Why Would Anyone Use Another Centralized Social Media Service After This?
from the make-the-right-choice dept
So, it’s been quite a year for legacy, centralized social media — and all without any really big change to the laws that govern it (yet — the EU’s are coming into force shortly, but possibly too late to matter). Meta seems to be collapsing into its own gravity. Twitter has been taken over by the equivalent of a stoned ChatGPT (very confident, but very wrong) and seems to be rapidly driving the company off a cliff. Turns out maybe we didn’t need antitrust reform: we just needed two obscenely rich tech CEOs to be totally out of touch with humanity.
Of course, into the void, competitors are appearing. There were a few small ones that were already around that have sought to jump into the limelight, including things like Hive and Tribel. And then there have been some other upstarts that are rushing to try to be the “new Twitter” like Post, T2 and Spoutable.
But, really, after all this, I cannot fathom how anyone can possibly get all that excited about joining yet another centralized social media site. Perhaps I’m biased (note: I am biased) because it was my frustration with the problems of these big, centralized social media services that made me write my Protocols, Not Platforms paper a few years ago. But, after all of that, the big question that kept coming up about it was “sure, but how would you get anyone to actually use it.”
For years I had argued that the best bet was for one of the big companies to embrace this model and move away from a centralized model to a decentralized protocol setup. Because, it’s one thing to build a decentralized social media protocol (lots of people have tried). But it’s another thing altogether to get people to use it (lots of people have failed). So, it was exciting when Jack Dorsey announced that Twitter was looking to do exactly that. The Bluesky project has continued to move forward, despite all this mess, though it seems like quite the longshot that Twitter will ever adopt it. I’m still excited about the possibilities for it though.
But, really, what’s been fascinating over the past two months has been the rapid resurgence of the fediverse/ActivityPub, with most people focused on Mastodon, one useful and more widely adopted open source software to create a federated social network.
For years, whenever people talked to me about the protocols, not platforms approach to things, and asked about ActivityPub, I frequently downplayed it and brushed it off as less serious. My vision wasn’t about federation (where you basically have a large number of “mini” centralized players who can all talk to each other), but something that was truly decentralized, where you controlled your own data, and could choose who can connect to it.
However, with millions of new active users rushing into Mastodon, I’m forced to reevaluate that. I think I may have become too focused on what I saw of as the limits of a federated setup (putting yourself into someone else’s fiefdom), without recognizing that if it started to take off (as it has), it would become easier and easier for people to set up their own instances, allowing those who are concerned about setting up in someone else’s garden the freedom to set up their own plot of land.
And then, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was likely bigger players would enter the market as well. I’ve started wondering about when Mastodon/ActivityPub might have its “Gmail moment.” Some people may not remember, but Google entering the webmail space on on April 1, 2004 completely upended the concept of email. It was so different and so much more useful, that many people legitimately thought it was a classic April Fool’s joke. Prior to that, you either had clunky email from your ISP or you used a slow and complicated webmail provider that would charge you if you used more than 10Mb of storage. And then Gmail showed up with a clean interface, that focused on tags (rather than folders) and drag and drop and (*gasp*) 1 gig of storage. And the entire email space changed overnight.
It seems likely to me that something similar likely could happen with Mastodon. Maybe even Google could do it with their own instance. Or possibly someone brand new. Or maybe someone old. Yesterday, Mozilla announced plans to offer a publicly accessible instance. And that seems like a milestone moment. Automattic (who hosts Techdirt), the owners of Tumblr, have said that Tumblr will add support for ActivityPub as well.
Both of those seem like big moves. Not that Mastodon needs giant players to validate it. It’s doing just fine on its own. But one of the big complaints some people have is that they don’t know which instance to sign up with, and the whole sign up process seems confusing. Most people who get past that initial concern and just choose an instance and start playing around figure it all out, but even that mental cost of having to pick in instance likely scares off a bunch of people it shouldn’t. Having a few “mainstream” instances that new users can be directed to seems like it will be really useful.
Also, having some bigger companies developing for ActivityPub can also be useful. Just in the last couple months there has been a fairly astounding set of new Mastodon tools and apps popping up, but, again, having a big “Gmail moment” where things start to expand to another level can only help.
Mastodon obviously isn’t perfect, and it has some very real issues. Content moderation questions don’t go away, obviously, They just become somewhat different (and somewhat the same). But I’ve been surprised at how quickly the fediverse has already been evolving. I’ve certainly run across some trolls and spammers, but often they disappear incredibly quickly. Earlier this week, I even had an instance admin reach out to me to apologize for a troll who had been hassling me, which was a different kind of experience than on any other social media site.
There remain some pretty big questions regarding scaling, but so far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how it’s all gone. There are certainly a lot of other questions regarding legal issues for instance operators. I hope that those running instances take those issues seriously, and do basic things like register a DMCA agent. But it’s increasingly seeming like it might even work?
At least on a personal level, Mastodon currently feels like Twitter around the year 2010, when it was… just fun?
Either way, I’m now much more interested in how the federated system could actually fulfill the promise of the protocols, not platforms vision. Whereas before I had feared the many fiefdoms still involved giving up too much control, the ease for individuals or small groups to set up their own instance has me reconsidering that. I can’t find it now, but I saw someone joke something along the lines of the progression Mastodon users go through is something along the lines of 1. Wait, I have to pick an instance? What is that, how do I choose? 2. Oh, I see, this isn’t that complicated. 3. I am so freaking excited to try to run my own instance.
That may be an exaggeration, but many people do quickly realize the cool aspects of federation, which allows for a balance between “I don’t want to have to do everything myself” and “oh, hey, I can do everything myself if I want to.”
That said, I’m still quite interested in other, even more decentralized ideas out there. I’m excited to play with Bluesky when it’s finally available. And over the past few days I’ve been playing around with nostr, a very, very early, and very, very basic (but extraordinarily simple) new distributed social media protocol that is based on clients and relays. Jack Dorsey (who has been pushing Bluesky, obviously) is also super excited about nostr and has said he thinks it’s the realization of my paper. I wouldn’t go that far, but I would say it’s been really fun to play around with, if you don’t mind the fact that it is super, super buggy and probably not very clear for the less technical users. If Mastodon feels like Twitter in 2010, nostr feels like Twitter in the summer of 2006.
All that is to say… there’s a lot of fun and interesting development going on none of which relies on a big centralized, VC backed social media company. While those are rushing in to try to fill the void… I’m kinda wondering why would anyone invest in building up a social graph and content on one of those?
We have a chance, collectively, to avoid the mistakes of the last decade and a half. We have an opportunity to not put ourselves (and our data) onto someone else’s farm. I absolutely loathe terms like “surveillance capitalism” or the phrase “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” (because I think both are misleading), but I am perplexed at people who make both of those claims about Facebook and Twitter… and now rush to sign up for some brand new company based on the same sort of model, with the same sorts of risks.
