To your points (1) yes, everything was slower back then (2) people could and did post streams of their work within the BBS framework, everything from multi-part posts to “owning” a message-board topic, to text/ansi e-zines, but back then the focus was much more on following topics than people.
Maybe it's time for Usenet to come back.
- Truly federated
- Topic focus instead of people-focus
- Killfiles!
- Proper threading
- Standards-based servers and clients
Ah yes, censorship rears its ghastly head again. Or, what a quaint approach to spam.
In other words, it's a personal filter on incoming information. It's Joo Janta Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses. If it is censorship, it is a censor who works for you, obeys your commands, and never imposes your opinions on anyone else.
And it's not particularly good for spam, nor does anyone think that is its purpose. A killfile works against persistent trolls and idiots.
Right, and still I was super amazed that I could send a message to someone halfway around the world, and it would arrive there only a couple of days later! Compared to a letter that's really fast!
Twitter doesn't really give handlers the tools to manage their celebrity client, otherwise we would have seen things with Trump go very differently.
An owned and managed instance can invest heavily into moderation and image cultivation in ways that Facebook and Twitter will never provide.
The whole thing with Wil Wheaton on mastodon.cloud was a good example of what goes wrong, however.
Perhaps that's what Bluesky is intended to be.
Twitter could re-enable RSS if they really wanted to show that their interest was genuine.
me neither. I think, based on Twitter's track record, people should remain skeptical until shown otherwise. They haven't delivered much to prove they're willing to do the right thing.
I'd summarize Mastodon as a confusing version of Twitter that most technical people don't even understand. Drawing such a bad analogy like "it's basically like 2000s message boards" just drives this home even further.
It's like nobody can explain what it is. Though I suspect it's like monads where people need to drop the belabored metaphors and use simple language. Though then you just end up with something like "it's Twitter but the same UI shows people registered elsewhere."
It's basically twitter/microblogging* with multiple hosts, and you can see posts from other hosts. So instead of just @andrewzah, my handle becomes @andrewzah@<host-I-chose>. You could visualize twitter as @[email protected], but it's redundant as twitter is the only host. This is basically how email works, no?
The only other difference is federation, so you have two timelines instead of one: the entire** federated timeline, and the local timeline to your host. Plus the timeline of users you follow.
So unlike twitter, the user must decide what host they want to use. Or they can self-host an instance. I'm not sure if it's up to date, but https://instances.social has a wizard for this.
*: IIRC mastodon's default limit is 500 chars, and pleroma's is 2,000.
**: One exception: Hosts can block other hosts. So if you use i.e. mastodon.social, you won't see posts from users on blocked hosts unless you specifically follow them.
Choosing host is more important than it should be. Mainly because hosts are trying to do 2 things at the same time: being identity provider and being some kind of content host in federated environment (moderation etc).
Because of this when you choosing a host, you are investing too much. Their future policy changes etc will effect you, you cannot afaik move to another host. (like moving your email)
When you give people choice, things are much harder. On other platforms we have few choices depending on what you will publish (media type mainly), but here more like topic based separation, which is making things tricky, as we are humans with many different sides.
But yes, the issue gets outsourced to the user, and you have to trust a random individual instead of an entity like twitter.
But when you self host your Mastodon, aren't you losing the benefit of local. What is the point of local if I will be alone there?
To me local timelines only make sense if the instance has a very clearly defined group with some kind of shared access, e.g, a company that has an instance for use by its employees, or a club or organization have some kind of membership. Unfortunately Mastodon's culture seems to about aggregating around instances with a very loose sense of "community" - e.g, "photographers", "open source developers", "lgbtq allies". To me this is - quite frankly - stupid. Not a day goes by on /r/mastodon where someone asks "is there an instance for X?" thinking that Mastodon instances works like subreddits.
Wow yeah, this makes a lot of sense. It's too bad nodes became associated with niche hobbies or interests.
E.g. a fraternity/sorority that hosts a node would make perfect sense for a local timeline. I guess the only issue is that these organizations aren't permanent. So people would have to migrate, which isn't a thing for twitter or facebook. I know mastodon has a feature for this specifically but I think people would still find it too confusing if people's handles kept on changing.
