I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power.
But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic, but worse, fragments the community and creates (IMO) unacceptable privacy concerns. Self-hosting requires unnecessary hoops, loses some community functionality, and runs into the risk of "defederation", which only exacerbates the problem of servers being overly important. If you do decide to go with one of the existing servers, and hadn't been there early enough to get into one of those run by the foundation, you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar.
Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.
- User identities are attached to domain names controlled by third-parties;
- Server owners can ban you, just like Twitter; Server owners can also block other servers;
- Migration between servers is an afterthought and can only be accomplished if servers cooperate. It doesn't work in an adversarial environment (all followers are lost);
- There are no clear incentives to run servers, therefore they tend to be run by enthusiasts and people who want to have their name attached to a cool domain. Then, users are subject to the despotism of a single person, which is often worse than that of a big company like Twitter, and they can't migrate out;
- Since servers tend to be run amateurishly, they are often abandoned after a while — which is effectively the same as banning everybody;
- It doesn't make sense to have a ton of servers if updates from every server will have to be painfully pushed (and saved!) to a ton of other servers. This point is exacerbated by the fact that servers tend to exist in huge numbers, therefore more data has to be passed to more places more often;
- For the specific example of video sharing, ActivityPub enthusiasts realized it would be completely impossible to transmit video from server to server the way text notes are, so they decided to keep the video hosted only from the single instance where it was posted to, which is similar to the Nostr approach.
> First, you must know them and get their public key somehow
And here lies the main problem of most of these decentralized alternatives: how do you discover new content? One of the biggest innovation of Twitter was to be able to follow a hashtag-- say #SomeEvent2022 and you see all tweets using that hashtag, not only those of people you follow. This tends to be abused by spamers, but it’s a great way to follow what’s going on at large events or find stuff related to some topic.
You can easily achieve the same with ActivityPub relays and a few small tweaks - if this turns out to actually.be useful it'd be easy to provide gatewaying relays for those who care.
> you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar
I have some friends operating a Mastodon server, with a team of volunteer operators, and I'm pretty sure I've met all of them in person. I've only used Twitter a handful of times and don't really like the medium, but it's really not that hard to run a server. And I don't think there's any fundamental reason this doesn't scale. Every single community center runs a website, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine local, trusted Mastodon-type servers operated by all sorts of organizations. You may already be a member of an organization that has the capability and drive in your area, if you just can find the other people who want it.
I am a little younger than the days of decentralized social media, but I caught the tail end of it. To me, Mastodon feels like an “email address” for social media. I think a lot of people are so used to centralized platforms that it seems crazy to have it be decentralized again.
I suspect as Mastodon grows, there will be more servers that become popular and will likely host the bulk of people, in much the same way that gmail pulled in the bulk of email users—but it will still be possible to have other “addresses” too. The idea is starting to grow on me.
> "Imagine you signed up for a sort of reverse-email address where your sent emails landed on a public page that anyone who knew your address could read if they wanted to and even follow you for more."
I think this is a feature for most communities to be honest. Twitter is great at inter-networking, and a decent soap-box, but communities there are shallow and when your audience is "everyone on the platform" the chilling effect means only certain types of people are participating honestly and in full. There's probably some great communities that happen to be on twitter in spite of there being almost no open functionality that helps with that, but I bet they would all grow and foster better conversations if they added a discord server or something similar. Twitter is about as good as a blog comment section for long-term community building.
I agree that subcommunities are a useful feature. That only proves my point, though. The positive example you give, Discord servers, are a lot more like subreddits than they are like Mastodon servers. You can join multiple of them, the power of the moderator is local and doesn't affect your account as a whole. Discord and Reddit are of course centralized services, but in theory there's nothing preventing a decentralized system from having a similar feature.
You can export your data and move it to another server. If you're banned on Twitter, you're done.
Also, complete failures like banning important stories, banning presidents, banning journalists etc. cannot happen on Mastodon the same way that it has happened countless of times on Twitter and will continue happening.
Mastodon is obviously superior when it comes to the freedom of speech. Elon is afraid, because he knows. Funnily enough, he is the reason why we will get the better version of social media faster.
What if your server that is run by a hobbyist suddenly shuts down without any notice? If they had an accident for example or they got hacked or whatever
I just downloaded the app for a second time and tried to create an account. I failed.
