I think this is a feature for most communities to be honest. Twitter is great at inter-networking, and a decent soap-box, but communities there are shallow and when your audience is "everyone on the platform" the chilling effect means only certain types of people are participating honestly and in full. There's probably some great communities that happen to be on twitter in spite of there being almost no open functionality that helps with that, but I bet they would all grow and foster better conversations if they added a discord server or something similar. Twitter is about as good as a blog comment section for community building.

I have some friends operating a Mastodon server, with a team of volunteer operators, and I'm pretty sure I've met all of them in person. I've only used Twitter a handful of times and don't really like the medium, but it's really not that hard to run a server. And I don't think there's any fundamental reason this doesn't scale. Every single community center runs a website, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine local, trusted Mastodon-type servers operated by all sorts of organizations. You may already be a member of an organization that has the capability and drive in your area, if you just can find the other people who want it.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/tumblr-to-add-support-for-...

But this will never describe a significant portion of Twitter users. It might work for some, but it wont replace Twitter.

I'm not suggesting any individual do so, but this is not rocket science. I feel like maintaining a physical building is probably harder, so any organization with a physical building that has ~100+ members should be able to do this - and enough organizations doing this could replace Twitter.

Also, complete failures like banning important stories, banning presidents, banning journalists etc. cannot happen on Mastodon the same way that it has happened countless of times on Twitter and will continue happening.

Mastodon is obviously superior when it comes to the freedom of speech. Elon is afraid, because he knows. Funnily enough, he is the reason why we will get the better version of social media faster.

I still blog on a server I rent but the backup is hosted in a server in my closet. I’m fully aware that rental can go away any time. And that’s been the case for decades.

Maybe it’s a generational thing but it appears people assume these platforms owe them something. The TOS makes it clear they owe them very little. So you can be muted, banned or deleted at any moment.

I’ve watched many social networks disappear and end up in the footnotes of a Wikipedia article. Nothing about the internet is guaranteed nor permanent. Twitter nor Mastodon owe you anything.

But generally it takes a lot to get banned by most fediverse instances. You basically either need to be a nazi or consort with nazis.

There are, of course, instances that would ban you for less than that, but these tend to be much smaller and trying to foster a very specific type of community. If they'd ban you, they probably wouldn't follow you either.

The solution to this is to move to an instance which hasn't defederated from the one you're on. Worst case, setting up your own.

It works by the old and new server "cooperating", so it won't let you move between two servers which won't federate with each other - in that specific scenario you'll need to go via a third server which both speak to.

The move appears to you as if your followers unfollows your old account and follows the new account, so they're all "redirected" to your new handle. E.g. you can see that here: https://mastodon.social/@vidarh

You indicate to the old server where you want to move to, and then to the new server where you're moving from, and the fact the old server will specify your new handle in your profile is used as proof when informing your followers instances of the new address.

If you do this, you can see mastodon.social returns a "movedTo" attribute for my old account:

    curl -H "Accept: application/activity+json" https://mastodon.social/users/vidarh | jq .movedTo

But you can still move to a third party server. If you desperately want to move from A to B and A and B are defederated from each other, you can even do that by moving from A to C and C to A as long as both A and B are willing to talk to C.

Also, you can't back up your followers.

I think Mastodon is a tiny bit better than Twitter in that, at least you have a chance to move as long as things are good. If that makes a practical difference, I don 't know...

It needs improvements, such as the ability to move in spite of the old server (the ability to get at your private key so you or the new server can sign an assertion about the move with the old accounts key would be one option which would at least give people the choice of being prepared), and moving over the old posts (there are some stupid concerns about "faking timelines" which you can trivially do anyway, so I think this is a question of time to resolve that - it's not technically hard), but it already does offer significantly more freedom than Twitter.

There's no moving on goalposts here. I have not replied to you suggesting anything less than this previously, so there were no goalposts for me to move.

> Which, BTW, isn't even a filter criterion on the often linked instances.social.

So don't rely on instances.social if that is a consideration for you. If this matters to you, do your research. Joinmastodon.org does have a filter for "legal structure", but if you care about that you really should read the about page of your prospective server. Or run or pay for your own.

I simply provided you with a list of options if this is a consideration for you. It's your choice whether or not any of those options works for you.

> Also, you can't back up your followers.

