I'll take Mastodon fringe over obnoxious Twitter or Facebook anytime.
The idea of "mainstream" is dying, and will continue to do so. What we're seeing is a deep cultural fracture where communities, ideas, and people do not form the kind of stardom or centralized propagation of ideas that the previous decades were known by. As production gets cheaper, and getting an audience becomes easier, people will begin to form seamless self-sustained communities that support each other (think patreon).
If video killed the radio star, then the internet killed the star, and fractured it into infinite pieces.
Who do the kids of today look up to? Those are your next celebrities.
Many of these youtubers are actually somewhat surprised about the size of their following and the fact they can actually make a living with the profits from their channel.
I'm not sure if there's any other place besides youtube where they can monetize their channel in such a successful fashion. They don't really talk about how much one earns as a youtuber, and I suppose it varies wildly. But otherwise, they're not really tied to their channel, just tell the fans where you're heading and they follow.
It's hard to see how this is the future without experiencing it in some way personally.
Facebook Groups connected me with fans of a particular kind of fringe art about 4 years ago and made leaving Facebook really difficult. This might seem exceedingly anecdotal, and I get that, but you have to realize that, before Facebook, it would have been impossible for any of us to even know this interest existed; much less that there were others also into it. Nothing in the cultural canon quite sufficed, although some trends in music and literature had come close, none of them quite articulated the thing. Finding the thing was a necessary part of a certain stage of my life, and gave me a psychological grounding that something mainstream might never could have. I think admitting so actually devalues the spectacle in question, but I can't deny it. There was a value in the fact that this small group of people spoke this unique language. We became something like a tribe.
Attention economics are strange and only beginning to define our lives. Younger people will depend on fringe engagements to achieve a sense of self-identity that used to be a given. Life experience is going to take a new shape accordingly.
I think early evidence of this is in music scenes, which is haphazardly often the case with forms of sociocultural influence. No conventional wisdom can explain the proliferation of indie music and things like tape labels but these things are massive forces. They just genuinely don't care what you think. They have an audience and it's up to you to be a part.
Mastadon is strangely ahead of the curve and probably doing a poor job of meeting in the middle. I think it would benefit from shoving everyone into Mastadon.social at signup and letting them learn about instances from there. Finding a home is too difficult as it is. But, eventually, it does look like the future.
Is drawing attention to the "attention economy" taboo here?
Here's a tip: general explanations like 'is drawing attention to the "attention economy" taboo here' are basically never the answer. It's almost always something much more mundane. You could also know the answer to your question by using HN search to find any of countless threads that discuss these questions extensively. Even "attention economy", though that isn't one of the more common phrases, shows up quite a bit: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22attention%20economy%22&sort....
Anyway, I've been tempted to try Mastodon. But I don't like the idea of joining a particular instance, and being unable to change later, without more-or-less starting over. If I or my instance got blacklisted, how would I be better off than being banned from Twitter? In either case, I could come back with an new identity, with new credentials.
Before anybody goes about the ecochamber: I ban obnoxious people, self-promoters, bad arguers, I don't ban for sincerely held, well argued politics. I follow a former cam girl, a couple in the rational altruistic movements and a Catholic, pro-life convert.
But that's subjective, so you'll just end up reinforcing your own opinions, which is exactly what an echo chamber is, unless I'm missing something...
In other words: https://mastodon.social/@helldude/100572161034726032
The internet doesn’t necessarily need everyone to be on it to be successful.
The whole point of a social network is that the majority of people are on it. That’s why Facebook is still successful despite being an absolute dump.
I don’t care about the technicalities, open source, etc (and I say that as a software engineer). I care about being able to lookup the person I just met at the bar and add/follow them. Until Mastodon can achieve that, I won’t care about it.
Twitter has an immense collection of people that particularly matter in their given field, interesting famous people, and so on: celebrities, journalists, media personalities, musicians, authors, politicians, athletes, techies, companies, bankers, VCs, CEOs, entrepreneurs, famous bloggers and gamers, fashion people, etc.
