DigitalOcean has a one click app that lets you setup a Mastodon instance ridiculously easily. For my own reasons I’m trying to migrate away from Twitter, and have found it relatively easy to sync Twitter profiles with a self hosted Mastodon instance so I can follow the accounts I’m interested in without directly interacting with Twitter. Configuring email sending and DNS is a little tricky, but if you use namecheap and mail gun it’s not too bad.
I routinely on Twitter criticize Musk’s bad behavior and lies about the full self driving product, but semi anonymously since Musk and his fans have a history of doxxing and harassing critics: https://www.inverse.com/article/47461-elon-musk-responds-to-... His purchase of the platform makes me worried that my identity and private messages could be misused, so any alternative is much appreciated.
Unfortunately it looks like Mastodon still hasn’t renamed their “toots” to “posts,” which sadly makes it impossible to recommend to others because there’s no way they’ll take it seriously in the US, due to the double meaning.
That’s what I was expecting, but as of today it still shows up in the onboarding tutorial and with the big “TOOT!” button on the main page, but these may be specific to desktop. It’s a little disappointing because it was a big announcement when they decided to change, and it really is the little things that make the biggest differences.
>Unfortunately it looks like Mastodon still hasn’t renamed their “toots”
Maybe we wouldn't have so many reasons to leave twitter if people had taken tweets less seriously in the first place. If everyone knows that artificially short posts with insanely widespread potential reach are all 屁s, that could help fix a lot of what's wrong in our world.
I'm back, to smell and reply to my own toot today. It's always better fermented. I want to talk about the kanji I used earlier, "屁". Like many movements about what should be done with regard to social media platform policies, it's composed out of radicals.
In the case of 屁, that would be this radical, 尸, whose on yomi is shi, and 比 which is hi. The kun yomi are longer and not derived from the shared Japanese heritage with China, who also use this kanji for the word "fart". The Japanese word is "Onara", the chinese word is "Pi" which seems a lot more onomatopoeic.
尸 in this case has a meaning of "corpse" or human remains, and is very close to the kanji for "door", I almost mistook it for just being that. 比 has to do with comparisons, also apparently has something to do with race. So the image I get through this kanji when I connect it to "tooting" on social media, is as follows: "The corpse of someone who could have been somebody opens up the door of its sphincter, and releases a gaseous comparison about race."
My favorite Mastodon feature is the ability to subscribe to hashtags [1] which makes discovering people to connect with super easy and you don't feel like a victim to some magic algorithm.
Another thing I love about it is the small niche little community instances like this photographer [2] community. Themed instances make a huge difference in organizing your social media time - it feels less of a distraction and more of a purposeful exchange. I talk photos, close the browser tab and it feels like I've done what I set out to do, whereas whole purpose of Twitter is to steal your attention for the sake of ad revenue - so you start with a purpose and end up feeling like you've done free work for someone. Like one of those early internet gigs that made you to surf semi-random ads for few pennies.
> My favorite Mastodon feature is the ability to subscribe to hashtags [1]
You need to enable "advanced web interface", search for a hashtag, click the top right icon and then pin it, right? I had no idea I could do that. Thanks!
EDIT: I'm having a hard time adding tags like "#matrix", it insists on me using autocomplete and propose #matrixdotorg.
Ahh, what a disappointment. Being able to subscribe to hashtags is the feature I wanted to see for so long and when I saw the first comment, I thought they did it finally. But no, it's not what I needed. It should not be called "subscribing hashtags", but "pinning" them
That's what it is tho. You create a time-line filter that shows only posts containing those hashtags - is that not a subscription?
There are also more literal implementations for this like SocialHome [1] where you can click + on hashtags you like and public post with them appear in your home timeline
I could form a business entity, open a PO box, create an <insert payment processor here> account, and accept value from those who use the service. People could pay whatever the service is worth to them. Some are in circumstances such that they're unable to pay. Those with means may be able to contribute more - it's whatever the service is worth to them. Value for value.
(Repost from last time Mastodon was on the front page)
There are a multitude of Mastodon-compatible ActivityPub implementations[0][1]. Save for bugs, which devs and maintainers tend to be motivated to work out, they should all federate together, meaning you can follow and share between them. All have instances with open registrations and are also straightforward to self-host. There are moderation tools and admins can set policies for federation; some servers are picky with how they federate, some more free-speech-oriented. Fully unmoderated servers with open registration that try to federate promiscuously tend to get siloed of from the rest fairly quickly.