Yes you can, though not from the default Mastodon UI. In fact anyone can download your followers list as JSON. What you can't do without support from the original server is to cause your followers to refollow you on the new account, and that is indeed a legitimate flaw that I'd like to see fixed (and it's doable - there are key-pairs associated with the accounts which would allow for signing an assertion about the account moving, and while the server need to have a copy of the main private key there's no reason for users not to be able to get a copy of it). It probably will be - the entire account move functionality is quite new and needs iteration.

All servers can communicate. You're not locked into servers. This isnt an MMO... infosec.exchange, the one I use, isnt an exclusive thing. It basically just shows my name as: [email protected].

I can see and talk to mastodon.social. I can use hashtags and people from other servers will see it just like twitter.

The server you pick is just a name and a local server. If you pick a server that's dying, just move to the next one. You keep everything, it just changes from:

[email protected] to [email protected]. You wont lose the friends, just the host name changes.

The only thing you can do is own your data, running on servers you own, at a domain you own.

The internet owes you nothing.

No, that’s a failure of the specific protocol. Your identity could simply be a public key. This way it’s:

1) Tamperproof

2) Not dependant on any specific server

A public key is a way to securely and uniquely say "this is me". It says nothing about who you are, anything about you, what you like or do, your links to other people, or anything like that.

All that information has to be stored somewhere.

https://joinmastodon.org/covenant

I don't understand what decentralized internet service you would prefer then? The ability for anyone to host their own decentralized instance is exactly what a return to the protocols of old would look like. They may not have had anime avatars, but you were just as susceptible to the whims of your IRC admin. Either you trust in the faceless centralized conglomerate or in your smaller devop. What third option is there?

I acknowledge that Mastodon is not perfect, but raising that as "badly designed and engineered" seems weird, when it's the most decentralised, actually working solution we've got.

However.

> you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar.

Is this worse than trusting Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok? Those companies are actively looking to exploit you for profit. Whereas strawman kitty avatar can't do anything. Especially are there are no private messages on Mastodon.

Yes for the first two, no for the third. US-based companies are large targets for potential lawsuits, and consequently have processes in place to prevent random employees from accessing your DMs without cause. I obviously wouldn't trust those companies completely -- we're really arguing about probabilities here -- but there's at least some measure of accountability that makes them unlikely to do something trivially stupid.

> there are no private messages on Mastodon

It does have a DM feature -- that they aren't private is exactly the point.

I thought I'd try mastodon.social but couldn't find it on any of the lists so chose the search option. Found it but it wouldn't let me register an account. Go go site, there's a register button but rather than taking me to a signup form I just get a big wall of text about how I can't be a sexist or a transphobe. Fine, I won't. But why can't I register?

Go with the one everyone talks about? Closed to new signups. Pick some other one, run the risk that it closes (the owner gets bored, it becomes too much work, they find keeping it up and stable too hard). Or else that it gets “defederated”, and hence you get effectively banned, because someone else disagrees with moderation decisions of the owner which are nothing to do with you personally. And even if none of that happens, and the server you pick turns out to be a good one - then your friend asks you how to join Mastodon, you direct them to the server you use, but it is closed to sign-ups due to popularity, so they have the same issue.

I can’t be bothered. I’m sure I’m hardly the only one.

How do you choose anything? On joinmastodon.org/servers you're presented with filter options and descriptions. You look at the descriptions and pick one you think you'll like. If you don't, you can do an account move. Plenty of people will be happy to help.

Personally I'm perfectly fine with making people think twice if they're not willing to invest the time to find a server. It's ok - they can pick something else if that works better for them.

> Or else that it gets “defederated”, and hence you get effectively banned, because someone else disagrees with moderation decisions of the owner which are nothing to do with you personally.

This is a highly exaggerated risk unless you go out of your way to find a server full of racists or other people that should instantly make it clear to you it's likely you'll face blocks. Some people will insist this or that mainstream server is banned everywhere (e.g. some say that about mastodon.social), and in reality unless the server is obviously bad it often turns out to be a few inconsequentially tiny instances which block them. Look at the list of banned instances on a handful of servers and you'll see that most places it's not very long and most of it is made up of a core set of common culprits. None of which are listed on joinmastodon.org/servers - it takes effort or really bad luck to end up on a server where this is a big issue.

> then your friend asks you how to join Mastodon, you direct them to the server you use, but it is closed to sign-ups due to popularity, so they have the same issue.