Twitter has an extremely dense, active collection of those people. You can say that you don't personally care about that, however the majority of people very clearly do (and always will).
- What are you aiming for then? What is the whole point of that "elevator pitch" if not getting more attention for and grow it so it's not that niche anymore?
I think the idea is that they want to use their unique design to grow lots more niches, not make any one niche bigger.
If Twitter is like Times Square, Mastodon is like Kansas City's town square. Mastodon's plan seems not to grow Kansas City into a Times Square sized competitor -- their plan seems to be to grow 1,000 more new-but-different Kansas City sized town squares.
At least, that's the impression I'm getting from reading the third and fourth header's paragraphs.
Reloaded.
Ah, there it is.
I don't think the advantage for Mastodon is being able to do anything that Twitter can't. Instead, it's being able to do everything that Twitter can without a lot of the negatives that come with Twitter.
My view is that, fundamentally, Twitter is a good platform, but it suffers from a number of toxic elements (dog piles, turning everything into angry politics, new "features" designed to increase engagement/number of ads you see, etc.). I'm guessing that "Twitter, but without everything you hate about Twitter" is enough to overcome the network effects, especially as Twitter keeps finding new ways to annoy its users for money.
But maybe I'm wrong about that. I guess we'll see.
Feeds. Creators collect and filter on subject, importance and volume. Follow a Feed instead of a person.
Locality. Connect people in an area, like Facebook starting in schools. Use age and membership (church, work, school) for getting people onto a server where they know people.
Events and Calendar. Instead of posts with date/time information, make a different type. Let people view aggregated calendars with multiple filters, and make Feeds for calendars.
Private chat groups with their own invite and moderation choices. Put keys on mobile devices so the server doesn't know; can't be available on a website client.
Minor suggestions: Make moving accounts dead simple, and with that, have a global registry/dns for names. Change the name "toot"; isn't "tweet" generic at this point? A tagline of "blow your horn" with a mastadon tusk as the horn.
(IANAL, but former tweep)
Mastodon doesn't make anything 10x better or easier. It will never gain mass adoption accordingly. Mainstream users will never care about it, not under any circumstances.
It'll languish as just another techie fantasy, with every other decentralized premise (not one of which has ever acquired mass consumer use, not in decades of trying). It's the standard techie failure to understand average users. The same reason techies for nearly two decades have been baffled as to why average people haven't adopted command-line Linux - they can't be objective and properly put themselves into the shoes of other non-tech people.
You mean like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Uber, Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat, Shazam, Grubhub, Bell labs, Intel, Xerox Parc, Pixar, Amazon etc, just to name a few (and of course Twitter)? Techies have been doing just fine in the anticipation department.
I unfollow everyone who becomes overly political or comments on every outrage-du-jour. These people are inviting the bullshit. They're not making important contributions to political discourse. I don't care if they get dogpiled for it.
As a result, my Twitter experience has been smooth.
Even though in many cases, I would otherwise be in complete agreement with the core argument being made. The vitriol and vociferation is vexing though (sorry about that).
For all the shade I throw in its direction, the 'snooze' and 'unfollow' features have been more than welcome additions to Facebook as far as I'm concerned.
Gotta be honest, I never thought I'd see the day where "First day of school" pics and statuses actually get engagement from me--they're so much more pleasant and calming than "($CONSERVATIVE_PERSON| $LIBERAL_PERSON | $GROUP | $PARTY ) DID A THING, I HAVE FEELINGS ABOUT IT, AND YOU'RE GOING TO HEAR ABOUT IT".
This phenomenon is more concisely expressesd as "boo outgroup".
Personally, my reasons for using Mastodon are purely ideological. Companies like Twitter and Facebook go against the very principles of having an open and distributed internet. They centralize power, and get to decide how people interact online. They also create walled gardens that make it difficult for users to move their data between. Each of these platforms locks the users in.
With ActivityPub federation, you can have many different platforms interacting with each other seamlessly. For example, Mastodon already federates with PeerTube, so you can post a video on PeerTube and have it show up in your Mastodon timeline. This is something that will never be possible between Twitter and YouTube since they're run by different companies that have no interest in letting their users communicate with each other.
