I agree with the premise of the article. I’m a new Mastodon user trying to give the platform an honest shot, but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another. Why choose anything other than the pseudo-default Mastodon.social? If I’m forced to choose another server, is that choice actually meaningful? I feel like I’m randomly picking between Hachyderm and TechHub.io and others. One advantage of federation I keep hearing is that servers can block other servers if their users become problematic. My question is this: why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane?
I do see the potential advantages of federation to prevent the same fate that overcame Twitter and Reddit, but I can’t figure out how to make a user’s server choice actually meaningful. Without solving that piece of the puzzle, I don’t see any practical advantage to federated services.
Problematic users do tend to congregate on certain servers because they keep getting banned from better moderated ones. Eventually they find the ones that won't ban them, and now well moderated instances have an easy target to block them wholesale. That's how you end up with instances like explodingheads.
> ... but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another.
Email is often a good analogy for questions like these: Why do you pick one email service over the other? Maybe you think the domain is cool. Maybe you heard that they are reliable or have features that others don't. Maybe your university, company or other community you belong to runs its own service. Or you decide to host your own. Or you really have no preference and you just go with the one your friend uses.
We just don't have just don't have the gmail-equivalent catch-all choices yet. Maybe that will come later or maybe it won't.
Except that with e-mail there are obvious good reasons, which basically boil down to whether you've centered your digital life around the Google, Microsoft, or Apple ecosystems (or never moved away from Yahoo, etc.).
These are recognizably proven brands that aren't going to disappear next year, and which integrate with your other tools in ways that clearly provide benefit.
And back in the day before webmail was a thing, your ISP gave you an e-mail address so you didn't pick at all.
But none of these are even remotely applicable to Mastodon instances. So I'm not sure that e-mail is actually a helpful analogy at all here.
And for both email and the Fediverse, there's an ideal answer that requires only marginally more work: have your own domain. In both cases, you don't have to host a server yourself, you can pay for email hosting and use your own domain. For email, services like Fastmail let you bring your own domain. For the Fediverse, https://togethr.party/ works well.
Your email choice used to reflect your ISP, and now reflects your chosen platform for file storage, image albums, productivity suite, calendaring, etc.
I'm not sure how this applies to Mastodon servers in practice.
The same way people manage to decide whether to buy buns at the bakery on the right rather than the one on the left or donate to the NGO1 rather than NGO2 doing exactly the same, you ought to manage to judge which instance is a better fit or if it even matters in your case.
>why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane?
Well, exactly. And who's doing all the blocking and filtering? What are the rules? And which community is better at reporting and keeping the instance the way you like it? What about your interests? If you join a busy generic instance, of course, you will become disinterested in your local timeline.
But why force people to categorize themselves? There's no special type of Twitter for people who are musicians, for example, or people who do airbrush paintings of squirrels. Who knows what you might want to send messages about tomorrow or next year or in half an hour?
Having "themed" instances implies that you're committing to whatever that theme is, but all you want to do is share whatever is on your mind from day to day. This apparent pigeonholing is enough to make the whole idea a failure. Remember Yahoo? It wanted you to drill down through dozens or hundreds of canned search categories... and then Alta Vista came along with just a text box. And of course today that's Google too.
Speaking of search... the bizarre and rabid animosity expressed by many Mastodon users toward FINDING CONTENT on Mastodon is baffling. I've seen threads where someone asks how to search for things on Mastodon and gets berated for even suggesting that people who PUBLISH STUFF on the Internet would ever want it found.
> The same way people manage to decide whether to buy buns at the bakery on the right rather than the one on the left or donate to the NGO1 rather than NGO2 doing exactly the same, you ought to manage to judge which instance is a better fit or if it even matters in your case.
Bakeries and NGOs aren't sticky. Your relationships with them is a series of one-time transactions, and at any time you can switch to the alternative at no cost.
Picking a Mastodon instance is more like picking a school or university - it's a choice of where to commit, made at a point when you're least equipped to make a good call, and increasingly hard to reverse the longer you go along with it.
Perhaps Mastodon is just too immature at this stage for the servers to really differentiate themselves from each other. However, as the number of users and posts on Mastodon grows, will any server actually be capable of adequate moderation? Twitter has ~6,000 tweets per second—it's hard to imagine any Mastodon server today being able to handle even a fraction of that content.
I have also noticed that in some cases....user blocks are being replicated to an instance I run. I have this huge and ever growing list of banned users on my single user instance in lemmy. ANd I have no idea who is banning and why...I doesnt seem to affect me...but its odd
> why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane?
The fediverse is not one unified whole, the fediverse is a bunch of loosely-connected communities that can very easily throw up walls at a moment's notice.