We’re at a fork in the road, and it seems like we should be looking to take the other path. The one that is open, not closed. The one that gives us more freedom, not less. The one that pushes the power out to you, the users, rather than the latest billionaire. The power of the internet was that it was built on protocols, and gave the power to the ends of the network.
For whatever reason, the old castles are crumbling. Let’s not run to new ones. Let’s go back to the more open world that we were promised in the early days of the internet, whether it’s ActivityPub or Bluesky or nostr or something totally different. There’s no reason to hand over all the control to just one company that doesn’t provide an escape path.
Filed Under: bluesky, decentralized, mastodon, nostr, platforms, protocols, protocols not platforms
Companies: facebook, meta, twitter
Comments on “Why Would Anyone Use Another Centralized Social Media Service After This?”
The same reason they’d do it after AOL. Or LiveJournal. Or Tumblr. Or…
Unfortunately, it appears that the advantages of the open web are something people need to re-learn every few years.
Re:
Most people won’t learn, for various reasons. One is that they didn’t see this before – AOL was gone as a mainstream thing before many Americans old enough to drink now were born. Then, while they had their heydays, the other sites you mention weren’t actually used by a majority of the population.
There’s people who think they go to a website by typing the URL into Google then clicking the result, and people who think that an app is the only way they can use a website. Those people neither know nor care about the open web or how things operate behind the scenes. What they care about is they can use a site, and their friends are there.
This will be the same. While people in our circles care greatly about the methods by which free speech are protected, how much power individual people or corporations have over it and all sorts of other concerns, most will just go wherever current trends say they should go.
We should do our part in directing people toward open, decentralised alternatives, but while people are discovering the likes of Mastodon for its benefits in this area, even more are trying it once then giving up because choosing a server is “too complicated”. Or trying the first one and giving up because they’re overloaded with new users, never thinking to try a different server.
I don’t want to be all doom and gloom here, but from various experience ranging from supporting public desktop users early in my career to what I encounter in conversations with less techy friends and family, you can’t expect them to “relearn” these things. They’ve never learned, and if you asked them about it they wouldn’t understand the question…
Re: Re:
…might want to check your math on that one. 21 years ago was when they bought Time Warner in what was then the largest corporate merger in history.
Re: Re: Re:
Man, that company can’t stop itself from falling into shitty mergers, can it.
Re: Re: Re:
9/11 was over 21 years ago. AOL merged with Time Warner around the beginning of the new year 20 (not 21) years ago: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/aol-time-warner-complete-merger-with-fcc-blessing/
Re: Re: Re:
I might be off by a year or two in my recollection, but where I’m from (UK), people pretty much jettisoned AOL as a major provider in 1997/8 when Freeserve introduced mainstream dialup separated from the content provider, and they collapsed when broadband hit the mainstream in the early 2000s. I remember it as AOL already being on a downturn when that merger happened, they just hoped that expanding into a media company rather than moving to broadband was the right direction. But, again, that might be personal bias in my memory.
Either way, there’s a lot of people who had never used AOL now, so expecting them to relearn something from that is hard because they never saw it happen the first time. Not that the people who used it did either – most of them just learn to click on a different icon.
Re: Re: Re:2 Mockery
Yeah. I’m pretty sure that we were already making fun of people who still used an AOL email by the late 1990s. The gist of it was “AOL, eh…Nice. um…why don’t you join us on the ACTUAL Internet?”
Re: Re:
Or, to put it simply, they don’t want to learn, or to be informed.
Re: Re: Re:
I think that’s oversimplifying things. There are lots of people who are willing to learn, but have to decide what’s most important to dedicate their time learning. And trying to figure out a decentralized social media service just isn’t high on that priority list.
Having a way to “ease in” via Tumblr or Mozilla’s service will be the Gmail equivalent for these people.
Re: Re: Re:2
It is an oversimplification, but also, very observable.
Most people, myself included, wouold have to be forced into learning new things, and only if our livelihoods depended on it.
Otherwise they would pick the path of least resistance, claiming that simply surviving is tiring enough.
Re: You forgot...
The best one of all! PRODIGY!
Re: Re:
They had some nice jams.
Re: Re:
As in Prodigy vs. Stratton Oakmont, which led Chris Cox and Ron Wyden to write §230? THAT Prodigy?
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Why? Because it's fun.
Twitter is better than ever, Mike, despite your relentless attacks on the site and your unrequited love for the previous, US security state-collaborating regime there (a regime that failed to effectively combat CSAM, btw).
Re:
Given that Musk gutted the team at Twitter responsible for doing that job, how can the new regime be doing any better at it?
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
no no, he “gutted the team” of people pretending to do that job.
By actual metrics, they are doing a better job.
Evidence is pretty strong that 75% of the previous employee base just didn’t do anything useful. The hardest working people were probably those engaged in draconian and often unconstitutional censorship, but they they STILL weren’t doing anything about kiddie porn.
Amazing, isn’t it?
Re: Re: Re:
[citation needed]
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:2
75% of the company is gone now. It’s working the same or better.
No, you don’t need a citation, actually. Don’t be dumb.
Re: Re: Re:3
Well, I guess you really like hate speech, racism, bigotry and conspiracy theories then because Twitter is rife with it now.
Also, how does something work better when it lost a big chunk of the income since nobody wants their ads next to the above topics, huh?
Seems stupidity is a prerequisite for people like you because no reasonable person would spill the kind of verbal bile you do on a regular basis.
Re: Re: Re:4
I assume he means that since Musk fired a bunch of people who were in the middle of performing maintenance, updates and general operations and things didn’t explode on day one, things are fine.
The fun thing about such things is that you often don’t know what’s needed until they’re needed, and what you don’t know until you need to know. Musk already had a problem randomly shutting down microservices then needing to re-enable it because 2FA no longer worked. I wonder how many other issues that nobody understood were there apart from the guys who were fired are waiting.
Re: Re: Re:5
Kinda like with Trump defunding the CDC until the Coronavirus hit our shores.
Re: Re: Re:5
This firing people is why I’m dubious Musk has the ability to manipulate his own polls beyond bots, troll farms, and his rabid stans.
I think there was a lot of speculation that he wanted to use that recent poll as a way to escape Twitter and pretend he was listening to the users, but clearly he has not gone away yet. Instead he decided to limit fake decision-making to limited customers.
Which narrows it down to people who apparently don’t mind almost all of their tweets being replied to with someone posting a “this guy paid for Twitter” meme. Which is increasingly surreal when a news article references Twitter and that meme is the third reply when you click through to the original tweet.
This is something I spent a bit of time talking with my old high school friends about when catching up recently. Unlike myself, most of them actually stuck with tech degrees and careers but one shared a detailed list of the technical ways Twitter could fail and it is actually very likely things have already failed that haven’t caused apparent problems yet alongside the multiple reported ways Twitter has failed.
The 2FA fail was not the only reported failure, after all. That Twitter thread was the equivalent character count to several long and mind-numbing pages, but there’s a MIT Technology Review article that shares some similarly relevant information, if not in such painful detail
Re: Re: Re:3
It is, is it?
