I feel like if people truly cared about what you had to say they would seek you out regardless of the platform. Follower numbers are glorified internet points meant to keep you engaged/chained to the platform.
Yes but how many Twitter accounts are truly in that category?
One former president has kinda sorta managed it, and he was in the news every single day for years. Who else could achieve even his limited level of success? Maybe Barack Obama?
I think this is too simplified. For example, I don't care much for Stephen King(he's a great writer horror just doesn't do anything for me), but I still heard what he has to say on this due to it being posted on twitter. I pay attention because I know he's a significant person. I wouldn't seek him out otherwise, but because he happens to be in my network I pay attention to him even though I don't consume his works.
Without that large network, the only people seeking him out will be fans. There are at least two negatives to that. The audience is smaller, and there's less exposure to non-fans
There are countless people who I couldn't enumerate who I might be potentially interested. I don't want them 'recommended' or algorithmically forced on me, but retweets and quote tweets have effectively surfaced their work over time. I absolutely don't want to have to do that again and again across social network. Twitter 'mutuals' aren't like facebook friends. They're a two way asynchronous conversation with a pool of people with varying relationships of wildly different kinds. Many of whom are pseudonymous.
Except history is littered with dead social networks that were once huge. People said the same thing 'network effects' yet phase shifts happen. Don't just bet on twitter staying twitter.
Mastodon is a not for profit project ran by many community members in a federated fashion. What do they have to gain by „juicing“ their growth figures?
The term "Blue Check" or "Blue Checkmark" is not exactly a term of endearment so seeing those move to other networks certainly will have an effect. As to whether that effect is a positive or negative for Mastodon remains to be seen.
Twitter's main value proposition is that there are VIPs and lesser Internet Famous people to follow on there. There are far better platforms for conversations, but most of those don't give you access to journalists, creators, politicians, etc right down to your local community.
> A huge number of those VIPs have blue checkmarks.
The problem does not lie with the verified identity identified by the blue checkmark but with the fact that many if not most of those "Blue Checks" are hell-bent on "following the narrative" wherever that may lead us. It lies with their vacuous virtue signalling and their "let them eat cake" discourse. They will fly the flags needed to show they are loyal, they will modify their bio to add the required shibboleths while living the good life in their personal enclaves of prosperity, guarded and manicured and pampered.
Bud literally nobody was talking about any of that. And why is it wrong for people to jump on a bandwagon when the bandwagon is stuff like "trans rights are good" and "invading Ukraine is bad".
It's difficult to see the value in spending time on Mastodon, compared to other services.
For example, just checking joinmastodon.org gives the following top 10 recommended options:
"
GENERAL INVITE ONLY
snabelen.no
Ein norsk tenar for den desentraliserte sosiale media platformen Mastodon
Get on waitlist
1.8K
GENERAL INVITE ONLY
mastodontti.fi
Tämä on suomenkielinen Mastodon-instanssi. Julkisten päivitysten tulisi olla suomeksi, mutta käyttäjät voivat olla mistä vain. Oikeakielisyys ei ole tärkeää, joten tuuttaile vapaasti, vaikka olisitkin vasta oppimassa suomea.
Get on waitlist
2.8K
GENERAL
mastodon.iriseden.eu
Instance Mastodon hébergée en France chez OVH et maintenu par @iriseden
Join server
2.4K
GENERAL INVITE ONLY
sociale.network
Sociale.network è una iniziativa dell'associazione culturale altrinformazione.net e dell'associazione peacelink.it
Get on waitlist
2.4K
GENERAL
pouet.chapril.org
Chapril, membre du collectif CHATONS, un projet de l'April.
Join server
1.4K
GENERAL INVITE ONLY
mast.dragon-fly.club
????????????????,?????????????????????????!????????????????????????,???,????????????……
Get on waitlist
2.5K
GENERAL INVITE ONLY
mastodon.zaclys.com
Bienvenue sur l'instance libre et française de Mastodon ! proposée par Zaclys.com
Get on waitlist
16K
GENERAL
mastodon.bida.im
Un'istanza mastodon antifascista prevalentemente italofona con base a Bologna
Join server
880
GENERAL INVITE ONLY
tooot.im
????.?? ??? ??? ??????? ????? ???? ????? ??????.
Get on waitlist
3.4K
GENERAL INVITE ONLY
masto.nobigtech.es
Instancia de Mastodon principalmente en español/castellano que se aloja en Bilbao, Pais Vasco.
Get on waitlist
2.6K
"
Which pretty much sound like a list of Discord or IRC servers except the non-english ones are not filtered out.
So it's a bit weird why it's advertised as a Twitter replacement at all. Clearly competition will balkanize everything into thousands of mostly invite-only niche servers.
Maybe it makes more sense as an IRC or Discord replacement?
> So it's a bit weird why it's advertised as a Twitter replacement at all. Clearly competition will balkanize everything into thousands of mostly invite-only niche servers.
That doesn't _really_ matter, though; Mastodon sites largely interconnect. I'm on mastodon.social because I am very lazy; most of the people I follow are on other, more specialised sites.
> That doesn't _really_ matter, though; Mastodon sites largely interconnect. I'm on mastodon.social because I am very lazy
Mastodon is a mess. Pawoo.net is the LARGEST userbase Mastodon node, professionally ran by a company and is one of the few that can scale appropriately to demand. You'll find that mastodon.social has limited its federation abilities with it.
From my personal experience in using Mastodon, the node operators basically have different ideas about what is acceptable or not and black/white list different nodes based on these ideas rather than leaving it up to the user to decide who they want to see posts from.
Unfortunately, a lot of this is really unclear when you're first trying to dip your toes into the fediverse and it gets really confusing in some threads when you're missing some of the messages.
I think the worst part is that they've previously advertised you have control of your data. But I can tell you that if you accidentally post something on Twitter and want to delete it, it's trivial, it's gone. On Mastodon, tough, it's been federated and now your deleted message lives on across multiple nodes and you can't delete it -- not out of maliciousness, but because of oversight in the federation protocol design.
The reason I bring the above up is, again, you can miss a lot of bits of conversations entirely dependent on which node you are because some messages are now deleted on the origin node, but not the nodes that has other people replying on.
"Let the instances choose their own moderation" that people think is a great feature seems to have serious downsides like you're describing. Before on Twitter you knew, generally speaking, what was allowed on Twitter and what wasn't. Now you have not just a whole panoply of different moderation standards, but instances making decisions on if what other people's moderation policies are acceptable to them, which ads a whole level of indirection an opaqueness to users. And forget about any ability to try to appeal...
Folks on pawoo.net regularly post lolicon, so, yeah. Depending on your interpretation of your local laws, you might pretty much be obligated to defederate from that sort of thing.
I think focusing on what has the biggest userbase or can give you the most reach is kind of missing the point with regard to the Fediverse. Without investors or stock prices or the need to sell ads, a lot of the motivation behind that sort of thinking evaporates. If you're looking at Mastodon and thinking "this is worthless, I can't build my brand with this," good, you're right, it's built that way on purpose.
Which isn't that obvious that there is a problem as a new user. People are posting all kinds of trash on Twitter equally, you don't expect to find the entire node is blocked because some users are posting things some others disagree with.
> Depending on your interpretation of your local laws, you might pretty much be obligated to defederate from that sort of thing.
Not that I'm defending this, but because you mentioned it; I looked it up. Mastodon.social isn't obliged because it's located in Germany and so is Eugen; so this reasoning doesn't apply. Block the problem users, not the entire instance.
