Sick of Musk?
November 29, 2022 5:41 PM Subscribe
As Twitter continues its daily descent, Post has popped as, hopefully, a hate-free replacement. Still in beta and you have to wait a few days after registering to get an account, but it certainly looks promising.
jinx!
posted by awfurby at 5:56 PM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by awfurby at 5:56 PM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
Is there a reason that every keeps looking past Mastodon for a Twitter replacement in the past few weeks? It feels like (some) folks really don't want a return to a more decentralized web?
posted by flamk at 6:06 PM on November 29, 2022 [15 favorites]
posted by flamk at 6:06 PM on November 29, 2022 [15 favorites]
I am personally watching with interest Post's recent declaration that accessibility is not a major priority of the site. I was tentatively interested in the platform when a few friends of mine migrated over there--but uh, that was a major misstep that may or may not actually be legal.
posted by sciatrix at 6:08 PM on November 29, 2022 [45 favorites]
posted by sciatrix at 6:08 PM on November 29, 2022 [45 favorites]
They do keep telling us their reasons, flamk, even though the reasons aren’t ours.
posted by clew at 6:10 PM on November 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by clew at 6:10 PM on November 29, 2022 [7 favorites]
Is there a reason that every keeps looking past Mastodon for a Twitter replacement in the past few weeks? It feels like (some) folks really don't want a return to a more decentralized web?
In fannish circles, the main argument I see is that a federated web run by many small groups runs the risk of the owner of your local instance throwing some kind of tantrum or otherwise engaging in Elonesque behavior, revealing any private communications you've had between you, and possibly destroying all access to the social venue and maybe even your data.
Which, to be fair, happened a lot in the old days of fandom on a more decentralized, pre-AO3 internet, and sometimes people did lose entire communities, archives, and public collections of work. I think probably mastodon in conjunction with Discord circumvents those concerns, but I think it's a fair concern to consider.
posted by sciatrix at 6:15 PM on November 29, 2022 [31 favorites]
In fannish circles, the main argument I see is that a federated web run by many small groups runs the risk of the owner of your local instance throwing some kind of tantrum or otherwise engaging in Elonesque behavior, revealing any private communications you've had between you, and possibly destroying all access to the social venue and maybe even your data.
Which, to be fair, happened a lot in the old days of fandom on a more decentralized, pre-AO3 internet, and sometimes people did lose entire communities, archives, and public collections of work. I think probably mastodon in conjunction with Discord circumvents those concerns, but I think it's a fair concern to consider.
posted by sciatrix at 6:15 PM on November 29, 2022 [31 favorites]
Mastodon is too hippy-dippy for many Twitterati. Post can give them the Birdy vibe without the edgelord stench... for now.
posted by aeshnid at 6:16 PM on November 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by aeshnid at 6:16 PM on November 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
Interesting that the "net worth" phrase has been removed from Post's list of protected categories. Charitably, that could mean they're responsive to reasonable criticism. Less charitably, the original attitude could still be reflected in their internal moderation decisions to shield wealthy and powerful people on the platform from legitimate criticism. Only time will tell I suppose.
posted by biogeo at 6:17 PM on November 29, 2022 [15 favorites]
posted by biogeo at 6:17 PM on November 29, 2022 [15 favorites]
Post is a pet project of conservative billionaire and colonialism defender Marc Andreessen, so no reason to expect it'll be any better than Elon Musk's Twitter.
posted by splitpeasoup at 6:20 PM on November 29, 2022 [74 favorites]
posted by splitpeasoup at 6:20 PM on November 29, 2022 [74 favorites]
In fannish circles, the main argument I see is that a federated web run by many small groups runs the risk of the owner of your local instance throwing some kind of tantrum or otherwise engaging in Elonesque behavior, revealing any private communications you've had between you, and possibly destroying all access to the social venue and maybe even your data.
That's a reasonable concern, to be sure. On the other hand, the lesson of Twitter is that a massive centralized system can still be subject to the same Elonesque (or just Elon) behavior, if it is not democratically owned and controlled. I think people are better off negotiating interpersonal conflict on a smaller scale, and if an instance owner melts down that definitely sucks for the folks on that instance, but the fandom community as a whole can survive. Not so if a billionaire can buy your centralized platform and nuke your whole community for the lulz.
posted by biogeo at 6:22 PM on November 29, 2022 [17 favorites]
I signed up for a few different alternatives when the Twitter exodus began. Of Post, Mastodon and Hive I prefer the user experience of Hive. There are no "different instances" like Mastodon (which I don't understand at all), and plenty of the comic book and comedy people I like are already on Hive.
As far as I know Post is just a website, and that's kind of annoying to use on the phone. I have to log in every time I open the link I have pinned to my phone homepage.
posted by joelhunt at 6:24 PM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
As far as I know Post is just a website, and that's kind of annoying to use on the phone. I have to log in every time I open the link I have pinned to my phone homepage.
posted by joelhunt at 6:24 PM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
Yes, with the Andreessen taint I don't expect too much — but we need all the grist we can get in this mill. Twitter won't get a 1:1 replacement and it may be a year or two before there's something worthy (if that's the word) of being its successor.
In the meantime I would check out everything including Post with the full expectation that they will NOT turn out to be the excellent next thing but may perhaps have features and ideas that we can carry forward into another, and another. Twitter, after all, was the work of many years of iterations and absorption of other services. It wasn't formed in a day, though may very well be dissolved in a month!
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 6:24 PM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
In the meantime I would check out everything including Post with the full expectation that they will NOT turn out to be the excellent next thing but may perhaps have features and ideas that we can carry forward into another, and another. Twitter, after all, was the work of many years of iterations and absorption of other services. It wasn't formed in a day, though may very well be dissolved in a month!
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 6:24 PM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
"not unsullied by corporate finance, exactly" understatement of the century
posted by subdee at 6:29 PM on November 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by subdee at 6:29 PM on November 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
the wait list is the new favourite.
posted by clavdivs at 6:31 PM on November 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by clavdivs at 6:31 PM on November 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
sciatrix, at least with wandering.shop (full disclosure, am an admin) we've already had one successful passing of the torch and I'm pretty confident that barring costs we'll be around for a while.
posted by ChrisR at 6:34 PM on November 29, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by ChrisR at 6:34 PM on November 29, 2022 [9 favorites]
Similarly mastodon.art had a change of management a few years ago and is doing great.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:40 PM on November 29, 2022
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:40 PM on November 29, 2022
I'm on the waitlist but I'm not sure I'll bother to sign up if my number comes up because of how creepy the company sounds.
posted by octothorpe at 6:47 PM on November 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by octothorpe at 6:47 PM on November 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
Is there a reason that every keeps looking past Mastodon for a Twitter replacement in the past few weeks?
In my case, it's Instances. I don't understand them and can't choose.
posted by dobbs at 6:49 PM on November 29, 2022 [10 favorites]
In my case, it's Instances. I don't understand them and can't choose.
posted by dobbs at 6:49 PM on November 29, 2022 [10 favorites]
I went to Mastodon but I have mixed feelings about the ecosystem's potential to endure rapid growth. Most of the instances are run by "a couple of volunteers". Well that's great, but mstdn.ca went from 500 active users to TWENTY THOUSAND almost overnight. I'm sure it looks different from the perspective of mastodon.social which is huge but this is a pretty typical small instance story.
I do not think most of those volunteers are prepared for the level of burden that moderating an instance will take as the twitter exodus continues, or for the level of activism/flamewars/politics that will be generated over policy and federation/defederation decisions (of which there will constantly be many). Seems like a recipe for burnout and churn.
It's Eternal September for the fediverse!
posted by allegedly at 6:50 PM on November 29, 2022 [18 favorites]
I do not think most of those volunteers are prepared for the level of burden that moderating an instance will take as the twitter exodus continues, or for the level of activism/flamewars/politics that will be generated over policy and federation/defederation decisions (of which there will constantly be many). Seems like a recipe for burnout and churn.
It's Eternal September for the fediverse!
posted by allegedly at 6:50 PM on November 29, 2022 [18 favorites]
Is there a reason that every keeps looking past Mastodon for a Twitter replacement in the past few weeks?
Because it’s a confusing mess run by a bunch of hall monitors.
posted by rhymedirective at 6:51 PM on November 29, 2022 [50 favorites]
Because it’s a confusing mess run by a bunch of hall monitors.
posted by rhymedirective at 6:51 PM on November 29, 2022 [50 favorites]
As someone said on twitter
"damn it sucks that the site i like was destroyed by someone with capital exercising their arbitrary will over it to try and make a quick buck. anyway time to move to this venture capital funded app"
posted by simmering octagon at 6:52 PM on November 29, 2022 [49 favorites]
"damn it sucks that the site i like was destroyed by someone with capital exercising their arbitrary will over it to try and make a quick buck. anyway time to move to this venture capital funded app"
posted by simmering octagon at 6:52 PM on November 29, 2022 [49 favorites]
Is there a reason that every keeps looking past Mastodon for a Twitter replacement in the past few weeks? It feels like (some) folks really don't want a return to a more decentralized web?
Mastodon has been around for a while, but has its own fleet of weirdo problems. Servers block other servers arbitrarily (snowdin.town hates hachyderm.io, for instance, because I guess the latter has tech workers on it), the big instances are surely gonna be active at a large enough scale to need the infrastructure that a li’l free project probably doesn’t have, the clients are all clunky (as is masto itself), the idea that the people you think are terrible will still be around, you just can’t see them is kinda weird (Twitter thrives on the presence of people you hate), and -as you note with one valence and Moxie Marlinspike noted with another- web 1.0 lost to web 2.0 because running your own little hardware is a (fun) pain (but a pain nonetheless).
posted by Going To Maine at 6:55 PM on November 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
Mastodon has been around for a while, but has its own fleet of weirdo problems. Servers block other servers arbitrarily (snowdin.town hates hachyderm.io, for instance, because I guess the latter has tech workers on it), the big instances are surely gonna be active at a large enough scale to need the infrastructure that a li’l free project probably doesn’t have, the clients are all clunky (as is masto itself), the idea that the people you think are terrible will still be around, you just can’t see them is kinda weird (Twitter thrives on the presence of people you hate), and -as you note with one valence and Moxie Marlinspike noted with another- web 1.0 lost to web 2.0 because running your own little hardware is a (fun) pain (but a pain nonetheless).
posted by Going To Maine at 6:55 PM on November 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
Mastodon is, reportedly, a real pain to run yourself. There is a service that will spin up an instance for you for a fee.
I have an account and will probably start actively using it, but I got over the big conceptual hurdle of what federation is and does, and most people simply won't get over that.
posted by Merus at 7:00 PM on November 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
I have an account and will probably start actively using it, but I got over the big conceptual hurdle of what federation is and does, and most people simply won't get over that.
posted by Merus at 7:00 PM on November 29, 2022 [4 favorites]
A feature was added to mastodon about a year ago that, if expanded upon, I think really resolves a lot of the issues people think they have with mastodon: migration. If I my instance maintainer is burned out, or the instance is passed to an asshole, or I just don't really want to be on my current instance, I can easily just migrate to another. It doesn't copy your old posts over (which is probably a good thing), but it automatically updates your followers and readds your follows so you don't lose your community. It's becoming pretty seamless, and it's kind of a killer feature for decentralized networks in general.
posted by phooky at 7:00 PM on November 29, 2022 [18 favorites]
posted by phooky at 7:00 PM on November 29, 2022 [18 favorites]
I like Mastodon but I also quite like its "problems" (running your own hardware, instances don't scale well) and think people wanting it to be the new Twitter are misguided. If Metafilter were Reddit then it would have a lot more people but it would no longer be Metafilter.
posted by solarion at 7:02 PM on November 29, 2022 [16 favorites]
posted by solarion at 7:02 PM on November 29, 2022 [16 favorites]
Is there a reason that every keeps looking past Mastodon for a Twitter replacement in the past few weeks?
The reason is simple, so simple that it might be hard for generally highly tech-literate MeFites to accept:
If you're talking to potential users about servers or instances or whatever, you've already lost.
But it's so easy you just
No, you're wrong. Whatever anyone is writing objecting to the above, you are wrong. 99.99% of people see talk about instances and instantly disengage. It actually isn't that hard if you're willing to learn, but the vast majority of people just aren't going to get over that hurdle.
Convenience isn't king, it's God. It's Anselm's God: that which none greater can be conceived. Putting any bumps along the way for potential users, especially ones that sound complicated to non-tech people, is a death sentence for a service.
The people who will end up using Mastodon are a small, self-selecting group of motivated tech-literate people who are already inclined to use such services anyway.
posted by star gentle uterus at 7:07 PM on November 29, 2022 [87 favorites]
The reason is simple, so simple that it might be hard for generally highly tech-literate MeFites to accept:
If you're talking to potential users about servers or instances or whatever, you've already lost.
