybe someone else is following…

People who learned how to use Discord can sure as heck deal with Mastodon. They just need a real motivation beyond curiosity.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#99

Post by halfbrite »

What I'm looking for is effectively a fidonet style federation. I understand Lemmy is bordering on that, but it's not quite there from my observation, and I'm yet to see a suitable implementation that would entice an old fart like me.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#100

Post by camjohnson26 »

MivLives wrote: post #39
cyborgx7 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People just have lost the ability to comprehend the concept of federation because everything in the current internet is walled gardens. There is nothing Mastodon can do to "fix this" without giving up on federation. But people understand how federation works. They see it happen everyday with e-mail. You just need to tell them it works like that and they'll get it.

I think it helps mastadon writes it's users as @ @instance.example which looks very similar to email with a twitter handle slapped on front.

Most people choose Gmail as their email provider specifically because understanding federation is too much mental overhead. There is no gmail equivalent in the Mastodon space, instead there’s many small instances that are difficult to compare.
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