I think whether Mastodon can succeed or not is past academic debate at this point. The community has over a million users now, and it's growing actively. Mastodon is very resilient by it's very nature of being open and distributed.
A company like Twitter needs to make money to stay afloat, if it doesn't grow then it will go under. This is not the case for Mastodon since it's largely an open source effort, and the core team needs relatively meager amount of money to stay afloat. Meanwhile, the distributed nature means that the cost of running Mastodon is distributed across the community. Instead of one company having to run servers that can support millions of users, you have lots of small instances that each support thousands of users and federate together.
This creates a demand for alternatives. Once a community moves to a system like Mastodon, that creates a demand for that system.
No one cares about myspace anymore. In 10 years, noone will care about twitter. That's the nature of technology.
I think this is untrue. I think social media sites are removing people at .1% outlier belief system that most people deem disgusting enough to warrant taking action to not have associated with their brand.
Your "100%" implies that everyone on say Facebook has to have the same belief system, when that obviously isn't true. You can state many belief system on Facebook, except hateful ones that target swaths of people.
This won't create a Myspace situation, it'll create a 8chan/voat situation.
I don't think that's true. Tommy Robinson's beliefs about Muslims are held by a good deal more than 0.1% of the UK population, yet he was banned from Twitter.
Do you have a source for that number?
But I had a look at specific opinion poll results and this one https://yougov.co.uk/opi/browse/Tommy_Robinson suggests that 17.4% of people see Tommy Robinson favourably.
Me too, currently coming up to 50 years.
> https://yougov.co.uk/opi/browse/Tommy_Robinson
That's favourability of Mr Robinson, not his beliefs though.
True, but 17.4% is a much larger number than 0.1%
In any case, I feel this is splitting hairs over numbers. If 30% of the UK hated Muslims, Facebook still wouldn't be requiring "100% silicon valley values" to use the platform. You just can't post racist stuff on it. I.e. those racists have other aspects of their worldview they'd be welcome to bring to the table.
If they won’t care about Twitter, why should they care about an open source clone with no users?
It’s also not true of all tech platforms. It’s not true of desktop operating systems for example. Today the desktop is dominated by Apple and Microsoft. Who dominated it 30 years ago? So there’s nothing inevitable about these things.
You’re just assuming the alternatives will have no users. That’s the worst argument ever.
Certainly that got Google search and Gmail started.
If Twitter gets better at filtering, maybe they will be more popular?
This has happened to some extent with Voat, and if there's really a demand for like minded people to communicate without having their discourse contaminated by opposing partisans then I'm sure the same could happen here.
That is a flat-out lie, unless you disagree with the terms of service. Find me one person that was booted that wasn’t booted for violating the ToS.
Perhaps you could explain the case of Elizabeth Heng, a candidate in CA of the US Congress?
As for your example, she violated the ToS. They then changed their minds. I'm not seeing the grave injustice you're claiming.
A candidate from a mainstream party for US Congress with mainstream views creates an ad about her past that is true and historical, and that gets banned.
Hiding behind vague TOS does not cut it.
Mastodon has a similar feel in that the content is amateurish and free.
As an anecdote, I use chaos.social and they are throttling signups because there are too many new signups. Maybe you will be surprised.
Will it be the biggest social phenomenon? Probably not. But it already has the critical mass to keep funding its continued development, and lot of interesting voices, if you know where to look.
Moderation and content quality.
You know the reason why people prefer reading the New York Times instead of checkout-counter tabloids? The reason why people like buying from Amazon instead of Ebay? I mean, Ebay usually has better prices. Why would anyone buy from a store just because it's able to (or at least claims to be able to) filter bad products and keep off scammers?
That's Mastadon's advantage. The userbase isn't crap. Twitter, so far, has shown no indication that its userbase is ever going to be anything except crap. I don't think it's possible for Twitter to even start fixing that problem. Moderation doesn't scale.