But it's so easy you just
No, you're wrong. Whatever anyone is writing objecting to the above, you are wrong. 99.99% of people see talk about instances and instantly disengage. It actually isn't that hard if you're willing to learn, but the vast majority of people just aren't going to get over that hurdle.
Convenience isn't king, it's God. It's Anselm's God: that which none greater can be conceived. Putting any bumps along the way for potential users, especially ones that sound complicated to non-tech people, is a death sentence for a service.
The people who will end up using Mastodon are a small, self-selecting group of motivated tech-literate people who are already inclined to use such services anyway.
posted by star gentle uterus at 7:07 PM on November 29, 2022 [87 favorites]
My feeling is that this is a platform with clout, that can offer the most viable alternative to Twitter. No platform is going to be perfect, all will have its faults. Using a VC when their influence is nothing but hoping for growth, let's use them. When they feel they can step in and influence that growth, let's leave it. (Us being the very ROYAL "Us", the populous). Right now, I want to my news sources to leave a particular platform so that I can have comfortable access to them. Might it not be great?... maybe, probably, maybe not. But change doesn't happen without change. No time for perfection when Twitter is on fire... how to we do it? To me, this seems like the best chance. I do empathize that the developers can't focus on accessibility now because certain, thoughtful development needs to take place after you have a certain, thoughtful platform. Dangerous thinking, I get it, but also... necessary?
posted by kybix at 7:07 PM on November 29, 2022
posted by kybix at 7:07 PM on November 29, 2022
Given multiple mentions of AO3, has anybody started an AO3-like project for a better social-media platform?
Even if running such a site is beyond the means of a volunteer-run project, I'd love to see more collaborative discussion of design goals and guidelines and best practices and cautionary tales...
The conversation sparked by Astolat's essay fed into AO3's requirements.
Is anyone compiling what people have been saying about the things Twitter did well and the ways they (and others) fall short, essays like speed-running content moderation and rahaeli's recent tweets on Terms of Service.
posted by cheshyre at 7:13 PM on November 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
Even if running such a site is beyond the means of a volunteer-run project, I'd love to see more collaborative discussion of design goals and guidelines and best practices and cautionary tales...
The conversation sparked by Astolat's essay fed into AO3's requirements.
Is anyone compiling what people have been saying about the things Twitter did well and the ways they (and others) fall short, essays like speed-running content moderation and rahaeli's recent tweets on Terms of Service.
posted by cheshyre at 7:13 PM on November 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
I’m definitely not using a social media site with the stench of Marc Andreessen on it. Anything running on VC cash is going to have to goose engagement and I just don’t see any way you don’t get a repeat of the bad parts of Twitter. I’m really happy with Mastodon, as most of the people I liked on Twitter are there now and active, and the folks who are new to me there are also awesome.
posted by zsazsa at 7:23 PM on November 29, 2022 [17 favorites]
posted by zsazsa at 7:23 PM on November 29, 2022 [17 favorites]
No, you're wrong. Whatever anyone is writing objecting to the above, you are wrong. 99.99% of people see talk about instances and instantly disengage. It actually isn't that hard if you're willing to learn, but the vast majority of people just aren't going to get over that hurdle.
Same argument can be made for leaving for Post instead of staying on Twitter. Having to figure out a new UI and find all the people you follow is a pain. I don't think Twitter will be replaced until Musk ends up running into the ground for financial/tech debt reasons. After all, it's not like there weren't reasons to leave Twitter before it got made considerably worse.
posted by No One Ever Does at 7:31 PM on November 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
Same argument can be made for leaving for Post instead of staying on Twitter. Having to figure out a new UI and find all the people you follow is a pain. I don't think Twitter will be replaced until Musk ends up running into the ground for financial/tech debt reasons. After all, it's not like there weren't reasons to leave Twitter before it got made considerably worse.
posted by No One Ever Does at 7:31 PM on November 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
I'm pretty meh on any Twitter alternatives, although I'm finally off the waiting list at Post, which I was interested in because most of the Twitter accounts I follow are journalists. But I dislike Mastodon's decentralization. For social media, I don't want to worry about what instance of a thing I'm logged into. I'm @emelenjr most places. If you need more than one @ in your social media handle, I think you goofed.
Also, when Trump pouted about wanting his own Twitter, the braintrust that built Truth Social for him used Mastodon's code without attribution and tried to pass it off as proprietary. That makes Truth Social look bad, not Mastodon, but "move to Mastodon if you're not getting along with Twitter" is exactly what Trump did, and I want little in common with him.
edit: typo
posted by emelenjr at 7:32 PM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
Also, when Trump pouted about wanting his own Twitter, the braintrust that built Truth Social for him used Mastodon's code without attribution and tried to pass it off as proprietary. That makes Truth Social look bad, not Mastodon, but "move to Mastodon if you're not getting along with Twitter" is exactly what Trump did, and I want little in common with him.
edit: typo
posted by emelenjr at 7:32 PM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
I went to Mastodon but I have mixed feelings about the ecosystem's potential to endure rapid growth. Most of the instances are run by "a couple of volunteers". Well that's great, but mstdn.ca went from 500 active users to TWENTY THOUSAND almost overnight. I'm sure it looks different from the perspective of mastodon.social which is huge but this is a pretty typical small instance story.
Funny that mstdn.ca got mentioned, because it now has an unexpected backer: CIRA, the private not-for-profit organization that manages the .ca TLD. Specifics are slim but there's at least some funding involved. No idea what this means in the long run, so this doesn't necessarily assuage your concerns. Especially in light of the fact that mstdn.ca seems to, uh, be down right now.
Personally I'm still looking for an instance; I have an old account on mastodon.social but given its size and concerns from various other instances about its ability/willingness to moderate in the ways those instances prefer, I wonder if some of the guesses about a wave of servers blocking mastodon.social will actually come to pass, and what I'll do if it happens. Also don't really want to think about what happens if one of, if not the biggest Mastodon instances, suddenly gets blocked by half the fediverse. That sounds like a potential extinction-level event, to be honest.
posted by chrominance at 7:33 PM on November 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
Funny that mstdn.ca got mentioned, because it now has an unexpected backer: CIRA, the private not-for-profit organization that manages the .ca TLD. Specifics are slim but there's at least some funding involved. No idea what this means in the long run, so this doesn't necessarily assuage your concerns. Especially in light of the fact that mstdn.ca seems to, uh, be down right now.
Personally I'm still looking for an instance; I have an old account on mastodon.social but given its size and concerns from various other instances about its ability/willingness to moderate in the ways those instances prefer, I wonder if some of the guesses about a wave of servers blocking mastodon.social will actually come to pass, and what I'll do if it happens. Also don't really want to think about what happens if one of, if not the biggest Mastodon instances, suddenly gets blocked by half the fediverse. That sounds like a potential extinction-level event, to be honest.
posted by chrominance at 7:33 PM on November 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
Am currently back on Tumblr and Discord. The mostly likely Mastodon instance would be wandering.shop for me because I'm an SF writer, but it's somewhat sheltering in place during the scattering of the Twitter users (invite-only at the moment). Though I've been hanging around with strangers since Usenet (rec.sport.fencing and/or CompuServe HOM-9) for a long time, I'm finding it more than a little exhausting to start all over again. I used lists on Twitter rather than follows, and they were great lists. I miss them but I seriously mistrust the "libertarian" wealthy people who are our current crop of gurus for the greedy.
posted by Peach at 7:37 PM on November 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Peach at 7:37 PM on November 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
Convenience isn't king, it's God. It's Anselm's God: that which none greater can be conceived. Putting any bumps along the way for potential users, especially ones that sound complicated to non-tech people, is a death sentence for a service.
This is a pretty silly thing to say. People learn how to use new things all the time when they think it’s worthwhile, and aiming for growth for growth’s sake is not the same as making something good.
It was incredibly easy to find, log into and use Google+.
posted by mhoye at 7:38 PM on November 29, 2022 [11 favorites]
This is a pretty silly thing to say. People learn how to use new things all the time when they think it’s worthwhile, and aiming for growth for growth’s sake is not the same as making something good.
It was incredibly easy to find, log into and use Google+.
posted by mhoye at 7:38 PM on November 29, 2022 [11 favorites]
I'm digging mastodon so far. Sitting on two of the bigger servers, and I just enjoy that they're clearly distinct creatures. That all the servers are distinct creatures. It gives me a little of that chatroom/BBoard feel that reddit killed and twitter never had.
posted by pan at 7:55 PM on November 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by pan at 7:55 PM on November 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
The people who will end up using Mastodon are a small, self-selecting group of motivated tech-literate people who are already inclined to use such services anyway.
A lot of the internet we take for granted-- stuff that is ubiquitous and easy now, started with a self-selecting group of motivated tech-literate people, who tinkered until they got it right.
I'm trying to be more patient and less judgy and nitpicky about these new experiments because (a) the recent history of social media shows how hard it is to get right and (b) I really want things to be better than they were.
What I'm hoping for is: Mastodon for my smaller social graph: friends, friends of friends, and less directly political stuff. Tumblr for serendipity and weirdness. And something like Post for breaking news and political analysis without the trolling and harassment. I think I've got the first two in place, but the last one is still wishful thinking at this point.
posted by gwint at 7:59 PM on November 29, 2022 [15 favorites]
A lot of the internet we take for granted-- stuff that is ubiquitous and easy now, started with a self-selecting group of motivated tech-literate people, who tinkered until they got it right.
I'm trying to be more patient and less judgy and nitpicky about these new experiments because (a) the recent history of social media shows how hard it is to get right and (b) I really want things to be better than they were.
What I'm hoping for is: Mastodon for my smaller social graph: friends, friends of friends, and less directly political stuff. Tumblr for serendipity and weirdness. And something like Post for breaking news and political analysis without the trolling and harassment. I think I've got the first two in place, but the last one is still wishful thinking at this point.
posted by gwint at 7:59 PM on November 29, 2022 [15 favorites]
Personally I couldn’t get past the term toots. I’m a visual thinker and any humor in it got old fast. Tried desperately to replace the image with a little elephant trumpeting but now he’s just tooting from both ends…
posted by brook horse at 8:00 PM on November 29, 2022 [12 favorites]
posted by brook horse at 8:00 PM on November 29, 2022 [12 favorites]
I felt the same about 'tweets', sounded like a pigeon on brevity.
Thanks, Jack.
posted by clavdivs at 8:13 PM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
Thanks, Jack.
posted by clavdivs at 8:13 PM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
They're all just posts. Posts. Posts posts posts.
Shit, now "posts" sounds weird.
posted by gwint at 8:15 PM on November 29, 2022 [14 favorites]
Shit, now "posts" sounds weird.
posted by gwint at 8:15 PM on November 29, 2022 [14 favorites]
Most of the instances are run by "a couple of volunteers".
I have the same problem with this. I've been kicked out of several Facebook groups for doing things like arguing with racists who happen to be friends with the group owner. I'm not going to spend serious amounts of social energy on something that can disappear at one or two people's whim*, even if I know the people.
* Yeah, Elon, I know.
posted by mmoncur at 8:16 PM on November 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
I have the same problem with this. I've been kicked out of several Facebook groups for doing things like arguing with racists who happen to be friends with the group owner. I'm not going to spend serious amounts of social energy on something that can disappear at one or two people's whim*, even if I know the people.
* Yeah, Elon, I know.
posted by mmoncur at 8:16 PM on November 29, 2022 [3 favorites]
I know journalists try to do good work with breaking news on this type of platform, but the truth is it's bound to spread as much misinformation as information. Does no one remember Sandy Hook? or the Boston Marathon bombing? Trying to scoop in real time is a bug, not a feature.
posted by rikschell at 8:23 PM on November 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by rikschell at 8:23 PM on November 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
My favorite bon mot about the new mysterious social media sites is actually a toot:
Creating a new social media platform. It will be called FloopDrop. It will allow you to drop so many floops. Now you may ask, what exactly is a floop? This has yet to be determined. But you can drop them. Our moderation team is led by a "former" CIA agent and a guy who brags about how he inspired a character in American History X. (We do not ask which one.) We already have $400 million in funding and have preemptively filed for bankruptcy.
posted by credulous at 8:24 PM on November 29, 2022 [27 favorites]
Creating a new social media platform. It will be called FloopDrop. It will allow you to drop so many floops. Now you may ask, what exactly is a floop? This has yet to be determined. But you can drop them. Our moderation team is led by a "former" CIA agent and a guy who brags about how he inspired a character in American History X. (We do not ask which one.) We already have $400 million in funding and have preemptively filed for bankruptcy.
posted by credulous at 8:24 PM on November 29, 2022 [27 favorites]
I'm personally done giving my data to for-profit, VC-funded social start-ups. I've been on Mastodon for 4 years and it just keeps getting better.
posted by dantheclamman at 8:46 PM on November 29, 2022 [11 favorites]
posted by dantheclamman at 8:46 PM on November 29, 2022 [11 favorites]
The Internet has become so hollowed-out by centralized commercial interests. It makes me very sad. The "centralization is good, actually" and "I'm not willing to learn a single new thing" takes break my heart. Folks don't even know what they've lost. People who show up to the Fediverse with big "well, to make it in the REAL WORLD you're gonna have to make some big changes" attitudes are locked into hyper-capitalist growth-at-any-cost modes of thinking. It doesn't have to be like that. People can enjoy things and do things for themselves without a financial incentive or a goal of world domination.