> I think focusing on what has the biggest userbase or can give you the most reach is kind of missing the point with regard to the Fediverse.
I looked for which node was ran with reliability and scaling built in, because I didn't want to be on a node that is ran by some hobbyist that is just going to give up one day, I also don't want to be on a server that falls over because scaling problems. Pawoo was top of the list.
This was further validated when my second account on another node disappeared one day because the owner decided they didn't want to continue running their node anymore. And further validated on other nodes where the server became so slow it was practically unusable, the server owner didn't really have any idea how to deal with the userbase.
I tried running Mastodon myself, but quickly found it awful to keep updated; at the time (I don't know if it still does), it wasn't very clean to update and was fairly manual. I eventually switched to GNU Social with the Qwitter addon because it was easier to maintain and update, only for Mastodon to decide to drop support for the federating protocol it was using one day.
You're absolutely right though, I don't get the key point of the fediverse currently.
> Without investors or stock prices or the need to sell ads, a lot of the motivation behind that sort of thinking evaporates.
If we take your logic to its ultimate conclusion, you're saying that without investors or stock prices or the need to sell ads, the motivation behind making a good and sane experience evaporates, considering the state it's been in for years. I honestly wouldn't try to disparage open source community projects like that to be honest.
> If you're looking at Mastodon and thinking "this is worthless, I can't build my brand with this," good, you're right, it's built that way on purpose.
I don't care about stock, brands. I'm looking at Mastodon and thinking that it's got serious communication, usability, data and privacy issues. It has so many basic things fundamentally broken. On Twitter, if you delete a post, it's gone. On Mastodon, delete a post, well, it's deleted on your node. But the rest of the fediverse has replicated it and it's not deleted. The other nodes aren't even keeping your data maliciously, it's just poorly designed and the fact it still won't tell you that "deleting" messages doesn't really "delete" them is plain vindinctive at this point after it has been raised as an issue repeatedly.
> People are posting all kinds of trash on Twitter equally, you don't expect to find the entire node is blocked because some users are posting things some others disagree with.
No, but I do expect the owner of the site to moderate its content. Pawoo doesn't care to; as a result, many people care not to federate with them. That's fine. You can still use Pawoo if you want to, or a server that federates with it, or set up your own and federate with them.
> Block the problem users, not the entire instance.
If it's a recurring problem that the owners of the instance won't do anything about, it's a lot less work to just block the entire instance.
> I looked for which node was ran with reliability and scaling built in, because I didn't want to be on a node that is ran by some hobbyist that is just going to give up one day, I also don't want to be on a server that falls over because scaling problems.
You're thinking like you're a customer, but on the Fediverse you're generally more like a houseguest.
> I tried running Mastodon myself, but quickly found it awful to keep updated
You've got a fair point there; I'm not sure why they can't distribute a container image with the assets pre-built instead of making you build your own. It's been trouble-free for me since I got it up and running, for what it's worth.
Lots of other things speak ActivityPub, though. If you're looking for something as simple as possible, you might like https://microblog.pub/
> I eventually switched to GNU Social with the Qwitter addon because it was easier to maintain and update, only for Mastodon to decide to drop support for the federating protocol it was using one day.
I haven't used it, but for what it's worth, the documentation for GNU Social seems to indicate that it supports ActivityPub these days. OStatus never made it past the draft stage, and GNU Social seems to be the last project hanging on to it.
> If we take your logic to its ultimate conclusion, you're saying that without investors or stock prices or the need to sell ads, the motivation behind making a good and sane experience evaporates, considering the state it's been in for years.
People mostly run instances for free, for fun, for their friends. The motivation is to have fun hanging out with friends on the internet. For this purpose, it seems to be pretty good at its job to me, and gets better at it with every version. The lack of financial incentive does mean there's no drive to capture more eyeballs, though, which means there's no drive to cater to folks that would rather have something exactly like Twitter.
> I honestly wouldn't try to disparage open source community projects like that to be honest.
I'm not sure what words you're trying to put in my mouth here, but that sentence certainly doesn't give me impression that you're trying to have a good-faith discussion.
> It has so many basic things fundamentally broken. On Twitter, if you delete a post, it's gone. On Mastodon, delete a post, well, it's deleted on your node. But the rest of the fediverse has replicated it and it's not deleted.
Yes, email works this way as well. It is an unavoidable consequence of federation. ActivityPub does have a "Delete" activity, but other servers are under no obligation to honor it. Regardless of what protocol is in use, once you've sent data to someone else's server, you're not going to be able to delete it without that server's cooperation.
This is very confusing. Why do they largely interconnect? (Why do they connect at all / why don't they always connect?) What's the point of multiple sites if they connect to each other?
What about ones that don't interconnect? Is that a thing? Do users know where they should go in order to be connected to everyone?
With a mobile app that picks a 'server' for you without interaction, no problem.
With a browser where you see an address and it's not what you expect - like 'twitter.com' is what people expect - how does a user know if they're going the right way?
There are a few that don't interconnect at all (I think Parler or Gab or one of those is an unfederated Mastodon service, all alone in the world), but it would be more common for some of them to block others.
The operators can choose who to work with and can ban other servers as well as just other users. Many do this because the other server is too right wing, too left wing, content illegal in some jurisdictions (the above mentioned pawoo is a Japanese server involved in the Japanese anime scene and therefore has lolicon on it), etc.
Think of it like Twitter if the use of shared blocklists was standard rather than niche behaviour.
You're forgetting that Mastodon runs on ActivityPub, which means that the point is to divide users into different servers. For example, when everyone joined mastodon.social, the balance tipped and a lot of users lost access. Concentrating users into a single instance is not what's supposed to happen.
Ideally, you wouldn't want to go through joinmastodon.org and join the highest ranking server since that would centralize the whole protocol. It's favorable for everyone using the service that you join invite-only niche servers or self host.
Servers bring invite only is like when Hey was invite only. It doesn’t mean you can only talk to other Hey users it just means being hosted by them is exclusive. The only thing you miss out on is the feed of what people on your server are posting -- maybe that's not a problem or maybe that's the raison d'être.
You can use a service; not all of them are invite only, or you can setup your own blog software. Federation is pretty close to RSS. Yes it's trying to be microblogging.
How so? Every instance is not independent, they all communicate with each other. In practice, it's like everyone (Misskey, Pleroma, Mastodon) is on the same platform, except that some users have an address after their handle.
It's not "advertised" as a replacement for Twitter; the word "Twitter" does not appear on the Mastodon homepage. It's talked about because at the moment there aren't many similar alternatives.
Mastodon looks like Twitter, functions like Twitter, apes Twitter's features such as using @username, and even calls its posts "Toots." You really can't honestly argue that Mastodon isn't trying to be Twitter.
Look, I get it - it's not Twitter therefore it's a failure. And some people are ok with that, I really don't get why the need to campaign against Fediverse, it isn't killing anybody's dog.
I never said Mastodon was a failure because its not Twitter. I'm somewhat skeptical but I think the jury is still out on Mastodon. There is a lot of potential there. Part of me thinks the Fediverse is a great idea but it causes more problems than the value you get from it.
using pieces that work well and that users enjoy doesn’t preclude you from also doing other things differently.
just because hacker news has usernames, comments, and voting, that doesn’t mean it’s “trying to be reddit”
there are countless little things one can change that make it an entirely different experience even if some features are similar.
just like hackernews to reddit, the experience i’ve had on mastodon has been a noticeable improvement over twitter. yes, there are comments and voting in hackernews, but the experience is noticeably different—and better—than reddit.