Will they? Isn't it the same case with email? I used my University email when I was a student. I have a different company email for different jobs? Those that needed to communicate with me because of the job, I would give them my company email. When my work at company X ended, no one expected me to still message me at raphael@x.
The same with addresses from "email providers". They change less often, but it is still possible. My first account was probably at yahoo, but when gmail came up, I migrated, started to tell people my new address and auto forwarded any message that went to the old email.
"Well", that may be a lot of work to some people. To which the answer is "the only way to have absolute stability regarding your identity is if you own it". You can buy a domain a use a managed email service, you can have a domain and have a managed activitypub service provider.
I really don't get people's confusion over federation. It's just like email.
After starting a new job, I don't care about my old job's emails, but my twitter (which is my social network) is still the same
You can. Who said otherwise? Where did you get that idea?
An account at Mastodon (or Pleroma/Misskey/Pixelfed/anything) lets you follow anyone you want. There is no restriction about server talking with each other at the protocol level. If the server is federating and its admin is not trigger-happy with federation, you are good to go.
When I first saw Mastodon and topic based servers, I was thinking "photography" hosts will federate between each other, "developers" between each other etc. If you are a photography liking developer, you will have 2 accounts, one in "photographers in SF" instance, another one "developers in SF" maybe.
What I realized was I should have been asking: Do I care about the federated timeline? Do I care if my host blocks other hosts at random? Do I care if my host allows certain things (I.e. pornography with or without a NSFW tag, or at all). Do I know who the host is and can I trust them with my private messages and to not randomly ban me?
I personally like seeing the federated timeline as I have discovered some accounts through it. But my host absolutely needs to do some filtering because some hosts will allow -anything-. I never really found much use for the local timeline.
So for me, hosting was clearly the best option. I do try to get my friends to consider joining the fediverse, and I offer hosting to them to solve this issue.
One of my goals with communick is to get rid of this idea, actually. I try to make the point that an instance does not say anything about who you are or who you should follow.
Perhaps Automattic (the current owner of Tumblr) can shoehorn the ActivityPub protocol into Tumblr and find a way to market that system to your average Joe.
Twitter and Facebook only ban the more extreme or inconvenient forms of wrongthink. Mastodon servers on the other hand often are Subreddit style echochambers.
Think Mastodon instances (hosts) as reddit subreddits.
Basically you are creating an account in not universe (reddit) but on instance (subreddit)
And this subreddit is deciding, which other subreddits you can see with your account. (fediverse)
Using your analogy:
I don't need to create an account to view a subreddit or reddit. I don't need to create an account to view federated instances.
When I publish content on any social network I am always thinking about who it is intended for. I don't post the same things on Facebook that I would on Instagram, for example.
Users have to make the same choice of what to publish with any other social media service.
Mostly topic based federation is what I am against. (When bundled with identity)
Just like before someone needs to host the "message board" and that someone needs to be relied upon.
I often see posts on fediverse related subreddits of people who are dismayed because their instance admin did something. They expect every instance to be a "Mastodon instance" and follow some sort of rules.
People need to be reminded of the internet that was. Before Facebook and Twitter started to run it for them.
(Even if the Fediverse does support long post lengths, that matters little if the community has not embraced it.)
The problem with Twitter/"microblogging" is also lack of hierarchical structure. A BBS has a series of subboards, those subboard have posts and the posts have comments. Sure, things can degenerate to just a series of "mega-threads" but if it's done, everyone the topic and the subtopic and so you can good contextual discussion. Facebook has a three level structure; post, comment and reply. Some of the oldest boards had full tree-structure as does HN, here. Multilevel comment and reply can be confusing but can be really useful to drill down to the detail of discussion wants.