Nobody who is trying to make a buck off of social media has your best interests at heart. Not a single one of them. Definitely not some venture-capital backed cloud of smoke that nobody had heard of two weeks ago. These platforms actively try to screw with the way you think. They set up systems to incentivize you to transform yourself from a person into a marketable brand; the platform gets free content to pepper with advertising and in return, you get fake internet points.
I know lots of people found good communities on Twitter, and I'm sorry for them, but on the whole I think Twitter has been much more harmful than beneficial to society. I hope it burns down completely and I hope nothing ever rises to take its place.
posted by jordemort at 9:33 PM on November 29, 2022 [33 favorites]
Nobody who is trying to make a buck off of social media has your best interests at heart. Not a single one of them. Definitely not some venture-capital backed cloud of smoke that nobody had heard of two weeks ago. These platforms actively try to screw with the way you think. They set up systems to incentivize you to transform yourself from a person into a marketable brand; the platform gets free content to pepper with advertising and in return, you get fake internet points.
I know lots of people found good communities on Twitter, and I'm sorry for them, but on the whole I think Twitter has been much more harmful than beneficial to society. I hope it burns down completely and I hope nothing ever rises to take its place.
posted by jordemort at 9:33 PM on November 29, 2022 [33 favorites]
$8, same as in town.
posted by sjswitzer at 9:39 PM on November 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by sjswitzer at 9:39 PM on November 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
I might remember wrong but in my recollection the first social things on the internet were “web rings.” I’d broken my arm in a really stupid snowboarding accident and was searching for information about that, prolly on Alta Vista. Somehow I found a web ring about cast fetishes. I blew my orthopedic surgeon’s mind. This was possibly the high point of the internet.
posted by sjswitzer at 9:45 PM on November 29, 2022 [13 favorites]
posted by sjswitzer at 9:45 PM on November 29, 2022 [13 favorites]
People don't like Mastodon basically because it's not Twitter. Which is a bit odd, given that Twitter is currently burning to the waterline because of what it is — a social network governed by a publicly-held for-profit company.
The way Twitter achieved their moron-in-a-hurry-proof UX is because the app development, underlying server infrastructure, and governance was all handled by one organization. A lot of shit becomes easy when you can just decide it via some existing, hierarchical power structure, and everyone says "jawohl" and starts implementing. Of course that leads to smoother onboarding and UX. It's just a much simpler challenge: it punts on the whole concept of governance by leaving it, ultimately, up to American Corporate Capitalism to decide how things will be run.
And we're seeing in real-time how American Corporate Capitalism likes to run things. Turns out the invisible hand of the market is, sometimes and unpredictably, the pale, sweaty hand of a thin-skinned billionaire. Whoops.
The slickly-designed, thoughtless convenience that Twitter and other Web 2.0 properties provided—where you could sign up and never have to think about things like "who runs the server?" or "how do they pay all these engineers?", much less "what set of rules do I have to abide by, and who gets to decide them?"—should be a warning, not an enticement.
I suspect we'll see a few more for-profit social media ventures turn ugly before people realize that convenience is always double-edged, though.
All that said, the "runs with scissors" dumb-luser crowd is smaller than a lot of tech people generally assume it is. The average user is lazy, not stupid.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:01 PM on November 29, 2022 [29 favorites]
The way Twitter achieved their moron-in-a-hurry-proof UX is because the app development, underlying server infrastructure, and governance was all handled by one organization. A lot of shit becomes easy when you can just decide it via some existing, hierarchical power structure, and everyone says "jawohl" and starts implementing. Of course that leads to smoother onboarding and UX. It's just a much simpler challenge: it punts on the whole concept of governance by leaving it, ultimately, up to American Corporate Capitalism to decide how things will be run.
And we're seeing in real-time how American Corporate Capitalism likes to run things. Turns out the invisible hand of the market is, sometimes and unpredictably, the pale, sweaty hand of a thin-skinned billionaire. Whoops.
The slickly-designed, thoughtless convenience that Twitter and other Web 2.0 properties provided—where you could sign up and never have to think about things like "who runs the server?" or "how do they pay all these engineers?", much less "what set of rules do I have to abide by, and who gets to decide them?"—should be a warning, not an enticement.
I suspect we'll see a few more for-profit social media ventures turn ugly before people realize that convenience is always double-edged, though.
All that said, the "runs with scissors" dumb-luser crowd is smaller than a lot of tech people generally assume it is. The average user is lazy, not stupid.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:01 PM on November 29, 2022 [29 favorites]
I do enjoy my masto experience for the most part as I'm curating my follow list. There're platform-specific issues of course, but i track the conversation around each with interest. I'm still on the Post wait-list though, because I'm willing to use this as a way to micropay journalism I want to support.
But really, if Pronoiac didn't step up to organize a Mefi instance, I still wouldn't actually be on the Fediverse. I'd probably wait till Tumblr gets federated, lol.
posted by cendawanita at 10:20 PM on November 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
But really, if Pronoiac didn't step up to organize a Mefi instance, I still wouldn't actually be on the Fediverse. I'd probably wait till Tumblr gets federated, lol.
posted by cendawanita at 10:20 PM on November 29, 2022 [5 favorites]
Post's success seems to be be entirely dependent on making news article micropayments happen:
https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/post-the-latest-twitter-alternative-is-betting-big-on-micropayments-for-news/
Although I think it's a nice idea I'm skeptical that they can make it work. Apart from the repugnant Andreesen connection, and the fact that it can at any time be sold to the bad guys same as Twitter was, I'd be equally concerned that the site will just go broke and disappear one day if publishers don't buy in or micropayments don't take off the way they hope.
Personally I'm finding Mastodon/Fediverse to be great, I don't know if it can replace Twitter for everyone but it's encouraging to me to see it succeed as much as it has so far.
posted by riddley at 11:04 PM on November 29, 2022 [6 favorites]
https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/post-the-latest-twitter-alternative-is-betting-big-on-micropayments-for-news/
Although I think it's a nice idea I'm skeptical that they can make it work. Apart from the repugnant Andreesen connection, and the fact that it can at any time be sold to the bad guys same as Twitter was, I'd be equally concerned that the site will just go broke and disappear one day if publishers don't buy in or micropayments don't take off the way they hope.
Personally I'm finding Mastodon/Fediverse to be great, I don't know if it can replace Twitter for everyone but it's encouraging to me to see it succeed as much as it has so far.
posted by riddley at 11:04 PM on November 29, 2022 [6 favorites]
There is a different between watching and participating in the car crash.
I think Post is pitched here as another hub to watch and scrapbook the car crash, but it's all car crash.
posted by k3ninho at 11:22 PM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
I think Post is pitched here as another hub to watch and scrapbook the car crash, but it's all car crash.
posted by k3ninho at 11:22 PM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
I consider myself pretty techie (I'm hosting my own mastodon server on digital ocean and am giving out invites to friends looking for a first instance), but can't really figure out how I could hope to grow or discover community. It's not like anyone can find me on mastodon, and the porous chance encounters just aren't there for me. People who I might follow, which would lead me to discover other people I'd want to connect with, haven't gone to Mastodon, they've mostly gone to Tumblr.
posted by constraint at 11:57 PM on November 29, 2022
posted by constraint at 11:57 PM on November 29, 2022
No time for perfection when Twitter is on fire...
But there is? Like, we all existed just fine before twitter, it's not like it's life support. At a minimum, you can afford to bide your time in finding a replacement.
posted by Dysk at 12:14 AM on November 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
But there is? Like, we all existed just fine before twitter, it's not like it's life support. At a minimum, you can afford to bide your time in finding a replacement.
posted by Dysk at 12:14 AM on November 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
i just want to know if it’s hellscape-y enough
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 12:24 AM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 12:24 AM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
Post seems to be creating fake accounts for news organisations to try to entice them to join. This is a Yelp-level shady practice.
posted by autopilot at 12:45 AM on November 30, 2022 [16 favorites]
posted by autopilot at 12:45 AM on November 30, 2022 [16 favorites]
It doesn't copy your old posts over (which is probably a good thing), but it automatically updates your followers and readds your follows so you don't lose your community.
The one time I did this (which mind you was just last week), it seemed to get my mutuals and followers okay but I had to manually readd a bunch of people I followed that didn't follow me back.
posted by juv3nal at 12:46 AM on November 30, 2022
The one time I did this (which mind you was just last week), it seemed to get my mutuals and followers okay but I had to manually readd a bunch of people I followed that didn't follow me back.
posted by juv3nal at 12:46 AM on November 30, 2022
>In my case, it's Instances. I don't understand them and can't choose.
> There are no "different instances" like Mastodon (which I don't understand at all)
Come join us at mefi.social! Enjoy a local timeline populated by other MeFi members! That's the great thing about a small instance of nice people, you have a great local timeline without having to follow everyone specifically.
posted by JHarris at 1:02 AM on November 30, 2022 [19 favorites]
> There are no "different instances" like Mastodon (which I don't understand at all)
Come join us at mefi.social! Enjoy a local timeline populated by other MeFi members! That's the great thing about a small instance of nice people, you have a great local timeline without having to follow everyone specifically.
posted by JHarris at 1:02 AM on November 30, 2022 [19 favorites]
I might remember wrong but in my recollection the first social things on the internet were “web rings
An argument could be made that that was newsgroups, which predate the web.
I'm not going to spend serious amounts of social energy on something that can disappear at one or two people's whim*, even if I know the people.
You're taking Mastodon to be just that one server you start on. I'm on my fourth: I was on mastodon.cloud but they got greatly defederated for allowing spammers, I moved to cybre.space but they shut down, and then I moved to gamemaking.social but I toot about a greater variety of thing than their themed group like. Now I'm on mefi.social. My point is, I didn't leave Mastodon. I'm not going to say that Mastodon makes it frictionless to change servers, but you can do it in about 15 minutes. You even take your followers with you!
posted by JHarris at 1:10 AM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
An argument could be made that that was newsgroups, which predate the web.
I'm not going to spend serious amounts of social energy on something that can disappear at one or two people's whim*, even if I know the people.
You're taking Mastodon to be just that one server you start on. I'm on my fourth: I was on mastodon.cloud but they got greatly defederated for allowing spammers, I moved to cybre.space but they shut down, and then I moved to gamemaking.social but I toot about a greater variety of thing than their themed group like. Now I'm on mefi.social. My point is, I didn't leave Mastodon. I'm not going to say that Mastodon makes it frictionless to change servers, but you can do it in about 15 minutes. You even take your followers with you!
posted by JHarris at 1:10 AM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
A third comment in a row? I'm not trying to be tiresome, sorry, but--
Personally I couldn’t get past the term toots. I’m a visual thinker and any humor in it got old fast.
The rumor goes that that name is actually the responsibility of Youtuber Hbomberguy, who donated to Mastodon's creator on the condition that its version of tweets be named toots. I cannot speak as to this fact's veracity.
posted by JHarris at 1:14 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
Personally I couldn’t get past the term toots. I’m a visual thinker and any humor in it got old fast.
The rumor goes that that name is actually the responsibility of Youtuber Hbomberguy, who donated to Mastodon's creator on the condition that its version of tweets be named toots. I cannot speak as to this fact's veracity.
posted by JHarris at 1:14 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
Personally I couldn’t get past the term toots.
All version 4 instances now call them posts, so the old term is quickly going away as people upgrade.
In my case, it's Instances. I don't understand them and can't choose.
You could say the same about email, if I have an account on Gmail there is no way to see or contact Yahoo or Outlook users unless you already know their address.
The thing that will limit Mastodon is that it is purposely designed to avoid a small number of posts going viral. Once all the big celebrities and journalists figure this out they will shun it. Mastodon is social media for the rest of us.
posted by Lanark at 1:42 AM on November 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
All version 4 instances now call them posts, so the old term is quickly going away as people upgrade.
In my case, it's Instances. I don't understand them and can't choose.