Admins are actively incentivised to kick problem users off. If a server becomes known as a source of problems, then other admins will defederate from it. How you define "problems" depends on who you are, in general if an admin looks at a report for one of your users and finds you doing the exact same kind of bullshit as what your user was reported for then they will probably defed from you without a second thought. After a while your server will only be federated with other servers that are also fine with that particular kind of bullshit. If your particular kind of bullshit is "finding people who are different from you and making fun of them" then there's a high chance that the users on your server will either wander away, or turn on each other; both of these tend to lead to admins deciding it's not worth keeping the place running in my experience.
Mastodon.social is way too big to realistically be handled by anything but a bigger crew of paid moderators than it has, and "we should defed from mastodon.social because it's right on the border of being a constant source of trouble" is a topic that admins constantly chew on in places like the #fediblock tag. But you can start on one of the big servers and move, too. Possibly to a small one with a lot of your friends, so that the "local" timeline is useful. Possibly one run by one of your friends, who will make largely the same "oh god look at this server full of assholes, block'd" calls that you would, and save you the trouble. Possibly one with a cool name, would you rather be sxg@mastodon.social, sxg@possums.gay, sxg@gop.party, sxg@...?
(As far as I know neither Lemmy or Kbin offer account migration yet, so you're stuck on your initial one until they fix this. I'm sure it's in their roadmaps.)
At least as big an issue for Lemmy and Kbin is community migration. A server that hosts a popular community shutting down is a very real risk, and simply telling users to switch doesn't scale. (No, not everything needs to scale, but it would be better if that did.)
What you see on Mastodon is (a) stuff posted by other people on your server, and (b) stuff posted by people on other servers whom people on your server are following. So your choice of server has a strong affect on your feed. And hosting your own instance means that you really need to start following loads of people if you want to keep an eye on what's going on. I suppose I can see this as a good thing, or at least vaguely see why other people might see it as a good thing, but I mostly find it annoying. (It also means that there isn't an overall Mastodon zeitgeist, the way there may have been with Twitter.)
Another, even more annoying side-effect, is that conversations may have bits silently missing, if they're posted by someone not on your instance. I have been reading a thread of seven posts, posted by five different people, and then looked at that same thread from another server and found that it was actually sixteen posts, posted by eight different people, several of which had not federated to my server. I have been irritated by two different people asking me the same questions, leading to two separate threads hanging off my initial comment, covering exactly the same subject, until I looked at the conversations from their servers and realised that they were invisible to each other.
I would never use Mastodon for anything serious: the chance of irritating people, missing context, and talking at cross purposes are far too high.
>I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another
Who runs the server? On what kind of funding, and how long can it last? Are you served intrusive ads? Are your a customer or a product for the people running this instance? How hard is it to run an instance yourself, and what happens if you suddenly post a video that attracts 10M views?
So many questions, I know, that's too hard, gimme something easy.
At the time I signed up for Mastodon and a server, I didn't consider and wasn't presented with any of these questions/answers or other points of differentiation among servers. I guess that's part of the issue: when an ordinary user signs up for Mastodon, they're unaware of what they should even consider when picking a server. As an ordinary Mastodon user myself, I just wanted to get on the platform and start using it.
>but I can’t figure out how to make a user’s server choice actually meaningful
in theory, the instance-specific bit of it is the moderation. the one you sign up with chooses which other instances to federate with, as well as how to moderate the content on their own instance. in theory, you could sign up for an instance that only allowed the sort of politics you agree with, or that had very lax moderation, or that had very strict moderation.
unfortunately, none of the fediverse seems to actually talk about this so without signing up and using an instance for a while to see what the moderation policies are like there's no way to know.
> unfortunately, none of the fediverse seems to actually talk about this so without signing up and using an instance for a while to see what the moderation policies are like there's no way to know.
Correct, but that's why you can actually migrate your account (including your followers!) from one instance another. The initial choice doesn't matter too much. Just migrate if you don't like it. That's why there isn't much discussions about it.
The phone network is a federated service. You can call an ATT customer from Verizon. You can also call them from Joe's Discount Boxes and VoIP sales.
Now, if you start making spammy calls, ATT might block you as a customer (after warning you first). Same for Verizon. But Joe's Discount Boxes and VoIP sales doesn't, because box sales are down and these VoIP margins are so, so juicy.
Spammy customers flock to Joe, because he allows it. Joe keeps letting customers on, without doing due diligence, without caring if they're legit (beyond a valid looking credit card), and eventually gets blocked by FCC order.
(See https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-23-389A1.pdf, for an example).
Now, federation doesn't have an FCC, the various server admins will be filling that role themselves, but there is a reason scummy people will use scummy servers.
Side note: This kind of FCC enforcement is fairly new to the industry, so if you're wondering why you get spam called all the time still, there is some hope this'll change.
Yes, all problematic users don’t congregate on the same server. Problematic users can pop up anywhere. However, a server could fail to moderate effectively and become a source of misinformation and trolling. That’s the benefit of federation: it ensures a minimum level of moderation quality. Servers that don’t moderate are blocked, which sets up the proper incentives.
