I think Mastodon is even more dangerous than Twitter/FB in reinforcing filter bubbles.
Consider: There are various federated servers, often with some shared interest/allegiance. The operators can disconnect you from other federated servers they consider untoward. You now have to choose the filter bubble you most actively want to be associated with, and hearing dissent can become technically impossible.
Someone supporting Russia and someone supporting Ukraine in the current war may not be allowed to talk to each other about model trains, because their bubbles blocked each other.
I think this is scary. It's halfway between centralisation (Twitter) and decentralisation (e.g. Scuttlebutt) and thus creates an uncanny valley.
But even in the more generic sense -- they can't disconnect you, they can disconnect the account you have on their server -- and it's common practice for people to have alts on different ones just for different topics they post about.
> there have been stories here before about e.g. blocking of far-right Mastodon instances.
See:
> they can't disconnect you, they can disconnect the account you have on their server
There's nothing stopping you from having an alt on a different server that does connect to fascism.social or what-have-you, and the apps these days are pretty good about switching among alts so the UX isn't bad. I will also note, the "stories here" tend to focus on corner cases: instance blocking is predominantly reactive (with Gab being the big exception) and you can always just run your own instance if you want to control your own moderation. I run my own and haven't had any problems with instance blocking.
Not really? Having alts can be a bit like how people have NSFW alts on Twitter (or, for artists, an art account and a personal one), except if you put them on different instances you can find a local timeline that's more relevant to the kind of thing you're posting.
Some people (notably, it seems, Eugen) think "the point" of federation is to provide a seamless Twitter-like global experience that just happens to be hosted modularly. A lot of the current site culture prefers to consider each instance like a little neighborhood, with federation augmenting a local-first experience. (Conflict over product vision ensues.)
But really, no matter what you're looking for, the vast majority of the time you can just use whatever instance and it's fine -- mod drama whole-instance-blocks get a lot of attention, but it's way more of a problem in theory than in practice (especially now you can move your followers if you move instances).
There is also a fork of Mastodon called Hometown [0] that goes further and provides local-only posting as an extra option. These posts will not be federated but stay on the instance (your Home community). A new application GoToSocial [1] also supports local-only posts.
This is mostly a client problem. Mastodon has propagated some pretty lax behaviour with respect to adherence to the ActivityPub protocol, mostly because their reach is very large in comparison with the other projects, and because they just mapped their existing API on top ActivityPub (which was finalized post Mastodon being popular) and that was their existing use case.
The ActivityPub protocol itself makes it very simple to keep activities out of the public view. It's Mastodon, and projects that implement AP as a compatibility layer with it that address everything as public.
You don't have to keep just one account. Find a community that doesn't refuse to federate with the instances you're interested in, or make another account in the instance you're interested in, and log into both. IIRC you can even mix the news feeds in some apps.
At worst it just becomes good old fashioned forums. Remember the 10s of forums & associated accounts we all had?
Many people in the fediverse have several accounts on different servers. I have an account on a Norwegian instance where I mostly follow and interact with Scandinavian folks and another account on of the bigger, international instances for more general use.
I think of the fediverse more like email, where it is natural to have a couple of accounts for different uses and with the possibility to host/manage your own.
Sure, you could make your own bubble if you really want to, but that takes some conscious effort, like blocking your server of from the rest of the network, basically functioning as a walledgarden. That is not default behavior.
> I think Mastodon is even more dangerous than Twitter/FB in reinforcing filter bubbles.
Probably for most people this is a benefit. Not having strangers shove their firmly held beliefs down your throat is a net gain for one's mental sanity in my mind. However I feel like this problem shows itself only because the vast majority of people think of social media in terms of an all encompassing amorphous mass of discussion where all ideas are worthy and all topics are valid.
As someone that builds a service in the same space as Mastodon I am trying to steer away from this behaviour. My project addresses itself to small to medium communities that are focusing their discussions on common interests and topics, and allow for moderators and system operators to police this with the help of individual members. The members on the other hand, can take part in any other community as long as they play by their rules, through the mechanism of ActivityPub federation. Think of it as subreddits but enforced on a service level but having the capability to intercommunicate both at a server to server level and on a client to server level.
It works like the real world (i.e. North Korea cutting itself off from everyone else, or countries boycotting/cutting relations with others), which is the perfect model in my opinion, or the nearest to perfect as is humanly and realistically possible.