You could say the same about email, if I have an account on Gmail there is no way to see or contact Yahoo or Outlook users unless you already know their address.
The thing that will limit Mastodon is that it is purposely designed to avoid a small number of posts going viral. Once all the big celebrities and journalists figure this out they will shun it. Mastodon is social media for the rest of us.
posted by Lanark at 1:42 AM on November 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
Post seems to be creating fake accounts for news organisations to try to entice them to join. This is a Yelp-level shady practice.
The link seems to go to a tweet about reverse engineeering Bosch HomeConnect? Did you paste the wrong URL?
Personally I couldn’t get past the term toots. I’m a visual thinker and any humor in it got old fast.
The rumor goes that that name is actually the responsibility of Youtuber Hbomberguy, who donated to Mastodon's creator on the condition that its version of tweets be named toots. I cannot speak as to this fact's veracity.
There's certainly some evidence for it.
posted by a car full of lions at 2:23 AM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
The link seems to go to a tweet about reverse engineeering Bosch HomeConnect? Did you paste the wrong URL?
Personally I couldn’t get past the term toots. I’m a visual thinker and any humor in it got old fast.
The rumor goes that that name is actually the responsibility of Youtuber Hbomberguy, who donated to Mastodon's creator on the condition that its version of tweets be named toots. I cannot speak as to this fact's veracity.
There's certainly some evidence for it.
posted by a car full of lions at 2:23 AM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
Convenience isn't king, it's God. It's Anselm's God: that which none greater can be conceived. Putting any bumps along the way for potential users, especially ones that sound complicated to non-tech people, is a death sentence for a service.
I don't think that Convenience is God -- Facebook is convenient, and no one is saying "use Facebook" -- but Opacity, Incomprehensibility and Long-Winded Explanations are pretty much the Unholy Trinity. I read Mastodon's TOS and got a headache right in my eye. No one has time for that, man. Once you start talking about instances and shit, anyone at all normal checks the fuck out. Maybe you don't want normal users? Fair enough, but then don't complain when the average person shakes their head and moves on. My feeling is that Mastodon has gatekeeping baked into it, and is working the way its creators intended...I guess?
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:08 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
I don't think that Convenience is God -- Facebook is convenient, and no one is saying "use Facebook" -- but Opacity, Incomprehensibility and Long-Winded Explanations are pretty much the Unholy Trinity. I read Mastodon's TOS and got a headache right in my eye. No one has time for that, man. Once you start talking about instances and shit, anyone at all normal checks the fuck out. Maybe you don't want normal users? Fair enough, but then don't complain when the average person shakes their head and moves on. My feeling is that Mastodon has gatekeeping baked into it, and is working the way its creators intended...I guess?
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:08 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
I read Mastodon's TOS and got a headache right in my eye.
Have you tried reading the Twitter TOS? it isn't any better, these things are aimed at lawyers.
The Mastodon TOS last changed in 2013, Twitter last changed in June.
posted by Lanark at 4:24 AM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
Have you tried reading the Twitter TOS? it isn't any better, these things are aimed at lawyers.
The Mastodon TOS last changed in 2013, Twitter last changed in June.
posted by Lanark at 4:24 AM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
Whoops link should have been @laurahazardowen. I’ve flagged it, sorry!
posted by autopilot at 4:38 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by autopilot at 4:38 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
The problem is that Mastodon is off-puttingly unusable to most people. Twitter is not. Now, maybe Mastodon likes to be unusable to most people! I can see many advantages to that. But as long as it is unusable to most people, most people will not use it. It, therefore, is a poor Twitter substitute.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:55 AM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:55 AM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
Come join us at mefi.social!
MEFI.SOCIAL IS NOT ACCEPTING NEW MEMBERS
posted by box at 4:58 AM on November 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
MEFI.SOCIAL IS NOT ACCEPTING NEW MEMBERS
posted by box at 4:58 AM on November 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
Post is a pet project of conservative billionaire and colonialism defender Marc Andreessen
Run away.
a social network governed by a publicly-held for-profit company.
Unless that word “governed” is doing more work than usual, there should probably be a “formerly” or “was” around “publicly-held” right?
posted by aspersioncast at 5:04 AM on November 30, 2022
Run away.
a social network governed by a publicly-held for-profit company.
Unless that word “governed” is doing more work than usual, there should probably be a “formerly” or “was” around “publicly-held” right?
posted by aspersioncast at 5:04 AM on November 30, 2022
To box, mefi.social is not open sign-ups (yet?), but Pronoiac is adding Metafilter members who contact him or who reply in the Mastodon Talk thread.
posted by JHarris at 5:04 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by JHarris at 5:04 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
(It's probably because, while there have been multiple offers to contribute to its funding so far, he's currently using managed hosting funded out of pocket, and hosting a lot of users can become expensive quickly.)
posted by JHarris at 5:07 AM on November 30, 2022
posted by JHarris at 5:07 AM on November 30, 2022
Mastodon still doesn't make any sense to me. I've looked at it, joined something...still don't get at all how it's like Twitter or would replace it. I hate Twitter, don't use it...but as an average social media person, I definitely don't get Mastodon.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:09 AM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:09 AM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
In the Mastodon Talk thread it says:
People can follow people on other servers;
Huh?! This is what I don't get.
My understanding is that you join an instance and get a username there and you can only follow people on the same server and only see things on that server. This is why, though I created a username on an instance when Mastodon launched, I've never used it.
Am I incorrect? Does your instance have nothing to do with who you can follow or what you can read?
posted by dobbs at 5:13 AM on November 30, 2022
People can follow people on other servers;
Huh?! This is what I don't get.
My understanding is that you join an instance and get a username there and you can only follow people on the same server and only see things on that server. This is why, though I created a username on an instance when Mastodon launched, I've never used it.
Am I incorrect? Does your instance have nothing to do with who you can follow or what you can read?
posted by dobbs at 5:13 AM on November 30, 2022
Am I incorrect? Does your instance have nothing to do with who you can follow or what you can read?
Yes you can follow anyone on any instance, just copy their name, which looks a bit like an email address into the search box, click on the name which comes up and press follow.
posted by Lanark at 5:17 AM on November 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
Yes you can follow anyone on any instance, just copy their name, which looks a bit like an email address into the search box, click on the name which comes up and press follow.
posted by Lanark at 5:17 AM on November 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
To use a car analogy, a lot of people expect moving from Twitter to mastodon is like switching from a Ford to a Honda, a few switches in a different place but fundamentally the same. The reality is that it is more like switching from a Ford to taking the train, yes you need to find a station (instance) to start your journey but you can still go anywhere.
posted by Lanark at 5:21 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by Lanark at 5:21 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
dobbs, you can follow people not on your server. The servers talk to each other behind the scenes. You can search for people by URL or their full username @[name]@[server], and so long as the servers are in contact with each other (they haven't defederated) you should get the option to follow them, and their posts will show up in your feed.
Even though it is not a complete replacement for Twitter, there are actually many reasons to use Mastodon. It is actually just one aspect of the larger fediverse, everything that uses ActivityPub under the hood, which includes more services than Mastodon. It may include Tumblr before long. Yet, because Mastodon isn't run by a single corporate monolith there is no incentive for misfeatures like algorithmic shenanigans, advertisements, or blocking useful features such as RSS feeds for your timeline. And because it's open-source, people can make interesting forks of Mastodon with new/different features. mefi.social is one such fork, it runs Darius Kazemi's Hometown variant, which allows people to make posts that are only readable by local users, with the :local-only: flag.
ActivityPub is rather more profound a thing than just Mastodon, and it's possible that eventually a social media service will arise that uses it that isn't Mastodon itself, but since they both have the same underlying basis they should be able to interoperate.
posted by JHarris at 5:22 AM on November 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
Even though it is not a complete replacement for Twitter, there are actually many reasons to use Mastodon. It is actually just one aspect of the larger fediverse, everything that uses ActivityPub under the hood, which includes more services than Mastodon. It may include Tumblr before long. Yet, because Mastodon isn't run by a single corporate monolith there is no incentive for misfeatures like algorithmic shenanigans, advertisements, or blocking useful features such as RSS feeds for your timeline. And because it's open-source, people can make interesting forks of Mastodon with new/different features. mefi.social is one such fork, it runs Darius Kazemi's Hometown variant, which allows people to make posts that are only readable by local users, with the :local-only: flag.
ActivityPub is rather more profound a thing than just Mastodon, and it's possible that eventually a social media service will arise that uses it that isn't Mastodon itself, but since they both have the same underlying basis they should be able to interoperate.
posted by JHarris at 5:22 AM on November 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
also people seem to be more comfortable just talking to people in the replies, because a) you can easily see a firehose of people you don't necessarily follow, and b) you probably have something in common, so it's more like talking to a stranger at a concert than on the street that would be Twitter in this analogy.
posted by Merus at 5:25 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Merus at 5:25 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
I see Derek Lowe of In The Pipeline just mentioned setting up on Post. As a data point.
posted by brainwane at 5:29 AM on November 30, 2022
posted by brainwane at 5:29 AM on November 30, 2022
The socially anxious person's experience of Mastodon:
1. Write down the Mastodon servers mentioned by people you follow on Twitter. Important point: none of these people know you, you're just an internet stranger who sometimes likes their nature photos or retweets their silly jokes.
2. Install the Mastodon app. Oh god, there's more than one. Flail briefly. Pick the one that seems most likely to be official.
3. Open it up. OK, you have to create an account in order to do anything. Not really surprising. Step 1 is to pick a server. Doesn't look as if you can actually browse posts on them first, so lucky you've got that list, hey?
4. Oh. None of the servers you wrote down comes up in search, and maybe search is broken, but you don't see them when you browse categories either.
5. Overthink it. If you can't find the servers then they must be private somehow. If you don't know someone who'll... vouch for you? Extend an invitation?... then you're not welcome there. Throw away your list: those people weren't sharing their server details with *you*, you just happened to be hanging around when they said them. Feel ashamed for not having worked this out sooner.
6. Keep on overthinking. Pick one of the ones you can see? But the people you want to hang out near aren't there, and "You can still chat to people on any server" is well and good but then why do you have to choose one in the first place, it's clearly an important decision or you wouldn't be required to make it, and that tells you that there *are* consequences to the choice, and in any case, if you join just to follow internet strangers on private servers, ye gods, that sounds horrifyingly stalky and creepy and look you just can't do this, it's awful, you're awful for wanting to.
7. Close the app without completing signup. Delete the app. Feel ashamed of your inability to make normal human connections.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 5:32 AM on November 30, 2022 [69 favorites]
1. Write down the Mastodon servers mentioned by people you follow on Twitter. Important point: none of these people know you, you're just an internet stranger who sometimes likes their nature photos or retweets their silly jokes.
2. Install the Mastodon app. Oh god, there's more than one. Flail briefly. Pick the one that seems most likely to be official.
3. Open it up. OK, you have to create an account in order to do anything. Not really surprising. Step 1 is to pick a server. Doesn't look as if you can actually browse posts on them first, so lucky you've got that list, hey?
4. Oh. None of the servers you wrote down comes up in search, and maybe search is broken, but you don't see them when you browse categories either.
5. Overthink it. If you can't find the servers then they must be private somehow. If you don't know someone who'll... vouch for you? Extend an invitation?... then you're not welcome there. Throw away your list: those people weren't sharing their server details with *you*, you just happened to be hanging around when they said them. Feel ashamed for not having worked this out sooner.
6. Keep on overthinking. Pick one of the ones you can see? But the people you want to hang out near aren't there, and "You can still chat to people on any server" is well and good but then why do you have to choose one in the first place, it's clearly an important decision or you wouldn't be required to make it, and that tells you that there *are* consequences to the choice, and in any case, if you join just to follow internet strangers on private servers, ye gods, that sounds horrifyingly stalky and creepy and look you just can't do this, it's awful, you're awful for wanting to.
7. Close the app without completing signup. Delete the app. Feel ashamed of your inability to make normal human connections.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 5:32 AM on November 30, 2022 [69 favorites]
The more I think about it, the more I realize that the only social media site that’s never failed me or turned into a nazi hell-hole is… this one, right here, the one we are all using right now.
I mean no one that I know PERSONALLY is on MeFi, but a whole hell of a lot of pretty interesting and thoughtful people are here every single day putting up good content for us all to dissect and discuss. I’ve been reading it since ‘99 and a full member since ‘04 and have been actually chipping in to help fund the site for multiple years now, because it’s proven it’s value to me as a community.
What more to ask for, really?
posted by caution live frogs at 5:47 AM on November 30, 2022 [23 favorites]
I mean no one that I know PERSONALLY is on MeFi, but a whole hell of a lot of pretty interesting and thoughtful people are here every single day putting up good content for us all to dissect and discuss. I’ve been reading it since ‘99 and a full member since ‘04 and have been actually chipping in to help fund the site for multiple years now, because it’s proven it’s value to me as a community.