Sure, but as the number of users on the federated service grows, how do we not end up in the same place as email today? Does it not become good moderation policy to auto-block all new and small servers (e.g., self-hosted email servers) if you're a big server (e.g., Gmail)? If that happens, wouldn't all users migrate to the big server (e.g., Gmail) and effectively re-establish centralization and undermine federation?
What's misinformation? Things you don't think are true? Things the instance admin doesn't think are true? Things officially deemed untrue by the State? Or by the UN/WHO? Is is considered Misinformation if it was deemed Untrue in the past by State Officials but is now Official State Policy? We have always been at war with Eastasia. We have always recommended the wearing of masks. We have always seriously considered the possibility of a lab leak. Border closures are a bad, racist, problematic idea. No wait, now New Zealand is the hero of the pandemic because it closed its borders. We have always recommended border closures!
Servers defederating because of viagra/nigerian prince/etc. spam is one thing. A "lefty politics" server defederating with a "righty politics" server or vice-versa because they just want an echo chamber? Sure, you do you. General-purpose defederating other general-purpose servers because of "misinformation" and "trolling", when those terms basically mean "disagreeing with the current mainstream narrative on any controversial issue"? That's absurd. The generally-accepted issue with social media was for years that it created echo chambers. Now people are trying to use mastodon to create even more powerful echo chambers.
Mass federation is the best solution to resist mass surveillance and censorship. I never have a problem picking an instance because I just create my own instance whenever I want to use different SW. In a few minutes I can usually spin one up. and I have a few running on my SBC sitting here on my desk. I rarely ever block anyone as unfollowing is good enough.
Current federation looks like that, a bunch of small independent communities focused on a single topic like tech or photography or whatever, but it doesn't have to be like that. If federation catches on then the most likely the pick will be between 5-10 huge general instances run by corporations.
In such world, Twitter and Facebook could add support for ActivityPub, Google and Microsoft could build their own, different ISPs and media companies could run their instances, and so on. Then the benefit of choice becomes more clear - who do you trust the most to provide you an account. Basically, it would be like the situation with email where most people use a 3-4 biggest services, but the ecosystem is open to new competitors.
The current state of federated social networks is very experimental. If it catches on with big corporations 90% of people will use that, and these small communities can still survive but would be more or less irrelevant.
Yeah, tried the same with Lemmy. A list of half done of dead communities, all of them with zero explanation of why and how.
Then i read about the codebase and people were struggling with SQL so performance is bad - i mean what? is that really the state things, where's the talent working on this?
I'm honestly surprised that both the design, performance and docs of these alternatives are this bad in 2023.
If this has to work you need an extremely simple and well designed landing page with a super simple explanation of how this works, the creation of a user should work on more or less all instances, and you should be able to easily meta search for the communities you want and get an easy overview quickly.
I think if the intent and structure of federation curves towards every household having its own server or something analogous the federated universe seems more sensible. But that does seem like a difficult curve until we have a universe where there's something like app-store level ease around self hosting your household services on something equivalent to a fancy home router is the norm. And that universe seems far off and actively not what the powers that be desire.
“ why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? ”
There’s a simple answer to why server blocking is a feature of mastodon. It was built to handle a real world problem. I.e there was early on a server that was a “free speech absolutist” server that server mods wanted to block at a server level.
I think many servers/instances post what they're all about and how they're different, and that should help. We're seeing all kinds of sites springing up to help navigate this, and I think in time it'll be sorted out.
That’s exactly the problem with replacing Reddit with a federated service. The opposite is true with replacing Twitter in which case it’s difficult to explain why a user has to pick any server at all.
If the goal is to talk about your interests with strangers (and not pull in your whole family and political and journalistic class), some minimal federation friction could be beneficial actually, as a soft filter. Maybe it's worth it to have some common pre-Eternal September spaces on the Internet, even it means not building unicorn empires.
The latter seems to be a mindset people aren't able to shake off for some reason, applicable to the given case or not. If a person can write and read two sorta coherent paragraphs of text for a internet forum, they are already on the level of being willing to learn and a little curious, above what the tech giants expect from their model user. There are enough of such people to have interesting and diverse discussions. Don't tell me Discord is easy to figure out. I'm not saying the devs should be working to make the experience easier, but it starts to be one of those topics where the discussion is meme-based.
You can tell search engine robots not to index your copies of different forums. I don't think they are viewable by default anyway? Avoiding small instances to avoid outages sounds like 4D strats to most users, who might prefer cosiness, personal connections and camaraderie, like on Minecraft servers, say.
The problem is discoverability. You don't know where to look for stuff or people. I wanted to check out this whole Lemmy thing and found almost completely dead (no comments) communities linked from their project page.
