Decentralized social media, and the fragmentation of control
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: Decentralized social media, and the fragmentation of control
#2I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what problem it is trying to solve.
* Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers against something Twitter does really well.
* Creating interesting communities that can interact with each other -- See IRC, Slack, Reddit, forums, Wordpress blogs, etc.
Honest question: what problem are they solving, and/or why should I use Mastadon instead of older platforms such as IRC or Reddit?
Re: Decentralized social media, and the fragmentation of control
#3I think Mastodon (and any decentralized social media) needs to be easier to host. The thing is relatively a beast to get working, whether you try and install the dependencies separately on a distribution that's not Ubuntu (IIRC) or if you're not familiar with Docker. I host quite a few instances of things for myself but I gave up on Mastodon (I wasn't trying that hard, to be fair) after trouble getting it working behind the same reverse proxy everything else is behind.
If we could get a cross-platform, statically linked, near zero configuration social media tool where I essentially just have to forward a few ports, that'd be fantastic for me and I'd hope many others.
The biggest draw of something decentralization is being able to own and control all my data and having some stranger on the Internet rather than BigCorp own it is not meaningfully different to me.
Re: Decentralized social media, and the fragmentation of control
#4I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what problem it is trying to solve. * Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers…
> I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what problem it is trying to solve.
Many aspects of Twitter-the-service are wonderful, but in many people's opinion the service's creator has shown (and continues to show) poor judgement and an apparent inability and/or desire to moderate bad actors. For example, Chris Sacca has been a prominent critic[1], and there's a long history of Twitter's somewhat-abusive history with developers[2].
[1] https://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/technology/12twitter.html
> Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place.
Decentralized services don't preclude that — see Google and websites, Apple and podcasts, etc. An open ecosystem means that one company doesn't have to solve every problem, and that multiple companies can compete to solve the same problem.
Re: Decentralized social media, and the fragmentation of control
#5I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what problem it is trying to solve. * Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers…
Censorship.
Re: Decentralized social media, and the fragmentation of control
#6I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what problem it is trying to solve. * Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers…
Your first point on Twitter's appeal is valid, but I don't think this is necessarily restricted to centralised systems. Discoverability is something decentralised networks struggle with - look at the role the very centralised (albeit endlessly mirrored) pirate bay plays, despite efforts like btdigg - but I think it's very solvable. Somehow. With some effort and ingenuity.
On your second point, the IRC comparison makes sense, but Slack and Reddit are locked in ecosystems. Don't see how they compare.
Mastodon is basically IRC with Twitter's format.
Re: Decentralized social media, and the fragmentation of control
#7I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what problem it is trying to solve. * Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers…
> Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers against something Twitter does really well.
Mastadon is a federated platform using the OStatus protocol, so you an interact with anyone on any server using that protocol (Mastadon, GNU social, etc.). That means you can follow anyone, boost (re-tweet) any message, and even see a feed from the whole fediverse.
Now, it is possible to block some servers from your server and vice versa, but this just allows you to find a community that shares the same values as you or even setup a server of your own if you can't find a server you like.
Re: Decentralized social media, and the fragmentation of control
#8I think Mastodon (and any decentralized social media) needs to be easier to host. The thing is relatively a beast to get working, whether you try and install the dependencies separately on a distribution that's not Ubuntu (IIRC) or if you're not familiar with Docker. I host quite a few instances of things for myself but I gave up on Mastodon (I wasn't trying that hard, to be fair) after trouble getting it working beh…
I'm not disagreeing with you that there is so much room for improvement in ease of use.
But tools help. It took like an hour to tweak an existing helm chart to get it running in my personal kubernetes cluster.
All the reverse proxy stuff is handled by the nginx-ingress-controller I use. external-dns set up all the DNS rules for me in Route53. kube-lego did all the LetsEncrypt ACME shenanigans.
Used to try to run these all using docker on a single VM, and do some manual nginx configging to route to them. This is much easier. Took awhile to learn, but get to benefit from those efficiencies for years.
Re: Decentralized social media, and the fragmentation of control
#9I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what problem it is trying to solve. * Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers…
there are some awesome mastodon communities that have moved off twitter because they are trolled too frequently on there, and aren't empowered to make their own rules to prevent that. If you're discussing somethign PTSD-inducing, for example, this struggle is so real and hard.
There are communities, for example, that block other communities that are 'freespeechers'. i.e. communities that don't ban people for sayign things that the former community operator deems as racist. At first I was like, "that's messed up, it's too subjective". But then I remembered that actually, unlike Twitter, that decision to block the people didn't affect me. They're allowed to create their own community how they want, and I'm empowered to join or self-host my own.
Pretty cool that vulnerable and very very helpful communities have tools like this.
Re: Decentralized social media, and the fragmentation of control
#10Mastodon 2.0 speaks ActivityPub now! https://activitypub.com/
I made the world's first public ActivityPub implementation a little over a year ago: https://distbin.com
Now I have https://mastodon.bengo.is
Now I need to iron out interoperability bugs: But I look forward to the day that you can respond to a mastodon post anonymously via distbin, and vice-versa. And on both sides the conversation should render as threaded, etc.