What more to ask for, really?
posted by caution live frogs at 5:47 AM on November 30, 2022 [23 favorites]
ManyLeggedCreature, that was SO close to my experience, thank you for writing all that out. Huge problems with "sign up" on Mastodon.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:49 AM on November 30, 2022 [14 favorites]
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:49 AM on November 30, 2022 [14 favorites]
It seems to me that most of the people having trouble signing up to mastodon have only tried it app-first, which to be honest seems a really weird route to me. The web interface is much better and upgrades a lot quicker than the apps (I've tried Mastodon the app and Tusky, so far I like Tusky a bit better).
posted by sukeban at 5:54 AM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by sukeban at 5:54 AM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
People keep using the "email" analogy for Mastodon, but I think a neighborhood/city analogy is better.
When you choose a place to live, you think about your local environment, your immediate neighbors, things like that. This is your "instance" and will dictate what you see on your local timeline.
But unless you live in North Korea (your instance is banned/defederated) you can very easily meet up with (follow) people in other neighborhoods or cities. If you realize that most of your friends (followers) are from a different neighborhood (instance) you might think about moving (migrating) -- but you don't have to!
Sign-up was annoying and took a while (so did closing on my house, tbh) but now that I'm there, I like it better than Twitter. Lack of algorithm means the posts I see are all from people or hashtags I've actively followed, and there's a lot less of the self-promoting puffery I used to see from the Twits.
posted by basalganglia at 5:55 AM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
When you choose a place to live, you think about your local environment, your immediate neighbors, things like that. This is your "instance" and will dictate what you see on your local timeline.
But unless you live in North Korea (your instance is banned/defederated) you can very easily meet up with (follow) people in other neighborhoods or cities. If you realize that most of your friends (followers) are from a different neighborhood (instance) you might think about moving (migrating) -- but you don't have to!
Sign-up was annoying and took a while (so did closing on my house, tbh) but now that I'm there, I like it better than Twitter. Lack of algorithm means the posts I see are all from people or hashtags I've actively followed, and there's a lot less of the self-promoting puffery I used to see from the Twits.
posted by basalganglia at 5:55 AM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
Either way, they need to guide people like me better in joining their thing.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:56 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:56 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
Have you tried opening the address of the mastodon server you want to join in your web browser and signing up from there? Because it's not particularly difficult. It's only hard when you try it app-first.
posted by sukeban at 5:58 AM on November 30, 2022
posted by sukeban at 5:58 AM on November 30, 2022
ManyLeggedCreature, did you have a similar amount of trouble with email?
I have not signed up for Mastadon (because I'm not yet seeing a compelling argument for why I would yet), but the process being described by people here is definitely far more complex and different than signing up and using email. I mean, I'm reasonably comfortable with technology, and all the "instances" and "federation" and so on just makes my head hurt. I'll learn it if I have to, but definitely not until there is a compelling reason.
I use Twitter the same way other people I know use it -- very casually, and mostly as a way to read things posted by a curated group of people. For me, that is exclusively academics, journalists, and activists focused on the war in Ukraine; for someone else it is going to be college basketball or politics or whatever. Of the potential replacements being discussed, it sounds like Post might come the closest but that will depend on them actually attracting enough of the people whose posts others like to read. Mastadon sounds like something quite different entirely, and maybe I am misunderstanding it but I am not seeing how it could realistically serve as a Twitter replacement for most people.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:00 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
I have not signed up for Mastadon (because I'm not yet seeing a compelling argument for why I would yet), but the process being described by people here is definitely far more complex and different than signing up and using email. I mean, I'm reasonably comfortable with technology, and all the "instances" and "federation" and so on just makes my head hurt. I'll learn it if I have to, but definitely not until there is a compelling reason.
I use Twitter the same way other people I know use it -- very casually, and mostly as a way to read things posted by a curated group of people. For me, that is exclusively academics, journalists, and activists focused on the war in Ukraine; for someone else it is going to be college basketball or politics or whatever. Of the potential replacements being discussed, it sounds like Post might come the closest but that will depend on them actually attracting enough of the people whose posts others like to read. Mastadon sounds like something quite different entirely, and maybe I am misunderstanding it but I am not seeing how it could realistically serve as a Twitter replacement for most people.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:00 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
ManyLeggedCreature, did you have a similar amount of trouble with email?
No - my first email address was given to me at university, my second by my first (dial-up) ISP, and I don't remember the process of signing up for a Gmail account (early enough to get first-initial.surname), so presumably it wasn't panic-inducing. I'm sure I'd overthink like mad if I had to do it again now though. But email is used for two-way communication with people I know in person (and one-way communication from every company I've ever bought something from, whether I signed up for their mailing list or not). Different scenario.
As for app vs website, Metafilter is the only social-media-ish thing I ever do from a computer. Non-work-related internet interaction is pretty much all done from my phone, where apps are usually a better bet than mobile web interfaces. Hadn't even occurred to me that there *was* a website, oops.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 6:01 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
No - my first email address was given to me at university, my second by my first (dial-up) ISP, and I don't remember the process of signing up for a Gmail account (early enough to get first-initial.surname), so presumably it wasn't panic-inducing. I'm sure I'd overthink like mad if I had to do it again now though. But email is used for two-way communication with people I know in person (and one-way communication from every company I've ever bought something from, whether I signed up for their mailing list or not). Different scenario.
As for app vs website, Metafilter is the only social-media-ish thing I ever do from a computer. Non-work-related internet interaction is pretty much all done from my phone, where apps are usually a better bet than mobile web interfaces. Hadn't even occurred to me that there *was* a website, oops.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 6:01 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
I just got an account instantly at mas.to if anyone else is looking for a quick signup.
I'm @volver@mas.to — who will be my lucky first follower?!
Thanks for the tips in this thread!
posted by dobbs at 6:05 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
I'm @volver@mas.to — who will be my lucky first follower?!
Thanks for the tips in this thread!
posted by dobbs at 6:05 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
My alternative to twitter is...twitter. Nothing much has changed on my feed since Musk took over (with the exception of a flurry of posts about how twitter is going to break tonight! This week! Soon! Eventually!) and so I don't see any reason to shift. Musk is an obnoxious so-and-so, but the people running Post don't seem better and I have no way of gauging whether folks hosting Mastodon servers are nice or not. I also don't want to have to learn a complicated new way of interacting with a service. There are other, much more important areas that I'd like to focus on learning complex things; a random social media site isn't one of them.
(I recognize that this is one person's experience)
posted by Galvanic at 6:10 AM on November 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
(I recognize that this is one person's experience)
posted by Galvanic at 6:10 AM on November 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
I love how this fpp’s comments have completely ignored the Twitter-alternative it’s ostensibly about in favor of discussing Mastodon.
Anyway, yeah, choosing an instance is important in the long run but not in the short run, and you can use it just fine without ever making a choice about an app. Asking for an account on the MeFi instance mentioned above sounds like a great choice. If you think you’d be comfortable on a place full of queer people who like to present as dragons on the net, some of whom may be convinced that they Are dragons in an important way, MeMail me and I’ll hook you up with an account on dragon.style in a few days.
Choosing an instance is like… going to MeFi for your daily links and discussion thereof instead of Reddit. What’s the mod team like, do their values mesh with yours? If you’ve got a few bucks to spare, do you feel like donating to the Patreon that pays for servers and admin time? There’s no ads on any Mastodon and we gotta pay for it somehow.
It is totally cool for you to quietly be on an instance and follow strangers on other servers. If you constantly get into *arguments* with those strangers you may get noticed by your admin, if you don’t then nobody cares.
The important parts of server choice:
* the local timeline. Just the thread-starting posts by everyone on the server, no retweets, no replies. These are like the people who live on the same block as you, who you see in passing. If a place is too big it’s unreadable and pretty anonymous, like walking past a few apartment buildings. If it’s small then it’s like passing by people hanging out on their porch and catching snips of their discussions, and saying hi, maybe stopping to join the conversation if appropriate. If you get on random.social with an unusable local timeline and notice that half the people you follow are on a little place called butter.town, then DM a few friends and see if they can get you an invite, maybe you’ll like the other buttertowners too and make some new friends. If you do then you can easily close up your random.social account and have all its followers automatically pointed to the one at butter.town.
* moderator policies. Check out instance.name/about/more for those. Do they mesh with your values? Warning: “free speech” will get an instance defederated from by a lot of places, as in practice it means “we let our users spew racist bullshit as long as it’s not legally actionable”. $8, same as in Twitter town.
Using an app is not required, I do all my interaction with my instance via the web interface. You can pin it to your phone’s home screen and get an icon for it, even.
posted by egypturnash at 6:14 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
Anyway, yeah, choosing an instance is important in the long run but not in the short run, and you can use it just fine without ever making a choice about an app. Asking for an account on the MeFi instance mentioned above sounds like a great choice. If you think you’d be comfortable on a place full of queer people who like to present as dragons on the net, some of whom may be convinced that they Are dragons in an important way, MeMail me and I’ll hook you up with an account on dragon.style in a few days.
Choosing an instance is like… going to MeFi for your daily links and discussion thereof instead of Reddit. What’s the mod team like, do their values mesh with yours? If you’ve got a few bucks to spare, do you feel like donating to the Patreon that pays for servers and admin time? There’s no ads on any Mastodon and we gotta pay for it somehow.
It is totally cool for you to quietly be on an instance and follow strangers on other servers. If you constantly get into *arguments* with those strangers you may get noticed by your admin, if you don’t then nobody cares.
The important parts of server choice:
* the local timeline. Just the thread-starting posts by everyone on the server, no retweets, no replies. These are like the people who live on the same block as you, who you see in passing. If a place is too big it’s unreadable and pretty anonymous, like walking past a few apartment buildings. If it’s small then it’s like passing by people hanging out on their porch and catching snips of their discussions, and saying hi, maybe stopping to join the conversation if appropriate. If you get on random.social with an unusable local timeline and notice that half the people you follow are on a little place called butter.town, then DM a few friends and see if they can get you an invite, maybe you’ll like the other buttertowners too and make some new friends. If you do then you can easily close up your random.social account and have all its followers automatically pointed to the one at butter.town.
* moderator policies. Check out instance.name/about/more for those. Do they mesh with your values? Warning: “free speech” will get an instance defederated from by a lot of places, as in practice it means “we let our users spew racist bullshit as long as it’s not legally actionable”. $8, same as in Twitter town.
Using an app is not required, I do all my interaction with my instance via the web interface. You can pin it to your phone’s home screen and get an icon for it, even.
posted by egypturnash at 6:14 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
If you check my comments to date on Mastodon, you'll note that I'm not a cheerleader for it or anything, on the culture side (which is changing rapidly tbh; this wave of mainly twitter users isn't just white/European but they've gone through at least several cycles of discourse).
But on the technical side, it's really not that hard once you have an account. And that is a big caveat esp for those with marked identities because a badly moderated instance keeps you vulnerable to abuse. But as I said at the start, that's a culture thing (and we're in a few weeks of renewed discussion of moderation which recognizes this is a cultural and thus political concern. HEY, maybe mefi mods can do a q&a -- idk what platform though).
STILL: it's a big caveat. I don't want to minimize it at all. That's why many people opted for mastodon.social, which (and here we bump into culture) some smaller instances opt to defederate from because moderator choice in allowing some transphobia? So it seems. But that instance is now so generic and general defederation penalizes the smaller instances tbh (because it's an action that's also meant to be seen as a technical execution of social censure). Mas.to is also another one that seems easy enough to sign up for.
HOWEVER: once you get on, it's not like emails. It's like blogging back in the day. Hell, it's like livejournaling near the end of its peak when OpenAuth was being touted. An LJ friends list is basically an RSS reader specific to your LJ account. And as long you want to follow someone on the OpenAuth schema, you just need to type their full URL (not just ID) and follow. Someone created an RSS feed for Metafilter, that's how I found about it, through browsing my friends-of-friends list (meaning an RSS feed of what your follows follow).
An instance is a webhost hosting the database package that's the mastodon version of ActivityPub. A livejournal, if you will.
Your feed is your friends list
Your instance feed is your friends-of-friends list (roughly).
Because of that, yes, you build your feed with a lot of manual work (finding people). You don't come on to a new account with a pre-built feed that was based on the quick questionnaire you provided to Twitter (or barring that, their generic feed).