Where do I go? How do I search for something worthwhile? There's no central space to find it, compare communities etc. I was curious but now I am kind of put off.
Discoverability is a double edged sword. You'll find it, but so will every bot and scammer on the planet too. Then moderation will get ever stricter to get rid of the abusers and eventually the place becomes a mess for one reason or another.
I ran into this same issue. But I asked myself, if I passed through and left because no one was active, why not plant some seed content for the next person that passes through? I couldn't be the only one looking for smaller, more intimate communities.
I did this for a "dead" forum and after about a week of "squatting" there and posting for myself, other people started showing up and replying to it.
People should treat the digital silence of dead communities as an asset and free real estate to share their thoughts.
I checked and you can find a good number of communities by going to one of the larger Lemmy sites, clicking on the Communities tab and selecting All. If you want one directory from many instances (I assume this is what you meant by central space), someone would have to create it.
I wonder if the rise in smartphones as people’s default device has indeed reduced the likelihood of gathering such knowledgeable and worthwhile strangers together. Even many people with intellectual acumen and adventurousness, who might have tried an alternative community, are using devices that discourage longform text and logging into obscure websites.
Case in point, I am a member of some hobby and travel communities where, a decade ago, many people had blogs where they described their experiences with rich, detailed text. Now those same people hardly even touch a keyboard and are content to maybe just post a few pictures. They also are more likely these days to engage in political battle, since political polarization is so much greater than it used to be.
And they still state that it's easy and the other posters are scratching their heads as to why don't people understand this. "Whyyyy???"
They don't seem to understand that the average user doesn't find it easy to use. That's the biggest hint, but instead are acting like everyone is stupid but them.
That's why the fediverse is going to get a bump for a bit during this reddit situation, but then calm down as users aren't going to want to stick around. The same happened when others were leaving Twitter.
This fediverse situation reminds me of that Silicon Valley episode in which they're testing an app with a focus group. The group just doesn't understand the app and find it too complicated. Richard tries to explain the app to them, but it's too technical for them to comprehend.
> They don't seem to understand that the average user doesn't find it easy to use. That's the biggest hint, but instead are acting like everyone is stupid but them.
In all fairness those were the exact same comments when people moved away from Digg to reddit, only in the opposite direction. History is just repeating itself.
I remember vividly when the digg exodus happened, I don't ever remember a single person complaining that reddit, nor digg, were too technical/difficult to understand/use.
Both sites you simply clicked the register link, input your username/pass/email then done. The fediverse does not have a clean onboarding that lends itself to comprehension by a regular non-technical person. It seems way over the head of your average user. I've tried to get friends to check out Lemmy and it's a solid no-go.
If you need an entire matrix of understanding of a concept before feeling comfortable to use it then it is simply too much cognitive friction.
During the Digg migration, the main criticism I remember is that Reddit was ugly but still usable. For casual users of the fediverse, I think the criticism is that kbin, Lemmy, and Mastodon are actually too confusing to understand and therefore unusable, which is a key distinction.
Funnily enough, clicking the link currently results in a very long load time followed by a 5xx error. Federated social media has more than just the "understanding" problem, and the problems also compound on top of each other nicely.
Yes. The usual problems. Discovery, identity, storage.
Identity is the hardest problem. Yes, there's stuff like OpenID. But few non-programmers use it. We badly need some kind of ID system that doesn't depend
on a vendor that's in the advertising business.
Discovery is a problem mostly because Google has a monopoly in search.
The problem with federated storage is that storage is currently organized by "where", not by "what". There's the BitTorrent approach, where the address is the hash of the content.
There's IPFS, but it's 90% Make Money Fast with crypto and 10% actually storing stuff.
Whatever happened to the DOI concept?
There's distributed caching, like PeerTube, which works better. Every file has a home location, but if lots of people want something, it gets replicated. So if your cat video goes viral, your tiny server won't be overloaded. That solves the problem of popular content, but not the long tail.
And because the option to not index posts is enabled by default and a good chunk of the fediverse is opposed to indexing due to their irrational fear of bots:
I think the only reason people know about email supporting multiple providers is because its old, if email was made today, you bet its going to be centralized.
Heck people already scratch their heads when an email isn't hosted @gmail.com or @hotmail/outlook.com.
And the learning curve exists because unprofitable companies like Twitter and Reddit made centralization possible by burning money, the old internet was decentralized because centralization was impossible, it was too expensive.
If these failing companies die, federated services will be the mainstream again.
But as long as there is money to be burned to try to make a poor business model out of social interaction, federation is never going to be able to compete.
I've heard plenty of stories of people saying "my email is fred@fredsmith.com" and it being input by a customer rep as "fred@fredsmith.com@gmail.com". Or them asking "At gmail.com or hotmail?" and you have to explain "No, at fredsmith.com".
Except most normal people don't use their corporate email address for personal stuff.