I thought I'd try mastodon.social but couldn't find it on any of the lists so chose the search option. Found it but it wouldn't let me register an account. Go go site, there's a register button but rather than taking me to a signup form I just get a big wall of text about how I can't be a sexist or a transphobe. Fine, I won't. But why can't I register?
> Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.
I don't want to be too glib, because your technical concerns are legitimate and well-argued. But... have you actually tried using it?
It works fine! It doesn't work as well as Twitter and has rough edges, but at this point it's well past the "will it work?" stage. There are real people there posting real content and engaging in real ways. If Twitter were to disappear tomorrow, people could all just move over and... it would be fine.
So it's OK to criticize, but the idea that it's somehow fatally flawed seems weird to me. It works fine.
I think I'm in the same demographic as you, but I don't see it as negatively. Most of the issues you mentioned don't bother me as much or could be fixed.
The only thing that concerns me is the risk of defederation. Why would anyone want to run an instance if they (and their users) are at the risk of being excluded on the whim of a small and intransparent group of people?
I mean so far moderation on Mastodon seems to work, but it still does not sit right with me that we basically replaced a dictatorship with the (benevolt) oligoply of the group of most popular server's owners.
In the end it's all a matter of trust and it would be good if more organizantions ran their own instances so that we would have bigger plurality of large instances.
> I mean so far moderation on Mastodon seems to work, but it still does not sit right with me that we basically replaced a dictatorship with the (benevolt) oligoply of the group of most popular server's owners.
Elon Musk has made some dumb moderation calls, but he seems open to changing some of them in response to popular feedback and media pressure. I don’t know if the same is true of those people. If new Twitter bans whoever, odds are high everybody will hear about it, and if they shouldn’t be banned, odds are decent it will be reversed. I’m not sure the same is true for this “oligopoly” for whom few know who they are. Seems even worse than Twitter as far as transparency and accountability goes
I agree with some of what you wrote, especially regarding selfhosting. I personally would like to see the ability to follow and post to local timelines, to ensure that you're able to be part of communities in a decentralised way.
However.
> you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar.
Is this worse than trusting Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok? Those companies are actively looking to exploit you for profit. Whereas strawman kitty avatar can't do anything. Especially are there are no private messages on Mastodon.
> Is this worse than trusting Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok?
Yes for the first two, no for the third. US-based companies are large targets for potential lawsuits, and consequently have processes in place to prevent random employees from accessing your DMs without cause. I obviously wouldn't trust those companies completely -- we're really arguing about probabilities here -- but there's at least some measure of accountability that makes them unlikely to do something trivially stupid.
> there are no private messages on Mastodon
It does have a DM feature -- that they aren't private is exactly the point.
In terms of local timeline inclusion that kind-of already muddies things, but WebFinger does provide for aliases and supports forwarding, so maybe the ability to have accounts on multiple instances but have them all forward to the same "follows"/"following" lists might work (likely not without changes, and there are many potential pitfalls there, though).
lack of algorithmic feed (and the whole anti-algo slant) and lack of openly viewable likes on people's profiles are actually gonna backfire. mastodon is gonna get lonely and boring, because it's kinda hard to do content discovery, particularly the kind where you get recommendations based on people you follow or interested in, so that those recs would be in closer proximity to you, rather than just getting random posts from trending. for how much algo stuff (like topics, suggested tweets, etc.) and particularly algo feed gets talked shit about, it's vital to discovery of new posts and new people.
without those things, it's easier to just run out of stuff and people to see, and end up in a place where you're caught up with things, and new people aren't entering your circle, and the activity just stops. well, it is also unlikely, because people just do stuff and mix other people in, but it's easier to end up in that static state, when you don't get suggestions in other ways.
at least there are reblogs. but there's also no option to filter those out right in someone's profile. so it's gonna get real annoying if those are gonna be the only way for someone to push content from somebody else.
When you follow someone, you can mute just boosts from them if you like.
Other than that, all of these things are things people can build using the API. I agree they're needed, and I think enough others do that things will get built.
I certainly want to build my own algorithmic feed, because reverse chronology is already a nuisance to me.
> I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power.
Personally, I think we should have this stuff regulated. We have power, mail, phones, internet, etc but most of the internet just isn't. Which seems really odd considering that for most people their Outlook/Google email is far more important to them than their postal mail but can be taken away from them because they emailed a photo to a doctor. Your revenue generating Twitter account can be suspended because you tweeted something some random person just didn't like with no real recourse. YouTube is probably the worse for kneecapping people's livilhoods over dodgy claims.