This isn't "shares some features", this is directly copies the look and functionality of Twitter. It may have some differences, but so much is the same you can't argue that isn't what they were going for.
it’s not “advertised” as a twitter _clone_, it’s just being talked about as an alternative.
whether or not it fits what people are looking for, it’s being compared to twitter because it’s been pretty clear for a few years, even prior to the elon mess, twitter users really want to move somewhere else, they just haven’t settled yet on where.
this is all reminiscent of discussions around facebook a few years ago, it was clear at the time it was on its way out, people just hadn’t settled on where to go at the time. most just shifted their time to twitter or insta and the kids all just went to tiktok.
twitter will be the same way. if i had to guess it will be similar to facebooks boomerish crowd, twitter will have its user base who refuses to move on—they’ll be shaking their fists at the “cancel culture virtue signal woke woke” sky and the rest of the internet will just continue on somewhere else.
I'd be interested to see what might happen if quality daily/weekly news publications, science journals, academic institutions, professional bodies (representing educators, medics, dentists, climate scientists, mathematicians etc) were to set up and run Mastodon instances. Seems like a possible way to encourage a return to the old-school newsgroup discussion communities; to bring focus and avoid the chaff clogging up the centralised megaplatforms.
"EU Voice is the official ActivityPub microblogging platform of the EU institutions, bodies and agencies (EUIs). Together with EU Video, it is part of an alternative social media pilot program proposed, and provided by the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS). The pilot program contributes to the European Union’s strategy for data and digital sovereignty that aims to foster Europe’s independence in the digital world.
EU Voice provides EUIs with privacy-friendly microblogging accounts that they typically use for the purposes of press and public relations activities."
my guess is this will absolutely happen over time.
whatever forms will be similar to libera being the logical irc network for open source projects channels. if you’re a science org, you’ll just naturally join $science_instance.
it’s still early in the process but i’m stoked to watch it all unfold. it really feels like we’re watching in real time what people mean when they explain how the internet was prior to everything being centralized behind walled gardens and google.
Different between Mastodon and the other platforms you linked is that Mastodon facilitates communication between the various instances (if they agree to that). So you can join instance X and still communicate with people on instance Y, and it's easy for the administrators to set that up. It's possible with IRC/Discord as well but it's hacky and requires "bridges" while that functionality is "native" in Mastodon.
Right but the users on discord can chat with eachother just fine, while in case of Mastodon if 2 server admins don't like eachother no dice ? Or I'm understanding how it works wrong ?
It seems counter-intuitive to moderate based on "which server user is from" too.
It makes sense to moderate email based on what server it's from. Alice@spammer.com wants to sell me a mortgage and bob@spammer.com wants to sell me "natural male enhancement". I don't want to hear from anyone @spammer.com because that server permits or exists for the purpose of sending spam.
There are Mastodon servers that exist for things that most people don't want to interact with, such as racist hate speech, as well as servers that are essentially unmoderated. It makes sense for a server with a mainstream audience to block those.
> It seems counter-intuitive to moderate based on “which server user is from” too
it sounds like the exact answer to me.
just like massive chunks of our infrastructure blacklists entire domains because their admins are overly friendly to ddos, spam, illegal porn, etc… mastodon simply makes it easy to do the same thing.
this isn’t new, our entire internet runs on this principle.
the difference between centralized social like twitter/facebook and this is, the choice is ours to make. if we don’t like how a server is run, move or spin up our own. we curate it, not advertisers, not executive boards, not faceless shareholders, etc…
with decentralized, freedom of speech and more importantly, freedom of association is back in our hands again.
As someone with seven Mastodon accounts. I know from experience that it's so easy to choose the wrong node and find out it's not being federated with on other Mastodon nodes. Worst part is even when you run your own Mastodon node, there are some nodes that operate instead in a whitelist mode, so you still lose out.
Who is advertising it as a twitter replacement? Maybe some twitter users are desperate for that, but that's not how I have seen it proposed in the past. It's a microblogging social network, yes. But explicitly federated.
In any case, there's no single "Mastodon" entity that does any advertising.
Rather than counting users, I'll be more interested to see if any specific communities actually manage to collectively transition to another service. It's not 2006 anymore, nobody makes an account on Twitter because they want to "microblog" about the sandwich they had for lunch; no, you make an account on Twitter because, say, you're a ML researcher and all the prominent ML researchers are talking on Twitter. If the prominent ML researchers leave, then to an ML researcher doesn't matter how many users Twitter retains, because the ML crowd will follow the core. Conversely, even if Twitter were to lose 99% of its users, if the core ML researchers stick around then the ML community would also stick around.
I suspect that this framing will make the number feel even worse. The number of complete (or even majority) communities that this 70k number represents is surely very nearly zero.
It could be better or worse. Communities tend to follow their core members. If those 70k users were the most connected and central nodes in any of Twitter's thousands of subcommunities, it would precipitate a significant shift. But if those 70k users are leaf nodes, then it will amount to no change as far as Twitter is concerned.
A big chunk of the $TSLAQ community moved to Discord, but the experience is very different. For context these are the people who took early bets against Tesla and have been calling out its unethical practices. A lot of people are understandably nervous about continuing that research on a platform owned by its CEO.
Not great, the signal to noise ratio is off because everyone’s posts have equal weight, where on Twitter since you choose who to follow you can curate your own feed. On Twitter it feels like the important posts rise to the top so it’s great way of keeping track of news, but With Discord it’s much easier to miss important posts.
Also threads are harder to follow, and since channels aren’t public by default and don’t have a web address you can’t bookmark threads to reference later.
yeah.. sounds like a storm in a teacup unfortunately and is probably unlikely to have any effect on anything (incl. the adoption speed of Mastodon)... heck that number is probably 0.003% of the BOTS on Twitter ;)
No one was expecting that half the users would just go away in the first few days of the Musk regime. The problem for Musk is that he can't afford to drive anyone away, or reduce engagement with the platform. Unless he is willing to subsidize the losses out of his own pocket.
That's about 0.018% of total twitter user base (assuming total user base = 396.5 Million, 0.018 = 100*70K/396.5M). In relative numbers that's very little.
The most important quality I hear people are looking for in a replacement for Twitter is "Everyone else is on it" so they're all stuck in a catch 22. I don't think this energy to get off Twitter is going to go anywhere.
Like with everything else that is large, any shift will be slow and gradual. You are right saying that any “surge” is not going to last, but it does not mean the change won’t happen. Everyone else was stuck on Facebook 5-8 years ago, but many people from my age group rarely go there anymore.
This is true until it isn't. I expect that if Twitter dies, it won't be a mass exodus, but a thousand cuts. It's not dying tomorrow, but in my opinion its days are numbered.
And I don't mean just because Musk took over, although he's made some decisions already that make no sense to me. It's got issues. People WANT an alternative.
I think it's a mistake to think that Mastodon would necessarily be the beneficiary of any Twitter exodus. I think it's more likely that the beneficiaries would be established, centralized services like Discord or Reddit. The underlying media models may be different, but I suspect people care less about the model than about seeing things they're interested in, and plenty of these people will already have accounts on these other major services. (Some people use Twitter less for "participating in a specific niche community" and more for "building a personal brand", but there are other centralized services that provide that as well, like Instagram).