For those of you raising issues with ways in which the AP-speaking fediverse is lacking at this point, many of these points are acknowledged by members and implementers of the community. The biggest one IMO being the same challenge other federated and P2P communication systems (like Matrix) need to solve: DIDs, which should make users less under authority to their server admins, and server owners less under the authority of ICANN and registrars. The second one (which follows DIDs) being more effective models and tools for moderation and curation.
If you're actually interested in exploring constructive conversation on how to move forward to where we don't need to rely on centralized authoritarian incumbents and getting a healthier ecosystem, come join in[2][3][4].
My recommendation to anyone having difficulties getting started or finding interesting people: try to find a small instance that suits your interests.
Mastodon got so much better for me when I left the generalist instances. I now see my instance as a micro community with the ability to connect to a greater community.
Each instance has a local (instance) timeline and a federated timeline in addition to one's own personal timeline. The local timeline only shows posts from accounts on that instance. The federated timeline shows posts from all accounts followed by at least one user on the instance.
So these two timelines can be dramatically different and they're a big factor in account discoverability and the "feel" of an instance.
Of course you can go out and follow ~anyone from ~anywhere, and that's the Fediverse's killer feature, but the more local content matters too.
Because there is no algorithm news feed, finding new people to follow across the whole fediverse can be a challenge. If you instead find an instance that aligns with your interests, you can easily find other people on the same instance by looking at the Local feed.
Also it is not 100% true that every post bubbles to every instance because instance admins can blacklist other instances.
Maybe I'm still not familiar enough with HN's algorithm but was a bit surprising to see this topic with 180 points in one hour is now on the second page since I last checked about ~15 minutes ago, while others hours older with less points are on the first page.
There’s an unclear set of factors that can nerf a post. The most normal one is a high comment-to-post-upvote ratio (sign of a flamewar). I assume this triggered one or more of those factors.
For those with an interest in books, try BookWyrm [1]. It's a Mastodon instance that caters for books (think 'federated Goodreads'). I use it to put up my reviews of books and to find new books and bookish people.
Beware that Bookwyrm is distributed under the "Anticapitalist software license" [1] so you must be very veyr very careful before using it. It may be actually impossible to legally deploy it for a lot of people.
The only reason I see would be if you want your posts to reach people you don't know and who don't follow you; they will end up on the local timeline of the instance you're on.
Conversely if you don't want to spend time with setting up relays/subscriptions (which can get you the same thing) and want to easily discover things on the local timeline there, the local GUI helps with that.
IMO that Mastodon's timelines work this way by default for non-private instances is unfortunate as it conflates physical infrastructure with social community too much.
Other than that it should all be the same.
Theoretically you should also be able to set up "relay accounts" on foreign servers that can mirror your profile and just mirror/reshare your content there. It's not something I've seen already so you'd probably have to script your own bot for that.
I rather like mastodon compared to the other implementations of activitypub (Misskey, Friendica and Pleroma). What I'd really like is to build my own activitypub server and client, but it's so hard. I'm going to keep using mastodon for now, but it sucks that the best activitypub implementation is basically a twitter clone. I'd really like something with a layout more like Facebook. Most of the people I try to convert to mastodon don't like twitter. I want to give them Friendica, but it needs a lot of UI work and a nice android client to really be useful to them.
I wish I could be happy to use this, but I’m afraid big tech is just too big for me to jump ship. (Network effect) I’m starting to think that Government should think about breaking up social media sites or highly regulate them. The twitter Elon saga makes me think it will be impossible in the United States.
>Government should think about breaking up social media sites or highly regulate them
they don't need to do anything that drastic. They literally need to do one straight forward thing. Force Twitter to open up their API and let people build a bridge to ActivityPub.
Hell Elon could do it if he is serious about decentralization.
He never really said decentralization, I’m not sure where you read it. He wants to identify people like Facebook does it to get rid of bots.
At the same time at least he is greatly incentivised to get rid of car emissions, which is good enough reason for me to side with him instead of other people.
The Digital Markets Act [1] was just passed in the EU. It does exactly that. Enforce interoperability for "gatekeepers". I think Twitter is not quite big enough, yet, though.
There are already bridges from twitter to activitypub, however most of the people in the fediverse feel themselves superior to twitter and actively discourage this. If there's a way for twitter to interop with activitypub you will most likely see instances specifically blacklisting it (especially if it becomes a free speech platform).