Decenteralized just seems like it'll be a pain for me to find stuff. And instead of being held hostage by a big company with policies and processes and money to sue them. You're being held hostage by some random guy who may decide he doesn't like being connected to a certain network and all of sudden you've got to create a new account somewhere else.
> I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power. But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronisticm.
I don't understand what decentralized internet service you would prefer then? The ability for anyone to host their own decentralized instance is exactly what a return to the protocols of old would look like. They may not have had anime avatars, but you were just as susceptible to the whims of your IRC admin. Either you trust in the faceless centralized conglomerate or in your smaller devop. What third option is there?
Peer to peer networks, with servers being purely optional for convenience (for convenient access from mobile, for example). Nothing about the social experience -- including your identity -- being tied to the "server" you're using to access the network. Technology has advanced since the invention of IRC.
Yeah so instead of worrying about all the stuff you are worrying about, I've just been using Mastodon and its been fine. I see the toots from the people I follow, I find the people I want to follow. Its been fine.
Choosing a Mastodon instance is like signing up for an email provider. Email is decentralized and seems to be doing alright.
I picked an instance that was good-sized at 9,000 users with a focus I liked: indieweb.social. That gives me a Local feed of interesting indieweb-related content in addition to my Home feed of people I follow. I didn't have to trust my privacy to an anonymous activist. I know who is running the instance and support it via Patreon.
Every one of your complaints about individual servers apply to Twitter as it is already, and some of them I see as features. For instance, not completely losing your community because Twitter or Discord or whatever parent company decides one day you don't belong there.
You can move accounts to a different server if you stop liking where you're at, which is a feature nobody has elsewhere it seems.
I view Mastodon as if Twitter, a Microblogging platform, and IRC had a child.
Let's take the reverse tack though, and agree with your opinion that it's a clusterfuck. Twitter should be threatened by Mastodon because they're losing users to it in spite of all those "problems".
Any article tangentially related to Mastodon inevitably has a comment like yours voted to the top, even when it's off-topic and adds little to the conversation. I'm reminded of the immortal slashdot comment about another "inferior" disruptor: No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame
> Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.
Perhaps because Twitter has metrics on how many times the Mastodon links are posted and followed, and you don't?
I think mastodon will be ok. The lesson learned from comparing twitter to Reddit, hacker news, and Facebook is that creating a successful social network is a moderation problem not a technology problem. BYO moderation strategies like those in use by mastodon, Reddit, twitch and discord can scale (while those of hackernews, fb, twitter cannot).
Mastodon, regardless of your server, can see and connect to everyone in the federation. The servers are just for how your name appears, local and moderation rules.
infosec.exchange can talk to and see content in mastodon.social
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, but I’ve switched off my Twitter and I’m going to really try and make Mastodon work because I think all issues except the network effect are surmountable here
Assuming you mean an actual blockchain and aren't just using it, as some people seem to do, as a catch-all term for cryptographic signatures, it's expensive overkill. Social media really doesn't need to pay the brutal computational costs to solve the Byzantine generals problem. You don't need to establish an immutable record under adversarial conditions because there's no "double spend" problem. A simple synchronization mechanism for cryptographically signed posts (to prove authorship) is enough.
I am an admin of a small instance that most likely isn't on Twitter's block list, so my profile name and description could report the link to my Mastodon profile without getting me banned.
However, even without a ban from their side, this has really been the last nail in the coffin between me and Twitter. Suspending accounts for posting links to another (open-source) social network is wrong on so many levels that I don't even know where to start listing them.
So I've decided to permanently deactivate my account and say goodbye for good to the stinky fascist shithole that Twitter has become.
I'm never sure if people are downvoting because they disagree or because they think its a bad post that doesn't contribute to the discussion... maybe we should have a system with more than one way of voting?
It's unlikely that Twitter has the (human) resources at this point to implement comprehensive censorship of Mastodon. They're currently only warning about links to popular instances such as mastodon.social, but links to smaller instances such as the one I use are still fine. One advantage of decentralization.
Every news outlet, and perhaps journalist associations such as the NUJ, should set up their own mastodon instance now and advertise that that's how to avoid Musk's blocks. There's no need for them to take this lying down.
Hilarious you see the NUJ as competent enough for that. In my view the NUJ, NCTJ etc are (sadly) not the answer for the challenges of media in 2022 and beyond - it could be argued they are not fit for purpose.