I've always used a custom domain for my main email addresses and whenever I've had to give it to someone else verbally it inevitably leads to some amount of confusion. At the very least they get thrown off by the fact that I didn't say gmail/outlook/yahoo after the @ and I have to repeat the domain name.
> I mean that’s the whole point of federation right??
The point of federation is not to be dependent on oligopolies from a single country, one with poor grasp of and legal enforcement of personal privacy at that.
>It kinda loses its point.
Even if it comes to this, it doesn't. Another migration can happen at any point, but this time you wouldn't lose your social contacts - and in the future hopefully neither your content.
>But Google and Microsoft got in the game.
That's like your common anti-Linux argument.
>Search engine indexing for these federated services SUCKS.
Decentralized content/link aggregators just became popular so we'll see what'll happen, but personal social media shouldn't be as public for most people as it right now anyway.
> not to be dependent on oligopolies from a single country, one with poor grasp of and legal enforcement of personal privacy at that.
The oligopolies from a single country might get replaced by groups of instances who will claim they're holders of the Truth and who are the Service, while rest is dangerous. Nothing also stops countries from running own instances or compatible services by dedicated companies or people to either dominate or lure people out of the federation. A good campaign, attractive interface and features and people will follow.
The remaining option is to "run your own instance" but in time when the federation will most likely solidify enough it might be hard to do so. Hard as in getting people to join your new playground. What we're seeing right now it's a boom period.
Don't get me wrong, I do like concept of federated services but there's too many sides where it might fail in long-term and help create a highly tribalized echo-chambered communities
The problem with federation is that “HTTP browsers” simply just don’t work that way.
There is nothing you can do to make Firefox or Chrome to understand what a “federated network” even is. For a browser, an “Origin” is an extremely well defined concept. You can’t just decide to amend it because that’s how you feel it ought to be. If you can’t make mastodon.social be relates to social.mastodon in the browser, then you’ll have a rough edge. And that’s just to start. Federated services have so, so so so, many usability issues that all could be attributed to what a “browser” interrupts HTTP or the internet to be vs what is actually possible.
> Federated services have so, so so so, many usability issues
I like how you're talking about it like it's some abstract underground BBS style system that requires a modem, ISDN line installed, custom software running on a unix subsystem
I mean I found https://fosstodon.org/home signed up, clicked on local, liked posts, followed people, now I get a stream of posts to my home feed every day
Maybe your everyday facebook user might struggle with the idea of signing up to a site and interacting with it but I'm just not seeing why anyone who can sign up to discord or reddit would struggle with it
Try loading up an image on a different instance, or browsing that instance from a different instance. If you can figure it out, it's as slow as molasses.
There's absolutely nothing stopping browser vendors from implementing ActivityPub. I don't think the browser is the right place, but browsers also implemented automatic RSS feed detection for more than a decade so it's not exactly unprecedented either.
Browsers don't need to care, anyway. There are some problems that need solving (notably, following/interacting with users on other platforms) but there are ways to do that. I'm not quite sure why nobody has come up with a good standard for a web-activitypub: URL handler, but once everyone agrees on a format adding support for cross-server stuff should be easy.
Web browsers can access webmail clients and mailing lists just fine. They even have mailto: as a means to cross the federation gap. All of these problems are implementation issues, not conceptual impossibilities.
I don't get these posts. I've yet to hear someone developing federated social media whose goal is mass uptake. Mastodon is designed to avoid viral posts for instance. I use latex and vim to produce pdf documents. I wouldn't write a long post saying "I don't see this replacing ms office any time soon".
> I don't get these posts. I've yet to hear someone developing federated social media whose goal is mass uptake.
In which case it's being mis-sold. It will never replace the thing that people are claiming it will replace.
> Mastodon is designed to avoid viral posts
"viral posts" aren't inherently a bad thing. It's part and parcel of some of the good aspects of social media - the sense of having a collective conversation among a large group. Fragementation is fine up to a point (We're already fragmented between half a dozen large social networks) but I want people to find me easily if they are interested in what I'm posting.
And why do you want to be found easily, really? In case you get your 15 minutes? I think the goal is to build community. Large numbers and reach are actually not so important.
Readit News
I do see the potential advantages of federation to prevent the same fate that overcame Twitter and Reddit, but I can’t figure out how to make a user’s server choice actually meaningful. Without solving that piece of the puzzle, I don’t see any practical advantage to federated services.
Email is often a good analogy for questions like these: Why do you pick one email service over the other? Maybe you think the domain is cool. Maybe you heard that they are reliable or have features that others don't. Maybe your university, company or other community you belong to runs its own service. Or you decide to host your own. Or you really have no preference and you just go with the one your friend uses.
We just don't have just don't have the gmail-equivalent catch-all choices yet. Maybe that will come later or maybe it won't.
