If Mastodon takes off because of Musk ill be pretty amused. There is an irony to Mastdon, a more open platform than Twitter, becoming more popular because people thought Musk would make Twitter... more open.
Musk is banning people who make fun of him... I don't think anyone is under any illusion that Twitter is somehow becoming more open lol
Anyways I think the biggest concern is obviously that blue checkmark tweets will now be prioritized by the algorithm. Making it a pay-to-influence media platform. That's definitely why I quit (or at least unfollowed every single blue checkmark) and that seems to be the biggest concern amongst my friends
I would rephrase it to "political propaganda machine dislikes and distrusts Musk". It is telling that Tesla was not invited to the EV summit or that or was removed from S&P 500 ESG.
For me it is how one person can suddenly own an entire social network and dictate the rules as he likes or dislikes. Mastodon it self is more open, the server you choose to sign up to might have content policies in place.
Wait, that's literally Zuckerberg? How was it OK when a Saudi Prince bought into Twitter to make sure Saudi Arabia wouldn't be hit by an Arab Spring[1]?
I don't really like Musk, but is every conversation and topic these days just plain hysteria?
But all the social networks are owned by a few individuals. Even twitter before musk bought it was owned by a select few (with real control), and they already dictated the rules based on their own likes/dislikes... that's what started this whole thing in the first place.
If I could choulse twitter would be a protocol, but to me the worst case is being owned by an anonymous bureaucracy working exclusively to optimize the platform for add revenue, that changes the 'rules' on the fashions of US local politics. Anything else is an improvement.
It won't though, this isn't going to be like the Digg exodus.
Digg and Reddit were basically like-for-like, the friction in moving over was non-existent, because the focal point of both sites was the interesting links that people would post and discuss in the comments.
Twitter is different because the 2010s social networks did everything to kill external links, and turn the focus on the 'personalities' on the platform.
Also trying to go from Twitter to Mastodon is going to be like what beginners experience trying to set up a crypto wallet. Terrible UX, especially with dialog prompts with inscrutable messages about 'instances' that are meaningless to people coming from a walled garden.
I think a number of other people have tried and it turns out mastodon isn't a very good piece of software. Gab was based off mastodon for along time and what they found was it's just not set up to scale, and they were constantly removing features during peak use to keep the servers from crashing. Pleroma is written in elixir scales a lot better (which is why all the biggest instances like poa.st use it) but fundamentally you're still dealing with a lot of overhead sending and receiving messages from other servers. I think something would have to fundamentally change with the API if it wanted to grow past a few hundred thousand active users.
This. Mastodon is a federation in name only. If the protocol is not the policy then you really don't have a federation at all, rhetoric notwithstanding. I note that this is not a problem particular to Mastodon/The Fediverse, though, as its the exact problem that led to people forking their own networks off of FidoNet.
The only people interested in Musk's disingenuous theory of "open" are the right wing industrial-scale disinformation peddlers and those enabled by them.
QElon's amplification of deranged right wing conspiracy theory wasn't mere trolling or stupidity; it was a declaration of intent.
Never forget he was partners with Peter Thiel, and the two of them together have minted a fascist-friendly grift into literal kleptocracy pipeline for themselves. You don't have to do more than peel back the sticker to learn Musk hasn't invented any of the companies he's associated with; and his success with them hinges on dishonesty and card tricks.
“More open” as owned by a billionaire extremist that promised to destroy moderation efforts that weren’t even good to begin with. People in the US have a weird notion of what “open” means.
> If Mastodon takes off because of Musk ill be pretty amused.
Iirc, Elon Musk said social networking should not be centralized but distributed. Perhaps he bought Twitter just to shut it down so that ActivityPub would become more popular?
Another new tool in this vein is Fedifinder. It works by scanning Twitter bios of accounts you follow for strings that look like Mastodon addresses: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
5 years ago there was a neat tool called Mastodon Bridge that did what Twitodon says it does but much better, I think because it didn't require everyone opt in. It stopped working because of some change Twitter made to their API terms of use. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-bridge
There's also Moa Party, but it's so complicated I have never used it. https://moa.party/
Is there a way to find the Mastodon instance you yourself signed up on? I am pretty sure I already made a Mastodon account, but not on mastodon.social and based on the list of instances, nothing rings a bell. :-/
Edit: it was mastodon.social, the password reset email just took 15 minutes to arrive… Good tip in the comments though, thanks!