And they’ll just be reporting news to each other leaving a massive vacuum on Twitter for others to quickly fill.
Most people don’t really care about this story. They’re just users looking for news, opinions, trending topics, etc. if you don’t follow these types of accounts then you haven’t noticed much change on Twitter.
Honestly if anything I’ve noticed Twitter is probably a bit more fun and interesting now.
People are on Twitter because of accounts like that, across the spectrum. It was the one place where you could find everyone, including politicians, organisations, journalists, experts, and random people with cool interests, and interact on a more or less equal basis.
When enough of those leave it'll just become Truth Social or Parler. You might personally find that more fun and interesting, depending on your political background, but it'll never sustain the same user base.
I don't think Mastodon has any chance of overtaking Twitter. Here's how I would do it:
Create basically a clone of Twitter, with the same UI and functionality. The goal would be to make transition as seamless as possible. I have no interest in learning about why Mastodon works, why it runs on multiple domains and getting used to its UI. I just want Twitter without Elon.
Make it possible to easily transfer your data, including the people you follow. You would be able to see which of them are on the "new Twitter" and get notified when they switch.
Be inventive in making people convert. Perhaps organize a coordinated switch of many high-profile users to generate a lot of media attention. Or provide incentives such as some sort of ownership share.
It's not about the look of the social network - it's about the people you are interested in moving to a place and you following them. Mastodon has been that for me (the infosec people moved over and enough interesting "celebs") and I've been enjoying my time after a couple of days of adjustment.
You'll probably get that if Musk steps down as CEO... The best part about Mastodon IMO is that it's NOT Twitter, speaking as a Mastodon user of course. It feels way more manual and it feels like I need to build my feed and community myself, but it's empowering for specifically those reasons.
Not that I care, but you could even copy the current twitter usernames to your new twitter, alongside all their public tweets and followers. So, when switching, a user wouldn't even need to add back their data or find back their previous followers.
They mention base64 encoding messages to evade filters. There were actually other base{n} methods [1] created specifically for Twitter to be more space optimized though not as readily available to operating systems. I guess this is less useful if they are really expanding the text limit to 4k soon but figured I would add it in the event they add a parser for base64.
This assumes most people would be able to:
npm install base2048
I think it might be interesting if Mastodon added a function to automatically detect and decode base2048 for browsers in javascript since JS is required to view a Mastodon site anyway. Bots would then have to adopt this logic, rendering most bots useless until they adapt and evolve. But I am not a developer and maybe this is just not possible.
Readit News
But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic, but worse, fragments the community and creates (IMO) unacceptable privacy concerns. Self-hosting requires unnecessary hoops, loses some community functionality, and runs into the risk of "defederation", which only exacerbates the problem of servers being overly important. If you do decide to go with one of the existing servers, and hadn't been there early enough to get into one of those run by the foundation, you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar.
Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.
Jack linked to nostr which tries to solve some of these problems: https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768
> The problem with Mastodon and similar programs:
- User identities are attached to domain names controlled by third-parties;
- Server owners can ban you, just like Twitter; Server owners can also block other servers;
- Migration between servers is an afterthought and can only be accomplished if servers cooperate. It doesn't work in an adversarial environment (all followers are lost);
- There are no clear incentives to run servers, therefore they tend to be run by enthusiasts and people who want to have their name attached to a cool domain. Then, users are subject to the despotism of a single person, which is often worse than that of a big company like Twitter, and they can't migrate out;
- Since servers tend to be run amateurishly, they are often abandoned after a while — which is effectively the same as banning everybody;
- It doesn't make sense to have a ton of servers if updates from every server will have to be painfully pushed (and saved!) to a ton of other servers. This point is exacerbated by the fact that servers tend to exist in huge numbers, therefore more data has to be passed to more places more often;
- For the specific example of video sharing, ActivityPub enthusiasts realized it would be completely impossible to transmit video from server to server the way text notes are, so they decided to keep the video hosted only from the single instance where it was posted to, which is similar to the Nostr approach.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#very-short-summary-o...
> How do I find people to follow?
