Mastodon

[KevinL]

Lots of online predictions that Twitter is likely to destabilize sooner than later. With the soccer World Cup coming up (typically a heavy traffic event for them) this could well happen in the coming week.

[Bytor]

Stuff like Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook and so on work because they're extremely straightforward. You create an account in 60 seconds and bang, you're online and can be following whatever sort of thing you want.

Same thing on Mastodon. If you know what a hashtag is on Twitter, you know what a hashtag is on Mastodon.

A 70 year old grandma can sign up while she sips tea and become a popular poster. It's simple, which is great. 

She can do that on Mastodon, too, and the exact same way she did it on Twitter. Make a few search, find a few accounts to follow, and see whom they are responding to, follow a few of then and so on. Or search for a hashtag or two

The Mastodon web client even allows you to pin hashtag searches so you can always watch them, without following anybody, but you can still use to to find people to follow.

The average person - the vvvaaaaasssstttt majority of users on the internet these days - don't have the patience for messing around with hunting out servers/instances that suit their interest and finding friends. They want instant, mass results and they want to be part of what is the biggest platform where the most people are.

They can do that, too. Most Mastodon clients can give you a few prompts to help you choose a server, whether it's niche or has a lot of people.

But here's the thing, even if you choose the niche server rather than mastodon.social, you can still follow people on other instances.

A: Hey, you now how even if you have a Hotmail account for email you can still send email to a friend who uses GMail?
B: Yeah?
A: So even if you use mastodon.social, you can still follow me at mastodon.xyz.
B: Oh, OK, so it doesn't really matter which one I use, just like email?
A: You got it.

Also another problem with Mastodon is that you just get a bunch of Mini Musks. My server must be run this way! Only this can be said! You must follow these rules. It just creates this niche, gated echo chamber where you end up with specific groups of people who think or believe etc the same way.

Actually, it turns out to be almost the exact opposite of that. You're implying that mastodon instance admins are censorious by nature, and that isn't the case. There's a different between moderation and censorship. And that you think this shows how unfamiliar you are with Mastodon and the Fediverse

The reason something like Twitter or Instagram works so well is that you can pretty much get away with anything on there.

More like that's what makes Facebook and Twitter the toxic cesspools they are.

You might get banned eventually, but you're able to go on there and talk about your cooking, your pet cat, dox people you don't like, post videos of rapes, spread state propaganda etc. It is an incredibly open forum for communication which is why it's so big.

Oh, yeah because doxxing is totally OK, and so are rape videos. That's sick and twisted, dude, to say that's why Twitter is so great.

You can't have that with a bunch of federated servers that are all cocooned and full of people who think the same.

LOL! Contradiction alert! Either their federated or they are cocooned. Which is it?

But, again, this just shows that you're not familiar with Mastodon or the Fediverse.

[ijmorlan]

You can't have that with a bunch of federated servers that are all cocooned and full of people who think the same.

LOL! Contradiction alert! Either their federated or they are cocooned. Which is it?

But, again, this just shows that you're not familiar with Mastodon or the Fediverse.

Plus, if all server admins are so terrible, why is ac3r wasting his time here under the repressive heel of Spokes?

[danbrotherston]

....

Also another problem with Mastodon is that you just get a bunch of Mini Musks. My server must be run this way! Only this can be said! You must follow these rules. It just creates this niche, gated echo chamber where you end up with specific groups of people who think or believe etc the same way.

Actually, it turns out to be almost the exact opposite of that. You're implying that mastodon instance admins are censorious by nature, and that isn't the case. There's a different between moderation and censorship. And that you think this shows how unfamiliar you are with Mastodon and the Fediverse

....

Also, it simply doesn't matter. The problem with Musk is not that he is a selfish egotist--those have existed since time immemorial. The problem with Musk is that he is a billionaire (we can leave aside the discussion of whether all billionaires are inherently bad, and also whether it is his wealth which causes him to be a selfish egotist to the extent he is) and can BUY the ENTIRE platform.

If some Mastodon server ended up being run by some Musk, people would leave. Migration isn't entirely frictionless, but it's completely possible. But it wouldn't mean the whole system would fail. And if *all* server admins were Musks, then new people would start their own servers.

Unless the suggestion is being a server admin is inherently corrupting, which is an incredibly cynical viewpoint, and one that is easily dispelled given the forum you are speaking in now.

[danbrotherston]

Alright guys, I wrote a longer, boringer thing than I usually write here.

If you're curious about it, you can find it here:

https://danbrotherston.medium.com/mastod...65afe9fcdf

[tomh009]

ARTHUR: How do you do, good lady. I am Arthur, King of the Britons. Whose castle is that?

WOMAN: King of the who?

ARTHUR: The Britons.

WOMAN: Who are the Britons?

ARTHUR: Well, we all are. we're all Britons and I am your king.

WOMAN: I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.

DENNIS: You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship. A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--

WOMAN: Oh there you go, bringing class into it again.

DENNIS: That's what it's all about if only people would--

ARTHUR: Please, please good people. I am in haste. Who lives in that castle?

WOMAN: No one live there.

ARTHUR: Then who is your lord?

WOMAN: We don't have a lord.

ARTHUR: What?

DENNIS: I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.

All three minutes of it on video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAA-G947ofg&ab_channel=lampbrain

[danbrotherston]

ARTHUR: How do you do, good lady. I am Arthur, King of the Britons. Whose castle is that?

WOMAN: King of the who?

ARTHUR: The Britons.

WOMAN: Who are the Britons?

ARTHUR: Well, we all are. we're all Britons and I am your king.