You shouldn't be exposed to or forced to interact with people, opinions or content you don't want to see. Want to interact with Nazis (which most instances block), feel your federation is too restrictive or disagree with their direction or rules? You can seamlessly migrate your account to another instance (or make an alt account). You can even spin up your own instance – your very own social network – if you want to, and federate with other instances as needed.
Centralisation in social media is a very unsustainable model, and impossible to effectively moderate a platform as you have a single central entity trying to be everything for everyone, and people and cultures are very different and have different ways of perceiving and viewing the world and others. Each side or party always feels the platform is biased against them, no matter what. Lengthy thread explaining all of this really well: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440
The internet was always meant to be and is decentralised, and the same should apply to social media. A platform's role should be to simply provide the network and tools for people to communicate, and end at that. The social part must be up to and controlled by the people. The issue with all current platforms like Twitter/FB is they try to control the social part and how people should interact with each other, and then there's AI and algorithms which is an entire thing and issue in itself as well where you have a corporation employing surveillance capitalism and controlling what you see and what you think.
Mastodon has no ads and no personalisation algorithms and strongly sticks to and follows ethical and humane design principles where only you control what you see.
The instance is the property of its owner, and owners have the right to control their own property as they see fit. Many Mastodon clients allow users to manage multiple accounts, which can be on different instances with different server rules.
Centralized social networks only have one instance that is controlled by a single company. Mastodon can be self-hosted by anyone, and any instance can interact with any other instance by default. Any Mastodon user can pick an instance with server rules that suit their preferences, while centralized social network users must abide by the rules of the only available instance.
Mastodon servers and clients are free and open source, and also ad-free. Most Mastodon instances allow you to sign up without providing any personal information other than an email.
We don't need leaderless digital services. We need non-capitalist digital services. Like a Facebook clone operated by NPR. One that collects enough revenue to operate, but not to pay shareholders.
you can always hear dissent because following any server never requires you to disclose your identity. If you want to be an active participant in multiple communities with your name attached to it, sure another group might exclude you. This is possible on all platforms where people can form networks, including on twitter. This is not really a technological thing. Wherever there are factions there usually is exclusive membership.
The official Mastodon apps are missing two major features of Fediverse microblogging: the local and federated timelines. Whilst there are plenty of general-purpose instances, there are also those tailored to specific interests or communities. Many are small enough for one to be able to keep up with posts from local users (the local timeline) every day or two without missing a beat. These aren't entirely on-topic but they're usually strongly flavoured towards their focus and those I've used and perused have a strong community feel.
The federated timeline is a firehose of all of the posts on instances that the home instance talks to and whilst it has plenty of chaff can also yield some gems which are sometimes worth the pastime.
Although the use of tags in posts and profiles are the primary methods of discovery on the Fediverse, I've found both these timelines crucial in building a network and generally enjoying the platform.
Look for clients further afield if you think these would be interesting or useful for you. My personal preference on Android is Fedilab https://fedilab.app/ , a snappy, feature-rich client that does not decide what content you're permitted to consume and even has a third-party push notification system which reduces the data footprint Google collects.
This illustrates the worst thing about Play Store: I can search for an app that I know exists, but if it's not supported for my device /OS version, Google will pretend there's no such thing. Surely there's a reasonable UX solution for returning unsupported results such that even if you can't install them, you at least know they exist and what the requirements are.
This is one of benefits of searching on the web version. It might help that my browser doesn't force me to open a page in an app; and my habit of browsing in private tabs by default. I don't know what the experience would be in Chrome.
Eh. I love Mastodon, and host a reasonably busy server. The official apps are just OK, though. In particular, they deliberately leave out the critical "local" timeline showing posts from users on that server. That's half the point of having a federated network: each instance can have its own "feel "or "flavor". Cutting new users off from an easy way to see what their neighbors are talking about makes servers almost fungible.
there are multiple clients to choose from, and third-party clients (as far as I know) maintain the "local" timeline.
The project made an intentional design decision here regarding their own official client, and personally I don't have feelings one way or another about that choice. It's good to hear the use-case towards local timeline inclusion though.
I've posted some links to variously decent iOS apps at https://honeypot.net/post/mastodon-apps-for-ios/ . I'd strongly encourage a new user to chose from one of those (IMHO better) apps than to use the official, limited version.
I love the idea of Mastodon but none of the people I follow on social media are using it. I wonder if there's some kind of web service that re-toots tweets from twitter so I can ditch the crappy Twitter web app and slowly move towards the fediverse at the same time. So far I've only seen publisher-oriented services, but I what I actually want is a combined feed of tweets and toots.
moa.party will re-syndicate your tweets to your Mastodon account.[0] It looks extremely shady, but I've been using it for a year, and it seems to be legitimate.