Webfinger technically supports that sort of delegation today in its spec: you can drop a /.well-known/webfinger JSON file on the domain's web server (or a cgi-bin app of some sort if you need to support more than one user because the protocol uses GET request parameters to differentiate) and tell ActivityPub servers "if you are looking for user anexample@thisdomain.com please forward to the inbox or check the outbox for anexample@mastodon.social". That works today for things like @ mentions or DMs of an account sending the right notifications. Unfortunately, this isn't yet the best experience because in many places including follows/follow requests Mastodon users will always see the forwarded address everywhere "anexample@mastodon.social" instead of the delegating address and so far as I'm aware there's no easy way to send messages addressed as the delegating address.
There was a world and a life before Twitter, and there is one without Twitter as well.
I deleted my Twitter account about a year ago and have not missed anything. People and topics I am interested in I can updated on by many different means.
I don't think Mastodon is meant to be a replacement for Twitter, or will ever be that. It would be a mistake to treat it that way.
It's more like this place than Twitter, in a way.
Or, it's kind of similar to how Usenet was in the early 90s.
It's a simple linear feed of who've subscribed to, or what the people you've subscribed to have "boosted". So you find the interest groups you're into and join a node that matches that, then find the people you like on various nodes, and follow them. There's no recommendations really. There's hashtags, but few ways to "discover" them and they don't seem to get heavily used right now.
It's maybe like Twitter when it first launched. Certainly not what it became (which I never personally participated in).
It certainly doesn't have the level of "action" or "engagement" you'd find on Twitter. And that's probably a good thing.
I follow various scientists, authors and so forth and I like to read their thoughts or see their recommended reading. And as silly as it sounds, it's wild to see eg William Gibson and Gerry Conway, two guys responsible for some of my formative adolescent reading, interact with one another at random.
> Heresy: Why do we need a replacement for Twitter? There was a world and a life before Twitter, and there is one without Twitter as well.
Yes, and it was much harder to shill newsletters, courses, conspiracies and cryptocoins back then on the back of minor internet blogger fame.
There is significant money to be made in all of the above, which is why a replacement for Twitter (holding people in a dopamine cage) is inevitable, whether we need it or not.
I wonder if there's something like Twitter but a feed (RSS or otherwise) of interesting people's blog, YouTube, podcast or creative work?
I feel the value of Twitter would be a feed of interesting people. But 280 characters is just knee jerk thoughts.
Something to easily discover people, like Twitter, whist showing their content, seems more valuable.
Right now, the discovery part sucks. It's possible to find interesting people and sub to the RSS, but not everyone has that (like my blog). Not to mention how spread out content is, someone might release a podcast, or interesting YouTube vid, instead of just blog articles. It's just too much work.
We need to decouple discovery and distribution of content. Discovery is much easier to manage with centralized platforms. Distribution is better decentralized. And since we have URLs there's no reason for them to be tied together.
> Fraidycat is a desktop app or browser extension for Firefox or Chrome. I use it to follow people (hundreds) on whatever platform they choose - Twitter, a blog, YouTube, even on a public TiddlyWiki.
This doesn't solve the problem of discoverability, but it solves half of what you described.
People can add ActivityPub to their websites/blogs, and it will be a part of the fediverse. WordPress has a plugin for this, and you can add your own implementation as well.
I wish there was a way to integrate ActivityPub into static sites. As far as I know, you can't just add ActivityPub to your site hosted on GitHub Pages, for example.
I use Twitter to follow fellow engineers and honestly all the politics (regardless of the new guy in charge) was getting annoying. I might as well use this opportunity to become more active on mastadon.
Can anyone recommend a good android client? Preferably from f-droid?
It’s not, I followed a prominent Clojure dev on there and it was mostly politics. Politics I mostly agreed with but it was too much to keep following. That’s not the only example, but it’s the one I think of every time I think of going back. I don’t think twitter needs a replacement, just quitting was good enough for me and that was long before mastodon came around.
Looking for Mastodon users progress, scanned 366 of 366 users you follow on Twitter. Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon who have previously linked their Twitter and Mastodon accounts by logging into Twitodon.
Was a bit surprised that it found 5 matches (out of 1659 people I'm following). A bit inconvenient that I can't just see these matches though, but have to download a CSV file first.
What happens if/when Mastodon gets mainstream and gets plagued by all the same problems as twitter? It being the distributed platform there's a very little options to fight fake news, hate speech, bots, etc. on Internet-wide level. Is there any option other than users gravitating to servers hosted by like-minded people, creating a clear separation into social bubbles?
AFAIK you can block individual users, entire servers, and servers can also block other bad rep servers. I think a federation of servers with open source software is better equipped to fight fake news and bots not in spite of but because of decentralized protocols and how solutions must involve democratic values by definition.