Personally I don't understand why, the negativity and the assholes are already there but maybe in lesser numbers.
This is a serious question, why is it that big tech is too big for you to jump ship?
What are you trying to get out the use of social media? To me, it's conversations with interesting people in a pleasant environment. I'm getting that from the Fediverse.
Unless you're a brand that uses social media for marketing purposes, I don't understand why it's sol important to use the big brand platform.
I kind of suspect the answer is going to be something like "the people I want to follow are on there". But there are equally interesting people on the other platform, it's just that you are not familiar with them because you're not on that platform.
Also, there is no need to switch completely. Follow both and perhaps you'll start paying more attention to the one that is friendly and not driven by engagement.
I felt the obligation to mention that Mastodon is not friendly at all, and you will have to resort to blocking and filtering all the time.
For example, there are instances which I won't name that are solely made to harass, doxx and stalk other people. There is also a significant amount of political extremism from both the right and the left, and drama is very prevalent just like on Twitter.
You really have to consider that for some, Mastodon is a place to gather if you have been banned from Twitter.
This is akin to saying "e-mail is not friendly at all" because you get a lot of spam and scams. It's in the nature of permissionless communication and the answer is the same as for e-mail (filtering and moderation, by user and/or server). If you want to be conservative you can use an allowlist (rather than blocklist) approach.
That has nothing to do with the "friendliness" of the Mastodon project.
Mastodon is not one place. It is many places, many of which interconnect.
You are correct. My post was just intended to show that you have to be careful since there are several malicious communities present on the "fediverse" that have a lot of influence. Also, email does not have a federated timeline where everyone is connected and you can see each others posts. This is not a Mastodon issue but a fediverse issue.
I think mastodons approach is a very good approach. You can as a user block entire instances.
And if you are on a good instance many abusive instances are already blocked.
So everybody can have their little space without shitty people.
Especially because city people tend to accumulate in certain instances since they’re not welcomed on eg. mastodon.social
Unfortunately, a lot of instances that block have a double standard where they won't allow nazis but allow anarchism and communism, and all the other ideologies, with people openly promoting harassment towards others. I have not seen an instance that blocks both yet.
You can always create your own with like minded ppl.
Maybe some non political instances are a shot worth.
The problem there is that everybody has its own definition of “extreme left” and “extreme right”.
So it could be that your preferences are just a bit niche or something like that :)
Yeah if you want to make your small instance a bit more federated you'll start adding AP relays and then you'll suddenly see a flood of different asian languages. Probably mostly Japanese.
And along with them will come a lot of hentai and weird porn. So when you add like 10 AP relays you'll spend several hours just silencing instances based on this. But once you're done you do get a very active federated timeline that will help your local users discover the rest of the fediverse.
I almost ban any misskey instance I see with Japanese characters now, not becasuse they're all bad but because I can't see what the instance is about easily. It requires JS and it has no "About" or "Explore profile directory" section like Mastodon does.
That was an eye opener for someone who was thinking of setting up an instance. Obviously there are risks to federating posts from other instances, but I wasn't ready for this.
You could start with an allowlist approach; add servers to federation when you see they have content/people you want to connect with. Over time the list will grow.
E.g. start with the biggest ones and maybe some that are specific to your interests. Over time you will see people resharing posts and commenting on threads from other instances and you can add those as well.
If you run a server for other users you could have an account set up for your users to ping with servers they want you to add.
For all the belly aching in the other thread about "The Algorithm^TM" being immune to open source, here is an example of a fully open-sourced system as an alternative.
I'm in an instance with a couple thousand users, it's not very active. I think network effects are extremely important and eventually you have most people going into the biggest instances anyway.
Though obviously this is still a preferable situation, mastodon's reach is still not good enough. People don't just want to say things, they want to say things and have others engage with them.
But I mean, I would still encourage at least trying it; exploring different instances, finding a home.
Where do you measure activity? I'm a small instance admin that has chosen to focus only on one particular type of user to grow slowly, and thanks to 10+ AP relays our federated timeline is very active. It does wonders for discoverability to see one message every second show up from all over the world.
The accumulation on one instance is not necessary, because there is almost no difference in the user experience between a local use and a Federated user.
Also you can cross post to Twitter.
This is what I opted to use.