Post takes out the second-guessing of finding the host and worrying about being defederated. That's the twitter part. But for those who have been using twitter also to read and sometimes interact with interesting people (and for me that's still unchanged because Musk cares not for stuff outside USA, so sorry for that), you can very much reproduce it on Mastodon/Fediverse. It's just old-school blogging, down to trawling hashtags to find interesting people, who might then become nodes in introducing you to other accounts.
posted by cendawanita at 6:16 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
But on the technical side, it's really not that hard once you have an account. And that is a big caveat esp for those with marked identities because a badly moderated instance keeps you vulnerable to abuse. But as I said at the start, that's a culture thing (and we're in a few weeks of renewed discussion of moderation which recognizes this is a cultural and thus political concern. HEY, maybe mefi mods can do a q&a -- idk what platform though).
STILL: it's a big caveat. I don't want to minimize it at all. That's why many people opted for mastodon.social, which (and here we bump into culture) some smaller instances opt to defederate from because moderator choice in allowing some transphobia? So it seems. But that instance is now so generic and general defederation penalizes the smaller instances tbh (because it's an action that's also meant to be seen as a technical execution of social censure). Mas.to is also another one that seems easy enough to sign up for.
HOWEVER: once you get on, it's not like emails. It's like blogging back in the day. Hell, it's like livejournaling near the end of its peak when OpenAuth was being touted. An LJ friends list is basically an RSS reader specific to your LJ account. And as long you want to follow someone on the OpenAuth schema, you just need to type their full URL (not just ID) and follow. Someone created an RSS feed for Metafilter, that's how I found about it, through browsing my friends-of-friends list (meaning an RSS feed of what your follows follow).
An instance is a webhost hosting the database package that's the mastodon version of ActivityPub. A livejournal, if you will.
Your feed is your friends list
Your instance feed is your friends-of-friends list (roughly).
Because of that, yes, you build your feed with a lot of manual work (finding people). You don't come on to a new account with a pre-built feed that was based on the quick questionnaire you provided to Twitter (or barring that, their generic feed).
Post takes out the second-guessing of finding the host and worrying about being defederated. That's the twitter part. But for those who have been using twitter also to read and sometimes interact with interesting people (and for me that's still unchanged because Musk cares not for stuff outside USA, so sorry for that), you can very much reproduce it on Mastodon/Fediverse. It's just old-school blogging, down to trawling hashtags to find interesting people, who might then become nodes in introducing you to other accounts.
posted by cendawanita at 6:16 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
Have you tried opening the address of the mastodon server you want to join in your web browser and signing up from there?
No, because as said above, I became completely flummoxed when I didn't know which one to join, or even have it explained coherently during sign up what the hell I was signing up for, and how it works. And then...completely lost interest. Which is why they need to do a better job guiding people like me.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:19 AM on November 30, 2022 [11 favorites]
No, because as said above, I became completely flummoxed when I didn't know which one to join, or even have it explained coherently during sign up what the hell I was signing up for, and how it works. And then...completely lost interest. Which is why they need to do a better job guiding people like me.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:19 AM on November 30, 2022 [11 favorites]
I expect MeFi to have a larger than average userbase of capital C computer enthusiasts, but christ on a bike, stop making it sound like those of us who are overwhelmed by this are just idiots. I have read so many "it's easy" posts about Mastodon and it is easy....if you have a certain amount of tech savviness. Which I do not and I will not be ashamed of.
posted by Kitteh at 6:21 AM on November 30, 2022 [23 favorites]
posted by Kitteh at 6:21 AM on November 30, 2022 [23 favorites]
Why? They make no money off of you. You’re still acting like you’re a product to be sold, and should be valued as such. If you want to enrich your social life and join a community, you need to walk a short distance and say hello.
Huh? I'm not a product, I'm a person. I don't fucking care about if this platform succeeds, but they should.
I don't need to enrich my social life and join a community, and even if I did, that should be communicated better what's on offer, for crying out loud.
(Whats with the hostilities? Simply sharing experience with this thing)
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:21 AM on November 30, 2022 [18 favorites]
Huh? I'm not a product, I'm a person. I don't fucking care about if this platform succeeds, but they should.
I don't need to enrich my social life and join a community, and even if I did, that should be communicated better what's on offer, for crying out loud.
(Whats with the hostilities? Simply sharing experience with this thing)
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:21 AM on November 30, 2022 [18 favorites]
Yeah it sounds really weird in 2022 to be hearing people say "use the web site, not the app on your phone"
posted by some loser at 6:22 AM on November 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by some loser at 6:22 AM on November 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
I also don't want to minimize the friction of moving instances because while the update helps you retain your social graph, you don't get to bring your old posts with you. But even switching hosts for my blog is a simple matter of downloading my old content in XML form, so idk why it's not technically feasible (other than the server load for the new host). But moving once you're settled is psychologically fraught, and it's one thing to move because another instance fits your vibe better, it's quite another when it's because you're not being protected from trolls and abuse. 'losing' your posts is very much seen as a penalty here. And on the wrong party.
But yeah, figuring out a good instance is not easy. Even if you opt to host an instance for yourself assumes a lot of technical capacity.
posted by cendawanita at 6:24 AM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
But yeah, figuring out a good instance is not easy. Even if you opt to host an instance for yourself assumes a lot of technical capacity.
posted by cendawanita at 6:24 AM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
(Signed up for waitlist for Post...but like, still don't even know what it is, so joining...maybe? How to even tell if it's promising, I don't know, for myself)
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:27 AM on November 30, 2022
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:27 AM on November 30, 2022
Yeah it sounds really weird in 2022 to be hearing people say "use the web site, not the app on your phone"
Seconded. A guaranteed chuckle every time I see it on the Fediverse. Good luck selling it to us deep where mobile penetration exceeds the population too, because even a dinky laptop is too big an ask. But, that's ok, it must mean we're too obtuse to not see the ~potential~
posted by cendawanita at 6:28 AM on November 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
Seconded. A guaranteed chuckle every time I see it on the Fediverse. Good luck selling it to us deep where mobile penetration exceeds the population too, because even a dinky laptop is too big an ask. But, that's ok, it must mean we're too obtuse to not see the ~potential~
posted by cendawanita at 6:28 AM on November 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
(Any screens shots, examples of Post anywhere? Cause this FPP is really just an ad for this (PepsiBlue?) at this point...not a major criticism but it's not much of a FPP, happy to have the discussion though)
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:29 AM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:29 AM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
tiny frying pan, i didn't track where i saw them, but if you're on twitter, Kara Swisher (pro) and Taylor Lorenz (skeptic) are good accounts to start from.
posted by cendawanita at 6:31 AM on November 30, 2022
posted by cendawanita at 6:31 AM on November 30, 2022
The bonus of never really getting into Twitter* (I took umbrage at the character limit early on and decided I'd wait for the long-form articles/blog posts that came from the tweets) is not needing a replacement now. Metafilter is still my Twitter, or whatever, I guess.
*Barring handful of incidents where I tried to post, I think the only time I went to Twitter was to read something linked in an FPP.
posted by thivaia at 6:39 AM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
*Barring handful of incidents where I tried to post, I think the only time I went to Twitter was to read something linked in an FPP.
posted by thivaia at 6:39 AM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
Another data point I noticed: someone noting that many of the people of color they'd followed on Twitter have moved to Post, and that's why they were checking it out.
posted by brainwane at 7:07 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by brainwane at 7:07 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
Mastodon definitely doesn't cover everyone on Twitter's use cases, so I hope at least one of these alternative services catches on. If not Post then Cohost or CounterSocial or Hive Social or Jack Dorsey's BlueSky when it eventually launches.
But I think that the biggest obstacle to a new service isn't ease of use but getting a critical mass of people to follow. The advantage Mastodon has is that servers can be based around common interests or particular communities. You can log in to check out your particular community, regardless of what everyone else is using.
Early Twitter's usability and reliability were terrible, but it was the only place where you could fully interact with short messages and SMS, so it got a critical mass of users who wanted that by default.
The problem for the other alternatives is that they seem to be trying to be all-conquering general purpose social media sites for everybody. If they succeed, their investors win big. But what's the on-ramp to get everyone on there?
posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:32 AM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
But I think that the biggest obstacle to a new service isn't ease of use but getting a critical mass of people to follow. The advantage Mastodon has is that servers can be based around common interests or particular communities. You can log in to check out your particular community, regardless of what everyone else is using.
Early Twitter's usability and reliability were terrible, but it was the only place where you could fully interact with short messages and SMS, so it got a critical mass of users who wanted that by default.
The problem for the other alternatives is that they seem to be trying to be all-conquering general purpose social media sites for everybody. If they succeed, their investors win big. But what's the on-ramp to get everyone on there?
posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:32 AM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
Why? They make no money off of you. You’re still acting like you’re a product to be sold, and should be valued as such.
I'm loving the ass backwards logic of this.
"It's self evident that people will only go out of their way to help you if they can make money off you. Thus, expecting people to treat you with consideration means you think of yourself as a product."
Does that mean that if I treat a person with consideration for their needs, I am insulting them by thinking of them as a product? 🙂
Since that's the only scenario in which user needs are something that should be considered?
posted by Zumbador at 7:34 AM on November 30, 2022 [12 favorites]
I'm loving the ass backwards logic of this.
"It's self evident that people will only go out of their way to help you if they can make money off you. Thus, expecting people to treat you with consideration means you think of yourself as a product."
Does that mean that if I treat a person with consideration for their needs, I am insulting them by thinking of them as a product? 🙂
Since that's the only scenario in which user needs are something that should be considered?
posted by Zumbador at 7:34 AM on November 30, 2022 [12 favorites]
My experience with Post so far... I am still on the wait list.
My experience with Mastodon so far... I signed up using my web browser on https://maston.social and then downloaded the app from the Google app store and logged in. Started out following people I'd heard of from various lists. (Walter Shaub's list and this list of journalists on Mastodon for instance). Found a few friends via other communities and followed the people they were following.
Eventually a friend of a friend started their own instance and my friends started moving over to it, so I moved too. Followed the instructions to switch accounts via the web sites for the new server and Mastodon.social, and the logged back into the app with my new account information. Took 5 minutes. Still had all the same people following me, and I was still following all the same people, and using the same app, so really my user experience didn't change at all. Except now I know the admin. (If I hadn't already joined that server, I'd've jumped on the opportunity to move to mefi.social.)
On the whole I am really happy with Mastodon. It feels way friendlier than Twitter ever did. I find the lack of ads really pleasant and the knowledge that I am not being surveilled for ad targeting purposes very restful. I saw a recommendation that everyone should try to follow 200 people and boost (re-tweet) anything they think their followers might enjoy at all because the lack of an algorithm requires humans to make some more content curation decisions. I have been trying to follow that advice, and my feed has gotten really fun, with lots of engagement.
I'll let you know my experience on Post if I ever get in. But so far I'd say Post is a lot more difficult to sign up for than Mastodon.
posted by OnceUponATime at 7:45 AM on November 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
My experience with Mastodon so far... I signed up using my web browser on https://maston.social and then downloaded the app from the Google app store and logged in. Started out following people I'd heard of from various lists. (Walter Shaub's list and this list of journalists on Mastodon for instance). Found a few friends via other communities and followed the people they were following.
Eventually a friend of a friend started their own instance and my friends started moving over to it, so I moved too. Followed the instructions to switch accounts via the web sites for the new server and Mastodon.social, and the logged back into the app with my new account information. Took 5 minutes. Still had all the same people following me, and I was still following all the same people, and using the same app, so really my user experience didn't change at all. Except now I know the admin. (If I hadn't already joined that server, I'd've jumped on the opportunity to move to mefi.social.)
On the whole I am really happy with Mastodon. It feels way friendlier than Twitter ever did. I find the lack of ads really pleasant and the knowledge that I am not being surveilled for ad targeting purposes very restful. I saw a recommendation that everyone should try to follow 200 people and boost (re-tweet) anything they think their followers might enjoy at all because the lack of an algorithm requires humans to make some more content curation decisions. I have been trying to follow that advice, and my feed has gotten really fun, with lots of engagement.
I'll let you know my experience on Post if I ever get in. But so far I'd say Post is a lot more difficult to sign up for than Mastodon.
posted by OnceUponATime at 7:45 AM on November 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
Yeah, to be clear, when I raise those concerns I'm doing it from a "this is the meaningful criticism I've heard elsewhere" perspective. I honestly think fannish worries about "and suddenly the instance goes to hell because of BNF vs BNF warfare" are a little overblown inasmuch as, well.... it's not like you can't use hashtags to connect perfectly well with groups of people while putting your home instance somewhere totally disconnected, socially, to the locus of your fandom. Not that I'm using mastodon for fandom myself, mind; tumblr is just fine for that for me.