If you're on social media not just to connect to friends - if you're on social media because you want to actually consume cultural content or interact with new communities, then this is like comparing Youtube and Netflix. 90% of everything on Twitter is garbage, and it's suddenly your responsibility as user to sort through all of it?
People want a platform that just works. They don't want to have to download custom block lists off of Github, or turn off DMs whenever anybody gets mad at them. They don't want to have to curate their own timeline. They want somebody else to do it for them, and Twitter can't do that.
> Alternatively, is there some new and novel porn that Mastodon will allow me to access?
Probably? Twitter has policies about pornography - they're inconsistently applied, but they're there. You could make a dedicated Mastadon instance that allows whatever. You can also choose not to have porn show up when you search across an instance because, again, Twitter can't moderate and Mastadon can.
I would feel a lot more comfortable allowing a kid to sign up for a Mastadon instance than Twitter.
Those are pretty much guaranteed to go down the more people would use the service.
If you want to attract a lot of people, you will have to accept a lot of people, wether you consider their content crap or not.
The platform is still in its infancy, but it's intended that people can migrate around the same way that you might move to a new neighborhood. And this is the feature that Twitter just fundamentally can't copy.
When you're talking about popularity, you have to distinguish between Mastadon as a platform/protocol and each individual instance.
I am (increasingly becoming) convinced that moderation does not scale - you can either have a single large community with no moderation, or you can have a small community with good moderation. This is what's clever about Mastadon. Moderation on Mastadon doesn't need to scale, because instances are fragmented.
Twitter will never be able to compete with that unless they split apart their service, which they will (probably) never do.
There's a lot of good content on Twitter too. You just have to deal with nazis to get at it. And a lot of good deals on Ebay as long as you don't mind being careful about scammers.
The question is, do users overall want to have to filter out all of this stuff on their own, especially if filtering means fighting with the platform that they're on? Youtube is a great example of this - tons of great content, but you have to put up with the recommendation engine. You either get horrible recommendations, or you constantly train the platform like a cat.
Getting Youtube to give quality recommendations on the homepage is work.
>> You know the reason why people prefer reading
>> the New York Times instead of checkout-counter
>> tabloids?
You're talking about different target audiences. The question isn't whether or not Mastadon completely kills Twitter and literally everyone moves over - it's whether there's a compelling reason for a significant number of people to switch over. Is it viable to for Mastadon to become a Twitter alternative with a broad level of adoption?
What people bring up over and over on every one of these articles is, "Oh, the project is doomed because why would any normal person switch over? You're only ever going to have the idealistic tech people on it, and it'll die as soon as they lose interest."
But it turns out that quality has a wide mainstream appeal, and it is a valid strategy to compete with other businesses purely on the basis of "our content is better." If Mastadon grows to the point where it has a similarly sized (albeit slightly smaller) userbase than Twitter and then stalls out, I don't any of what I said above would be invalidated. ;) Quite the opposite.
And for that reason there is a mastadon instance for sex-workers:
Have a healthy conversation? I know some people who stopped or reduced social media usage because that was pretty much impossible. Plus the local feed thing. Start an instance for your neighbourhood, follow people who are on there, and you've got all the neighbourhoodly gossip on there. Whilst still being able to follow whoever else you want (except Wil Wheaton because he went to a non-federated instance)
You can communicate with anything that supports ActivityPub. That means that you can get RSS-like feeds of blogs in your Mastodon timeline, or use Masto or any other AP-supporting platform to comment on a blog post (if it supports AP for that).
I find that exciting: your self-hosted personal site can now be just as much a part of the social network as something that was posted natively.
It's very much a work in progress but the promise of Mastodon is not so much replacing Twitter as it is a gateway to an internet-wide social graph with no walls.
What does Mastodon offer that regular people care about?