These are recognizably proven brands that aren't going to disappear next year, and which integrate with your other tools in ways that clearly provide benefit.
And back in the day before webmail was a thing, your ISP gave you an e-mail address so you didn't pick at all.
But none of these are even remotely applicable to Mastodon instances. So I'm not sure that e-mail is actually a helpful analogy at all here.
I'm not sure how this applies to Mastodon servers in practice.
>why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane?
Well, exactly. And who's doing all the blocking and filtering? What are the rules? And which community is better at reporting and keeping the instance the way you like it? What about your interests? If you join a busy generic instance, of course, you will become disinterested in your local timeline.
Having "themed" instances implies that you're committing to whatever that theme is, but all you want to do is share whatever is on your mind from day to day. This apparent pigeonholing is enough to make the whole idea a failure. Remember Yahoo? It wanted you to drill down through dozens or hundreds of canned search categories... and then Alta Vista came along with just a text box. And of course today that's Google too.
Speaking of search... the bizarre and rabid animosity expressed by many Mastodon users toward FINDING CONTENT on Mastodon is baffling. I've seen threads where someone asks how to search for things on Mastodon and gets berated for even suggesting that people who PUBLISH STUFF on the Internet would ever want it found.
Bakeries and NGOs aren't sticky. Your relationships with them is a series of one-time transactions, and at any time you can switch to the alternative at no cost.
Picking a Mastodon instance is more like picking a school or university - it's a choice of where to commit, made at a point when you're least equipped to make a good call, and increasingly hard to reverse the longer you go along with it.
The fediverse is not one unified whole, the fediverse is a bunch of loosely-connected communities that can very easily throw up walls at a moment's notice.
Admins are actively incentivised to kick problem users off. If a server becomes known as a source of problems, then other admins will defederate from it. How you define "problems" depends on who you are, in general if an admin looks at a report for one of your users and finds you doing the exact same kind of bullshit as what your user was reported for then they will probably defed from you without a second thought. After a while your server will only be federated with other servers that are also fine with that particular kind of bullshit. If your particular kind of bullshit is "finding people who are different from you and making fun of them" then there's a high chance that the users on your server will either wander away, or turn on each other; both of these tend to lead to admins deciding it's not worth keeping the place running in my experience.
Mastodon.social is way too big to realistically be handled by anything but a bigger crew of paid moderators than it has, and "we should defed from mastodon.social because it's right on the border of being a constant source of trouble" is a topic that admins constantly chew on in places like the #fediblock tag. But you can start on one of the big servers and move, too. Possibly to a small one with a lot of your friends, so that the "local" timeline is useful. Possibly one run by one of your friends, who will make largely the same "oh god look at this server full of assholes, block'd" calls that you would, and save you the trouble. Possibly one with a cool name, would you rather be sxg@mastodon.social, sxg@possums.gay, sxg@gop.party, sxg@...?
(As far as I know neither Lemmy or Kbin offer account migration yet, so you're stuck on your initial one until they fix this. I'm sure it's in their roadmaps.)
Another, even more annoying side-effect, is that conversations may have bits silently missing, if they're posted by someone not on your instance. I have been reading a thread of seven posts, posted by five different people, and then looked at that same thread from another server and found that it was actually sixteen posts, posted by eight different people, several of which had not federated to my server. I have been irritated by two different people asking me the same questions, leading to two separate threads hanging off my initial comment, covering exactly the same subject, until I looked at the conversations from their servers and realised that they were invisible to each other.
I would never use Mastodon for anything serious: the chance of irritating people, missing context, and talking at cross purposes are far too high.
Who runs the server? On what kind of funding, and how long can it last? Are you served intrusive ads? Are your a customer or a product for the people running this instance? How hard is it to run an instance yourself, and what happens if you suddenly post a video that attracts 10M views?
So many questions, I know, that's too hard, gimme something easy.
in theory, the instance-specific bit of it is the moderation. the one you sign up with chooses which other instances to federate with, as well as how to moderate the content on their own instance. in theory, you could sign up for an instance that only allowed the sort of politics you agree with, or that had very lax moderation, or that had very strict moderation.
unfortunately, none of the fediverse seems to actually talk about this so without signing up and using an instance for a while to see what the moderation policies are like there's no way to know.
Correct, but that's why you can actually migrate your account (including your followers!) from one instance another. The initial choice doesn't matter too much. Just migrate if you don't like it. That's why there isn't much discussions about it.
The phone network is a federated service. You can call an ATT customer from Verizon. You can also call them from Joe's Discount Boxes and VoIP sales.
Now, if you start making spammy calls, ATT might block you as a customer (after warning you first). Same for Verizon. But Joe's Discount Boxes and VoIP sales doesn't, because box sales are down and these VoIP margins are so, so juicy.
