#Mastodon is more interesting than I first thought. And people are quite friendly. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it seems worth it. The web UI is best. If anybody wants to follow me I’m at Doug Lerner (@douglerner@mastodon.world) - Mastodon
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Likewise, I’m at Nello (@Nello@ioc.exchange) - IOC.exchange
(One advantage of there being multiple instances is that there isn’t such a crush of name collisions and you’re more likely to get your first name as a handle.)
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Please do…
Apparently this Masto-Redirect Shortcut makes it a little easier to interact with content and profiles on another instance, though I haven’t tried it yet.
I found Mastodon a little confusing - there seemed a very limited list of servers presented when I first logged in. I’m not too fussed but when time permits I’ll look at some of the videos mentioned.
On a tangent, I’m seeing lots of references to Post as another Twitter alternative. I’m on the waitlist and wondering if anyone has experience they’d like to share. I’m assuming its server paradigm is a bit more centralised than Mastodon.
It’s nowhere near as good as Mastodon (or Twitter for that matter.) It has only a web site - no mobile apps. No muting tools. I don’t know anyone on the service, and it just seems to be a firehose of posts without a timeline (like Mastodon’s federated timeline), plus a timeline of people you follow - but I don’t know anyone on Post yet, and follow only one account, so it’s a bit sparse for me. The web site was a bit weird last week (it would skip around as you scrolled) but that seems to be fixed.
I think one point is that journalists can put their content under a micropayment paywall where you spend “points” to read the full content. I guess I’m all for people getting paid for their work, but we all know how frustrating it is to file a link to a media site and find the article behind a paywall (usually of course much more expensive than the points used by Post.) So far though I haven’t seen many posts that require points to read. So far I see a lot of duplicate posts (think of reading a Twitter view where you see a tweet and then, as you scroll up, the same tweet that’s been retweeted by all of the people you follow.)
What I don’t know yet is if it saves your position between visits. I don’t think it does. For the “explore” view, that’s probably fine. I’d want that for my “following” timeline though.
It has promise, but I’m not finding it if much use yet.
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The tech-related ones that I have considered are twit.social and fosstodon.org. But many are coming on line.
Keeping in mind that the community depends on the commitment by the owners to fund the site and moderate it. The funding costs are real: Fosstodon costs $1900 monthly to host. About | Fosstodon Hub
And a recent post says that each of the 2 original owners were spending 4 hours per day moderating.
Personally, I would be wary of joining an instance based on operating system usage. I think that was one of the first schisms of the Internet: macintrash vs windoze. (Or was it Star Trek vs Star Wars.) And most of the posts will be complaining about system updates etc.
Finally, I see that Tapbots (makers of Tweetbot) have their own domain, and are teasing a Mastodon client. W00t.
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It’s alpha, still, but still an excellent client already. (It’s called Ivory.)
For those that don’t know, there is another good Twitter client called Spring for Twitter which is, like Tweetbot used to be, a non-subscription, one-time price (well, at least for now.) It can feel quite a bit like Tweetbot. Anyway, the developer also has an alpha client in TestFlight for Mastodon called “Mona”. I don’t know if they have any test slots available right now, but you request them from the settings menu by hitting About Spring if you have the Spring app. It’s also already a very good Mastodon client.
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As I’ve said in other forums, I wouldn’t waste time trying to figure out and use Mastodon as a replacement for Twitter. As so many users are finding out, it’s not a replacement for Twitter, not even close.
It’s too difficult to use, too confusing for new users and even experienced Twitter users, and it’s extremely difficult to bring your Twitter history and users with you. You can’t even own your own username – because each Mastodon server is independent, many people can have the same username (with just a different top-level domain extension). That alone makes it difficult to find people you already know/follow from Twitter.
This is already playing out (see the link above), and I suspect Mastodon will fade back into obscurity in the next few months (unless they “un-federate”) their servers. I don’t see that happening unless they take HUGE amounts of VC money to do it.
