People interested in this stuff should check out alternate software as well. Hometown is a fork of mastodon that has a few extra features but one very interesting one in particular: you can post to the local server only, which is an excellent community building feature.
There's also pleroma, which I've run and is pretty great and low on resource requirements. And there are tons of other social UX paradigms like link aggregators and even Peertube which is a tube site server on the same network as mastodon using the same ActivityPub protocol.
I'd love to see people implement novel types of social sites besides functional clones of existing social media, there are some significant architectural and UX differences in a distributed, federated social architecture that can be leveraged to great effect.
This is the wide assortment of applications that speak the same common protocol that Mastodon does, as part of an interoperable social cloud. There's a Cambrian explosion of diversity in this space. Let's see more content management systems adopting this system for self-sufficient publication.
> ...you can post to the local server only, which is an excellent community building feature.
The idea of building a local community that you have to have an account and associated identity on a specific server to access is the kind of mal-aligned incentive that tends to cause federated systems to become de-facto centralized silos and, eventually, return to the status quo of a controlling oligopoly :(.
That's one take on it, and I've heard the maintainer of mastodon share similar sentiments. I disagree because as long as the servers are all interoperable and people can communicate across them they can never actually become silos.
An architectural feature of a federated system is that people congregate on servers together for whatever reasons they have. Communities are an emergent part of this architecture whether we like it or not, and this can be used to create a positive user experience that you cannot truly get on centralized services. What we wind up with is a network of communities that interact with one another, not as some people envision a network of superfluous servers that humans use simply to interact with one another, and this is unavoidable in a federated system like this. If we do want a network where the servers are meaningless to the social interaction it has to be fully peer to peer.
I admin and use a Mastodon instance. It takes a while to get used to the differences from Twitter, but it's far more polished than people seem to expect. The reading I tend to recommend if people have questions is Darius Kazemi's https://runyourown.social/
But one major aspect of fediverse, that people rarely talk about when promoting it, is the spam.
To summarize my impressions over the last 5 years I'd say there is no way to run a big open instance without funding. The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account.
And even then I'd suggest using Geo blocking to fence off your instance from certain parts of the world.
My personal wish is to see the fediverse made up of smaller, localized instances that federate across borders. So for example a Finnish instance that only accepts finnish users, but it federates with every other instance.
And ontop of that more ActivityPub relays to facilitate federation.
> My personal wish is to see the fediverse made up of smaller, localized instances that federate across borders. So for example a Finnish instance that only accepts finnish users, but it federates with every other instance.
This would be great to stop the American-influence dominating every conversation like happens on Reddit, etc.
> To summarize my impressions over the last 5 years I'd say there is no way to run a big open instance without funding. The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account.
I really like the way social.coop, a cooperatively run instance, handles this. Because we're all just pooling a little bit of money (1GBP/yr for most people) we can run a service cheaper than we could run it ourselves if we're renting a VPS and there are enough people interested to create a rotating moderation team, so we rarely get too much spam from other instances. So far a cooperative model has worked very well for us; no donations required, just splitting up costs in the cheapest possible way so that no one gets burned out or feels like their money is carrying the instance!
I feel like local governments running some sort of federated network like that would be really cool, and could reduce some of the political influence twitter has. How local "local" is could be anything from a city to state/province to country-wide. Unfortunately, I think it would require centralized or federated identity management which is pretty complex, especially at a government level.
> The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account.
Yup! That's exactly the approach Kazemi is advocating, too. It makes sense if you think about the trust that there needs to be both ways in a admin/account-holder relationship.
Mastodon was hard to "sell" to my peers when I tried to explain how it works. Recently I changed my approach by not explaining all the great technical features related to federation, and instead focused on the fact that it is ad-free, do not use an algorithm (feed is chronological) and is community run. Mastodon is what Twitter once was, before it got ruined by ads and algorithms.
A friend who is an artist was frustrated with the experience on Instagram, and finally signed up on an art-related community in the fediverse, and found it to be a breath of fresh air, with more meaningfull interactions, not just likes.
I followed this link and using the Server Wizard found that my biggest local instance is run by an experienced FOSS and business guru in my hometown. Thanks. I have to meet this guy now.
How do things stand on account portability? If I sign up at a mastodon server, build an audience and network there, but later if the server admin changes its policies in unfavorable directions, can I migrate to a new server with all my contacts and reputation intact - even without the old admin's cooperation?
Mastodon has a "profile move" feature that moves all of your followers (on instances that support the protocol) to your new account. However, it will not move your toots (posts).
All of your account data can be exported, and everything except for toots (and media) can be imported.
I would say that moving the posts is what worries me more about moving the account. I can refollow everyone, but I can't post hundreds (or thousands) of posts in their original datetime
Hi, yes, you can move your followers to another account, and export/import other contacts. Perhaps not entirely without the old admin's cooperation though.
I run my own instance in a convoluted way - I added ActivityPub source and sink support to my own webapp. But every user deserves account portability, not just those who know how to deploy and maintain a Mastodon instance.
I'm one of the moderators of the /r/Mastodon subreddit, and folks are more than welcome to stop by and share their experiences using and operating this software.
Background: I've been building a growing commercial social network. There are things about what I want to do that made that the better option for what my target market is.