Spammy customers flock to Joe, because he allows it. Joe keeps letting customers on, without doing due diligence, without caring if they're legit (beyond a valid looking credit card), and eventually gets blocked by FCC order. (See https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-23-389A1.pdf, for an example).
Now, federation doesn't have an FCC, the various server admins will be filling that role themselves, but there is a reason scummy people will use scummy servers.
Side note: This kind of FCC enforcement is fairly new to the industry, so if you're wondering why you get spam called all the time still, there is some hope this'll change.
Servers defederating because of viagra/nigerian prince/etc. spam is one thing. A "lefty politics" server defederating with a "righty politics" server or vice-versa because they just want an echo chamber? Sure, you do you. General-purpose defederating other general-purpose servers because of "misinformation" and "trolling", when those terms basically mean "disagreeing with the current mainstream narrative on any controversial issue"? That's absurd. The generally-accepted issue with social media was for years that it created echo chambers. Now people are trying to use mastodon to create even more powerful echo chambers.
In such world, Twitter and Facebook could add support for ActivityPub, Google and Microsoft could build their own, different ISPs and media companies could run their instances, and so on. Then the benefit of choice becomes more clear - who do you trust the most to provide you an account. Basically, it would be like the situation with email where most people use a 3-4 biggest services, but the ecosystem is open to new competitors.
The current state of federated social networks is very experimental. If it catches on with big corporations 90% of people will use that, and these small communities can still survive but would be more or less irrelevant.
Then i read about the codebase and people were struggling with SQL so performance is bad - i mean what? is that really the state things, where's the talent working on this?
I'm honestly surprised that both the design, performance and docs of these alternatives are this bad in 2023.
If this has to work you need an extremely simple and well designed landing page with a super simple explanation of how this works, the creation of a user should work on more or less all instances, and you should be able to easily meta search for the communities you want and get an easy overview quickly.
- Because might not be accepting new users.
- Because some other server has a local timeline that is interesting, perhaps catering to certain interests.
- Geographic: it may be closer to you.
- Language restrictions. You want to toot in certain languages, but some instances are English (or whatever) only.
- Some instances run hacked software with useful features.
> why would all problematic users congregate on the same server?
Because they behave in a way that gets them banned in other servers.
There’s a simple answer to why server blocking is a feature of mastodon. It was built to handle a real world problem. I.e there was early on a server that was a “free speech absolutist” server that server mods wanted to block at a server level.
The need to do this obviates the utility of federation completely.
Because they have been banned from other servers ?
The latter seems to be a mindset people aren't able to shake off for some reason, applicable to the given case or not. If a person can write and read two sorta coherent paragraphs of text for a internet forum, they are already on the level of being willing to learn and a little curious, above what the tech giants expect from their model user. There are enough of such people to have interesting and diverse discussions. Don't tell me Discord is easy to figure out. I'm not saying the devs should be working to make the experience easier, but it starts to be one of those topics where the discussion is meme-based.
You can tell search engine robots not to index your copies of different forums. I don't think they are viewable by default anyway? Avoiding small instances to avoid outages sounds like 4D strats to most users, who might prefer cosiness, personal connections and camaraderie, like on Minecraft servers, say.
Where do I go? How do I search for something worthwhile? There's no central space to find it, compare communities etc. I was curious but now I am kind of put off.
I did this for a "dead" forum and after about a week of "squatting" there and posting for myself, other people started showing up and replying to it.
People should treat the digital silence of dead communities as an asset and free real estate to share their thoughts.
Case in point, I am a member of some hobby and travel communities where, a decade ago, many people had blogs where they described their experiences with rich, detailed text. Now those same people hardly even touch a keyboard and are content to maybe just post a few pictures. They also are more likely these days to engage in political battle, since political polarization is so much greater than it used to be.
https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/59927/rant-Why-is-th...
And they still state that it's easy and the other posters are scratching their heads as to why don't people understand this. "Whyyyy???"
They don't seem to understand that the average user doesn't find it easy to use. That's the biggest hint, but instead are acting like everyone is stupid but them.
That's why the fediverse is going to get a bump for a bit during this reddit situation, but then calm down as users aren't going to want to stick around. The same happened when others were leaving Twitter.
This fediverse situation reminds me of that Silicon Valley episode in which they're testing an app with a focus group. The group just doesn't understand the app and find it too complicated. Richard tries to explain the app to them, but it's too technical for them to comprehend.
In all fairness those were the exact same comments when people moved away from Digg to reddit, only in the opposite direction. History is just repeating itself.
Both sites you simply clicked the register link, input your username/pass/email then done. The fediverse does not have a clean onboarding that lends itself to comprehension by a regular non-technical person. It seems way over the head of your average user. I've tried to get friends to check out Lemmy and it's a solid no-go.
If you need an entire matrix of understanding of a concept before feeling comfortable to use it then it is simply too much cognitive friction.