The privacy concerns I have also heard people in fandom sharing wrt mastodon are harder to circumvent, but like I said, just route your private shit through email or discord or literally any more private protocol. I know people are especially worried about NSFW stuff getting linked, but really one of the nice things about mastodon from a NSFW-adjacent internet perspective is that... well... you aren't beholden to any specific app or megacorporation in the same way as you are on a more centralized service. No one has to worry about Apple's morality opinions, because no instance relies on the use of any app to retain its ability to contact the rest of the social network. It could be a really useful place for a fannish instance set up along Dreamwidth lines to ensconce itself, actually, or for the OTW to launch an instance... particularly if tumblr hooks itself up to the fediverse, as I have seen it announce that it's planning to do.
posted by sciatrix at 8:15 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
The privacy concerns I have also heard people in fandom sharing wrt mastodon are harder to circumvent, but like I said, just route your private shit through email or discord or literally any more private protocol. I know people are especially worried about NSFW stuff getting linked, but really one of the nice things about mastodon from a NSFW-adjacent internet perspective is that... well... you aren't beholden to any specific app or megacorporation in the same way as you are on a more centralized service. No one has to worry about Apple's morality opinions, because no instance relies on the use of any app to retain its ability to contact the rest of the social network. It could be a really useful place for a fannish instance set up along Dreamwidth lines to ensconce itself, actually, or for the OTW to launch an instance... particularly if tumblr hooks itself up to the fediverse, as I have seen it announce that it's planning to do.
posted by sciatrix at 8:15 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
So far what I've learned from this thread is that Mastodon is horrific to use (and especially sign up for) in the mode that must people use social media (mobile app) and that the major main instance allows transphobia, while it is all but impossible to meaningfully participate in the "fediverse" without also accepting transphobia. Post is built on a foundation of capitalist ideals (with monetisation as a basic selling point feature, even!), with the most problematic of VC money possible.
Twitter is and always has been a hell hole in my opinion. It sounds like all the replacements are very much following in its footsteps.
posted by Dysk at 8:23 AM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
Twitter is and always has been a hell hole in my opinion. It sounds like all the replacements are very much following in its footsteps.
posted by Dysk at 8:23 AM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
So far what I've learned from this thread is that Mastodon--
I contributed to a number of this so I'll respond a bit--
is horrific to use (and especially sign up for) in the mode that must people use social media (mobile app)
I'm one of those who responded to the "oh just the desktop browser" statements, for sure. But I've set up everything and used it daily on nothing but on mobile. (Half of my eye roll on the desktop insistence comes from my own use case)
and that the major main instance allows transphobia, while it is all but impossible to meaningfully participate in the "fediverse" without also accepting transphobia.
I genuinely don't follow the drama of the big instances (esp as it's before me joining) but iirc Artw shared something about the mods responding to the case in the earlier masto FPPs. FWIW, when an instance is run well, they are (i like how responsive hachyderm.io, blacktwitter.io, and aus.social have been on moderation), and i don't want to erase that much of masto was built by (white) queer folks.
posted by cendawanita at 8:31 AM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
I contributed to a number of this so I'll respond a bit--
is horrific to use (and especially sign up for) in the mode that must people use social media (mobile app)
I'm one of those who responded to the "oh just the desktop browser" statements, for sure. But I've set up everything and used it daily on nothing but on mobile. (Half of my eye roll on the desktop insistence comes from my own use case)
and that the major main instance allows transphobia, while it is all but impossible to meaningfully participate in the "fediverse" without also accepting transphobia.
I genuinely don't follow the drama of the big instances (esp as it's before me joining) but iirc Artw shared something about the mods responding to the case in the earlier masto FPPs. FWIW, when an instance is run well, they are (i like how responsive hachyderm.io, blacktwitter.io, and aus.social have been on moderation), and i don't want to erase that much of masto was built by (white) queer folks.
posted by cendawanita at 8:31 AM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
Apparently, for some, the major stumbling block with Mastodon is that it is almost impossible to successfully be an anonymous flaming asshole, à la Twitter. The lack of quote posts, the inability to do full text searches and having mute/block/report in the hands of every user makes for a very high hurdle. And all by design...
posted by jim in austin at 8:37 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by jim in austin at 8:37 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
Yeah it sounds really weird in 2022 to be hearing people say "use the web site, not the app on your phone
If a site works fine in a browser, what's the benefit of using an app?
posted by octothorpe at 8:38 AM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
If a site works fine in a browser, what's the benefit of using an app?
posted by octothorpe at 8:38 AM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
(but the mastodon.social drama with the smaller instances involved iirc one that got boosted a lot that was an instance of one person, but i think there's another one with at least more than one person, but that's just that person practicing the right of free association -- mastodon.social was definitely caught up in the earlier post-musk-having-to-actually-buy-twitter wave where the existing culture was unprepared to consider that a lot of the behaviours wasn't just uncultured (gross) twitteratis not knowing how to act, but actual friction from previously papered over social discrimination -- i *think* they're ever so slowly improving but that's probably why most people try to encourage new folks to move. m.social does have incentive to clean up tho, it's also one of the flagship instances of the masto founders, i think)
Re: app - because it's more efficient on the backend? But i am a mainly mobile user.
posted by cendawanita at 8:40 AM on November 30, 2022
Re: app - because it's more efficient on the backend? But i am a mainly mobile user.
posted by cendawanita at 8:40 AM on November 30, 2022
I also learned that Cohost and Counter Social exist.
I saw them both mentioned, but neither seems to so much as have a Wikipedia article.
posted by Dysk at 8:43 AM on November 30, 2022
I saw them both mentioned, but neither seems to so much as have a Wikipedia article.
posted by Dysk at 8:43 AM on November 30, 2022
It is really almost a moot point to discuss because the general public and the market will decide despite what anyone says, here or anywhere else.
That being said, here's my opinion:
The successful web based social/media sites all have these in common:
1. No apps
2. They just work. You go to the web site and you can immediately see interesting content.
3. To contribute is simple: you set up an account and you immediately can post--nothing to learn.
4. Advertising (to pay the bills)
5. They pass the 'Grandma' test. A non-tech-savvy grandma can easily start using it.
Sorry to say, but Mastadon fails every one of these. It is a nice site for hobbyists, but that's about as far as it goes. You and your friends can enjoy it but don't expect the general public to join you.
I remember when Youtube started (before it was bought by Google). There were a million video sites--I remember experimenting with a number of them. Why did Youtube succeed when all the others failed? Most of the video sites required an app--a non-starter for many people, and very buggy for many others. They also were very picky (and buggy) about accepting videos. It had to be in just the right format. Youtube had no app and amazingly you could upload any video type and it would do all the appropriate conversions. It just worked.
I also remember Google+, Google's attempt at a Facebook type social network. I was really excited about it. It could do 'circles' of different groups that could even be overlapping. I remember setting up a subset of a family group to post pictures of a Thanksgiving event. But none of my family members could find the pictures, Later on, even I couldn't find the pictures. It began to dawn on me that Google+'s power was its weakness. It was a social network designed by PhDs, for PhDs, not for the general public. It failed the Grandma test.
posted by eye of newt at 8:44 AM on November 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
That being said, here's my opinion:
The successful web based social/media sites all have these in common:
1. No apps
2. They just work. You go to the web site and you can immediately see interesting content.
3. To contribute is simple: you set up an account and you immediately can post--nothing to learn.
4. Advertising (to pay the bills)
5. They pass the 'Grandma' test. A non-tech-savvy grandma can easily start using it.
Sorry to say, but Mastadon fails every one of these. It is a nice site for hobbyists, but that's about as far as it goes. You and your friends can enjoy it but don't expect the general public to join you.
I remember when Youtube started (before it was bought by Google). There were a million video sites--I remember experimenting with a number of them. Why did Youtube succeed when all the others failed? Most of the video sites required an app--a non-starter for many people, and very buggy for many others. They also were very picky (and buggy) about accepting videos. It had to be in just the right format. Youtube had no app and amazingly you could upload any video type and it would do all the appropriate conversions. It just worked.
I also remember Google+, Google's attempt at a Facebook type social network. I was really excited about it. It could do 'circles' of different groups that could even be overlapping. I remember setting up a subset of a family group to post pictures of a Thanksgiving event. But none of my family members could find the pictures, Later on, even I couldn't find the pictures. It began to dawn on me that Google+'s power was its weakness. It was a social network designed by PhDs, for PhDs, not for the general public. It failed the Grandma test.
posted by eye of newt at 8:44 AM on November 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
Just had a great conversation with one of the Cohost founders - yeah, their TOS is not great (it's better than it was, but it's still kinda janky) but the actual company ethos and goals remind me intensely of Metafilter, in a good way. (Metafilter still doesn't(?) even have a formal TOS, unless, as is entirely possible, I'm completely blanking on it.)
And one of the best bits of the conversation was learning that Cohost has zero intention of getting very big. Like Metafilter, they want to make something cool that pays their mortgages, and this involves limiting, not endlessly growing, their userbase. That's a core understanding that I don't see very often in people in this space and it was immensely cheering.
I said it in the other thread, but I think a single Twitter replacement would be a failure. There are too many scaling problems and too many compromises necessary to run something that big, and having global communications have a single point of failure is an unambiguously bad thing. I don't think we'll see one, and I don't think we should.
posted by restless_nomad at 8:48 AM on November 30, 2022 [10 favorites]
And one of the best bits of the conversation was learning that Cohost has zero intention of getting very big. Like Metafilter, they want to make something cool that pays their mortgages, and this involves limiting, not endlessly growing, their userbase. That's a core understanding that I don't see very often in people in this space and it was immensely cheering.
I said it in the other thread, but I think a single Twitter replacement would be a failure. There are too many scaling problems and too many compromises necessary to run something that big, and having global communications have a single point of failure is an unambiguously bad thing. I don't think we'll see one, and I don't think we should.
posted by restless_nomad at 8:48 AM on November 30, 2022 [10 favorites]
FWIW, I only found the app hard to use for signing up, not for using Mastodon. I primarily use the desktop because I'm an Old but found the app perfectly functional once I had an account.
it's not like you can't use hashtags to connect perfectly well with groups of people
Yes, I'm following #BlackMastodon, #BlackFriday (which was being used for the day after Thanksgiving and was brilliantly co-opted by the black twitter migration as a weekly hashtag to post pictures and stuff about existing as a black person), and #BunniesofMastodon, and as I notice people posting with those hashtags who consistently post excellent stuff I am following them.
I also used debirdify (it provides a spreadsheet you can import, it's not a manual process thank god). You can use debirdify to get lists of people to follow on Mastodon who follow or are followed by Twitter accounts you don't own, which means you can for example find accounts which follow a literary journal you like or who follow Popehat or Patton Oswalt, or who AOC thinks is cool enough to follow back, or whatever.
My instance currently is toot.site, which is small and filled with queer socialists, and they moderate heavily so I haven't seen anything abusive or racist or the like at all on Mastodon anywhere (this also means I can't follow journalists on journa.host because journa.host allows transphobic content, which is a trade I am happy to make - most of the folks I wanted to follow are on newsie.social anyway). I will probably switch to a writing-related instance at some point just for convenience.
I also learned that Cohost and Counter Social exist
I don't know anything about Cohost but Counter Social is just a Mastodon instance with good marketing afaict.
posted by joannemerriam at 8:48 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
it's not like you can't use hashtags to connect perfectly well with groups of people
Yes, I'm following #BlackMastodon, #BlackFriday (which was being used for the day after Thanksgiving and was brilliantly co-opted by the black twitter migration as a weekly hashtag to post pictures and stuff about existing as a black person), and #BunniesofMastodon, and as I notice people posting with those hashtags who consistently post excellent stuff I am following them.
I also used debirdify (it provides a spreadsheet you can import, it's not a manual process thank god). You can use debirdify to get lists of people to follow on Mastodon who follow or are followed by Twitter accounts you don't own, which means you can for example find accounts which follow a literary journal you like or who follow Popehat or Patton Oswalt, or who AOC thinks is cool enough to follow back, or whatever.
My instance currently is toot.site, which is small and filled with queer socialists, and they moderate heavily so I haven't seen anything abusive or racist or the like at all on Mastodon anywhere (this also means I can't follow journalists on journa.host because journa.host allows transphobic content, which is a trade I am happy to make - most of the folks I wanted to follow are on newsie.social anyway). I will probably switch to a writing-related instance at some point just for convenience.
I also learned that Cohost and Counter Social exist
I don't know anything about Cohost but Counter Social is just a Mastodon instance with good marketing afaict.
posted by joannemerriam at 8:48 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
People can have different experiences with Mastodon. E.g. 85 year old Star Trek actor George Takei is on there and says:
Choosing not to join Mastodon is like choosing not to be in a relationship anymore: the secret is that you don't need a reason. If you don't feel like it then just: Nope.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:49 AM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
I don’t understand why people think Mastodon is difficult. It seems pretty straightforward, and the separate servers are no biggie. I’m enjoying this fresh start here, like moving to a new apartment!But you don't have to try Mastodon if you don't want to. I think people are feeling pressured to join, and defensively complaining about the terrible complexity of picking a server in response.
