Mastodon is interesting. On the surface it might just seem like a Twitter clone, but it’s based on a federated protocol called ‘ActivityPub’. What this means in practice is that there’s no central server. There’s many instances. Each of these instances is managed by different people, and many of them focus on specific interests.
With email, it doesn’t matter which provider you go with Thanks to universal SMTP standards that every server uses, you can exchange messages with everyone else. This is the same with Mastodon. You’re not siloed into a single instance, and you can follow people from any other instance. Unlike email, it appears that with Mastodon you can actually migrate to different instances if you don’t like your current one.
I’ve left Twitter behind, too, and am having a much better time on Mastodon ever since. I plan on setting up a proper OSNews account on Mastodon as well, but that requires some coordination with Adam (our admin) and David (OSNews’ owner) that I haven’t gotten round to yet. You can follow me here if you so desire.
I tried Mastadon, and it was boring. In the past week, Twitter has gotten a 1000x better, and having my voice back without fear is the best thing.
Well as a troll, it might not be what you are seeking. Good you got Twitter back. Hopefully we can keep it as a troll zoo from now on.
I feel like I can speak freely on Twitter now without being anonymously reported for things that aren’t remotely controversial. Good for Elon. I should go buy a Tesla for supporting free speech in a cancel culture political landscape.
Are the Musk fans even for real? I feel sad for them.
I don’t like Mastodon myself, but that’s more because I think microblogging/social media is bad to start with, and Twitter being a giant archive of art and opinion should never have happened. Twitter was designed to generate conflict and monetize users’ words and time; a federated FOSS clone of it suffers the same design issues, even if moderation and attitudes are usually better.
Social media magnifies view points you agree with to keep you on the site to show you more ads. Because of this, it also leads to extreme polarization. Using a PiHole and uBlock Origin, I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen an ad, but Mastodon is the same echo chamber with the same “attitudes” as every other platform. For further reference, watch “The Social Dilemma” documentary.
Yes, and you do realize Musk still wants the echo chamber right? Trolls and harassment are orthogonal to echo chamber issues – nobody is going to change their opinion because idiots are yelling slurs at them, not with the feed algorithms still in place. All permitting harassment does is drive “engagement” and create conflict, i.e. more money for Twitter, while making the experience less pleasant for normal people and feeding the trolls’ radicalization.
Sounds like you are a firm advocate for censorship. Go lick Dementia Joe’s boots some more.
LMAO
En.Senada,
I’m following the discussion and all the points made sense until this point, both yours and rainbowsocks. I agree with you about what social media does and with rainbowsocks about musk’s behavior, these are not mutually exclusive. Rainbowsocks didn’t even mention anything about censorship though and the random political taunt seems uncalled for and unproductive to the dialog.
@Alfman
He’s probably far-right, his idea of “censorship” is “oh no I am not allowed to bombard people with bigoted slurs.” I’m sure he’d change his tune if it were e.g. radical feminist separatists claiming men are subhuman, or Black separatists claiming that white people are inherently evil. In any case his reaction makes sense if you view the free speech/censorship argument as in bad faith and subservient to his political agenda.
IRL, if you follow people around yelling bigotry at them in “the public square”, you may get arrested because that is a crime. But people like En.Senada do not seem to be on close terms with reality.
Those claiming to “defend democracy” are the first to try to try to silence viewpoints they don’t agree with.
En.Senada,
Says who? You must realize this is a straw man argument right?
You are free to hold whatever opinions you want, but it doesn’t add up that people who are pro democracy should not criticize Musk or anyone else. Criticism is perfectly in line with democracy. One just hopes that the debate is informed by facts and respect for others, although going by the political discourse in the US a lot of this seems like wishful thinking unfortunately. I’m legitimately worried about what happens if the would-be authoritarians manage to overthrow democracy. I never imagined the path towards authoritarianism in the US would be so clear, but continuous vilification that divides and conquers the public alarmingly could bring us to a point where swaths of them would ignore common sense to elect a dictator to fight perceived enemies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Bill Shooter of Bul,
+1 insightful 🙂
There’s a good likelihood of mastodon just collapsing if a lot of twitter folk migrate to mastodon.
Ruby on rails … not known for it’s efficiency/scalability.
Is that possible? My impression is that federation with separate servers made this very unlikely. Maybe underpowered servers would buckle, but not “Mastadon”.
Pleroma is more scalable (written in Elixir), and has a rep for being easier to set up last I checked. However it also bypasses some of the strictly voluntary “security” measures that Mastodon enforces, e.g. accounts on a Pleroma instance can view instances that have blocked them or their instance while logged in. IIRC this isn’t anything you couldn’t do with an incognito window, but the lower barrier makes it popular with trolls; back when I was on Mastodon, I was blocking some anime avatar incel on a Pleroma instance at least once a day. And from my interactions with them, the Pleroma devs also leaned trollish. So Pleroma overall had a poor reputation with a lot of Mastodon users from what I remember
This was back in like 2018 though, I’m not sure if/how the scene has changed since.
p13,
I wouldn’t have used ruby on rails given it’s performance either haha. But I need to look more at how mastodon is implemented. Because servers are membership based, it seems you have some control over the level of load. And (again depending on implementation) the federated functions may be very efficient. Consider how well DNS and IRC are able to scale to large user counts while cutting back on network requirements through federation. Is anyone here familiar with mastodon development?
I think “twitter” could be a near perfect application for federation and P2P. Decades ago RIAA lawsuits in combination with “safe harbor” for centralized providers radically shifted the industry towards centralized service providers that are not legally responsible for content.
https://www.justia.com/intellectual-property/copyright/copyright-safe-harbor/
It would be very interesting to see a communal backlash by the population shift us back towards federation and P2P. Large scale centralization is dangerous and society shouldn’t be based around a few ultra powerful tech corporations. I think that displacing the corporate incumbents is an uphill battle, but it could happen given enough dissatisfaction.
It sucks that a backlash might have to be driven by hateful ideas, misinformation and/or illegal activities instead of “normal people” doing normal things. I want these federated networks to draw in friendly and intelligent people but that will be hard if they’re full of hate & trolls.
The federated model of Mastodon is cool but unfortunately there are no lists like on Twitter.
Mastodon is impressive for what it is, but the security is awful. I have a total of maybe three DM’s ever in twitter, but worth noting that DM’s are not encrypted and every server gets them unencrypted. So, like don’t say anything you wouldn’t want widely distributed. I predict this will come back to bite some one.
I’ve seen a bunch of people move to Cohost lately, which looks interesting – it supposedly doesn’t have ads/algos and just requires a subscription fee to post, which sounds like a much healthier business model. Though other aspects of its model sound MLM-ish enough to worry me a bit.
TBQH I’m not fond of centralized anything, but in the absence of something actually secure…
Welp, there look to be scary problems with Cohost too: https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1588705470621122561
The idea Elon Musk will buy Twitter and preserve the freedom of speech in USA. Both far right and woke indoctrinated people will be left disappointed. Among others. The idea there will be some massive exodus to Mastodon. There won’t be that. As there is way to less intentional abuse and dopamine spikes involved.