>
> First, you must know them and get their public key somehow
And here lies the main problem of most of these decentralized alternatives: how do you discover new content? One of the biggest innovation of Twitter was to be able to follow a hashtag-- say #SomeEvent2022 and you see all tweets using that hashtag, not only those of people you follow. This tends to be abused by spamers, but it’s a great way to follow what’s going on at large events or find stuff related to some topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061 (11 months ago)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360 (22 days ago)
I have some friends operating a Mastodon server, with a team of volunteer operators, and I'm pretty sure I've met all of them in person. I've only used Twitter a handful of times and don't really like the medium, but it's really not that hard to run a server. And I don't think there's any fundamental reason this doesn't scale. Every single community center runs a website, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine local, trusted Mastodon-type servers operated by all sorts of organizations. You may already be a member of an organization that has the capability and drive in your area, if you just can find the other people who want it.
But this will never describe a significant portion of Twitter users. It might work for some, but it wont replace Twitter.
I suspect as Mastodon grows, there will be more servers that become popular and will likely host the bulk of people, in much the same way that gmail pulled in the bulk of email users—but it will still be possible to have other “addresses” too. The idea is starting to grow on me.
https://hachyderm.io/@TechConnectify@mas.to/1095298448544650...
> "Imagine you signed up for a sort of reverse-email address where your sent emails landed on a public page that anyone who knew your address could read if they wanted to and even follow you for more."
And it’s waiting for its AOL and Gmail.
I think this is a feature for most communities to be honest. Twitter is great at inter-networking, and a decent soap-box, but communities there are shallow and when your audience is "everyone on the platform" the chilling effect means only certain types of people are participating honestly and in full. There's probably some great communities that happen to be on twitter in spite of there being almost no open functionality that helps with that, but I bet they would all grow and foster better conversations if they added a discord server or something similar. Twitter is about as good as a blog comment section for long-term community building.
Also, complete failures like banning important stories, banning presidents, banning journalists etc. cannot happen on Mastodon the same way that it has happened countless of times on Twitter and will continue happening.
Mastodon is obviously superior when it comes to the freedom of speech. Elon is afraid, because he knows. Funnily enough, he is the reason why we will get the better version of social media faster.
I thought I'd try mastodon.social but couldn't find it on any of the lists so chose the search option. Found it but it wouldn't let me register an account. Go go site, there's a register button but rather than taking me to a signup form I just get a big wall of text about how I can't be a sexist or a transphobe. Fine, I won't. But why can't I register?
Go to joinmastodon.org or instances.social, not directly to a specific instance.
I don't want to be too glib, because your technical concerns are legitimate and well-argued. But... have you actually tried using it?
It works fine! It doesn't work as well as Twitter and has rough edges, but at this point it's well past the "will it work?" stage. There are real people there posting real content and engaging in real ways. If Twitter were to disappear tomorrow, people could all just move over and... it would be fine.
So it's OK to criticize, but the idea that it's somehow fatally flawed seems weird to me. It works fine.
The only thing that concerns me is the risk of defederation. Why would anyone want to run an instance if they (and their users) are at the risk of being excluded on the whim of a small and intransparent group of people?
I mean so far moderation on Mastodon seems to work, but it still does not sit right with me that we basically replaced a dictatorship with the (benevolt) oligoply of the group of most popular server's owners.
In the end it's all a matter of trust and it would be good if more organizantions ran their own instances so that we would have bigger plurality of large instances.
Elon Musk has made some dumb moderation calls, but he seems open to changing some of them in response to popular feedback and media pressure. I don’t know if the same is true of those people. If new Twitter bans whoever, odds are high everybody will hear about it, and if they shouldn’t be banned, odds are decent it will be reversed. I’m not sure the same is true for this “oligopoly” for whom few know who they are. Seems even worse than Twitter as far as transparency and accountability goes
However.
> you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar.
Is this worse than trusting Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok? Those companies are actively looking to exploit you for profit. Whereas strawman kitty avatar can't do anything. Especially are there are no private messages on Mastodon.
Yes for the first two, no for the third. US-based companies are large targets for potential lawsuits, and consequently have processes in place to prevent random employees from accessing your DMs without cause. I obviously wouldn't trust those companies completely -- we're really arguing about probabilities here -- but there's at least some measure of accountability that makes them unlikely to do something trivially stupid.
> there are no private messages on Mastodon
It does have a DM feature -- that they aren't private is exactly the point.