No one has to care about which pair of celebs are arguing
No bloody advertising
People are building interesting stuff with it
Third party apps work
It's not run by a guy seemingly at war with his own users
edit: more
Your parents aren't there
The people who left twitter years ago because of all the harassment and you've been missing are probably already there
If you've got a feature request or something, you can just toot Gargron and you will get a reply
But regular people care about being threatened and hateful conduct. On twitter countless reports go unanswered, and it's pretty clear at this point that there is no intent to make the situation better. On Masto when you report someone or a post for being abusive you've got an actual human (your instance admin) who will look at it and actually do something about it (like blocking that user for the entire instance).
If I start acting like a jerk, them my users will start leaving. Pretty soon I don't have anyone left except people who like being treated like that. In my experience that will probably mean they're jerks too.
And thus pretty soon my instance is "that instance run by that jerk who lets her users be jerks". At that point, admins on other instances stop federating with my instance. Eventually the only other instances who are willing to talk to mine are also run by and full of jerks, and I am amidst a hell of my own creation.
So that is, as I see it, the external forces acting on me to try and be a chill admin who's nice to her users. It's a lot easier for them to leave my server and stay in contact with people elsewhere than it is to leave Twitter.
Moving instances is not a big deal and yes, know your admin.
Instead most "blocks" are just muting from the federated timeline, precisely so that you're not cut off from contacts.
Every single centralized service (Hacker News included) reserves the right to ban anyone for any reason. Twitter may have a policy, but in practice it's no different than anyone else's Code of Conduct. It's certainly not legally binding.
Regular users don't care about whether someone could theoretically become abusive in the future - maybe they should care, but they don't. They just look at the track record and decide if they trust that person right now.
And right now, Mastadon instances are better at moderation than Twitter. You're worried about an instance admin theoretically not protecting you in the future; Twitter already, today, doesn't protect you.
A lot of people are OK with a middle ground where moderators remain, but are closely associated with their communities to reduce communication problems and increase their stake in doing a good job. Is it really crazy to believe that someone might want to trust other people, but also want to have more selection over who they trust?
You're here, so I would hazard a guess that you're OK with that middle ground too. HN admins could theoretically turn this site into 4Chan or Reddit if they wanted to. But we both trust them not to, and the fact that they theoretically have the power is not enough to make either of us throw up our hands and say, "well there's no difference, and nobody will care, and there's no reason for anybody post on HN instead of Reddit."
There are a lot of people here posting on a dedicated tech-community Reddit clone about why fringe Twitter is a bad idea.
Source: I'm a moderator on anticapitalist.party. AMA.
I guess what it offers them is social media that actually maintains your peace of mind to a degree.
That's the advantage they have over twitter, they're able to set community rules that fit to the respective communities. It's twitter that suffers from the anarchy.
When twitter users are setting up filters and mass blocks to remove all the nazis and trolls and conspiracy theorists from their feed, they're essentially just trying to painfully recreate what you get in a mastodon sized community by design.
The main thrust of my user agreement is "hi I am queer lady who is out of patience with people being jerks and wants a nice place to talk, if you piss me off you can go find a new instance or start your own". It's not much more formal than that, either.
You want a more lawyer-like policy with tons of explicit rules for people to try and work around, then run it yourself.
You trust your admin to not screw you over the same way you trust, say, the people who run that chill coffeehouse you’re a regular at.
And if it did, well it'd be just another commercial social network, and most of them completely suck.
Technology is not the solution to this problem.
I'd agree with 2/3rds of that. Mastodon is a technology, not a product, and it doesn't have a business model.
But that does not mean that it can't scale and grow—it means that it doesn't have any way to turn scaling and growing into money. email is a technology; javascript is a technology, the microchip is a technology. All of those technologies have seen tremendous growth, and none of them have made money (though products using them certainly have).
I suspect that, if Mastodon grows, it will be precisely because it is a technology, not a product. Making money isn't the only way to grow.
No, my non-nerd friends do not wish to "Join the Federation!"
Not to knock what Mastodon are doing, rather to criticise the idea that it's a social network for everyone.
It's like the value of a social media platform is in lots of people being on it
And as it grows maybe it starts to be a place where you have to go to find some of your friends. I mean, who the hell wants to be on Facebook any more? How many people still go there because that's where they can keep up with certain circles?