People aren't looking for Reddit or Discord. They already have these. The people using Twitter to promote their business-of-choice are already on Reddit and Discord if they want to be. They don't want Twitter because it's a good way to host their communities, they want Twitter for cross-promoting their community to other communities.
We're both necessarily speculating here, so I'll counter by suggesting that an enormous proportion of Twitter users don't actually care whether or not they're using Twitter, they just care that the content they want to consume and the people they want to follow are on Twitter. They can't be "using Reddit or Discord if they want to be", because that's not where the community already is. Solving the collective action problem to overcome this inertia is hard, but easier in tumultuous times like these.
I wouldn't be surprised if some huge percentage of Twitter "users" are people following random links that friends/groups link to them. They'll just as easily follow links to various other services.
On a similar note: I think it's also a mistake that a mass Twitter exodus to Mastodon would actually benefit that platform. Smallish waves, sure. An overwhelming influx of users? Please no.
Anyone who has experienced a tiny forum (or subreddit, or whatever) going viral knows what I'm talking about. Most of the time that experience at the very least transforms the existing local subculture for the worse, and sometimes outright destroys it.
If everyone on current-day Twitter would move to Mastodon at once it would turn into current-day Twitter. Which is not why I'm on Mastodon.
EDIT: can whomever downvoted this tell me what exactly they disagree with here?
I dont think discord or reddit could replace what I do on twitter. As in, on twitter I following selected bunch of people I am interested in. Neither twitter nor reddit can do that. It is not that twitter cant be replaced or abandoned, I think that I will move out over time. I expect there to be a lot more drama over time and it already had enough drama already. (I even muted Elon Musk cause he was source of quite of lot nonsense crap).
But, it wont be reddit nor discord. Maybe it will just be nothing.
The biggest beneficiary of a Twitter exodus may be... our free time.
There's no reason we have to go anywhere after Twitter. Global social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc., didn't even exist 20 years ago. We're probably better off without them IMO. The best Twitter replacement may be nothing.
This. I'm taking a break from Twitter for a while, in part due to people in one of my communities trying to convince the rest of the community to decamp for mastodon. I've argued that it will do nothing of value for the community as a whole, and will rather negatively impact it.
I'm just frankly sick and tired of all the posturing, virtue signalling, and other wasteful garbage I saw on there. Oh, and the massive upswing in antisemitism over the last month (started pre-Musk). That had something to do with it as well.
There is a good argument that Twitter and a whole class of other social media and related sites (HN, Reddit, YouTube, TV etc) are "time wasters."
I think if any of these disappeared, or all of them, are people suddenly going to start finding more productive uses of their time? No, they're just going to find other time wasters.
I've decided to not care about that (I've never had a Twitter account anyway). The idea that "everyone else is on it" is the problem, not the solution. The only real question is, is there a community you want to be part of? The rest of it is for their benefit, not yours.
Hmm, I wonder do they mean mastodon.social, or the whole network. I was trying to find network-wide stats and couldn't (it's a difficult problem, I suppose, in that it's not _really_ a single network).
It's barely responsive right now, presumably because it's getting hammered with traffic, but this site has some stats: https://the-federation.info/mastodon
It shows an increase in total users of more like 230k
I joined mastodon. Every instance I joined was full of posts about how good mastodon is, but there was no other content or conversations. I quit mastodon.
Not my experience, because I went and looked for interesting people and followed them. Through hash tags and looking at what other interesting people were 'boosting', etc.
Honestly, it's up to you to go find interesting people and follow them. There's no engagement "algorithm" like Twitter. That's a good thing, but yes, it does require an initial time investment.
It's not a twitter replacement. I never had twitter in my life -- on purpose -- so that's not how I think of it. It's more like FidoNET or Usenet of old. Which is fine with me.
People used to think the network effect for MySpace and Friendster were insurmountable.
I played around with Mastodon last night and I think it has some bad but not insurmountable ergonomic wrinkles, but I worry its decentralization will prevent it from ever becoming mainstream. Centralization makes it easier to deal with "bad" actors. Also Discovery is a huge problem: how do I discover people I know? How do content creators who want to build an audience (and so create content that would attract users to the platform) get discovered? I think discovery is a bigger catch 22 than "nobody is on it."
Centralization makes it harder to deal with bad actors, because the cost of moderating a huge platform is massive, and the centralized social media platforms we have today have been unable or unwilling to do it.
Federal platforms like Reddit and Discord are able to moderate effectively, on the other hand, because the cost of moderation is devolved to the municipal governments: subreddits and servers. Moderation at this scale works; it works right now on this forum.
That makes Mastodon more of an attractive alternative to Discord rather than a replacement of the "digital commons" aspect of Twitter. But as some people have stated, maybe Mastodon doesn't want to _be_ that, but some people hope that there can be something that can assume that mantle.
a bit of a tangent, but, this “digital commons” marketing strikes me as a bit hilarious.
there is nothing “commons” about a privately owned space owned by a billionaire.
and even worse, elon is trying to make us believe one can meaningfully discuss anything in 280 characters?
this whole “digital commons” really reinforces my concerns that hes just doing more manipulation and relying on the fact that few people stop to actually think how ludicrous the idea is from the ground up.
It doesn't need to be mainstream, nor do I want to be mainstream.
I just use it to follow a number of interesting people and to write my thoughts here and there. A bit like how Twitter was in its early days. (Except without the stupid short word limits which encouraged pithy one liners.)
I don't need it to have celebrities or big media organizations. That is literally the worst part of Twitter. I don't need my mom on there, or to get in an argument with the jackass down the street who is angry because underpaid education workers are going on strike. Or to hear random people's uninformed 200 character "hot-takes" on complicated issues.
Further I resent that the tech industry seems to have cultured its own weird industry-celebrity culture of short-thought hit'n'run tech-thoughts in the form of tweets. I have no desire to "show off" my engineering work on twitter in that form or follow people who do so. But I've seen some nice content on Mastodon of people doing neat things and talking about it; the 500 word limit is far better for this.
Twitter is/was a toxic cesspool of narcissism and engagement. I had no desire to have that in my life and didn't really use it...
But I am enjoying checking Mastodon a few times a day and engaging there. A few thousand people leaving Twitter and contributing to that is good. I don't expect them all to stay, but hopefully the good ones do.
Nope, it sounds like you want Mastodon to be twitter. Or think that it should be trying to be?
They have a blog & followers and some nomenclature in common. But they're really not that similar at all.
If they weren't using @ notation and "followers" etc people would complain it's too different. But because they're using those things, people also complain that it's not similar enough. Tough situation.
It's just best to think of it as something else. It's federated activity feeds.
You can call them whatever you want. Most people just say posts. The default mastodon server whimsically says "Toot!" in the button. But, like... run your own server and change it :-)
It's not even fart. The developer didn't know that was a meaning in the US when he changed the name to that. It's the sound a Mastodon makes. This is 100% people projecting their own assumptions and judging based on that, not anything to do with the project. It's not even a meaning I considered back when he made the change, and it's one of the meanings in the version of English I speak. Folks tell on themselves when they get hung up on this.
I find it funny that this is the only answer from someone affected, and it doesn't even attempt to explain what is wrong with the name, even as a snark.