It's an issue particularly now because signups are 10x-20x normal because of Musk. It's a scaling issue which will go away, as the number of new instances is also rapidly going up and people are addressing it. Additionally, if you e.g. go to mastodon.social and press "Create Account" you're offered an explanation and linked to joinmastodon.org/servers to pick another one.

> I can’t be bothered. I’m sure I’m hardly the only one.

That's of course your choice.

Look at how many controversies there have been about whether Twitter should or shouldn’t ban some controversial figure (everyone from Donald Trump to J K Rowling). What happens if Mastodon gets similar controversies, and then big Mastodon server operators disagree among themselves about how to respond, and then block each other’s servers out of that disagreement? Nobody can say it can’t happen, I can’t see any guardrails to prevent such splits. If anything, Mastodon’s community seems to be full of people who think that Twitter (whether pre or post Musk) is insufficiently moderated and not banning enough people, which seems to make such a development only more likely

What happens if it should come to pass is that users will need to decide whether they like it like that, or move to a third party instance that doesn't block either one or only block the one they want blocked.

And the prospect of a user exodus (for a decision either way) is an incentive for admins to pay attention to what their users actually wants. To me that's just fine (though I'd like improvements to the user migration functionality to make this process even easier).

I could worry about this, or I can worry about Musk's whims. On Mastodon I can move elsewhere (and did; where I started was fine, but I'm now on my own instance because I like having more control). On Twitter, there's no recourse. As such I'll take those future hypotheticals over what's happening to Twitter any day.

I'm beginning to see this as a feature. The best social network may indeed be one that requires effort.

This is exactly the same thing as creating an email address, and as far as I know no-one is complaining because they have to choose a server/domain to use.

If Mastodon is successful the same thing will happen again.

It's important to know that moving between servers is fairly well implemented; a few clicks and your followers will automatially migrate over to the new one. Your first pick doesn't have to be final.

Go to joinmastodon.org or instances.social, not directly to a specific instance.

I saw that elonjet had found a new home there so assumed I wouldn't have any trouble signing up. The "Create Account" button on mastodon.social seemed promising too.

I'll note that if you click "Create Account" on mastodon.social at the moment on desktop, it shows a modal that explains that you can interact no matter which Mastodon server you sign up on, then shows a "On this server" explaining mastodon.social is currently closed for signups, reminds people that they don't need an account on mastodon.social to use mastodon, then a "On a different server" header that explains that you can create an account on a different server, with a big blue "Find another server" button taking you to joinmastodon.org/server.

I'm sure this still confuses some people (and more confusingly, if you narrow the window enough the "create account" button takes you straight to the link above without explanation; that doesn't seem like great UX), and I'd love to see tweaks to make it better, but the above seemed odd to me, not least because it doesn't seem like they've tried the regular registration flow, so I have no clue what it is they actually did. It seems maybe they've clicked the "Learn more" link, given the description about a "wall of text" about what they can't do?

If not now, then when?

Jack linked to nostr which tries to solve some of these problems: https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768

> The problem with Mastodon and similar programs:

- User identities are attached to domain names controlled by third-parties;

- Server owners can ban you, just like Twitter; Server owners can also block other servers;

- Migration between servers is an afterthought and can only be accomplished if servers cooperate. It doesn't work in an adversarial environment (all followers are lost);

- There are no clear incentives to run servers, therefore they tend to be run by enthusiasts and people who want to have their name attached to a cool domain. Then, users are subject to the despotism of a single person, which is often worse than that of a big company like Twitter, and they can't migrate out;

- Since servers tend to be run amateurishly, they are often abandoned after a while — which is effectively the same as banning everybody;

- It doesn't make sense to have a ton of servers if updates from every server will have to be painfully pushed (and saved!) to a ton of other servers. This point is exacerbated by the fact that servers tend to exist in huge numbers, therefore more data has to be passed to more places more often;

- For the specific example of video sharing, ActivityPub enthusiasts realized it would be completely impossible to transmit video from server to server the way text notes are, so they decided to keep the video hosted only from the single instance where it was posted to, which is similar to the Nostr approach.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#very-short-summary-o...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061 (11 months ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360 (22 days ago)

> How do I find people to follow?