Just use the reach from Twitter, but the main thing is mastodon
Been using fediverse with mastodon for months now. People are often much nicer, there are actual discussions and trolls are easy to block. Can recommend.
How does this prevent a single instance growing to massive proportions, and then its property (and private data!) being sold to highest bidder? Those who self-hosted their data will have no problem, but the majority of users aren’t self-hosting, and will lose posts & media upon switching to a new instance (which may lead to the same network effects we see now with Twitter users not willing to migrate).
It doesn't. IMO it's not that different from email. Most people will open an account with a few major players (instances) they trust. Others will self-host or use friends/work/neigbourhood D&D group instances. The rest will be taking a chance.
But, 1) your past media and posts are not migrated to the new instance, so your timeline effectively has to 'start over', and 2) from what I understand the move is not seamless; you must announce your account has moved, and hope that your follow-base is proactive enough to re-follow you on the new account.
Since the architecture doesn't prevent take-overs, and requires instances to be continually maintained and upheld by their owners, you might have to do this several times over the years (take-overs, instances shutting down), leaving behind a trail of dead accounts. I presume most users will just end up sticking to a single major instance due to network effects and the desire to avoid these migrations.
More concerning is that all of the private data (including direct messages) on the old instance is now in the hands of its new owner, who may have a different idea of what to do with it.
I've used this a bit , but did not stick around due to lack of people i've wanted to follow. Hopefully this will get a lot of people over from Twitter, I'd love to use it instead...
Also, if any HN community member would take it on themselves to create an HN instance (yes, some of us on HN like Twitter), would love to join that.
Mastodon became popular in Japan after Twitter banned lolicon and Pixiv[1] decided to start its own Mastodon instance named Pawoo[2]. It had a mobile app and all[3]. Last year, Pixiv stopped supporting the mobile app and transferred the instance to Russel[4]. I haven't followed recently but it seems to be still quite active (Japanese speaking mostly).
It's not porn, it's just a fantasy drawing with almost no parity to real life except that they look like humans. It took me a while to realise this as well, but in the end, that's what it is. You should never fully compare anime to real life, it's a fallacy that can get you in trouble.
"It's not child pornography, it's drawings of child pornography."
This is one area I think Musk will have trouble with if he honestly does go in the "free speech" direction. There will immediately be speech that's so toxic it will drive off the majority of other users.
The defining feature of child pornography is that it includes an actual child.
Drawings, animations, and written works that depict fictional children in sexual situations may be quite icky to me, but to claim that they are the same as something depicting an actual living child is to deeply miss the point.
I don't think I did claim they were the same thing. Drawings of child pornography are repulsive (to me) and I wouldn't use a website where I would expect to encounter such. I think most people feel the same way. That creates a problem if you want to run a website that is so free of speech as to admit drawings of child pornography but also has the ambitions to retain a large audience - the two are mutually exclusive.
I have had a look into it, but came not to a final conclusion.
It seems possible, but I did not found a comprehensive guide what one would need to do so.
Each instance can federate with any other instance, meaning posts from the other instance will show up in your local instance's federated timeline.
On top of that they can add AP relays that will further add posts to your federated timeline.
I run a very small instance focused on geographically local users and the federation is so rapid that I have to scale up my background workers just to process all the URLs people post from across the world.
Just search the web for ActivityPub relay, you might add github.com as the site because someone has gathered a list of known AP relays there.
But beware that once you start adding relays you'll get a flood of messages in the federated timeline and much of it will be Japanese or other asian languages. Which might scare potential users away. So just silence them one by one, refuse media files from them. People can still follow users on these instances but they won't clutter your federated timeline.
>This is where the magic of federation comes in...
No. This is where the great misinformation about federated social media comes in.
It's painted as being this great decentralised, liberated alternative to Twitter et al "If you don't like the instance you're on, just go elsewhere..."
The reality is; you can't take your data elsewhere. There's no way to download your post history from one instance and upload it to another. There's no way to download your post history from one instance and upload it to your own server, if you decide to self-host.
The so-called Fediverse is vastly over-hyped. It would be better named the Fragmentiverse.
Requires pretty big buy in. Having to run your own instance is a big ask for most people and since whole idea of Mastodon revolves around the operator censoring discourse on their instance you pretty much have to run your own instance unless you want some random Joe deciding what you see and can post about.
Idea here is good, but I cringe at the main selling point being able to censor topics you don't like.