This seems an interesting over-reaction to me. Toot is an onomatopoeia that's as old if not older than the English language. It is enshrined in ancient, common aphorisms such as "tooting one's own horn". It's a childish word certainly, and it is childishly used sometimes for farting jokes in addition to horn noises and trumpeting sounds, which I can understand feels "ridiculous" as in silly (to which I retort once again: it's fun, let people have fun, people can be children on the internet and be silly sometimes) but I can't understand "ridiculous" as you put it in the same context of "bad" much less do I find it comparable to your other examples.
Soylent is a "Torment Nexus" style name, which is bizarre (and yeah, probably bad). (The "Torment Nexus" meme is: Scifi writer: I have described the Torment Nexus as a warning. Do not build the Torment Nexus. Company: The Torment Nexus sounds like a great idea. We are just about to ship our MVP of the Torment Nexus!)
Coq unfortunately sounds like genitalia to an English audience, and there are tons of hang-ups (for good and dumb reasons) about referring to genitalia in polite company. It's very different level of cultural hang up than "silly euphemism for a fart". Also, for the record, it's a tool from a French team and named a French word that has nothing to do with the English genitalia word that it sounds like. (It is related to the English poultry homonym and why English even has such a homonym.) Not all programming needs to be Anglophilic or consult with English speakers first before naming all their tools.
Yes, there are loads of brand names that didn't work in other languages. Look up the car Toyota Fit / Jazz for example, that one was very nearly called something slightly different.
I don't think these are just ergonomic wrinkles. I was surprised to learn that it seems to matter which instance you join. I assumed "decentralized" means "it doesn't matter where you're located". To me this is rather a basic, philosophical flaw.
I would also expect a decentralized network to easily support multiple identities. At least the default client seemingly does not. Twitter on the other hand allows switching between profiles.
I think these two issues are connected. It seems to me the mastodon community (or parts of it) leans towards a rather weird understanding of identity and community.
Yeah there are some UX optimizations that could probably be made...
OTOH, I can't think of many big-name mobile apps that don't have some issues with less-than-obvious long-press functionality. (Snapchat seems to literally do this shit on purpose, because it's "fun" apparently.)
IMO that's a general problem with mobile UX... long-press actions have zero affordance. There's no way to tell short of randomly long-pressing on stuff what's going to have an action associated with it.
Gmail client on Android lets you change profiles by swiping up/down on the profile icon which is probably one of the best discoveries of my week (its been a slow week)
FidoNET (got I loved FidoNET) had a central coordinating authority, you had to get on a nodelist.
With Mastodon it gets incrementally harder to just add someone. Are they on the same Mastodon instance as me? Does my Mastodon instance federate the Mastodon instance they're on? Is this handled client side with multiple identities? Now how do I handle these multiple identities, so I broadcast "toots" (cringe) to all of them?
I don't get it.. So far I've been able to add anybody on Mastodon. I'm on indieweb.social, but most of the people I'm following are elsewhere. Seems to work fine. Yes, it isn't spoonfeeding me contacts or content like Twitter wants to, but that's also a good thing. I see a lot less bullsh*t.
Also almost nobody I've come across actually says "toots" -- they just say "posts" :-)
The equivalent of the FidoNET nodelist would basically be whatever the most popular Mastodon servers are choosing to federate with. It seems in practice to be more of a consensus driven thing, but has the same net effect. We'll see if it scales.
I'm also confused about your description. I host my own single user mastodon instance and have no problems to follow anyone, just put their username into the searchbar and click follow.
This way I can follow anything on the fediverse, not only Mastodon accounts but PeerTube, Friendica, PixelFed, FunkWhale, etc. all from my Mastodon account.
> People used to think the network effect for MySpace and Friendster were insurmountable.
That was also long time ago and it was much easier to compete back then. I think now only way for that to happen is if big network fucks up, not if the better competition comes up
Google really timed that badly. Launching it branded that way precisely when their own brand was starting to become "uncool" and at a time when Facebook was in heavy ascendance.
But it was a better product, to me, and I enjoyed the groups and such I was on in G+. I think if it was around today, maybe with different branding, it would actually be doing quite well.
Internally @ Google most Googler's resented G+ for the way Vic ran the project and the way L&S let that happen. But it was implemented fairly well. I think it mainly confused the public because it was not Facebook and not Twitter, a bit nerdy, and it did poorly at the kind of network-effect "friends gathering" thing that boosted Facebook in its growth phase (and MySpace and Friendster before that...)
Ultimately Google+ was Facebook but slightly different. There wasn't really a compelling reason to switch.
But while Facebook has been around we've seen Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, Vine, WhatsApp, Reddit, Discord, and a handful of other smaller or regional sites rise. There's very little lock in. You've just got to do something other than "Facebook but different".
They seemed to forget that the thing that made Facebook gain traction initially was a very gradual rollout targeting affinity groups (colleges and college students) at first, with quasi-private networks, before they opened it up to everyone.
Google did the invite-only thing for a while but then IMO tried to grow too quickly too fast, and it felt like a Potemkin village situation.
My feeling is that if you want to launch a social network, you need to concentrate on an actual existing social group and get substantial penetration into that group, then slowly branch out. Trying to get anyone and everyone to sign up from the beginning is almost guaranteed failure, or at least a very hard uphill battle with trying to please everyone at once.
> Also Discovery is a huge problem: how do I discover people I know? How do content creators who want to build an audience (and so create content that would attract users to the platform) get discovered?
Hashtags play a huge role on Mastodon - discover people by following hashtags and include hashtags in your posts so that people can discover you.
I don't think the hashtags are a great experience. Common hashtags get overloaded with junk, how do you know which hashtags to use, you need to register with some external service (and find out about it) like fediverse.info which I've found to be a pretty clunky experience. These are the kind of ergonomic wrinkles I was thinking about.
You use the hashtags that match your interests, eg I wanted more Python content in my timeline so I typed #python into the search box at mastodon.online and followed the tag. I didn't need to use an external site for this, just the Mastodon site.
Now I'm seeing posts from people discussing Python stuff which gives me a pool of people to choose to follow. Now that I've got some people populating my timeline I can unfollow the tag if I decide it gets too noisy.
> Hashtags play a huge role on Mastodon - discover people by following hashtags
I'm probably twiddling the wrong buttons or something but whenever I've clicked on a Fediverse hashtag, it's always just been the hashtag on the originating server. Is there a way to get a wider view that I've missed?
Need to have people on your home node following people on the other node for your own node to be aware. Really unfriendly to small nodes / people who run their own personal nodes.
You can always click out to the same hashtag on other instances. It's a network graph. There's no one "perfect" view of a hashtag, but there are a lot of interesting sub-views of one if you've got time to click around.
The idea is to have a view built by the connections people on your instance make. The view from tech.lgbt is different from the view from photog.social, and that's a feature. Smaller nodes can subscribe to relays if they find it too limiting.
> The idea is to have a view built by the connections people on your instance make. The view from tech.lgbt is different from the view from photog.social, and that's a feature.
They look completely identical, the feature isn't working.
I'm sceptical it's even an intended feature as much as just the overall result of the protocol design not putting too much thought into it.
> Smaller nodes can subscribe to relays if they find it too limiting.
I looked into it, that's actually a better solution than the old one I was aware of which involved a bot account automatically subscribing to different accounts across the fediverse. It's my understanding that needs to be explicitly configured by a Mastodon administrator for a subscription though, out of the hands of the user.