WOMAN: I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.

DENNIS: You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship. A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--

WOMAN: Oh there you go, bringing class into it again.

DENNIS: That's what it's all about if only people would--

ARTHUR: Please, please good people. I am in haste. Who lives in that castle?

WOMAN: No one live there.

ARTHUR: Then who is your lord?

WOMAN: We don't have a lord.

ARTHUR: What?

DENNIS: I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.

All three minutes of it on video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAA-G947...=lampbrain

I mean, I'm not going to argue that Mastodon isn't implicitly political.

But it isn't anti-capitalist inherently...any more than any small business is inherently anti-capitalist.  What it is, to me, is anti-corporatist.

Now we're really off the rails lol.

[tomh009]

Yes we are

Haven't signed up for Mastodon yet as my Twitter usage is basically read-only, and only checking specific posters a few times a week. If they move to Mastodon, I'll need to do that as well. But, in the meantime, I have no urgency to make a move.

[ac3r]

LOL! Contradiction alert! Either their federated or they are cocooned. Which is it?

But, again, this just shows that you're not familiar with Mastodon or the Fediverse.

Plus, if all server admins are so terrible, why is ac3r wasting his time here under the repressive heel of Spokes?

Just waiting for the day I can buy WRC from him for billions of dollars and ban you all, of course!

[bravado]

I think if you need to write a Medium blog post about how to use your platform, it's just not intuitive. We'll see how it goes over time!

[tomh009]

Alright guys, I wrote a longer, boringer thing than I usually write here.

If you're curious about it, you can find it here:

https://danbrotherston.medium.com/mastod...65afe9fcdf

How about searching? How do I search for "Ukraine" and "grain", for example, across all the federated servers? Maybe this is not the usual use case, but it's what I do maybe half the time when I use Twitter.

[ac3r]

I think if you need to write a Medium blog post about how to use your platform, it's just not intuitive. We'll see how it goes over time!

A good summary.

I'll bet what Elon Musk paid to buy Twitter to bet that Mastodon never becomes anything comparable to Twitter. It's just too much effort. For a forum that talks about how lazy people are for driving and all that stuff, people are giving the average person with a phone or keyboard in their hand way too much credit. Mastodon is cool but will likely always struggle. Your average person has way too much going on in life than to worry about the ethics of using a darn website, nevermind just taking 20 minutes to figure it out. People really don't care that much about what you and I may personally care about, especially to the point where they'll go lurking Mastodon. IMO Reddit is a good middle ground even though it's owned by a large company. It gives people a sense of pseudoanonymity and feeling they're in control of their subreddits, despite the fact it's still on a central collection of servers yet also gives people much more freedom to customize (?) things without having to tinker around or learn things.

Both can exist and despite the chaos around Twitter right now, I think it'll be kicking for a looooong time. Heck even Angelfire and Lycos are still around and those things predate Google and managed to survive the first dot-com bubble crash. Or have you paid attention to how many billions of dollars Zukerburg has been burning just to make a ghetto Second Life clone? Lol. Yet "Meta" is still going strong. I think Mastodon will always remain one of those niche things that, because it's open source, will always be out there but will only attract interest from certain people which is just fine (kinda like IRC, for example). If you've read Walter Benjamin's essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit or Max Horkheimer's Theorie der Manipulation (and even Theodor W. Adorno's own expansions), then it makes sense why this occurs. The path of less resistance and all that...it's what defines us these days. The poverty of mass culture.

[danbrotherston]

Alright guys, I wrote a longer, boringer thing than I usually write here.

If you're curious about it, you can find it here:

https://danbrotherston.medium.com/mastod...65afe9fcdf

How about searching? How do I search for "Ukraine" and "grain", for example, across all the federated servers? Maybe this is not the usual use case, but it's what I do maybe half the time when I use Twitter.

This isn't really a supported use case. There's no universal search of all instances. This isn't even technically possible because nobody can know about all instances.

But even among instances which are known there is no universal search, all you can do is search content on your instance which includes content created or boosted by your local members and also by any users that anyone on your local instance follows.

While there are technical reasons, I think there are also philosophical reasons for this. The idea of a complete search doesn't make all that much sense in a social network like twitter IMO. I think it's also part of limiting the 'virality' of different posts and people.

[danbrotherston]

I think if you need to write a Medium blog post about how to use your platform, it's just not intuitive. We'll see how it goes over time!

You can write a Medium blog post about Twitter if you want.

I'm going into depth beyond what is necessary to use the service.

[tomh009]

How about searching? How do I search for "Ukraine" and "grain", for example, across all the federated servers? Maybe this is not the usual use case, but it's what I do maybe half the time when I use Twitter.

This isn't really a supported use case. There's no universal search of all instances. This isn't even technically possible because nobody can know about all instances.

But even among instances which are known there is no universal search, all you can do is search content on your instance which includes content created or boosted by your local members and also by any users that anyone on your local instance follows.

While there are technical reasons, I think there are also philosophical reasons for this. The idea of a complete search doesn't make all that much sense in a social network like twitter IMO. I think it's also part of limiting the 'virality' of different posts and people.

Personally ... I see Twitter as far less "social" than, say, FB. It's used a lot by corporations and other organizations to post short news items and updates. Yes, there is follow-up commenting by individuals, much like in a CBC or a newspaper comments section.

Others may use Twitter and view it very differently from me. But it's quite clear to me now that Mastodon is not really going to be the same as Twitter. It'll be better in some ways, but it won't be able to do other things that Twitter is used for today. So, there may well be room for both Twitter and Mastodon in the future.