From your description of your problems, it sounds like you absolutely want “one social network to rule them all”, where there is one single cloud-based server run by one corporation/organization, that can and will impose its policies on all the users.
In other words, you want Twitter or a Twitter clone.
Which is 100% opposite to the design goals of Mastodon.
Mastodon was designed from day-one to be decentralized, so that there can be no single organization imposing policies on everybody. Each server’s owner defines and implements his own policy, and if you don’t like it, you can go find a different server whose policy you do like. As opposed to Twitter (or Facebook or most other social networks) where if you don’t like the policy, your only option is to delete your account and not use it at all.
As for distributed user-names, do you consider this a problem with e-mail? Each mail service is independent, so many people can have the same username with different domains. I haven’t heard of anybody complaining that Internet e-mail is a bad idea because david@gmail.com is a different person from david@yahoo.com.
Or for that matter, other social networks. Nobody thinks that “David” on Twitter has to be “David” on Facebook. Everybody understands that they are two different services, even though there may be mechanisms for one to present information posted to the other.
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I’ve never tried it but apparently it’s easy to move from one instance to another:
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I’m liking Mastodon so far (yes, I’m a recent adopter.) It reminds me of early Twitter, when it was mostly tech people like us, and didn’t have a central server using algorithms to try to promote individual tweets. (Of course I rarely saw this myself using a third-party client in more recent times, but it sure filled the feed with reactions to popular tweets sometimes.)
The broad public message has been that Mastodon is a replacement for Twitter. As you’ve noted, it’s not – and in fact is designed in a way that is the antithesis of Twitter. I find Twitter (and Facebook) useful because it is centralized and so Mastodon’s decentralization is an active negative.
As to email, it serves a different need – and if someone told me that I could replace Twitter with email, I’d look at them with the same skepticism as with Mastodon.
I think @Shamino’s mention of email was entirely about Mastodon addressing using @servername, not that email as a system is in any way ‘social media’ or a substitute for Twitter.
I understood that. My point is that because email serves a different need, its decentralized structure doesn’t cause the same issues that such a structure does with Mastodon. I illustrated that by saying that if someone made the suggestion to replace Twitter with email we would realize it was silly.
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I’ve been following discussions on Mastodon but have yet to see anything to convince me to leave Twitter and move to Mastodon. Sure, Twitter is currently a mess but there are ways to minimize that. Mute and Block are obvious and there are browser extensions and apps that eliminate advertisements, present a clean[er] timeline, and eliminate promoted tweets.
Also, the annual meeting of one of the professional societies I belong to is now taking place–and everyone is posting comments on the presentations to Twitter via the meeting hashtag.
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Of course, Twitter and e-mail are completely different.
But Mastodon isn’t the first instance of a decentralized global discussion service. As I wrote above, Usenet was an incredibly successful example of one. Thousands of servers run by ISPs, corporations and universities all sharing content with each other to support millions of global discussions.
It worked great until the early 2000’s, when it started to fade away due to people choosing web-based communication fora over a (mostly) text/console interface. I personally used it right up until Verizon turned off its servers. (I’ve been meaning to buy a newsgroup account from a third party for ages, but it’s probably pointless today. I assume all of the interesting discussions have moved elsewhere.)
I personally see Mastodon as a modern incarnation of the same concept. Hundreds of local discussion servers that choose to share all or some of their content with each other in order to achieve global scope.
But a replacement for Twitter, it is not. And I think those promoting it as such really don’t understand what they’re talking about.
Then bringing up email in a discussion about twitter and Mastodon probably isn’t useful.
It was successful until it was outcompeted by, eventually, Facebook and Twitter. It’s unlikely that an USENET analog is going to recompete and win that battle again.
And you’re talking to someone who was a regular on rec.arts.sf.written
You’re making an argument akin to “MySpace was great – we should do that again!”