Re: Re: Re:3
“75% of the company is gone now. It’s working the same or better.”
The pilot and the co-pilot just jumped out of the door. The plane is still flying. Therefore, they didn’t do anything.
This is the fun thing about a lot of real operations and development. People think you don’t do anything, but if nobody’s there to fix problems, they keep happening. After a few months, you start realising there was a dodgy server that someone kept an eye on, a bug that needed intervention at known intervals, there wasn’t time to properly fix something so a container was set up to run a script every week. You’ll notice eventually, and by the time that happens, the guys who knew the 10 second fix to avoid 12 hour downtime are long gone…
Re: Re: Re:4
Consider Twitter’s infrastructure, that dodgy server that only needed a 10 second fix may start a cascade failure which Twitter may never recover from before becoming bankrupt.
Re: Re: Re:3
Is that why advertisers are leaving in droves and forcing Musk to sack employees? Well, not really in the latter. Psychopathic corporate leaders always look towards gutting their own grassroots-level grunt workers as a means of making sure that their 32nd yacht fund remains briefly intact.
Re: Re: Re:4
Metrics differ in how much time they take to change. It’s possible that the increased traffic inspired by Musk inviting trolls back and people scrambling to discuss an alternative have offset some of the loss of advertisers. It’s possible that he managed to retain enough day-to-day operations staff that they can fix known holes on a temporarily basis. It’s possible that he happened to take the reins when there were no critical outstanding bugs that required input from specific developers.
The question is how that looks in a few months. I wouldn’t be the first company I’ve seen brought to their knees because the wrong people were forced out.
Re: Re: Re:5
Or…
When the people who provide the necessary services for Twitter (like the office premises, utilities and all that fun stuff) start telling the media that Twitter has not paid their bills in months.
It’s mostly scuttlebutt right now, unfortunately.
Re: Re: Re:
And just where is this so-called evidence?
Re: Re: Re:2 and where is the evidence?
Don’t you read Space Karen’s tweets? How much more “evidence” do you need??
Re: Re: Re:3
disclaimer: limit daily and weekly intake of Elon Musk’s tweets, they can induce lasting psychosis when built up in your system over time.
Re: Re: Re:
[citation needed] Which metrics?
What evidence? That Twitter hasn’t completely collapsed yet? That doesn’t mean anything. For one thing, no one really expected the site to just fail completely in such a short amount of time. If anything, people are surprised at how quickly Musk is doing damage to Twitter. None of the detractors or experts predicted an immediate collapse like you suggest, so this is meaningless.
Also, “useful” doesn’t mean “absolutely necessary”. A car will still work if you remove the speedometer. That doesn’t mean the speedometer doesn’t do anything useful.
Unless you can provide actual evidence that those employees didn’t do anything useful, this is an unsupported assertion.
Re: Re:
Twitter: bleeding out in a gutter, every tooth broken, holding a single thumb up “Never been better, I swear.”
It’s all so Trumpian:
“Elon ‘Made Twitter Great Again’, it’s got yuuuge mDAU now. So many users, you wouldn’t believe how many users!
The best, simply the best. Full of really fine people, class acts.”
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Best Pegging
I’m told by people who would know that Vijaya Gadde gives the best pegging with a 12″ strap-on. Mike is very upset that his mistress lost her job.
Re: Re:
You sound like the kind of horrible person that doesn’t even return their shopping carts.
Re: Re: Re:
Also, very bizarrely obsessed with other peoples’ genitals.
Re: Re: Choo choo all abourd the meltdown express!
Well we are up to the sexual fantasy phase of the crybabby hissy fit.
Re: Re:
I hate to respond to this, but whoever said Twitter is less repressed was right! It’s cool you can admit that you fantasize about being pegged by Vijaya Gadde as a part of your fantasy about Mike being your ‘Daddy’.
I do think it’s problematic that you rope real life people into these fantasies without paying them for it, at least. That’s basically theft of labor even if you’re not counting it as sexual harassment.
Re: Re: Re:
Exactly. Thinking good about someone is basically rape. Thinking bad about someone is rape, too. Just goes to show how ingrained toxic masculinity is. You never see women, cis or trans, ever have this sort of disturbing thought.
Re:
… said nobody not on hallucinogens, ever.
Re:
i laughed so hard i nearly sprayed my screen. Good one!
Re:
“Twitter is better than ever”
The fun things about statements like that is that they’re totally subjective.
Other people are having very different experiences. Them stating so does not make them wrong just because you are experiencing something else.
Re: Re:
“Twitter is better than ever” for neo-nazis, MAGAts, and other assorted sociopaths. The sane and sober people, however, are going over to Mastodon.
Re: Re:
This.
For example, Twitter Japan sat on years of user reports, and suddenly went through the whole pile at light speed after the takeover. This was definitely an improvement for users in that region. From that kind of perspective, I’d say it’s perfectly reasonable to think things are better than ever. If you don’t care about anything else that is happening anyway.
Re:
Hi Elon!
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Mutually Beneficial
Perhaps there’s room for everyone. Considering that twitter mDAUs are increasing, as are mastodon, it just goes to show that everyone needs their own space. The normies can become active once again on twitter now that the repression is gone, and the folks who demand a high grade of speech control can use mastadon. It’s fun for everyone when everyone gets their way.
Re:
Ah yes, the repression that magically goes away when you checks notes “silence journalists”.
Re:
Hey, Koby: What specific speech did “normies” feel they weren’t allowed to use at Twitter until after Musk took over?
Re:
There is room for everyone, Koby.
Just not for you or your white supremacist ilk.
Re:
I guarantee you they are not.
Lol. Dude. Elon’s regime is way more “repressive” than anything that was at Twitter before.
Re: Re:
Elon provides the freedom to wear any shirt you want as long as it’s brown and any boots you want as long as they’re jackboots. The Henry Ford comparisons are really starting to make sense to me, I suppose.
No long must fascists repress their violent impulse on Twitter… ugh I can’t even. I wish Twitter at least improved the vocabulary of users instead of just making so many of them salute every time ‘number go up’.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
“Elon’s regime is way more “repressive” than anything that was at Twitter before.”
You have to be an actual moron to think that. But you are, so yay!
Re: Re: Re:
Thanks for providing a great example of how not to act, Matthew.
Every time you call Mike or anyone else on this site a ‘moron’, it’s at best farcical because you’ve shown your total unwillingness to listen to anyone else or even to take the time to comprehend what they’re saying. Attempting to insult our intelligence continues to reflect on your own.
Mike thinks you can do better, which is very generous of him, but that’s something I’ve seen him make a habit of even if he gets frustrated at times. However, you have to want to do better instead of just being a jerk to everyone here. I get that it can be satisfying to rage-post, really I do, but it also happens to be an endless downward spiral that doesn’t end up anywhere worth going.
Re: Re: Re:
That tells us more about you than anything Twitter is doing.
That is, you actually like the fact that you will not be punished for being a violent white supremacist on Twitter.