This still isn't particularly user friendly and I still think this is a terrible user experience, particularly when comments like these appear:
>>>> Hashtags play a huge role on Mastodon - discover people by following hashtags
>>> I'm probably twiddling the wrong buttons or something but whenever I've clicked on a Fediverse hashtag, it's always just been the hashtag on the originating server. Is there a way to get a wider view that I've missed?
They were just two random examples. As a server's connections build, it'll inevitably reach a point where it sees most/all of the network and it's no longer distinguishable.
If I look at [1] whilst logged in to that instance, I do get a slightly different (first couple of pages have a few more posts, then it starts diverging) view than from [2] where I am not logged in. Also slight difference from [3] in that posts from, e.g., @infosec_jobs@mastodon.social are not there but are in [1] and [2].
On Mastodon there's a setting "Require follow requests :
Manually control who can follow you by approving follow requests" so you get to whitelist Real People.
Server admins block other servers that do not effectively prevent the creation of spam accounts. Could this become a problem if the network grows fast enough to be a profitable target for spammers? Probably. Is it a problem now? Not that I've seen.
No, the idea is that you block entire instances where the admins are lax about allowing spam or bot accounts.
If you run an instance and don't do active moderation and just let any putz sign up and post crap, you'll end up getting de-federated and your real users will probably leave (Masto makes it easy to migrate your stuff from one account to another).
This is one of the reasons why having lots of instances is a good thing, and one of the risks of Mastodon's federated structure is having a lot of users sign up to one or two big generic instances.
I'm hoping that more sites that have existing user communities will start offering Mastodon instances for their already-vetted users. The instance I use (SDF.org) is largely but not exclusively for existing SDF members, and this seems to work quite well. I don't know how the mainline Mastodon server's authentication system works, but hopefully it's reasonably straightforward to plug into an already-existing user database for auth purposes.
I agree, discovery was my biggest problem for a long time with Mastodon.
Fortunately, most of the recent Twitter emigrés have been doing #introduction posts with tags about their interests, which makes them easy to find. Via the internal search, and with sites like https://fediverse.info/explore/people if they register for it.
* https://fedi.directory/ and https://communitywiki.org/trunk which have users categorized by interests and what they usually post. Just randomly clicking around these exposed me to new areas of interests (eg. generative art) that I had no clue existed on Mastodon. These follows then serve as your gateway into discovering more users, via their boosts (retweets in Twitter parlance).
My timeline is a lot richer than it was even a couple days ago, and it seems this trend of creating external tools to solve Fediverse-wide issues is growing and catching momentum. Which was sorely needed, as it means you don't have to depend on the Mastodon project or instance admins dedicating even more of their time. Instead, the problem gets solved through collaborative effort, as it's meant to be.
> Instead, the problem gets solved through collaborative effort, as it's meant to be.
Exactly. It's the world wide web, people. It's about discovery and distribution and linkage. Centralization on this medium is not necessary; just convenient.
This is what the early net was like when I got on it in 1990/1991. I ran a personal UUCP node on my Atari ST. When I got a telnet connection, I went and found lists of MUDs and MOOs and IRC servers to connect to. I used Archie and Veronica and Gopher. When the WWW first came along, I used directory services like Yahoo, etc.
And then things got more convenient as Google, etc. came to dominate. And for a while the compromises that came with that were fine.
But systems like Facebook and Twitter are really counter to the networked spirit that drove the excitement in the first place. They want all the marbles in one place. I don't want to play that game, seeing how it's gone. I think others are seeing now just how bad it can get.
Mastodon isn't my dream system. I'd rather see something synchronous and dynamic and programmable... like LambdaMOO, but federated. But that ship sailed in the early 90s. I'm enjoying the bump in activity in Mastodon right now.
Widespread adoption came from easier to use systems that didn't require you to go out and piece things together.
High barrier to entry systems to keep out the "normies" is already a solved, and incredibly uninteresting problem.
Although I loved LambdaMOO and thought we could see an evolution of smart contracts in that direction but cryptobro greed might have ruined or soured that potential future.
You might like what my current employer is working on; Clockwork Labs. It's got a vaguely MOOish vibe. Can't show you anything public yet -- and I'm personally leaving middle of the month -- but it sounds like it might be up your alley.
Mastodon has a nice feature where you can prove ownership of a link in your profile by setting a backlink on it (implying you at least control the content of that page).
So, if you don't want to set up your own Mastodon instance under your domain, you can instead link your Mastodon account to your homepage running on a domain of your choice. It's not something I bother to do, because I'm nobody important, but if I was e.g. Taylor Swift or something, I could show that my Mastodon account was affiliated with www.taylorswift.com, and thus give you a pretty good idea that I'm actually the real deal.
From the Edit Profile page on Mastodon (v3.5.3):
> You can verify yourself as the owner of the links in your profile metadata. For that, the linked website must contain a link back to your Mastodon profile. The link back must have a rel="me" attribute. The text content of the link does not matter.
Twitter didn't really have much of a discovery mechanism in its early years, and that's when it really built the userbase that is its main competitive advantage right now. I'm not sure that's a huge impediment, particularly since Twitter could be the de facto discovery mechanism for people on their way out the door ("Hey, I'm leaving for Mastodon, where I'll be foo@bar.org").
I do think there's an unmet demand for aggregator accounts on Mastodon right now, though. Like if I'm interested in esports (just f.ex.), there should probably be someone I could follow who boosts significant content related to that subject to aid people in finding new people to follow. (To be honest that probably already exists; like early Twitter, Mastodon is pretty tech heavy. There are a lot of gaps though.)
The experience with twitodon.com is very clunky. Since people seem to be putting their mastodon tags in their Twitter "name" fields now it seems like it'd be a much more streamlined process to just scrape that.
The technical barrier to entry ensures "normies" will not be able to use or understand (or at least enjoy) Mastodon. This will prevent it from becoming as huge as Twitter
It's worth looking at why people who are already on Twitter don't want to use Mastodon/Fediverse. The last time this topic came up on Twitter with Musk's first proposal to buy Twitter, several concerns were raised (and well-liked by thousands of other users) in several threads I noticed:
* Migrating one's account and tweets to Mastodon
* Finding people on Mastodon
* General confusion about what federation is, or what it means
* Stories of people who once used a Mastodon belonging to a friend group, had a falling out with whoever happened to be running the server, and was kicked off/had their account deleted
* The fact that DMs aren't private, and can be read by an instance admin, or by the instance admin of the instance of the user you send them to. This particularly seemed to unnerve people because you're more likely to interact and know who the instance admin is than you are with Twitter support/SWEs.
* The difficulty of choosing an instance.
* The difficulty of avoiding certain people and certain content, usually spoken of in terms of principle: that is, abusive messages and content which admins must agree to filter, but some admins may not want to block that content, leaving the users on an instance known for harboring that kind of content
* On the flip side, rampant defederation and the formation of cliques which become increasingly isolated social bubbles.
* The name of the software and its default interface
* The names of various instances which range from the whimsical to the offensive (e.g. 'wolfgirl.engineering' to 'fuckonthefirst.date').
* GDPR concerns and personal data privacy concerns - how do I delete media and text that I've uploaded that's now been shared across multiple instances? How do instance owners cope with this under the law?
I've seen very, very few responses to any of these problems; some of them I object to myself, but it seems short-sighted to say that the only reason people aren't jumping ship is because of network effects and not genuine concerns with the technology and the community as it exists today.
> Centralization makes it easier to deal with "bad" actors.