To see a Twitter user on Mastodon, you can follow them from Mastodon under the account [twitter handle]@beta.birdsite.live.[1]
Birdsite.live was exactly what I was looking for! I guess I'll have to set up a server of my own, maybe together with a private Mastodon instance, to get all the accounts synced without hitting the API limit, but this is very promising!
Beware that with many people crossposting from Twitter is frowned upon, found annoying, or may even lead some to block you. Your reposts will get different interactions than native ones. Less boosts, favourites and replies. An option may be to go Mastodon 2 Twitter instead.
I need to get better about posting to it, but I have possibly the best mastodon instance available :) https://www.omeowgle.com/web/@buzz only cats are allowed.
fun fact: the app was built by HN user grishka, who previously worked on VK and Telegram Android clients. He’s got upset with the state of social media and turned to Mastodon/ActivityPub
He's also the creator of Smithereen. "Federated, ActivityPub-compatible social network server with friends, walls, and groups". It is modeled after VK and federates with Mastodon.
I love it. I find people having read the documentation and the advice of people they're. I think a lot of people who claim there's no network effect or "content" may have just skimmed by without understanding or putting any effort in.
The network doesn't operate by manipulative, abusive algorithms that are designed to addict the user. One has to understand and put in some effort to curate a network.
Tags are the one of the primary discovery methods - searching for your type of content can be as simple as searching for relevant tags, which can be subscribed to and followed as their own timeline.
One can pin tags to one's profile and find, and be found by, users searching other users. There's also a selection of specialised instances for art, tech, sports, writing, etc. As someone who joined with very little social media experience or knowledge, I found curating my own network rewarding and not overly difficult.
If some people prefer to be force-fed content that's designed to rile and instigate, without putting in the groundwork, then they're welcome to it.
ugh, i tried. i really tried, and i really really wanted to love this but eventually came to find it inherited all the trash neoconservative hot takes, woke culture virtue signaling and micro-aggression bellyaching that twitter has.
its a "federated" service only insofar as large groups of admins openly advocate for, and agree to ban traffic from certain servers with speech they disagree with, so thats also been a sticking point with me as well.
I believe that's the killer feature. There's no futile one-size-fits-all moderation policy that has to work for every user in existence. Instead, each server is a freestanding little community with its own values and mores, and which can decide which other servers it wants to talk to. I love that.
I use it (almost) daily and really like it. The biggest challenge coming from Twitter to Mastodon is that your feed is quite empty and you have to actively curate who you follow over some time – no algorithm.
Since this was one of the main attractions for me, that was not a problem. Although I have far fewer followers on Mastodon than Twitter, I always get a much better discussion and engagement on Mastodon.
Twitters algorithm seems to "kill" most of my tweets (by not showing them to my followers), except for a few where I write about a specific topic that interests me, where I suddenly get a lot of reach. But mostly likes and retweets, not many reactions or any interesting discussions. I find this really discouraging in the long run. Mastodon just feels much more human and community-like, akin to how the good old forums felt.
Not discoverable like twitter, but find from other user's reply/following and instance's timeline. I miss other user's Liked post list feature on Mastodon.
I run a small 2 person family pleroma instance. I truly believe fediverse to be the best thing to happen to internet in a long time because just like in my case, I can have my own server with anyone I like. We don't need to serve 1000 people of different tastes, if I am content with people I am comfortable, why do I need to be exposed like on a public platform like twitter?
Or Facebook which monetizes this same interaction for what benefit of mine? I am getting the same/similar interaction with people I care about, on my own dime.
I get that people love the decentralization aspect of Mastodon, but... does it have better content than Twitter? I remember trying it very briefly once, and the few toots I saw were similar content -- some interesting info, but also a heap of complaining/virtual signaling.
I believe it has much better content. The easiest way to boostrap your friend group is to look at the local timeline and see who posts interesting stuff, and follow them. When they repost things from interesting people, follow those people. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
In many comments about the fediverse in general I read the disappointment that 'after many years fediverse still hasn't grown enough to blow Twitter and FB out of the water'. And if that's your objective I can understand the sentiment.
But to say "Very few people outside of open source tech and a couple fandoms" when refering to a group of between 3 to 5 million people makes me laugh a bit. If you want to find a good circle of followers and those following you to interact and have a good time with, then that is surely enough of a basis to choose from.