There are. Mastodon's problem (and/or best feature depending on how you look at it) is that it's pretty prevalent about their blocklists. So the most commonly federated and advertised places tend to be more liberal leaning. I don't keep close track of the community, but this is one blocklist that I just googled https://toot.cafe/about/more#blocked-instances
Aside from the obvious terrible shit the list itself looks kinda passive aggressive in tone
The more conservative demographic also has other more...professional(?) options in the form of Truth Social and Gab. At one point Gab was federated but got blocked into oblivion to the point where they decided to go standalone https://reclaimthenet.org/mastodon-blocks-gab/
It seems to me that for some it is enough that you don't block what they block or even ask someone why someone is blocked and voila, you are blocked too.
I absolutely see the value of blocking and there are things I am happy to block, but I have never seen the need to block anyone based on who they don't block.
It is kind of the outrage over Elon Musk buying Twitter: people are outraged not because they are blocked or prohibited from blocking others but because someone else might not be blocked by default.
Assuming by 'conservative' and 'libertarian' you mean 'right wing'... [sorry. But American political labels are confusing from a European viewpoint] ... that's because the fediverse is just as censorious as all the social media it seeks to replace.
Last time I looked into this fediverse stuff, the biggest 'Mastodon' instance by number of users was affiliated to gab.com. But good luck finding that, if you check out any of the directories of instances, as they [the rest of the fediverse] pretty much all decided to blacklist the Gab instance and block users on those Gab instances from being able to interact with any of the other instances. I think, in the end Gab went off, forked Mastodon and rolled their own version.
BTW --I'm not a right-winger or supporter of Gab in any way. I have no interest whatsoever in US politics. But I did note the irony that; the first thing the kind of people who protest most loudly that we need open alternatives to Twitter et al did, when they got their hands on the control levers of their own tiny Twitter clones, was to start banning people and silencing viewpoints they disapproved of.
Most Conservatives have instead gone to platforms that actively advertise for their specific niche. Especially places like Gab and Parlar. Although Telegram has been a very popular gathering place as well.
Libertarian Tech folks are actually a small minority in the grand scheme of things, and any I know are definitely in favor of Mastadon. But non-tech folks have a much harder time understanding and building out the platform.
It's called 'Outside'. Try meeting some people in it. They tend to be sane, and friendly. Usually."
1. These are not mutually exclusive
2. Very condescending tone
Yes being outside is great, but there are parts of the world where you spend half the year inside because of the cold(outside). There's also been a pandemic going on for quite awhile where in many parts of the world the "outside" has been severely restricted.
People outside might not be discussing topics that you're interested in.
I'm indifferent to both Mastodon and Twitter, but they both have their place in the world.
You're right on several accounts. I've been hosting a mastodon instance for almost 5 years now but people are horrible. Sexist, xenophobic, bitter and more. I don't think mastodon is a twitter alternative unless you just want to promote AP federation in classical communities.
That's what fascinates me about AP federation. I want to see a return to all those different punbb, phpbb, vbb type boards we had during the late 90s and early 2000s, but federated this time.
The metaphor I'm going for is that Mastadon is like some weird cross between e-mail and a shared mailing list with everyone on the provider (the local timeline).
Everything flows from that. Yes, your provider can read your DMs. If you're on a very small provider there might be weird shit going on. People kinda self-identify to the domain they're on. Huge domains will not really have a feel beyond being big.
And of course you can just go into your own little corner of the internet and do your thing. There are loads of instances that are pretty chill. And if you know someone on a different instance you can just follow them!
You can choose to be outside of nonsense if you want. And unlike other forms of social media, while there is _some_ homogeneity through social spread, the fact that there are these varied instances and people kinda sticking to their own corner of the fediverse for the most part, you can just have a localized experience.
Every social network doesn't need to be everything for everyone at once.
Of course if you're going onto instances that are, like, built around being Extremely Online All The Time, yes people will be annoying.
I routinely on Twitter criticize Musk’s bad behavior and lies about the full self driving product, but semi anonymously since Musk and his fans have a history of doxxing and harassing critics: https://www.inverse.com/article/47461-elon-musk-responds-to-... His purchase of the platform makes me worried that my identity and private messages could be misused, so any alternative is much appreciated.
Unfortunately it looks like Mastodon still hasn’t renamed their “toots” to “posts,” which sadly makes it impossible to recommend to others because there’s no way they’ll take it seriously in the US, due to the double meaning.