Moderation is a problem that scales terribly. We haven't actually solved moderation at scale, no matter how many algorithms and ML models we throw at it. That was part of the ridiculous opening salvo by Musk, if you'll recall, that Twitter was full of unmoderated bots and if they just sent him a ton of their data his engineers would find a better way to moderate over lunch. They did and his engineers didn't and he reneged on the deal at that point and became a morass for the courts.
Moderation is labor. The number of moderators you need per volume doesn't scale well, no matter how many tools you throw at it. This seems to be the repeating lesson of both Twitter and Facebook. We have too much data from Facebook that auto-moderation tools plus scale make the labor of moderation terrifyingly worse: instead of moderation being a continuous background process of seeing 97% fine posts and the occasional 3% of bad actor posts, moderators are fed streams of the opposite: 97% content from bad actors. This has huge mental health issues with many reports of PTSD and worse from Facebook's human moderators.
Decentralization necessitates more moderators and naturally spreads out the work of moderators to give individual moderators less to do "in their local neighborhood". It returns to a background activity where moderating the bad actors is a small effort compared to other things going on in an instance. Instances may be invite-only, further minimizing the role of a moderator on a small instance versus the threat of bad actors.
Reports of bad activity often get seen by at least two moderators: a moderator on your local instance and a moderator on the remote instance where the bad actor is. Mastodon provides a number of tools to moderators on both sides of that: the local moderator may silence all of a bad actor's content locally and can escalate that to silence or blocking a remote instance if the implication is the remote instance tolerates too many bad actors. The remote instance can put bad actors on probation or kick bad actors. Most of these tools are both quite easy to work with and powerful enough for most needs on Mastodon today.
Decentralization also shrinks the "blast radius" of a potential bad actor: bad actors can create all the instances they want, certainly, but if no one is following those instances, does anyone really notice? It's a tree falls in the forest problem. There's often a lot of "fediblock" drama when new instances from entirely bad actors show up, but often the "fediblock" messages themselves are much more viral than any possible bad actor (because admins/moderators care for each other in a decentralized manner).
> how do I discover people I know?
How do you discover someone's email address? How do you discover someone's blog? How do you discover someone's mailing list or Discord or YouTube Channel or Twitch Channel or …?
Discovery could obviously be better on Mastodon, but discovery is also an on-going process people do decentralized all the time, through word of mouth, through friend's recommendations, through other channels, through in person events, through friends' retweets (boosts in Mastodon) of other interesting people that they follow.
Some of the "huge problem" of discovery on Mastodon has nothing to do with Mastodon and everything to do with network effects. Not enough people use Mastodon so not enough people think to put Mastodon handles on their business or social cards. Not enough people think to add "follow me on Mastodon" after the usual "Like and Subscribe" in a YouTube video. Etc and so forth. From a network effects perspective discovery on Mastodon isn't a bigger catch-22 than "nobody is on it", discovery on Mastodon is the exact same catch-22. That's what makes it a catch-22: nobody is on Mastodon so nobody is talking/sharing about Mastodon so nobody is on Mastodon. Discovery on its own isn't a catch-22, it's a bootstrap problem. It's network effects that make discovery a catch-22.
> How do content creators who want to build an audience (and so create content that would attract users to the platform) get discovered?
How does anyone market anything on any platform? Discovery is marketing. Marketing is getting discovered. It's no different and arguably much better than (from a tooling standpoint) from the early days of Twitter when hashtags were just a search convention and not a built-in feature. All the usual tools from Twitter generally apply to Mastodon: virality and hash tags. Going viral is much harder on Mastodon with no "algorithms" to cajole and machines doing your work for you, just people to convince to boost you. Also, yes, there are a lot of instances that are defiantly allergic to obvious and outright marketing for major corporations or celebrities or general "influencing"/brands/branding. (Though many of those same instances adore small creators working independently and who wear their hearts on their sleeves, so long as they keep their marketing "human" and plain dealing and don't spam it.)
sounds like a win-win to me. I doubt I'd agree with many of the people who left Twitter on much - I might actually start using Twitter now - but I admire their willingness to stand by their beliefs and I'm sure Mastodon will be better for their arrival.
I got a mastodon account on the mastodon.social instance years ago and took another look recently.
I still can't figure it out. I see people say they're moving to mastodon, try to search for them on the platform, and find nothing. Possibly they're on another instance that's not searchable from mastodon.social, or their name is different, or the search is bad...
Pretty sure more than that re/joined since twitter's acquisition was confirmed. If you count the numbers since this whole ordeal began months ago, I'd say it's a pretty low chance Twitter is gonna "die" or get "tumblr"'d. They began stagnating years ago but this is at least gonna drag it for years to come. If Musk plays it right it might even grow (assuming meta's endeavors stay the same).
Ha! I was one of them. I never even used Twitter, but a nerd friend of mine told me about the Fediverse told me about it and I actually got quite excited.
Find the right server and it seems like a great place to be!
I have used Mastodon and had my own server for a while. I should take a second look. But a quick look makes me think that, unfortunately, proprietary new platforms like Tribel are more polished.
Gab was "banned" in that the vast majority of instances blocked it and blocked any other instance that didn't do the same.
If that's not censorship, I don't know what is. You can have your sandbox but you can't play with others unless you accept their censorship rules and politics.
> You are literally one search query away from it making sense...
No, that doesn't make it make more sense. You're saying Pleroma instances cannot decide to de-federate with a specific instance, and can't remove/moderate posts? That seems... unlikely.
I'm saying that censorship is ingrained in the Mastodon culture and is considered normal and necessary. Considering that Pleroma is also technically superior, I don't understand why one would prefer Mastodon over it, except popularity which is not a merit.
70k users doesn't seem like that many...and I am not sure I'd call them "users" yet, technically I'm a "user" but I checked it out for a few months here and there and don't plan on ever going back. The entire experience felt really clunky to me and moving the pin seems like a tough pull that would take quite awhile. but you know just my opinion!
A small fraction of Twitter's users create most of the value of the Twitter network. Given that, I think the interesting question is what segment do those 70k fall into?
Same with when GitHub annoys everyone and the folks pop up announcing their move to GitLab.
The segment that makes up the dramatic reaction is the same segment who can move without issue. No stars, no followers, no real reason to be there (specifically) if we're honest.
I think this is a mild marketing opportunity for Mastodon, a big old nothing for Twitter.
This seems like a completely different case unless the Leftists execute what they told the Right-leaning users all these years: "just build your own Twitter".
Right now I can sign up at twitter.com and get to see and talk to everyone else who has signed up - where do I sign up for Mastodon and do I get to interact with everyone else who has done the same?
(the fact that this needs to be explained at all should already be a hint that it will never be mainstream)
Mastodon.tech and yes (unless they've been banned)
There's no reason the answer needs to be more complicated than Twitter. Options exist, but in the literal ELI5 explanation people can already figure out "how do I message my friend who uses a different phone manufacturer than I do" without a long detailing of the inner workings of signal, or iMessage or whatsapp
The average Twitter user likely does not know what a file is (see: that one iPad commercial where the kid says "what's a file?" or something), and likely uses a mobile device of some kind (tablet or phone) as their daily driver.
Having unusual new concepts you need to explain is a negative point for sure, but that's a world away from the parent comment saying that having any new concept at all means it's doomed entirely.
Twitter had plenty of new concepts with replies, quote tweets, hashtags, threads, ratios. The evidence is that people can figure out this amount of new stuff.