>

> First, you must know them and get their public key somehow

And here lies the main problem of most of these decentralized alternatives: how do you discover new content? One of the biggest innovation of Twitter was to be able to follow a hashtag-- say #SomeEvent2022 and you see all tweets using that hashtag, not only those of people you follow. This tends to be abused by spamers, but it’s a great way to follow what’s going on at large events or find stuff related to some topic.

The discovery doesn't need to be at protocol level. You can have some servers following large number of accounts, analyze the feed, create a "trending" list and publish that under their own account that you follow. Then you can have second level "trending" servers which aggregate over first level ones if you want even more "trendiness"

Some may want a pure chronological view of posts from people the follow with no algorithm, some may want pure algos a la TikTok.

It seems like the nostr protocol allows for all of this. Users can decide their experience by downloading different client apps.

There's a big difference between creating a protocol that's intended for fully-content-agnostic communication over the Internet (eg, HTTP) and creating a protocol that's specifically intended to be used to build a social network. The latter type needs various features that enable the type of behavior we know people on social networks desire from them. It does not, as you say, necessarily need to encode strong opinions about how content discovery should be done into the protocol at a fundamental level, but it at least needs to acknowledge that that is a thing that will be necessary for any social network to succeed.

https://nerdschalk.com/how-to-follow-a-hashtag-on-mastodon/

No wonder, as it's essentially a German IT project. And those are usually in the man made horrors beyond comprehension territory. (Source: I'm a German and have had the """""""joy""""""" of working on quiet a few local IT projects).

There's something in the German soul that makes them great at building cars. But the same thing makes for horrible software architects. My pet theory is that it's the relative freedom of software. And freedom (as in no restraints) is not something Germans tend to encounter much in their society.

But lacking in design. See how German supercars look plain vis-a-vis the Italian ones

I suspect as Mastodon grows, there will be more servers that become popular and will likely host the bulk of people, in much the same way that gmail pulled in the bulk of email users—but it will still be possible to have other “addresses” too. The idea is starting to grow on me.

https://hachyderm.io/@[email protected]/1095298448544650...

> "Imagine you signed up for a sort of reverse-email address where your sent emails landed on a public page that anyone who knew your address could read if they wanted to and even follow you for more."

I think universities should immediately make official instances for students and faculty. At least in academic twitter circles having an official institutional home would probably help a ton with migration; it would feel like a natural place to be.

And it’s waiting for its AOL and Gmail.

Therefore, 'Gmail for Mastodon' would seemingly just swing the pendulum back towards centralization.

Nobody outside a select few want to host their own server. And nobody wants to research which server to join, before they’ve experienced an ounce of product benefit, nor how to back up their data. This was always going to be centralised to a degree. But Gmail/Outlook with some Proton/Fast is distinctly better than Twitter, Musk or no Musk.

email adoption was fast because it was a gamechanger compared to faxes and telegraphs. ISPs offered inboxes, as did universities and offices, years before Hotmail arrived.

Additionally, people got email because they wanted to communicate with friends. People get on social media mostly to escape boredom, not intentionally communicate with stranngers.

The only thing that concerns me is the risk of defederation. Why would anyone want to run an instance if they (and their users) are at the risk of being excluded on the whim of a small and intransparent group of people?

I mean so far moderation on Mastodon seems to work, but it still does not sit right with me that we basically replaced a dictatorship with the (benevolt) oligoply of the group of most popular server's owners.

In the end it's all a matter of trust and it would be good if more organizantions ran their own instances so that we would have bigger plurality of large instances.

Elon Musk has made some dumb moderation calls, but he seems open to changing some of them in response to popular feedback and media pressure. I don’t know if the same is true of those people. If new Twitter bans whoever, odds are high everybody will hear about it, and if they shouldn’t be banned, odds are decent it will be reversed. I’m not sure the same is true for this “oligopoly” for whom few know who they are. Seems even worse than Twitter as far as transparency and accountability goes

https://taylorlorenz.substack.com/p/elon-musk-banned-me-from...

Jacobs has been calling on Musk to ban Lorenz for doxxing her. Maybe he (or his staff) have listened. I’m sure Lorenz knows about this, so when she claims she “doesn’t know” why she was suspended, and implies that it was for asking Musk questions or criticising him, I think people should take that claim with a grain of salt

Besides, isn't any legal content fair game on the new Twitter?