You are an actionable threat to American safety. That is, you are an actual terrorist under FBI definitions.
Re: Re: Re:
Can you. Just. Stop. Projecting so hard.
Re: Re: Re:
And yet here you are. Losing an argument to one, so YAY!
Re: Re: Re:
Then why aren’t you thinking that? 🙃
Re:
“Considering that twitter mDAUs are increasing”
That’s meaningless on its own. I’ll admit I’ve been using it more recently than I have in the past – but, that’s largely to see where the people I care about following are moving to, and to see first hand the hilarious results of Musk’s bad decisions. So, I’m now in the mDAU group for some periods, where I wouldn’t have been before.
The proof isn’t what the figures look like now, but in 6 months – 1 year time. Anyone can have a spike in popularity but it’s another test to see who remains. I suspect there will be a drop similar to the Tesla stock drop. Let’s see.
“The normies”
What’s interesting is that you still think that describes you and your friends and not everyone else. Especially given that the mDAU figure you’ve been told to care about increased rather significantly since you started coming here whining about your type being kicked off.
Please don’t insult ChatGPT or drug users by comparing them with Elon Musk. (:
Cory Doctorow wrote about “better failure for social media” and how our data plays into the issues of exiting a crumbling social media service. Well worth the read.
Re:
Doctorow! I love him, but he fills me with a deep sense of inadaquecy. I can’t even keep up with reading Plluralistic and its many fascinating links. He’s either ateam of people or …I was gonna suggest speed but you cant mantain functional lucidity beyond 3 days
because normies don’t fucking care, Mike.
They will return to the same vomit they just threw up because they simply do not care enough to actually read up on the news, look deeper, and actually think for themselves.
The fact that the “conservative” assholes are here to shit on your comment section is just more evidence.
History Repeating
thousands of people running their own servers and people selecting one or more to join and enjoying it…
Sounds like WWIV from the 80’s to me…
What's missing from decentalized...
Is good one-touch ability to locate people of interest and search effectively.
This was the problem that google “solved” for the web better than AltaVista and Yahoo.
I don’t think most people need algorithm produced feeds at all. Using a timeline of followed and a “trending” seems to be quite workable.
Now, there is certainly secret-sauce algorithm in search results and in picking trends, and a certain amount of secrecy is needed to avoid SEO-gamers from screwing things up.
What does seem viable to me would be having the search and trending functions be provided by third-parties that have first class access to the distributed platform. The frontend app stays the same, and you select your search and trending from those who seem to give you the results you find most useful. They can have some space for advertising. Some of these can be free-by-advertising, and some can subscribe for better ad-free results.
Re:
“I don’t think most people need algorithm produced feeds at all. Using a timeline of followed and a “trending” seems to be quite workable”
I’d certainly argue that algorithms trying to second-guess people is a block rather than benefit to effective use. I know for a fact that I’ve missed conversations and IRL events because one social media platform tried to show me posts from days ago it thought I’d like rather than what people I follow have recently posted.
On the other hand, I have no interest in “trending”. I want to see the selection of people I want to follow, not what random people I’ve never heard of want to see. I like to branch out, but I also don’t want to see, for example, my feed being full of World Cup news because it’s “trending” when my main reason for using it is to follow tech, movie and music stuff I’m in to as an escape from seeing balls being kicked around everywhere else I go…
Options are great, but given that half the people I see complaining about stuff on social media haven’t worked out that they can block users and topics they dislike, I wouldn’t hold my breath for them using something that gives them more control.
“The frontend app stays the same, and you select your search and trending from those who seem to give you the results you find most useful”
A noble aim. But, you do have to bear in mind the public. They find more choice very confusing, and want what “works” rather than what they actually need. That’s why things like TikTok have been popular – they’re very good at guessing what will keep a user engaged, rather than what people are actually looking for. If people are engaged, they’re not going to look around for alternatives.
Options are great, but people are lazy. That’s why you hear so many complaints about Google search nowadays, but people act as if they control every website and online search option. They don’t look for the alternatives, let alone test them out and see if they’re better for their needs.
Re: Re:
People are lazy because centralized websites encouraged them to be so. They also underestimate how internet literate they are. Search filtering is a skill that needs to be taught in schools for that not to be the case.
Mozilla.Social
Did it? There’s no mention of open registrations in the 2022-12-20 announcement.
Re: Mozilla.social
I mean, yes, the first line in that article is
But I’m not quite sure what that means. It’s not “a gmail moment” if they “just” offer it to Mozillans, for example. (But it would still be good! Better probably.)
Re: Re:
GMail wasn’t a “GMail moment”. They helped change the way in which email web clients operated at the time and drove a lot of interest with their promise of unlimited capacity (which has since changed), but they didn’t even come out of beta for many years, and even then I’d argue that their dominance eventually came about as much because of the association with GSuite and the lack of direct response from Hotmail and Yahoo mail as a whole in many areas.
However, it’s a decent proposition. They, and Firefox, are not on the top of the heap any longer, but for the public who care about brands it could be an interesting move compared to something completely “new” to them like Mastodon. Plus, there’s precedent here. IE6 had a complete chokehold on the web browser market until Firefox came in and took over with its vastly superior capabilities. While Google/Chromium have since become the dominant player, there’s nothing stopping people from moving again, especially if they can find a way to be attractive in the mobile space.
I’m not sure if this will happen, and I honestly think that the “winner” here will be whoever a majority of the more popular Tweeters move to rather than the one that’s actually best. But, if they can get attention and traction I think they’ll have more success than just hoping that people choose Mastadon.
Let’s see. It’s still early days, and until either Musk actually collapses Twitter or there’s a consensus among the major users as to where to go, it’s too early to call.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
I actually hope mastodon takes off, or something similar
But you still have been proven very, very wrong about twitter and refuse to cop to it, so fuck off, Mike.
Re:
The projection is strong with this one!
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
not an argument
Re: Re: Re:
You didn’t offer one. Why should they?
Re: Re: Re:
Considering all the times that Mike and all of us commenters have proven you wrong about Twitter, why do I need another argument when you have already been proven wrong.
Re:
Such a bitter snowflake.
Re:
The Plaintiff’s failure to cite the substance of their claims, as is required for those claims to be taken seriously, compels dismissal.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
ignoring that you have been presented with evidence does not mean that you have been presented with evidence.
Going to try to beat out Masnick for gaslighting, huh?
Re: Re: Re:
Pointing to a water gun as evidence of a shooting doesn’t turn it into a smoking gun.
Re: Re: Re:
“ignoring that you have been presented with evidence does not mean that you have been presented with evidence”
Similarly, claiming that someone’s been proven wrong when the evidence presented does nothing of the sort does not mean they’ve been proven wrong.
Re:
… said nobody literate enough to understand what the word “proven” means.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Twitter is better than ever… wow
Re:
I might well be for some people.
Whether that’s a majority of people, the people who pay the bills or the people who attract the advertisers who pay the bills remains to be seen remains to be tested. But, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
“Twitter is better than ever” is a subjective claim that can’t really be disproven. “Twitter is a long-term viable concern capable of paying its overheads” is the claim to be tested.