It struck me this is an entirely arbitrary level of knowledge and people have, culturally, learned quite a lot about online computing in the past few decades. You can easily imagine seeing this posted 20 years ago:
"Right now I can sign up at AOL.com and get to email everyone else who has signed up - where do I sign up for social networking and do I get to interact with everyone else who has done the same?"
There's no reason to think people can't come to grips with a federated model just because they're used to a centralized one.
Mastodon is a bunch of separate federated Mastodon instances. In order to see content from several you need to connect to each of them (if memory serves, your identity and social graph are not portable between instances due to the limitations of ActivityPub. This is a problem Dorsey's @ Protocol attempts to solve). That does let you see the illusion of centralization though, sort of like email which is also federated
Considering Elon Musk is likely to revert the ridiculous censorship that went on at Twitter, rhe people leaving twitter are the ones who want censors.
Kind of ridiculous for them to go to Mastodon where decentralisation makes banning harder. They will be exposed to - the horror! - other people's ideas!
To rub it in - If Facebook & Mastodon were the only two social networks to 'switch' to, FB captured 99.8% of the 'switchers'.
If 24 Million new users had signed up for Mastodon, that would be a story. That only 0.2% of them chose Mastadon shows how bad the open, federated alternative really is.
> Facebook added 24MILLION new users in the same period
Of those 24M users, how many of them are people I care about or want to follow? I.e. not bots, not people on the other side of the planet, not people who don't have a language in common with me, etc. etc.
A network with 10,000 users, 10% of whom are interesting enough for me to want to follow, is much better than a network with 1M users but only 0.1% are people I'd care to interact with.
I've been pondering: If 1% of Twitter users move to Mastodon, can it even handle it? 1% is ~4.5M users, currently the entire Fediverse is around 5.5M users, so that'd be nearly doubling. In looking at the server lists when I tried to sign up, many of them were closed for invites and mastodon.social where I had previously signed up wouldn't load the homepage.
Sounds like the mastodon.social admin is ordering new hardware. The article mentions an admin of 80K users spending 300+euro/mo, extrapolate that out to 4.5m users and that's 17Keuro.
Not trying to FUD here, just thinking about what it would take to get Mastodon to take over.
Looking at it from another perspective what is the INCENTIVE to run a Mastodon server? What are those server costs and time to setup and moderate worth?
my guess is it’s the same rewards that drove people to run usenet servers, bbs servers, irc servers, forums, countless open-source projects, and whatever other non-centralized platforms flourished in the past and present.
Like I said, notoriety and control of users. People ran BBS servers to be sysops, IRC servers to get O:lines, open source projects to get their name out there, etc. "Pure altriusm" could also be a motivator.
as someone who has been significantly involved in open source projects and contributing to hosting for various projects for years, “control” and “notoriety” are rarely what people are getting lol.
I don't think anything built on traditional tech will catch on. Whenever I see anything touting decentralization, I always look at the setup instructions because I think the setup complexity will dictate the adoption potential.
With Mastodon, it looks like Ruby on Rails, Node.js, PostgreSQL, and Redis for the backend stuff. For me, the only realistic way I'd run a node would be via Docker (Compose) which means I'm limited to something non-redundant (ie: no HA) that only scales vertically, at least easily.
> The article mentions an admin of 80K users spending 300+euro/mo
I think it's well understood that centralized systems win because normal, non-technical people don't want to deal with the complexity of managing their own servers and that devolves into the situation like the one you pointed out where normal users consolidate on a single node and the owner of that node ends up stuck with all the cost, moderation, maintenance, etc.
The thing that I think isn't considered enough, or at all, is that decentralization of control doesn't need to mean decentralization of infrastructure. Imagine something like Mastodon but built with newer tech that makes it deployable to Cloudflare, Netlify, Vercel, etc. Think along the lines of using something like SvelteKit + adapters. I can see all of those infrastructure platforms getting to the point where a custom deployment could be distilled down to something as simple as installing an app on a phone where the only thing you need to do is feed it a domain.
As long as it's federated using a custom domain, making it simple enough for a normal person to run an instance increases the decentralization of control which is more important than decentralizing the infrastructure in my opinion.
I think one of the main things that we need to make that more realistic is for someone like Cloudflare to provide a local runtime for their core services (Pages, Workers, Functions, KV, R2, etc.). Having something vertically scalable is adequate because that's no worse than what most of us get with a Docker based deployment which is the maximum complexity most people will be willing to deal with, at least the people I know.
The other thing that would help a lot would be if those companies I mentioned collaborated to have deployment compatibility. IE: I should be able to write one app and deploy it to any one of them as long as I use a standard set of features. I think that would be amazing from the perspective of being a customer / dev, but I don't know how realistic it is on the business side of things.
Honest question: Can someone who actually uses and gets value from Twit please explain the use case and value? I totally grok interest-based social, but I do not at all understand why I would want to put effort into figuring out personality-based social (beyond family/friends/blogs/etc) - particularly when posts are limited to bumper sticker lengths (unless they are just URLS to rich posts hosted elsewhere, but that's just link aggregation, which Reddit does better). Bumper stickers back and forth are not real conversations either - why wouldn't I just go to reddit or forums or even IRC (which I guess is now Discord)?
Think of it as a socially driven RSS feed. On the one hand I enjoy following e.g. Science magazine directly. But the social part is that I follow people who post things they find interesting and often I find those things interesting as well. It's not really a platform for discussion as much as sharing links to content.
So it is really a link aggregator with a focus on personalities more than specific topics. Did I interpret you correctly?
If so, I think I'd much rather get the content from a topical aggregator (reddit/forums/blogs). I am interested in such a wide variety of topics that it is much easier to organize my browsing time by topic.
The people I know that use Twitter a lot are doing it mostly for conversation with a semi-known group of people around a niche topic (usually politics). Reddit is too anonymous and it doesn't allow you to hold grudges and be rude and mean to people with a known set of beliefs.
The same you find using HN, by your preferences and algorithm Twitter puts you in contacts with other people with the same interest and have conversation, Reddit have most of the communities but it has its downsides as pro-leftist and censored. Musk want to make it neither too left or right.
Federation isn't going to be everyone moving to a decentralised platform like Mastadon. It's going to be groups segregating to different platforms based on their interests and values. Whether or not that network of things becomes interconnected, not clear, maybe not. We'll see some churn from Twitter but the majority of people with 10k+ followers will stay.
Every engineer feels they could build a Twitter alternative, purely on a technical basis, but to actually draw a community there, that's the harder part. What Jack is trying to do with Bluesky is more interesting, an actual protocol as opposed to another platform, but again not clear that will work out either.
SMTP was truly the greatest communication protocol of all time, and then HTTP being an information protocol somehow subsumed that for social purposes. If we just assume public social is Twitter, Facebook, etc, then private social might end up being some smaller niche systems and then we may end up with some alternative new protocol for real time communication. Something dead simple is likely to beat out the wholly thought through in the beginning because clients could be easily implemented for it.
Twitter has some pretty terrible content on it but I rarely encounter it. When I tried Mastodon most of the posts I was exposed to were in a language I could not identify, some sort of anime based post (often pornographic), spam, or just random people I've never heard of talking about there last jog or meal. Not a great experience yet.
Network effects are WAY stronger than we think. Also, if you built a following on Twitter over 10-15 years, leaving it is a massive sacrifice.
I wouldn't bet on an actual twitter exodus.
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