Jacobs argues it did happen on Twitter, because Lorenz and others used Twitter to promote the NYT article in which she doxxed her.

> Besides, isn't any legal content fair game on the new Twitter?

I think when Musk said that, he really meant “ideas” not mere “information”. It might be legal for me to post your home address, but I don’t think that is what he had in mind. I think what he meant was that people with unpopular social/political/etc views should be free to express them if they are legal. Someone’s home address isn’t an social/political/etc view.

So I don’t think banning people for doxxing is really contrary to what he meant when he said that. Now, he actually has gone backward on what he meant - re-banning Kanye for extremely antisemitic posts, implying that extreme antisemitism is not going to be allowed even if legal - but surely it is good he went back on that?

(The problem with banning “non-extreme” antisemitism, is few can agree on where to draw the line - some pro-Israel people claim that anyone who criticises Israel “too much” is being antisemitic, effectively implying that all pro-Palestinian activism is antisemitic - but surely we shouldn’t just ban everyone who is pro-Palestinian. On the other hand, few would deny that sometimes, some pro-Palestinian activists do get “carried away” and veer into more clearly antisemitic territory. But how far is too far? Reasonable people can disagree. This is why I think it is okay to ban clearcut cases of extreme antisemitism, like Ye, but trying to ban every possible instance of it is not sensible.)

I don't want to be too glib, because your technical concerns are legitimate and well-argued. But... have you actually tried using it?

It works fine! It doesn't work as well as Twitter and has rough edges, but at this point it's well past the "will it work?" stage. There are real people there posting real content and engaging in real ways. If Twitter were to disappear tomorrow, people could all just move over and... it would be fine.

So it's OK to criticize, but the idea that it's somehow fatally flawed seems weird to me. It works fine.

You can move accounts to a different server if you stop liking where you're at, which is a feature nobody has elsewhere it seems.

I view Mastodon as if Twitter, a Microblogging platform, and IRC had a child.

Let's take the reverse tack though, and agree with your opinion that it's a clusterfuck. Twitter should be threatened by Mastodon because they're losing users to it in spite of all those "problems".

Personally, I think we should have this stuff regulated. We have power, mail, phones, internet, etc but most of the internet just isn't. Which seems really odd considering that for most people their Outlook/Google email is far more important to them than their postal mail but can be taken away from them because they emailed a photo to a doctor. Your revenue generating Twitter account can be suspended because you tweeted something some random person just didn't like with no real recourse. YouTube is probably the worse for kneecapping people's livilhoods over dodgy claims.

Decenteralized just seems like it'll be a pain for me to find stuff. And instead of being held hostage by a big company with policies and processes and money to sue them. You're being held hostage by some random guy who may decide he doesn't like being connected to a certain network and all of sudden you've got to create a new account somewhere else.

infosec.exchange can talk to and see content in mastodon.social

without those things, it's easier to just run out of stuff and people to see, and end up in a place where you're caught up with things, and new people aren't entering your circle, and the activity just stops. well, it is also unlikely, because people just do stuff and mix other people in, but it's easier to end up in that static state, when you don't get suggestions in other ways.

at least there are reblogs. but there's also no option to filter those out right in someone's profile. so it's gonna get real annoying if those are gonna be the only way for someone to push content from somebody else.

Other than that, all of these things are things people can build using the API. I agree they're needed, and I think enough others do that things will get built.

I certainly want to build my own algorithmic feed, because reverse chronology is already a nuisance to me.

Other than that I think what you're describing might well be a good feature for one of the frontends to support. Incidentally, since all of the profile info is available without auth, it's also possible to build an entirely separate profile browser that could offer that filtering for any profile.

EDIT: Mastodon in fact includes a profile browser for remote profiles; it's just that when logged out it will redirect to the remote profile instead of show the "local view" of it. So if someone wants to build a profile browser like that, all the necessary code for a good starting point is there in Mastodon already. Thought it might well be easier just to do it from scratch.

> Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.

Perhaps because they have actual metrics, and you don't?

Choosing a Mastodon instance is like signing up for an email provider. Email is decentralized and seems to be doing alright.

I picked an instance that was good-sized at 9,000 users with a focus I liked: indieweb.social. That gives me a Local feed of interesting indieweb-related content in addition to my Home feed of people I follow. I didn't have to trust my privacy to an anonymous activist. I know who is running the instance and support it via Patreon.