Re: Re:
I have to agree with you here; what makes Twitter better or worse is subjective aside from where it’s due to a lack of technically adept employees because they all got fired. Ignoring that, it’s cruising along functionally until it hits an iceberg.
Many of the people on Twitter probably love it for what I hated it for, which is essentially just drama, fighting, and the same memes over an over again. Punctuated by the same reaction GIFs over and over again. I hope the instance I joined ends up being a good way to deprogram from that chaotic environment.
It really strikes me that depending on who you are on social media, you can have a radically different experience regarding constant harassment. The Twitter of now is the same Twitter I’ve seen ever time I’ve made an account, but I’m starting to think that Twitter was more hidden from people who aren’t marginalized until the current owner bought it.
I left before that because I had decided that he was going to buy it and this would happen, and I’m glad that some good is coming out of that in the possibilities for people to migrate to spaces that don’t have a festering underbelly of bigotry like Twitter did. Hopefully humanity won’t drive Mastodon off a cliff like it’s namesakes supposedly all were.
Re:
At least spambots try to be nice.
Technologically Superior Platforms
Technologically speaking, Mastodon is superior to Twitter at a very fundamental level. I liken it to what happened when the world was introduced to the eDonkey2000 network when everyone was still used to FastTrack/Kazaa and Limewire. It is much harder for one entity to “take over” a whole network and it’s technically harder to censor something across the entire network.
The thing is, technologically superiority is by no means guaranteed to be successful. I’ve seen this happen too many times where a technologically superior alternatives fail to gain public traction. Betamax was technologically superior to VHS. VHS wound up being adopted. ANts P2P was technologically superior to Limewire/eMule/Limewire/WinMX/Bearshare/etc. The public balked at the idea of having no idea what you are uploading and was never really widely adopted to any significant extent. I could go on.
Building something that has superiority is a good engineering problem to fix. However, it is by no means going to mean something is going to be successful. You also have the added hurdle of having wide adoption of the public as well which is so often not in the wheelhouse of a good engineer/coder. Even when better alternatives exist, it’s not an indicator that the public will automatically go flocking to it overnight.
I am growing increasingly optimistic that Mastodon can overcome the public adoption hurdle. The network is approaching 10 million users which is an accomplishment that is likely beyond the wild imaginations of early adopters and architects of the network as soon as a year ago. I’m looking at Mastodon and keep thinking “this could be it! This could become the next big thing!”
One reason why I am looking optimistically at decentralized platforms is the increasingly tightening grip of government regulations on such platforms. Demanding link taxes? Good luck getting a decentralized system to cooperate. Demanding that people get pushed government sponsored content on video sharing platforms? Not going to happen on a decentralized video sharing platform (like PeerTube). The more the government pushes, the more attractive these alternatives become.
It really sucks that we now live in a world where basic human expression is becoming the new piracy (at least in Canada anyway), but I take comfort in knowing that decentralized alternatives already exist. The seeds are certainly there to grow a better internet of tomorrow. The question is, how will it all play out?
Putting our mutual loathing aside, I decided to see if Mastodon lived up to the praise I’ve given it and did sign up. So far I enjoy it more that I ever enjoyed any incarnation of Twitter. Mind you, I signed up for what’s probably a much-smaller instance than one of the mastodon (dot) social one, because why not?
And while I do see the content I create on the instance I’m on as something that would be a (relatively worthless) product on Twitter, it feels more like a useful contribution given the focus of the instance I’m on. It also pays off in being grouped with more people who share common interests and enlighten me instead of constantly dealing with reply guys.
Maybe that will change, but I’m willing to give it a try. And to leave social media if it’s a major fail like Twitter has been. I’d say that as a social media environment, it’s the first one that actually makes me WANT to be nicer to people. That’s got to be worth something all by itself.
Re:
I agree with your analysis. Whereas twitter made me want to bring out the [proverbial] flamethrowers, the Mastodon fediverse makes me want to have an Alice-in-Wonderland-esque tea party [also proverbially speaking!] with the other people using the Mastodon network.
Re: Re:
Right, like I really feel like working harder to be respectful in disagreements and find ways to collaborate.
It doesn’t hurt that not long after I joined and introduced myself I got help right off the bat that’s gotten me towards progress on some actual goals of mine (like setting up my fiction portfolio so people can easily read my short stories). I didn’t even join the one for science fiction writers, but it’s nice to know I can go look for people to follow there.
Re:
I agree as well: the mastadon/fediverse has been great. I was a bit skeptical about the whole federated instances thing, but for my use case it’s proven super cool. I’m a scientist who uses social media for networking and sharing results. (Basically, a bulletin board for cool papers). A bunch of instances have popped up that roughly correspond to scientific subfields. Because of how we follow people, the network architecture of my corner of the fediverse exactly mirrors my interest level: way more posts from fields I’m close to, fewer from further away. And this is without any sort of top-down feed curation from an opaque algorithm.
And overall people seem invested in a clean start, individually and collectively asking, “How can we make this place positive rather than toxic? It’s been wonderfully refreshing.
Re: Re:
I just saw this reply, but I’m going to have to look for some scientific subfield-specific corners because while I love my current server being able to connect with academics in my fields of interest would be priceless.
Re:
I’d say that as a social media environment, it’s the first one that actually makes me WANT to be nicer to people. That’s got to be worth something all by itself.
That’s the golden ticket, in my humble and admittedly unsolicited opinion. The presence of a generally adversarial element on twitter is its biggest weakness. My experience was that there was no comment too trifle for someone to have a problem with. And surely they had to let you know how wrong you were in the most explicit terms available to them.
Perhaps letting all the antisocial folks stay on twitter because of free speech just wasn’t the best model for a social network.
Re: Re:
And really I feel Twitter has made me react more antisocially and be prone replying to trolls. It’s pointless and I have better things to do even if it’s just not sinking to that level.
And for real at times Twitter was like this:
User1: I made soup for lunch, I forgot how good it is on a cold day
User2: That’s a great idea, here’s a picture of my soup from last week posts a picture
User3: Fuck your soup! I hate soup, because I’m allergic to noodles and I hope you get rabies.
All following comments: arguing with User3
Soup: has gone cold, uneaten
Re:
Twitter used to be like Masto/the Fediverse is now. What ruined Twitter was Quote Retweets. That made dunking on dumb bullshit easier than making screenshots and uploading them or whatever, but it also subjected the people following the “dunkers” to all that bullshit. The base version of Mastodon doesn’t include QRTs specifically for that reason (or some version thereof), and it improves the social media experience in every possible way. Granted, people on Masto do still dunk on Dumb Takes™ using screencaps and such, but it just doesn’t get much traction (at least as far as I’ve seen) because of the decentralized nature of the Fediverse.
On Twitter, there are an untold number of algorithms designed to push shit into your timeline that you may not want to see. Some of that could even be based on the QRTs of the people you follow. But on Masto, there is no algorithm but us.