It's also a place you can run for your friends, and kick out anyone who comes in trying to start trouble.
We've got chill. We've got quiet. We've got a place to talk semi-publically without EVERY ASSHOLE INCLUDING A ZILLION BOTS being there, and we've got an overall structure that maybe makes it more likely for people to want to keep things civil.
Most people have never logged in to Twitter, and have no idea how it works. Ask around among the normal people you know if they've ever posted there. A somewhat larger number will say they've used it to read messages from famous people but for most normal people, their Twitter consumption consists of media reports of what someone said on the platform.
As someone who uses Mastodon on a regular basis, I can tell you that it's usable right now, and that I have much better interactions there than anywhere else.
At the moment, Mastodon isn't Paris or London, and thankfully it isn't Las Vegas either. And that might actually be why it's such a nice place.
Regular people never used Linux and they still don't use Linux desktops. But there's still lots and lots of Linux desktop distros that people who use love. Not many people have genuine affection for using Windows, but when someone's installed their own distro they have genuine affection for using it. They'll donate hours and hours of their free time fixing issues.
People currently have genuine affection for using a mastodon instance. Genuine affection is a very powerful tool.
For example, a premium instance. Costs 100$ per month. Gives you 24/7 phone support, a free iPhone X, and the opportunity to toot exclusively to other premium users.
It's hard to predict the fate of social networks.
Sit on your high horse until the heat death of the sun, for all I care. But don't think anyone's not noticing you're posting and talking here instead of on a reddit. There is clearly some benefits to sub-selection and partially isolated communities.
This, again and again. (And again; it seems I can’t stop writing the same thing on my own blog: https://davepeck.org/2015/05/05/twitter-mainland/)
The entire point of Mastodon is to ensure there is no single instance that can control every other instance. Twitter has real issues. For instance, due to their inability to police truly awful behaviour (in the name of freedom of expression) there is no way of limiting the very worst excesses of the medium.
However, if you localize instances, then you allow people to gravitate to those instances they feel most free to join. It also allows instances to reject other instances they really don't want anything to do with - so Fosstodon would presumably block anything from Stormfront.
Frankly though, your idea of "fringe groups" is wrong - it will probably allow for SIGs. In fact, I'd say that Mastodon in that regard seems to be more like a distributed reddit than Twitter, only it basically emulates Twitter features and UI.
That's a bit the selling point of pixiv's mastodon instance. Artists post their art there, including NSFW material and it is more aligned with local moral standards.
Now if you just want discover art it's a terrible tool (just like twitter is) compared to dedicate art hubs like pixiv or dA, but for following individual artists it seems to work.
Mastodon might "win" just because it'll keep working after Twitter finally dies.
The place where the people AREN'T and the kylie jenners AREN'T is a perk of mastodon to some, not a flaw. It's like the tech nerd version of kids not using facebook because it's their parents' social network.
I just want to share cool pictures of my modular origami and not constantly be two degrees of separation from Trump's latest outrage
Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat. Is there some triple-I indie game that Mastodon will allow me to play in my browser? (Or triple-A non indie? I'm not picky. Just don't show me a point and click please.) Post the link for that game, you'll get a lot more people trying Mastodon. Alternatively, is there some new and novel porn that Mastodon will allow me to access? Or is there a new generation of FIFA stars on Mastodon? Or new generation of NBA stars? I mean, even a new generation of "It" Girls chasing NBA stars would be better for attracting users than "thoughtful and local uncommented retweets". Which is not only what you're asking me to get excited about right now, but is likely not even true. Boosts will be no more thoughtful than retweets, likely a good deal less thoughtful since Mastodon seems to be on a road that relegates it to fringe groups.
Right now, it's like buying a large tract of land in Kansas and saying that you've started a new municipality. No we don't have beaches, or theaters, or parks, or much of anything else, but everyone here is more thoughtful. so we're much better than Miami, San Diego, or Minneapolis.
I mean, it might work? But I think Las Vegas hit on a much better method of populating empty area by just saying, "HEY! We've got gambling and naked women!"