Deleted Comment
without those things, it's easier to just run out of stuff and people to see, and end up in a place where you're caught up with things, and new people aren't entering your circle, and the activity just stops. well, it is also unlikely, because people just do stuff and mix other people in, but it's easier to end up in that static state, when you don't get suggestions in other ways.
at least there are reblogs. but there's also no option to filter those out right in someone's profile. so it's gonna get real annoying if those are gonna be the only way for someone to push content from somebody else.
Other than that, all of these things are things people can build using the API. I agree they're needed, and I think enough others do that things will get built.
I certainly want to build my own algorithmic feed, because reverse chronology is already a nuisance to me.
Personally, I think we should have this stuff regulated. We have power, mail, phones, internet, etc but most of the internet just isn't. Which seems really odd considering that for most people their Outlook/Google email is far more important to them than their postal mail but can be taken away from them because they emailed a photo to a doctor. Your revenue generating Twitter account can be suspended because you tweeted something some random person just didn't like with no real recourse. YouTube is probably the worse for kneecapping people's livilhoods over dodgy claims.
Decenteralized just seems like it'll be a pain for me to find stuff. And instead of being held hostage by a big company with policies and processes and money to sue them. You're being held hostage by some random guy who may decide he doesn't like being connected to a certain network and all of sudden you've got to create a new account somewhere else.
Deleted Comment
I don't understand what decentralized internet service you would prefer then? The ability for anyone to host their own decentralized instance is exactly what a return to the protocols of old would look like. They may not have had anime avatars, but you were just as susceptible to the whims of your IRC admin. Either you trust in the faceless centralized conglomerate or in your smaller devop. What third option is there?
Choosing a Mastodon instance is like signing up for an email provider. Email is decentralized and seems to be doing alright.
I picked an instance that was good-sized at 9,000 users with a focus I liked: indieweb.social. That gives me a Local feed of interesting indieweb-related content in addition to my Home feed of people I follow. I didn't have to trust my privacy to an anonymous activist. I know who is running the instance and support it via Patreon.
You can move accounts to a different server if you stop liking where you're at, which is a feature nobody has elsewhere it seems.
I view Mastodon as if Twitter, a Microblogging platform, and IRC had a child.
Let's take the reverse tack though, and agree with your opinion that it's a clusterfuck. Twitter should be threatened by Mastodon because they're losing users to it in spite of all those "problems".
> Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.
Perhaps because Twitter has metrics on how many times the Mastodon links are posted and followed, and you don't?
infosec.exchange can talk to and see content in mastodon.social
If not now, then when?
Dead Comment
However, even without a ban from their side, this has really been the last nail in the coffin between me and Twitter. Suspending accounts for posting links to another (open-source) social network is wrong on so many levels that I don't even know where to start listing them.
So I've decided to permanently deactivate my account and say goodbye for good to the stinky fascist shithole that Twitter has become.
Dead Comment
It seems to work by blocking connections to the Twitterbot User-Agent while allowing other connections.
Most people don’t really care about this story. They’re just users looking for news, opinions, trending topics, etc. if you don’t follow these types of accounts then you haven’t noticed much change on Twitter.
Honestly if anything I’ve noticed Twitter is probably a bit more fun and interesting now.
When enough of those leave it'll just become Truth Social or Parler. You might personally find that more fun and interesting, depending on your political background, but it'll never sustain the same user base.
> Also TIL, <script> works just fine in data:text/html URIs, despite me having NotScript installed... Also remembering that one for later.
This seems pretty concerning to me… I would’ve expected the browser to prevent this somehow. Any security experts able to verify?
Create basically a clone of Twitter, with the same UI and functionality. The goal would be to make transition as seamless as possible. I have no interest in learning about why Mastodon works, why it runs on multiple domains and getting used to its UI. I just want Twitter without Elon.
Make it possible to easily transfer your data, including the people you follow. You would be able to see which of them are on the "new Twitter" and get notified when they switch.
Be inventive in making people convert. Perhaps organize a coordinated switch of many high-profile users to generate a lot of media attention. Or provide incentives such as some sort of ownership share.
It is basically inevitable that eventually this same thing will happen again and we are back in the same place.
This is why Mastodon is enticing. It provides some architectural advantages that mitigate this problem at a fundamental level.
This assumes most people would be able to:
I think it might be interesting if Mastodon added a function to automatically detect and decode base2048 for browsers in javascript since JS is required to view a Mastodon site anyway. Bots would then have to adopt this logic, rendering most bots useless until they adapt and evolve. But I am not a developer and maybe this is just not possible.[1] - https://github.com/qntm/base2048