With that said, I really like what Mastodon has done and as far as federated and open social networks go (ActivityPub!). It's in a class of its own IMO.
As much as I'd love to use Mastodon, both times I tried, I got bored and gave up because I couldn't find interesting people to follow. All of the people I do find interesting are only on Twitter.
Yeah that's how it is now. The federation sort of blends into the background so disregarding that part I feel like I'm using a big message board in the early 2000s.
But actually worse, because at least those message boards had better defined topics. I can follow some hashtags that I enjoy but in the web gui it's very limited. I've been thinking about writing my own software to help me follow tags alone. Just to participate in relevant discussion.
Otherwise you're just watching people rant in the public feed and if you're lucky you might catch the occasional interesting post.
But I persist because I truly believe in the fediverse concept.
> But I persist because I truly believe in the fediverse concept.
It helps to see Fediverse as the early web, where things aren't that smooth yet, and everyone is just experimenting. From that perspective as a techie it is a joy to explore the possibilities.
That's the most difficult part is finding who to follow (likely strangers) when you first start. You could watch the global timeline or search some #hashtags for things you are interested in or try to pick the right server with a like-minded userbase from the get-go. However, these issues aren't too different than any other social media tbf. And eventually you find interesting people exclusive to the Fediverse or post different content on it that is more interesting. Mastodon and others never force being social and following others though.
I've had the opposite experience for the most part (way easier to find good people to follow than on Twitter), but maybe that's just because circles I'm interested in have largely migrated to the fediverse which may not be true of most. It also might be because I found an instance dedicated to at least one thing I'm interested in and used that one. Maybe that approach could work for you too?
Readit News
There's also pleroma, which I've run and is pretty great and low on resource requirements. And there are tons of other social UX paradigms like link aggregators and even Peertube which is a tube site server on the same network as mastodon using the same ActivityPub protocol.
I'd love to see people implement novel types of social sites besides functional clones of existing social media, there are some significant architectural and UX differences in a distributed, federated social architecture that can be leveraged to great effect.
https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...
This is the wide assortment of applications that speak the same common protocol that Mastodon does, as part of an interoperable social cloud. There's a Cambrian explosion of diversity in this space. Let's see more content management systems adopting this system for self-sufficient publication.
The idea of building a local community that you have to have an account and associated identity on a specific server to access is the kind of mal-aligned incentive that tends to cause federated systems to become de-facto centralized silos and, eventually, return to the status quo of a controlling oligopoly :(.
An architectural feature of a federated system is that people congregate on servers together for whatever reasons they have. Communities are an emergent part of this architecture whether we like it or not, and this can be used to create a positive user experience that you cannot truly get on centralized services. What we wind up with is a network of communities that interact with one another, not as some people envision a network of superfluous servers that humans use simply to interact with one another, and this is unavoidable in a federated system like this. If we do want a network where the servers are meaningless to the social interaction it has to be fully peer to peer.
But one major aspect of fediverse, that people rarely talk about when promoting it, is the spam.
To summarize my impressions over the last 5 years I'd say there is no way to run a big open instance without funding. The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account.
And even then I'd suggest using Geo blocking to fence off your instance from certain parts of the world.
My personal wish is to see the fediverse made up of smaller, localized instances that federate across borders. So for example a Finnish instance that only accepts finnish users, but it federates with every other instance.
And ontop of that more ActivityPub relays to facilitate federation.
This would be great to stop the American-influence dominating every conversation like happens on Reddit, etc.
I really like the way social.coop, a cooperatively run instance, handles this. Because we're all just pooling a little bit of money (1GBP/yr for most people) we can run a service cheaper than we could run it ourselves if we're renting a VPS and there are enough people interested to create a rotating moderation team, so we rarely get too much spam from other instances. So far a cooperative model has worked very well for us; no donations required, just splitting up costs in the cheapest possible way so that no one gets burned out or feels like their money is carrying the instance!
Yup! That's exactly the approach Kazemi is advocating, too. It makes sense if you think about the trust that there needs to be both ways in a admin/account-holder relationship.
Deleted Comment
A friend who is an artist was frustrated with the experience on Instagram, and finally signed up on an art-related community in the fediverse, and found it to be a breath of fresh air, with more meaningfull interactions, not just likes.
https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25715513
All of your account data can be exported, and everything except for toots (and media) can be imported.
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
I would say that moving the posts is what worries me more about moving the account. I can refollow everyone, but I can't post hundreds (or thousands) of posts in their original datetime
If it is, have you considered running your own instance?
With that said, I really like what Mastodon has done and as far as federated and open social networks go (ActivityPub!). It's in a class of its own IMO.
Dead Comment
But actually worse, because at least those message boards had better defined topics. I can follow some hashtags that I enjoy but in the web gui it's very limited. I've been thinking about writing my own software to help me follow tags alone. Just to participate in relevant discussion.
Otherwise you're just watching people rant in the public feed and if you're lucky you might catch the occasional interesting post.
But I persist because I truly believe in the fediverse concept.
It helps to see Fediverse as the early web, where things aren't that smooth yet, and everyone is just experimenting. From that perspective as a techie it is a joy to explore the possibilities.