On your personal timeline you'd have at most a couple a hundred persons you follow, and with a couple hundred who followed you out of interest there'll be a good social vibe going on the topics of your interest. You will find that those people are more responsive than similar numbers on Twitter would be. For influencers however, who crave millions of followers, the fediverse is less interesting.
I follow a load of people who are written and visual artists, storytellers, animators, word fiends and all that ilk; a small minority are tech experts, or interested at all in open source. https://mastodon.art/ would be one example of an instance that caters for artists, rather than the techerati.
There you go and that is the truth here. Other than the open source tech echo chamber using it, it has no network effect to get regular users off of Twitter and to use Mastodon (the actual platform).
2 million users after 6 years is more or less of a slow failure to move users off of Facebook, and Twitter on to Mastodon's own platform.
I had high hopes for Mastodon to compete against the likes of even Twitter. It still cannot. It is also not'early days' either.
Compared with previous versions of fediverse server software, Mastodon has been wildly successful as an open source project. It's not only maintained a solid release cycle, but it's shipped native clients and has slowly but surely built out an interest in the federated social web.
Mattl, you can chime in and tell us what things were like back in the Gnu Social days or maybe someone else remembers the StatusNet/Identi.ca era further back. How many installations did you have, roughly? It wasn't a very active scene. Seems like Eugen Rochko and Mastodon gGmbH know what they're doing.
Yes it's not 'early days' but we can also argue the whole system (based on ActivityPub, including software like Pixelfed, Peertube, Misskey, etc) is a genie unable to be returned inside its bottle. It doesn't really matter if Mastodon gets mass adoption or not, as long as it follows the same path taken by email, DNS, or other internet standards it'll do okay in the end (Lindy Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect - these old and crusty standards have proven the test of time and are not going anywhere soon. Twitter could collapse tomorrow depending on what Elon decides to do with it.)
Mastodon was at one point a rewrite of GNU social in Ruby/Rails and I urged Eugen to at least change the license to AGPL to match.
Identi.ca was a lot of fun, but it was basically a silo. I’m glad to see Mastodon having lots of servers but I feel like Mastodon.social runs the risk of being seen as the only instance that matters to many.
I'm really excited to see that GNU social is still alive and kicking (https://www.gnusocial.rocks/), I had almost written it off as a dead project.
I firmly believe that as a whole, the Fediverse needs diversity in software implementations. While I like Mastodon, I don't like to see the Fediverse heavily weighted towards being the "Mastoverse". As much as I myself cheer Mastodon on, people should also be cheering on all the other component projects that make up the network.
My personal experience has been that the most interesting people I now chat with on Mastodon either 1) left Twitter long ago, or 2) deliberately stayed away from it. For instance, if you're into infosec stuff, Mastodon is a wonderful place to be.
Is there a specific place or way to find these infosec related posts? I've bounced hard off Mastodon a couple times in the past, maybe I just don't know where to look.
Yeah, you point out where fediverse differs from Twitter, FB and Instagram. There's no algorithm that starts pushing you in some direction based on your first interactions. Initially your personal timeline will be completely empty.
You might start by choosing an instance that is more on-topic than others, like https://hackers.town and discover people from the server timeline, or browsing the website. Then filter on various hashtags and see who interacts with them.
Having some good people you follow you also see whose posts they boost and this will lead you to find more.
I have no personal affiliation with the Mastodon project, I just like what they're doing to liberate social networking (and there are other Fediverse platforms to pay attention to, too!)
From time to time I try Mastodon again and every time I ditch it.
I joined the main server mastodon.social and still as of today it's pretty much impossible for me to perform effective searches and find content. Maybe I'm just unable to use it, I don't know.
If after 6 years of it existing and it is still unusable for outsiders and not just for open-source fanatics, programmers or furries then it has no realistic chance for retention, let alone adoption.
Don't bother with search. You really need to start out following people you already know about, then when they boost posts check if the people who wrote those posts are worth following. I started following 1 person and now I follow 102 people.
Search is where a lot of these services fail badly. The search on most video sites besides youtube is garbage. In fact, Youtube is so far ahead that they recently made their search worse to satisfy other priorities besides competing with rivals.
I'm the same way - I just signed up (again) to the main mastodon.social server and realized I have to have a separate account for each server I want to be a part of? I'm just confused at this whole thing.
You can follow people on any server that yours federates with, but if you want to show up in a particular server’s local timeline and possibly see local-only posts (if the server has been modified to allow this) you’ll need an account on that server.