Re: Re:
I… very much disagree with this. And some former Twitter folks on Mastodon have said it’s just not true. Indeed, Black Twitter has specifically called out the lack of QT as a reason for not using Mastodon, saying that QT was what made Black Twitter worthwhile, as it built up the kind of call-and-response culture that worked well there.
It is true that QTs can be abused, but, it seems like there are better ways to deal with that than just not enabling the feature at all. Indeed, one of the biggest things I’ve seen people struggle with is the lack of QT, because it makes it harder to add the context they’re looking to add to things they want to boost.
A few forks have enabled QT and playing around with them… they seem to work really well.
I think the way to deal with it is to enable QT, and just have rules that say “if you abuse this tool you’re booted.” And… then you get the good without the bad.
Frankly, I also still would like an algorithm, just one that I can program and control. My feed is now WAY too busy to manage without an algo.
Re: Re: Re:
Fair point to all the other stuff. 👍
But I have something to say on this point:
I can offer a suggestion that helped me immensely: Turn off Boosts/Retweets from most of the people you follow. After you follow a certain number of people, Boosts/RTs can get in the way of seeing content posted by the people you followed. I speak from experience—both Twitter and Masto—when I say that it can get overwhelming. It likely also helps with the addictive nature of social media services like Twitter and Masto.
The trick isn’t to turn off all Boosts/RTs, though. Figure out who is boosting/RT’ing the stuff you want to see the most of in your timeline, then keep boosts/RTs turned on for those accounts. Curation of that sort is an algorithm all its own—but the work is worth the reward of a timeline where you can focus on exactly what you want to see from your social media experience.
Re: Re: Re:2
I think that would ruin my experience, honestly. Boosts from people I follow is basically the best way for me to make Mastodon useful, and to find information/news from people I don’t follow, since there’s no algorithm to surface stuff for me.
Re: Re: Re:3
If that works for you, fair play. But as someone who likely has undiagnosed ADHD (among other issues), turning off Boosts/RTs put a dent in the addictive nature of Twitter-esque social media. T’was just a suggestion, though—feel free to take whatever action or inaction you deem appropriate. 😁
Re: Re: Re:
I think that’s the strength of having different servers, because some also have projects to implement customizable algorithms while having other that do and do not have QTs allows users some choice in features.
How that all meshes together could be a problem but maybe the solutions that will arise from them will create an even wider form of expression.
I know a complaint is a lack of consistent user experience across servers, but I find it a bit refreshing like a city having different neighborhoods with different histories.
Your comment about Black Twitter makes me wonder about how blacktwitter (dot) io has felt about a lack of QTs since they don’t seem to have an experimental QT on their server. Would their users find it to be a worthwhile addition?
One major negative I find about a lack of QT parallel in Boosts that applies everywhere is that QTs could also be used to ‘boost’ in the sense of allowing a popular Twitter user to promote the work of another Twitter user whether it was their work, their article, or simply an ask for donations. With a QT a person could say, “check out this up-and-coming writer” or “help my friend” tacked onto the RT.
I have seen QTs used to organize harassment, though… and that needs to be addressed in reimplementing something like QTs for Mastodon. Maybe just booting people will be enough, though. On a 200k-user server that seems hard at scale than on a 600-user server though. If a user can migrate off before being banned, what then? I guess admins may cooperate on problem users, but will that result in complaints about moderation transparency?
Uggggh, I guess those are all just a tiny part of the usual moderation-at-scale problems you rant about though.
Re: Re: Re:2
Incidentally, this is also why full-text search isn’t a thing on Masto: The intent was about preventing keyword searches that could help malcontents find people to harass. Yes, that makes discovery a bitch and a half on Masto, but people are encouraged to use hashtags generously to help counteract that flaw.
Re: Re: Re:3
I do enjoy the healthy use of hashtags I’ve seen in some users; and actually I like how this makes a distinction with toots. If I have a multi-part toot, the first might contain the main hashtags, but the subsequent toots may not so that if someone is looking they’ll find the first part and not start reading partway through.
And yesss, keyword searching is a favorite TERF tactic IIRC from Twitter, as well as others. I don’t recall a damned thing being done about it; which is a way Twitter allowed abusers to silence speech: by keyword-searching the terms that referred to themselves (the abusers) and harassing anyone who had a problem with those abusers. As TERFs would keyword search ‘TERF’ to harass trans people and their allies, friends, and families.
Re: Re:
I’ve heard an interesting theory that a bunch of the trolls trolled in hoped of being QTed, it was how they won points in their troll subculture. That could be a Twitter urban legend, but I do know that whether other people saw it or not, brigading is a huge flaw in Twitter.
Even the current mild ‘ratio’ (where users reply to a tweet with that in hoping their followers will brigade it for the sake of ratioing) version seems bad, and to some degree any version of it reminds me deeply of imageboard ‘sage’ terminology used as a way to message other imageboard users to downvote* a post.
That doesn’t require QTing, but if someone QTs a troll it does give them attention they’re seeking so… the issue with abuse may be in making posts with the intent to be argued with. Which is less-effective on fediverse servers, and being able to be QTed would allow trolls more visibility.
*Yes, KnowYourMeme’s entry on ‘sage’ will directly contradict this but they are either mistaken or more likely sugarcoating things. They weren’t there, anyway; but I unfortunately was.
migration
I’ve been happily using Mastodon, and one feature that I’ve been thinking about is server migration. If my particular choice of server ended up going downhill, I’m not sure how I would go about migrating to a different server. I can imagine how it might work to copy over bookmarks & the people I follow, but it gets a bit trickier when I think about copying over posts or followers.
Re:
Currently, account migration will let you export basically all of your own data: Posts, Follows, Lists, Followers, Bookmarks, and your lists of blocked and muted accounts and blocked domains. (You can also set your old account to redirect to your new one, which is a nice touch.) But when you do switch accounts, you can’t import Lists or Posts. That sucks, but I assume it’s a massive technical hurdle for the underlying ActivityPub protocol.
Re:
It’s actually really simple (supposedly, haven’t tried yet) to migrate and there are a few articles on it but it boils down to:
1) Create the account you want to migrate to on the desired server
2) In the account you want to migrate, there are a series of steps that allow you to migrate that account to your new account, and you’ll have options to migrate or redirect followers and so on.
3) If you want to import/export your data it can all be downloaded as CSV files from a different section in preferences, but this is OPTIONAL afaik, since migrating will also migrate what you’d be exporting and important; this might be better for merging or cloning your accounts.
4) YMMV given what app or server you’re using to do this.
Re: Re:
Thanks!
Re: Re: Re:
You’re welcome! I think Stephen left a pretty useful comment too, so I have to clarify I don’t know if Migration will transfer Posts/Lists even if Importing them (Importing is a separate menu option from Migration) doesn’t. The option to Export them should exist in the Import/Export menu, so if you cannot Import them… I can only assume that’s on the roadmap for development at some point.
And again YMMV given client/app and server.