I really thought forums lost something when UBB and its clones (vBulletin, phpBB, etc.) became dominant, because those systems only let top-level posts have replies. So you just had forum -> subforums -> posts -> non-threaded stream of comments under each post. It was honestly awful, and for much of the 00s forums just became a chore to read and participate in. And it really seemed to bring the worst out of people and of moderation policies: like, back in the WWWBoard days, if you wanted to respond to multiple comments on a thread, you'd reply individually to those comments, and they'd be threaded in the proper position. But on a UBB forum, if you replied individually to comments like that, half the forum would scream their eyes out at you for "double posting" and often the moderators would threaten to ban you if you did it again. And it also meant that any time an argument would start in a post's comments, that argument would take over any and all discussion under that post. In a WWWBoard system, the argument would be segregated into its own subthread and normal discussion can happen in other replies, but UBB didn't allow that. And when you have megathreads, a lot of times they just devolve into everyone just saying their piece and nobody having any real back-and-forth discussion (and honestly "megathreads" are something that didn't exist at all until UBB came around, because WWWBoard and its clones had no concept of bumping or sticky threads: every post was displayed in descending chronological order with no way to reorder anything)
Honestly, I jumped for joy when Reddit took over as the de facto Internet-wide forums system, because it finally meant we got to have real threads again.
If you imagine a forum as a large dinner table, trees are like conversations that start out at one corner of the table, maybe with a few people participating, and then usually split off into individual exchanges that don't interact with each other. When that happens late in the dinner after coffee and liquor, people usually move around and form little groups.
Streams are like shared conversations involving the entire table - one person at a time talks, everybody listens and replies. Sometimes people try to talk over each other, sometimes it's mostly two or three people talking and the others are nodding along for a while. But it's what makes the experience a communal one, and it's how you get to know the people in the group other than the few you directly spoke to.
It also acts as a moderating influence, since if two people are getting into a heated debate over some niche issue, other attendees will usually try to mediate for the sake of the event, instead of ignoring them and letting them fight among them.
Stream-based forums IME tended to form more robust communities where people recognized each other's names and avatars, whereas even in smaller subreddits I might recognize a couple of very frequent commenters but nowhere near as easily or as often. On the other side, tree-based forums make it much easier to establish a rapport with the couple of people you wanted to talk to and ignore everybody else.
(Potential objection: nothing's stopping a tree system from acting like a stream by having a "main" thread where most everybody pipes up. In theory that's true, but in practice I find that threads simply don't have the staying power of streams, because they fade off into the 'click here for the next 20 replies' purgatory where only the participants and a few lurkers follow. Streams keep all the eyeballs in the same place.)
personally I host a gitea server and link to my longer documentation on my federated account. that gives me a bit more freedom to edit the content and easier to reference. matrix servers are also great for hosting federated long form content.
Can you elaborate on that a bit? In my experience, Matrix implementations tend to be Slack/IRC-style chat interfaces.
Are you saying you find such interfaces to be good for long-form content, or are there other Matrix implementations that work out well for long-form content?
I don't host content on a matrix service but I imagine it's similar to Slack in that reguard.
I could be way off on matrix' utility here as I don't use it for my primary publication.
I host a synapse homeserver, and feel like I’m not using it to its full potential.
This idea is not new, really. Movim (https://movim.eu) is running a federated social network on top of XMPP for over a decade already.
I could be way off on matrix' utility here as I don't use it for my primary publication.
Mastodon, for example, can be configured to display popular users of that instance.
There isn't going to be a fediverse wide "topic" because of the nature of nodes but whatever the instance can see can be presented in any matter desired.
How is your instance going - did you build a community around it?
Facebook and Twitter have been hosting our social media for years, in a centralized way.
Federation makes this possible for every person, denctralized.
So essentially we're back to 12-15 years ago when private people were still hosting message boards for each other. All that changes is that those message boards can now federate content.
And everyone who remembers those days know that hosting a message board that became popular was a struggle.
Which is why I've opted to keep my instance small through various steps I won't say here but they aren't ground breaking or secret. I just don't want to give away my identity because this is my secret account on HN.
After 4 years on the fediverse, listening to issues, reading threads, my opinion is that we should focus on many smaller instance rather than a few huge ones.
People think it's a completely new concept.
People seem to have forgotten, or not been part of, all the message boards we used to have during the late 90s and all throughout the 2000s.
The ONLY thing Mastodon brings to this is federation. You used to have accounts on over a dozen message boards, sometimes with different avatar names. Most were special interest groups.
All of those boards were hosted by someone.
Having lived through that I view Mastodon as a different kind of PunBB software with federation. Because I view it from the perspective of the hoster.