I think social bubbles is sort of built-in to the fediverse concept. There's some hope that a decentralized moderation problem will be more tractable than a centralized-for-profit-company moderation problem.
Good moderation is labor (and likely forever will be) and Mastodon by its very nature has a lot higher moderators per consuming users ratio than Twitter ever had (even on messages originating on and "not leaving" Mastodon's biggest instances). (Just like if you are evaluating school districts you want a higher teachers per students ratio.)
Readit News
Anyways I think the biggest concern is obviously that blue checkmark tweets will now be prioritized by the algorithm. Making it a pay-to-influence media platform. That's definitely why I quit (or at least unfollowed every single blue checkmark) and that seems to be the biggest concern amongst my friends
I don't really like Musk, but is every conversation and topic these days just plain hysteria?
[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2471759/arab-prince-bu...
Digg and Reddit were basically like-for-like, the friction in moving over was non-existent, because the focal point of both sites was the interesting links that people would post and discuss in the comments.
Twitter is different because the 2010s social networks did everything to kill external links, and turn the focus on the 'personalities' on the platform.
Also trying to go from Twitter to Mastodon is going to be like what beginners experience trying to set up a crypto wallet. Terrible UX, especially with dialog prompts with inscrutable messages about 'instances' that are meaningless to people coming from a walled garden.
QElon's amplification of deranged right wing conspiracy theory wasn't mere trolling or stupidity; it was a declaration of intent.
Never forget he was partners with Peter Thiel, and the two of them together have minted a fascist-friendly grift into literal kleptocracy pipeline for themselves. You don't have to do more than peel back the sticker to learn Musk hasn't invented any of the companies he's associated with; and his success with them hinges on dishonesty and card tricks.
Iirc, Elon Musk said social networking should not be centralized but distributed. Perhaps he bought Twitter just to shut it down so that ActivityPub would become more popular?
Mastodon is even worse.
I can't see it taking off.
5 years ago there was a neat tool called Mastodon Bridge that did what Twitodon says it does but much better, I think because it didn't require everyone opt in. It stopped working because of some change Twitter made to their API terms of use. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-bridge
There's also Moa Party, but it's so complicated I have never used it. https://moa.party/
Edit: it was mastodon.social, the password reset email just took 15 minutes to arrive… Good tip in the comments though, thanks!
They're waiting on a new database server to handle the load.
https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109262705755044079
Somewhat related: there should be a way to have a Mastodon ID based on a domain you control, regardless of what instance it's hosted on.
It would be nice to see this improved.
There was a world and a life before Twitter, and there is one without Twitter as well.
I deleted my Twitter account about a year ago and have not missed anything. People and topics I am interested in I can updated on by many different means.
It's more like this place than Twitter, in a way.
Or, it's kind of similar to how Usenet was in the early 90s.
It's a simple linear feed of who've subscribed to, or what the people you've subscribed to have "boosted". So you find the interest groups you're into and join a node that matches that, then find the people you like on various nodes, and follow them. There's no recommendations really. There's hashtags, but few ways to "discover" them and they don't seem to get heavily used right now.
It's maybe like Twitter when it first launched. Certainly not what it became (which I never personally participated in).
It certainly doesn't have the level of "action" or "engagement" you'd find on Twitter. And that's probably a good thing.
For authors, other communities exist as well.
Yes, and it was much harder to shill newsletters, courses, conspiracies and cryptocoins back then on the back of minor internet blogger fame.
There is significant money to be made in all of the above, which is why a replacement for Twitter (holding people in a dopamine cage) is inevitable, whether we need it or not.
I feel the value of Twitter would be a feed of interesting people. But 280 characters is just knee jerk thoughts.
Something to easily discover people, like Twitter, whist showing their content, seems more valuable.
Right now, the discovery part sucks. It's possible to find interesting people and sub to the RSS, but not everyone has that (like my blog). Not to mention how spread out content is, someone might release a podcast, or interesting YouTube vid, instead of just blog articles. It's just too much work.
Per the description:
> Fraidycat is a desktop app or browser extension for Firefox or Chrome. I use it to follow people (hundreds) on whatever platform they choose - Twitter, a blog, YouTube, even on a public TiddlyWiki.
This doesn't solve the problem of discoverability, but it solves half of what you described.
https://fraidyc.at/
An RSS feed, but for social media.
Can anyone recommend a good android client? Preferably from f-droid?
Dumb question but why would this be any different on Mastodon?
Looking for Mastodon users progress, scanned 366 of 366 users you follow on Twitter. Discovered 0 Twitter users on Mastodon who have previously linked their Twitter and Mastodon accounts by logging into Twitodon.