Clunk
“you either had clunk email from your ISP”
I assume this is some kind of Utica phrase.
Re:
It’s a charming turn of phrase even if it might be a typo instead of from Utica.
Clunk email, junk modem, bunk ISP. Shrunken hard drive space space, thunk dropped connections… etc.
Re:
No, it’s an Albany expression.
Re: Re:
Well, Samuel, you are an odd fellow, but I must say: You make a good reference.
It all comes down to a combo of convenience, popularity and ironically enough, trust.
Mastodon is admittedly easier to use than it sounds, but it’s not really easy to get people to listen when it does indeed sound confusing. But people just like “set it and forget it” type concepts – their lives are already really hard, why waste time doing boring things (to them) in their free time? There’s a reason PS5 and Xbox still sell like hotcakes in spite of PC gaming being objectively superior; you just buy the console, download or pop in the game, and play. There’s no need to worry about upgrading graphics cards or RAM, or figuring out how to connect a PC to a TV.
Mastodon and similar federated services are top tier for tech geeks. But tech geeks aren’t even 1% of the world population, I’d estimate. Even people familiar with coding or programming for their jobs might not qualify.
On the flipside, if you shave off half of Twitter’s userbase as being bots or double accounts, that’s 2% of the world with a Twitter- otherwise, it’s over 4%. There’s a clear numbers game here. Because it’s so easy to set up and use Twitter, there’s more people, and because there’s more people, people want to go where there are more people. A lot of people openly critical of Elon aren’t ditching Twitter, they’re hanging on in the (likely misplaced) hope it can course correct; particularly online content creators/artists and their fanbases, who benefit from Twitter’s algorithm showing their stuff to previously uninterested parties.
Open source communication projects also get a lot, and I mean, a lot of bad rap when it comes to being connected to crime. Whether organized, individual, and especially of course child safety related crimes. A lot of that is propaganda started by and furthered by the corporations, of course, but nonetheless there’s that thought process there.
I remember a conversation I had about a month or two ago where someone was suspicious as to why anyone would want to use an encrypted service like Signal and Telegram, let alone encryption not handled by a third party. When I explained those apps were important for use by Ukrainians fleeing Russia, they said “yeah, but how many of them are Ukrainians, and how many are human traffickers or white power terrorists? Bet there’s more criminals.” They just think the harm of no one being universally in charge of a service outweighs the utility of avoiding repressive governments, and it’s gonna be really hard to convince people otherwise. When you point out Twitter and Facebook are regularly used by criminals already, they either say “imagine how much worse it would be if they didn’t moderate” or “well, that means they need to moderate more/better”, as if you can throw money at every and any problem.
When you try to give real world examples of overzealous government moderation in countries like Russia, China and India, they chalk it up to “oh, well, we’re not THEM”, while completely ignoring American, Australian and European attempts to become more like those countries in terms of the internet. Western exceptionalism rearing its head in their psyches, really. There’s also actual demand for authoritarianism as evident by Elon bots praising him to high heaven even as he becomes more restrictive of (legal) speech then Twitter ever was before.
I do think there’s a certain level of desire for “do-it-yourself” type ideas. Discord keeps growing at a steady rate, and it’s easy to set up your own “server”, and 99.9% of moderation is done by users. But, of course, a third party (or well, first party, really, Discord OWNS Discord) keeps an eye on everything, even if only when beckoned in private instances. And there’s nothing guaranteeing they won’t eventually start mass spying.
So, it’s really about first convincing people the federated service is easy to use, then that others will actually use it, and finally that they aren’t going to look like a criminal or enable criminals by using it. That’s gonna take a lot of public outreach which, naturally, the powers that be will try to quash using everything they can, stopping said quashing just short of creating a Streisand effect of public discourse. It’s a bit of an uphill battle. A lot of people do admit, even, there’s a problem with corporations and governments having so much control over our communications, but they suck it up because they just can’t imagine how it could possibly be different! It sucks, and I don’t know how to solve it other than talking about it and hoping it gets through someday.
Re:
Yes, yes, yes, this.
Convenience and popularity are huge factors in this. Most people have no interest in joining some small instance of an unfamiliar (and given FOSS tendencies, often frustratingly un-intuitive) platform run by some rando on the web. They want to be where their friends are, or they want to be where they can get eyes on their stuff, and they don’t want to have to read a user’s manual just to learn how to post. Even fewer want to be saddled with the learning curve and effort of actual self-hosting (and associated liabilities.)
Big mainstream platforms offer them that convenience and reach, and the eventual risk of instability and migration again in X number of years is just seen as the natural tradeoff. It’s a choice between “go where everyone is, deal with familiar corporate bullshit, lose it all when the company eventually goes under or bonkers” and “go where ~2 people are, deal with niche FOSS bullshit, lose it all when the local mod or admin eventually goes broke or bonkers”, and while there’s plenty of argument for the latter being more tolerable, it’s not hard to see how that opposite choice gets made.
Because social is hard
I think the answer is the same reason why we used iTunes in the early 00s, because a better experience can be worth it.
Note: I am not saying that Twitter is a better experience today, or even that it was a better experience under prior management, but as we see: content moderation is hard, stability is hard, scale is hard, discovery is hard, etc…
If done well, a centralized platform is valuable, but it definitely is hard to do well, and it’s not clear anyone is.
Maybe the better question is why use any social media service? I could probably use a lot of those scrolling hours back.
Interested in further reading
Mike, have you written elsewhere about why you think “surveillance capitalism” is misleading? I’m interested in your reasoning.
Re:
Yes. Techdirt search generally works pretty well.
Re:
Not Mike specifically, but from Cory Doctorw’s latest pluralistic:
And one of the critiques I’ve read elsewhere of surveillance capitalism as a conecpt is that it accepts the assertion that targeted ads & algorithmic feeds are effective mind control devices that exert significant control over people’s behaviour, rather than an excuse to slap a premium on what are essentially classified ads. (Remember when the classified ads made up half a newspaper’s weight?)
Forums will rise again, damnit.
Re:
Usenet! IRC! Telnet! Email lists!
THEY WILL TAKE THEIR ONE TRUE PLACE IN THE SUN
Re: Re:
GDI now I’m having flashbacks to the essay I wrote about mIRC’s license agreement change isn’t the worst thing in the world.
It’s not even news, but some website wrote a really salty article about it no longer being a lifetime license with support included. Which happened years ago, but whatever. Right?
Greta article full of great points, as usual. I disagree on one point. Neither “surveillance capitalism” nor “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” are at all misleading – unless you’re contending they don’t go far enough. But setting that disagreement aside, I think you make a strong case for the idea that the move away from centralized platforms might start happening at long last.
Because tradeoffs. Centralization has its advantages and disadvantages, and decentralization has its advantages and disadvantages, and when society is presented with a choice between the two sets of tradeoffs, over the long term (and not always a particularly long long term) centralization always wins. Always. This is one of the Great Lessons of Human History, and like so many other important lessons, people keep forgetting it and making the same mistakes over and over again and having to painfully re-learn the lessons of the past when their “new” idea blows up in their face just like it did for all the previous people who tried it back when they thought it was a new idea.
