From GNU social to Mastodon

Re:From GNU social to Mastodon by panic on Sunday August 26, 2018 @09:28PM (#17848872)

There's a tension here between different views of what Mastodon should be. Is an instance more like an email server (where it just acts as a gateway) or a web forum (with a community of people on each instance)?

It seems like the ActivityPub protocol itself is designed from the "email server" perspective, but as different instances try to differentiate themselves and attract users, I bet the platform will swing more and more toward "web forum". It'll be interesting to see how it turns out.

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Re:From GNU social to Mastodon by TuringTest on Monday August 27, 2018 @05:24AM (#17850358)

Even if each instance has its own community, that's no reason to force users to create a different account at each instance.

Given the federated protocol, it's a reasonable expectation carrying around the same identity across instances.

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Re:From GNU social to Mastodon by ok-repl on Monday August 27, 2018 @07:41AM (#17850807)

I feel like the product signals a strange mix of the two, which has to at least be resolved in terms of what's user-facing (e.g. UX-wise)

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