Thanks - that's not super clear to me (as a new user). I tried finding another server via an aggregator posted here and stumbled upon qoto.org. Seems like that needs its own account. Do I not get to see who posts from that server (qoto) on mine (mastodon.social)?
I wasn't able to join qoto so I gave up. The join screen never got past the display name/email/etc form but also showed no error. (This is with the official iOS app, I can only assume it's no better or worse on other apps).
Think of it like a cross between Twitter and email. You can see what the local users on your server are talking about, but you can also contact users on other servers run by entirely different people.
I tested this new "official" Mastodon app and see why it might be a good on-boarding experience for newcomers. I'll stick with Tusky [0] as it is much more mature and offer more features, like multiple account and a local timeline.
I thought with Mastodon, that if one server shuts down or you get banned that you can just migrate your account and all your info was federated to the other instances. However, when I tried to migrate an account from a server that was shutdown, I couldn't even do it cause I needed access to the old server to do the migration.
Is this still the case? If so, breaking Twitter up into hundreds or thousands of individual instances does nothing to fix any of the problems if they each have their own rules and can ban/remove your content whenever they want.
Well, yes, if you want to migrate all your data to a new instance you need a copy of the old data. Mastodon does have a takeout option that lets you export followers and your tweets, which you can import into a new account. Though I honestly don't know why you'd expect an account migration to work if the old server is not available.
> Though I honestly don't know why you'd expect an account migration to work if the old server is not available.
That is the whole point of federation, doesn't matter where you sign in your data should still be there and can migrate between instances freely. Without this, Mastodon does nothing to solve free speech or replace Twitter.
I think you misunderstood federation. It doesn't make all your data available everywhere, it means that all servers can talk and exchange some data. There is no reason for servers to hold much userdata outside of what other users have viewed.
It also doesn't mean you can sign in wherever. You can't use your email login from live.com to log into the google account, those are two independent credentials.
Data also can't migrate freely, it is exchanged freely but not migrated. When I request your account's data, my server requests it from your server. If that server is not available, it can possibly get there via other ways (pushed from other servers along with events, like someone liking the toot).
What you might be thinking of is a fully decentralized network, where data is kept like on IPFS. But that's not mastodon.
Mastodon offers you a takeout in case you don't trust your instances backups or admin. You can bring that along to a new instance. It does solve the free speech problems of Twitter in that way; if an instance wants to silence you, you're not forced to interact with them, nor can they enforce their moderation rules on you if you don't want to (since you can always move to an instance that agrees with your view on things).
Based on this open issue on the repo [0], it only has federated timeline support. The lead developer of Mastodon had this to say with regards to not adding it to iOS[1]:
> The omission is intentional and I do not intend to add these types of timelines into the app. They might have made sense for early Mastodon in November 2016 when there were less than 20k people total and all from a homogenous demographic but nowadays the signal to noise ratio makes them a liability in almost every aspect.
> [...]
> The local and federated timelines are not going away from other apps or the web app, to be clear. I’m simply not adding them to this app, and if that bothers you, simply don’t install the app.
This saddens me, and I truly believe it's because Mastodon's author, Eugen, also runs the largest server, mastodon.social. Of course the local timeline there is utter chaos, basically like the Twitter firehose. That's absolutely not the case for topical servers, like ones that specialize in posts about cats, or a friend group, or a particular city. I don't think Eugen opposes the idea out of malice, because he seems like a pretty good guy. I think he just has a particularly narrow view of what Mastodon is, as seen from his perspective.
> This will continue to limit its opportunity for wide adoption.
I don't see this having any practical effect. Unlike other services, you aren't locked into one app. There are others, and perhaps more importantly, they were here first.
Most people come to Mastodon seeking out viable alternatives to FB and Twitter, and many of them proudly announce to their Mastodon followers when they have deleted their FAANG accounts.
This might change when Mastodon attracts more non-techy folk, but even they seem to become more weary of centralized and algorithmicly directed social media.
Is the app restricted to a specific region? On desktop the play store says it is available to all my devices but for some reason the install button is greyed out. On the Play Store the app does not appear at all on the search.
Consider: There are various federated servers, often with some shared interest/allegiance. The operators can disconnect you from other federated servers they consider untoward. You now have to choose the filter bubble you most actively want to be associated with, and hearing dissent can become technically impossible.
Someone supporting Russia and someone supporting Ukraine in the current war may not be allowed to talk to each other about model trains, because their bubbles blocked each other.
I think this is scary. It's halfway between centralisation (Twitter) and decentralisation (e.g. Scuttlebutt) and thus creates an uncanny valley.