It's not just "average users" that don't find it easy. It's just more complicated - for everyone.
Deleted Comment
Identity is the hardest problem. Yes, there's stuff like OpenID. But few non-programmers use it. We badly need some kind of ID system that doesn't depend on a vendor that's in the advertising business.
Discovery is a problem mostly because Google has a monopoly in search.
The problem with federated storage is that storage is currently organized by "where", not by "what". There's the BitTorrent approach, where the address is the hash of the content. There's IPFS, but it's 90% Make Money Fast with crypto and 10% actually storing stuff. Whatever happened to the DOI concept?
There's distributed caching, like PeerTube, which works better. Every file has a home location, but if lots of people want something, it gets replicated. So if your cat video goes viral, your tiny server won't be overloaded. That solves the problem of popular content, but not the long tail.
And because the option to not index posts is enabled by default and a good chunk of the fediverse is opposed to indexing due to their irrational fear of bots:
https://fedsearch.io/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33546937
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/131amhl/why_are_s...
> Due to extreme backlash from the Mastodon community we decided to end the project, it is obviously not wanted by server admins.
Heck people already scratch their heads when an email isn't hosted @gmail.com or @hotmail/outlook.com.
And the learning curve exists because unprofitable companies like Twitter and Reddit made centralization possible by burning money, the old internet was decentralized because centralization was impossible, it was too expensive.
If these failing companies die, federated services will be the mainstream again. But as long as there is money to be burned to try to make a poor business model out of social interaction, federation is never going to be able to compete.
What people? Are they in the room with us right now?
Anyone that works at a small/medium/large company has an email address @company.com
I've always used a custom domain for my main email addresses and whenever I've had to give it to someone else verbally it inevitably leads to some amount of confusion. At the very least they get thrown off by the fact that I didn't say gmail/outlook/yahoo after the @ and I have to repeat the domain name.
The point of federation is not to be dependent on oligopolies from a single country, one with poor grasp of and legal enforcement of personal privacy at that.
>It kinda loses its point.
Even if it comes to this, it doesn't. Another migration can happen at any point, but this time you wouldn't lose your social contacts - and in the future hopefully neither your content.
>But Google and Microsoft got in the game.
That's like your common anti-Linux argument.
>Search engine indexing for these federated services SUCKS.
Decentralized content/link aggregators just became popular so we'll see what'll happen, but personal social media shouldn't be as public for most people as it right now anyway.
The oligopolies from a single country might get replaced by groups of instances who will claim they're holders of the Truth and who are the Service, while rest is dangerous. Nothing also stops countries from running own instances or compatible services by dedicated companies or people to either dominate or lure people out of the federation. A good campaign, attractive interface and features and people will follow.
The remaining option is to "run your own instance" but in time when the federation will most likely solidify enough it might be hard to do so. Hard as in getting people to join your new playground. What we're seeing right now it's a boom period.
Don't get me wrong, I do like concept of federated services but there's too many sides where it might fail in long-term and help create a highly tribalized echo-chambered communities
There is nothing you can do to make Firefox or Chrome to understand what a “federated network” even is. For a browser, an “Origin” is an extremely well defined concept. You can’t just decide to amend it because that’s how you feel it ought to be. If you can’t make mastodon.social be relates to social.mastodon in the browser, then you’ll have a rough edge. And that’s just to start. Federated services have so, so so so, many usability issues that all could be attributed to what a “browser” interrupts HTTP or the internet to be vs what is actually possible.
I like how you're talking about it like it's some abstract underground BBS style system that requires a modem, ISDN line installed, custom software running on a unix subsystem
I mean I found https://fosstodon.org/home signed up, clicked on local, liked posts, followed people, now I get a stream of posts to my home feed every day
Maybe your everyday facebook user might struggle with the idea of signing up to a site and interacting with it but I'm just not seeing why anyone who can sign up to discord or reddit would struggle with it
Browsers don't need to care, anyway. There are some problems that need solving (notably, following/interacting with users on other platforms) but there are ways to do that. I'm not quite sure why nobody has come up with a good standard for a web-activitypub: URL handler, but once everyone agrees on a format adding support for cross-server stuff should be easy.
Web browsers can access webmail clients and mailing lists just fine. They even have mailto: as a means to cross the federation gap. All of these problems are implementation issues, not conceptual impossibilities.
In which case it's being mis-sold. It will never replace the thing that people are claiming it will replace.
> Mastodon is designed to avoid viral posts
"viral posts" aren't inherently a bad thing. It's part and parcel of some of the good aspects of social media - the sense of having a collective conversation among a large group. Fragementation is fine up to a point (We're already fragmented between half a dozen large social networks) but I want people to find me easily if they are interested in what I'm posting.
And why do you want to be found easily, really? In case you get your 15 minutes? I think the goal is to build community. Large numbers and reach are actually not so important.