Minor derail, the comment about Betamax being technically superior, although common wisdom, isn’t quite right. It ultimately failed on usability, the tapes were shorter, so you couldn’t easily record a whole movie or sports broadcast on one tape, whereas you could with VHS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyKRubB5N60
When people say something is technically better they often mean either “more pleasant to use by programmers/administrators” or “able to do something difficult that another product can’t do”. But “more pleasant to use by end users” is pretty almost always what wins.
Centralized platforms like Twitter will always be easier for end users. Mastodon specifically caught on among the various ActivityPub implementations because it has a pretty good web interface that normal people can use.
The thing the fediverse it has over Twitter is that you have somewhat self-selecting communities with real actual community standards which can collectively eject/block/defederate with trolls and nazis. This leverages the open source ideal that an engaged community can actually bring more resources to the table than a single company working on its own.
Re:
The fediverse is socially better and more pleasant for everyone socially than Twitter ever could have been.
Technically, it’s not bad and encourages more experienced users to help other users get more out of it.
You don’t really need to know more to sign up and use Mastodon than you do to use Twitter, and the sign-up process feels much less invasive and controlling than Twitters.
I think the difficulty of it has been oversold, especially since interest in the platform seems to regularly contribute to improving everyone’s user experience in many senses.
Re: Re:
I think the hangup about the Masto onboarding process is the lack of a built-in Twitter-to-Masto follower/following check (third-party tools are good for that, but require you to have a Masto account first) and the whole “instances” thing (which can be a pain to maneuver depending on how many instances that a given instance has defederated from).
Re: Re: Re:
I hate to break it to Mastodon users that not everyone they followed on Twitter is going to make the same trip. Most people that do seem to be putting the fediverse address in their Twitter profiles since they can do it without being banned now, I guess?
I can’t really expected the Mastodon devs to code and add that feature when there are third party apps, but dealing with the underlying network structure is something that’s inescapable at present for a variety of reasons. Mostly resources, but defederation is also a tool that protects people from the Nazis people are so busy not being worried about.
And since anyone can run a fediverse server if they have the software and means, defederation is the only solution to Nazi servers. It’s something users have to understand has some inconvenient drawbacks and why they may actually find a motive to… keep using centralized social media, since that’s how many people moving from Twitter to Mastodon want it to behave.
That’s not about ease of use, that’s about having unrealistic expectations and the flip side is that Mastodon is totally unprepared to deal with how ‘hard’ that is on new users.
As a new user who found other new users’ behavior and need for incredibly shallow and uninformed ‘discourse’ on this topic, I decided that Mastodon really does share all the same things I hated with Twitter. It just hasn’t reached the scale where they’re visible yet. I briefly got to have an enjoyable experience that I have to believe is what many people experienced on Twitter before that got ruined for them.
And then the influx of people over the Christmas weekend essentially overloaded my ability to deal with problems that I’d been dealing with since at least 2014 on Twitter. So I left because it’s just not for me.
How do we protect federated social networks like Mastodon against attackers?
Mastodon’s currently much nicer than Twitter, because it’s mainly being used by people who want to be there, hang out, and talk.
– The big commercial sources are only starting to get on (journalists, newspapers, etc.)
– The blatant troll and spambot armies haven’t shown up to harass everybody yet
– The more subtle trolls and haters that need human moderation to keep them out mostly aren’t here yet either
– Mastodon instances WILL get attacked and manipulated the way Twitter has, and we need to stay ahead of them.
Re:
They’re either getting on the “flagship” (mastodon.social) or specialized instances for journalists, which will certainly help with defederation if another instance deems it necessary.
A lot of instances pay attention to the Fediblock hashtag as a way of gathering info about malicious users/instances. Any malcontents along the lines you mention are probably already blocked; if they’re not, they will be in short order. (Gab was defederated by much of the Fediverse as soon as it switched over to using Masto.) That said…
…harassment and malicious trolling does happen on the Fediverse. But it often gets nipped in the bud sooner rather than later.
Fediblock is useful for this. But even without that hashtag, info about malicious users/instances tends to spread quick. And defederation—especially when silencing options are used—tends to undercut the severity of whatever those malicious assholes are doing.
Re: Re:
I wonder how well that will scale, though. Twitter is big.
Re: Re: Re:
It doesn’t have to scale all that much. Lots of instances prefer to have smaller userbases—far less than what even mastodon.social has right now—so in-instance moderation is (theoretically) easier to handle, defederation (when it’s necessary) becomes the bigger issue to worry about, and the vibes stay vibin’.
Re:
Mastodon is much less attractive to spammers and commercial interests, because it is based on the user choosing who to follow, and it is much harder to push content in front of lots of people. Also, troll attacks will be much more limited in scope, limited by and large to one or two instances. What would make sense if companies and industries setting up instances where people could find and interact with them, or for the copyright Industries, Instances where their stars can be found so that people can follow them.
Because the alternatives are a shit show
Mastodon banned my account before it got approved, saying that I didn’t have a profile picture. fun
Re:
Maybe you just were in the wrong instance.
Re:
Except, that didn’t happen.
“Mastodon” is a piece of software. They don’t make any such decisions.
It’s possible that the instance you decided to try joining rejected your request because it didn’t have a picture, but that’s almost certainly because the rules of that instance said you needed one. You should read those before you try signing up, there’s different for each instance. If you disagree with the rules, there will be others who will let you sign up without one. But, whichever service you want to join, you should try reading the terms of joining first.
Also, an application to join being rejected is not you being “banned”.
Back to forums!
I am going to re-spin back up my 90s gaming forum mike!
As someone who doesn’t care about participating in politics and useless heated debates about ideology, I don’t get censored. Another complaint about centralized social media is recommendation algorithms and targeted ads that are true but nobody force you to use them. I always ignore ads and always switch to the chronological feed. The reason I use Facebook is the features it offers being able to see friend activity on my feed. When I want to see something about a specific theme I can read or post on a group. On mastodon, I have to subscribe to multiple servers. It doesn’t help that there’s no navbar to switch easily between servers.
Distributed vs Centralized?
Neither fully distributed nor fully centralized networks are sustainable. Networks exist to clear supply and demand efficiently and in the process reduce risk. They are multi-layered and multi-boundaried frameworks providing incentives and disincentives to both suppliers and demanders. There are scaling elements to consider and tradeoffs at every interface. It’s important to build the networks such that the interfaces in the framework are fluid and changing and the underlying costs and resulting value are shared equitably. Ultimately the real issue here is engagement. So how do we build a platform that enhances and elevates engagement both from the publisher and reader perspective where costs are lowered and value increased?
How does Mastadon compare to Usenet?
Usenet is federated, but otherwise nearly everything about how it functions is different. But the federation is why Usenet is still alive and kicking.
Are there any lessons we could be taking? (Aside from the fact that everything comes back if you wait long enough.)