Choosing not to join Mastodon is like choosing not to be in a relationship anymore: the secret is that you don't need a reason. If you don't feel like it then just: Nope.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:49 AM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
eye of newt, I agree on your points except for the mobile usage landscape. Global South these days, to use a general example, would prefer to use apps because of the strong mobile-using habits. Browser-led thinking is still PC culture, and over here the class/age/capacity situation is backwards. But if I stick to my example population, even Post (and Hive) would fail, because it's iOS-led. ActivityPub (ie Fediverse) packages might work if there's a lo-fi lo-res client/app if anyone's interested in penetrating the basic phone market. If not, the starter Androids all can handle the system requirements of a basic client/app already.
posted by cendawanita at 8:49 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by cendawanita at 8:49 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
Why did Youtube succeed when all the other fail? Most of the video sites required an app--a no-starter for many people, and very buggy for many others.
It's notable that this was basically in the pre-smartphone era. I don't think those same rules or trends hold true in a world where there are more Android and iOS devices than PCs in use for leisure in particular - look at the success of WhatsApp for example. Fundamentally app-based, and wildly successful. Also apps give you all kinds of advantages like push notifications.
Your other four rules make sense, but we live in a world now where people use the Internet through apps on their phone by default now, not through a browser on a desktop.
posted by Dysk at 8:51 AM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
It's notable that this was basically in the pre-smartphone era. I don't think those same rules or trends hold true in a world where there are more Android and iOS devices than PCs in use for leisure in particular - look at the success of WhatsApp for example. Fundamentally app-based, and wildly successful. Also apps give you all kinds of advantages like push notifications.
Your other four rules make sense, but we live in a world now where people use the Internet through apps on their phone by default now, not through a browser on a desktop.
posted by Dysk at 8:51 AM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
I mean I joined Mastodon a few years ago and I still think it’s non-intuitive and works poorly with my brain. I have reasons for it and it’s weird to proclaim people’s reasons as just defensiveness.
posted by brook horse at 8:54 AM on November 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by brook horse at 8:54 AM on November 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
Ed Zitron has some things to say about Post; this piece is mostly about Lone Skum (and his former supporters in the media, e.g. Kara Swisher, losing their religion), but his points about Post and A16Z are good.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:54 AM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:54 AM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
If a site works fine in a browser, what's the benefit of using an app?
An extreme [WHY NOT USE THE APP?] loathing for having [WE USE COOKIES!] my interaction with anything [PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR AD BLOCKER] interrupted by intrusive [DO YOU WANT TO JOIN OUR MAILING LIST?] popups has made me increasingly [HERE'S SOMETHING ELSE YOU MIGHT LIKE!] reluctant to find out if a site [STILL NO ON THE MAILING LIST?] works in a mobile browser in the [HEY DON'T GO!] first place.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 8:56 AM on November 30, 2022 [14 favorites]
An extreme [WHY NOT USE THE APP?] loathing for having [WE USE COOKIES!] my interaction with anything [PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR AD BLOCKER] interrupted by intrusive [DO YOU WANT TO JOIN OUR MAILING LIST?] popups has made me increasingly [HERE'S SOMETHING ELSE YOU MIGHT LIKE!] reluctant to find out if a site [STILL NO ON THE MAILING LIST?] works in a mobile browser in the [HEY DON'T GO!] first place.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 8:56 AM on November 30, 2022 [14 favorites]
"people use the Internet through apps on their phone by default now"
Yes, but not for browsing. At least my friends and I agree--we browse Twitter and Reddit, and other sites, on our phones without an app and get very annoyed when those sites try to get us to use their app. Maybe it is just me, but I only post to those sites from my desktop, where, again, I don't need an app.
And also sharing--I can't even count the number of sites I've been on that have shared interesting Twitter links--no app or login required.
posted by eye of newt at 8:58 AM on November 30, 2022
Yes, but not for browsing. At least my friends and I agree--we browse Twitter and Reddit, and other sites, on our phones without an app and get very annoyed when those sites try to get us to use their app. Maybe it is just me, but I only post to those sites from my desktop, where, again, I don't need an app.
And also sharing--I can't even count the number of sites I've been on that have shared interesting Twitter links--no app or login required.
posted by eye of newt at 8:58 AM on November 30, 2022
Maybe it is just me, but I only post to those sites from my desktop, where, again, I don't need an app.
You have a desktop, you're already not the majority - less than half of households world wide have desktops, over 60% of people have a smartphone.
posted by Dysk at 9:01 AM on November 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
You have a desktop, you're already not the majority - less than half of households world wide have desktops, over 60% of people have a smartphone.
posted by Dysk at 9:01 AM on November 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
I’ve been using computers since 1977. I’ve been on Mastodon for awhile in one small instance and a couple music software instances. All this talk about mefi.social caught my interest and I easily found the main page on the web. But NO NEW MEMBERS… So how does this person try to join?
posted by njohnson23 at 9:01 AM on November 30, 2022
posted by njohnson23 at 9:01 AM on November 30, 2022
(Like, I am also the weirdo that uses everything via the browser on my phone, and won't touch sites that refuse it - like twitter, Instagram, reddit - but I am very much a techy weirdo and not representative of the average Internet user. The average Internet user is closer to the agent in the "grandparent test" than they are to me.)
posted by Dysk at 9:05 AM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 9:05 AM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
So how does this person try to join?
To join the Metafilter Mastodon instance in particular, you need to put your email address in your profile, and post in this Metatalk thread.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 9:08 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
To join the Metafilter Mastodon instance in particular, you need to put your email address in your profile, and post in this Metatalk thread.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 9:08 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
I'll own up not to being an asshole on Twitter (tried not to) but to the rush of tossing off a funny comment at the right moment and getting liked/retweeted like crazy. Sometimes by famous people! But mostly it's like getting a laugh/positive response out of cool people you like (and follow). Don't get that dopamine hit elsewhere, at least not yet.
Also just the feeling of being connected to the whole world...news of big events abroad would cross my dash way before the news reported, and always with better links/analysis. Because I followed people who did that.
Mastodon is more like going to a club meeting. Fun but a limited circle of stuff. Less chance of random cool things.
Another place can come along and do well, and probably will, but clearly nobody knows which one it will be.
posted by emjaybee at 9:09 AM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
Also just the feeling of being connected to the whole world...news of big events abroad would cross my dash way before the news reported, and always with better links/analysis. Because I followed people who did that.
Mastodon is more like going to a club meeting. Fun but a limited circle of stuff. Less chance of random cool things.
Another place can come along and do well, and probably will, but clearly nobody knows which one it will be.
posted by emjaybee at 9:09 AM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
Why? They make no money off of you. You’re still acting like you’re a product to be sold, and should be valued as such. If you want to enrich your social life and join a community, you need to walk a short distance and say hello. A lot of people got used to the (fake, commercial) community chasing them instead.Hi. I'm a techie who uses Vim on a daily basis and has been posting online since the age of 11. I'm also a UX geek who will readily acknowledge that a lot of the UX community is one huge black-turtlenecked circlejerk.
But that was only because they wanted to sell you out. And then they did.
Attitudes like the one you're showing here are endemic to the geek community, and are 100% a form of gatekeeping. Sometimes it takes the form of "fake gamer girl"-style sneering at people who claim to find things hard; other times, it adopts a self-righteous "we are improving the world" sheen a la the sorts of things Elon Musk stans write in overlong blog posts. Either way, it sucks and I'd really encourage you to reconsider this kind of outlook.
Digital literacy is a lot harder than you'd think. It's hard even for people who grew up with this stuff, or who have decades of experience with digital interfaces. A friend of mine is 22 years old, grew up with phones, and still doesn't understand basic functions of email apps, let alone bespoke complications of an app like Mastodon. Don Norman, one of the most acclaimed interface-design guys of all time, has been sounding the alarm for a decade that computers are beyond the point of user hostility.
In 2006, right as Facebook and Twitter were taking off, I worked on the quality assurance team for a rival social network; shortly after that, I interned for a company whose app had a social component (until it was bought by Adobe a couple of years later). I'd built my own phpBB forums and even coded social networks in Drupal before then. I have spent a lifetime being the guy who tries to get people (and friends!) to use web sites that ostensibly want them as members. Hell, I even joined Google+.
So I'm speaking with a buttload of historical and professional experience when I say that you cannot possibly understand how difficult it is to use unfamiliar technical applications, unless you yourself have experienced that difficulty. It is invisible to you. And a lot of people with certain technical intuitions, ones they've spent decades slowly developing, are blind to how hard it is. I literally documented users' frustrations with different processes, showed the logs to higher-ups, and got responses like: "Nah, they just don't see how simple it is. It's their fault they don't understand."
Steve Jobs—who was many kinds of bastard but the patron saint of "users should be able to use things"—typically said that the difference between making something functional and making it usable is between 100 and 1,000 times more work. It's hard work. And refusal to do that work isn't just a marketing issue, it's an accessibility one. Mastodon is well-intended and I know lots of lovely dorks who use it, but its refusal to find better ways of doing this stuff strikes some people—people literally in this thread—as a more-than-technical failing. It reveals what they do and don't see as important priorities, and if "helping people use it" is a low priority you can't be shocked that said people decide to opt out.
The last decade and a half has sucked ass for tech culture on a lot of levels, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Tech usability has skyrocketed—and my day job involves working with technology that's still struggling to catch up with 2013 standards, let alone 2022 ones, so I am constantly reminded that apps like Twitter, for all their glaring flaws, are literally future tech in that regard. Going back to gleaming visions of the old web honestly sounds great, but serious advancements have been made on the usability front, and I'd suggest that we not shrug that off. And that's half for humane reasons—maybe let's NOT return to the standard of gatekeeping all but a slim demographic minority—and half because, from a strictly mercenary standpoint, if you can't build an app to the bare-minimum standards of users knowing how to make an account, something else will come along instead that likely has a tenth of the moral scruples as The Thing We'd Like To Win.
There's nothing wrong with more restrictive and atomized communities if that's what you're into. (I mean, we're here, aren't we?) But let's be honest that that's what they are. The double-slap in this thread of "scold people who want to find something better than Mastodon" and "scold people who explain why Mastodon doesn't suit them" feels pretty gross to me. And by "pretty gross" I mean it literally violates my professional code of ethics (ymmv).
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 9:18 AM on November 30, 2022 [73 favorites]
Surprised to see so much disdain for web browser based social media. While app stores look like a bulwark against letting fascists completely take over Twitter, their veto power may not always be in your side. Consider VPNs being banned on Chinese app stores. Or that you can’t even buy smartphones in sanctioned countries (Iran), but if you get one smuggled in, the browser will work, but the app store won’t.
It’s unimaginable today that a cellphone OS would ship without a browser, but if the app-ization of everything continues, you might not be able to find a community of queer folk living in unfriendly locales supporting each other. Remember SJobs declaring no porn on the iPhone? But of course there is, in the browser. There are/were mainstream objectification apps (Playboy, Sports Illustrated) apps allowed though. Do you want to be cut off from “dangerous” ideas and the people that share them?
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 9:29 AM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
It’s unimaginable today that a cellphone OS would ship without a browser, but if the app-ization of everything continues, you might not be able to find a community of queer folk living in unfriendly locales supporting each other. Remember SJobs declaring no porn on the iPhone? But of course there is, in the browser. There are/were mainstream objectification apps (Playboy, Sports Illustrated) apps allowed though. Do you want to be cut off from “dangerous” ideas and the people that share them?
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 9:29 AM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
Can't believe we got this far down the thread without:
Metafilter: it’s a confusing mess run by a bunch of hall monitors.
posted by daisystomper at 9:30 AM on November 30, 2022 [24 favorites]
Metafilter: it’s a confusing mess run by a bunch of hall monitors.
posted by daisystomper at 9:30 AM on November 30, 2022 [24 favorites]
There are/were mainstream objectification apps (Playboy, Sports Illustrated) apps allowed though. Do you want to be cut off from “dangerous” ideas and the people that share them?
Masto isn't one, yes, but web browsers is basically the reason why the janitorial staff at work and the seniors in my family ask for my help because the lack of digital literacy meant their phones are choked with browser spam baits and alerts. So from my end, i find mobile browsers to be about at par with mastodon in terms of what you need to do in making a thing useable. Otherwise much of the examples seem prevalent in iOS world? Android has different problems, though sideloading apps isn't one of them.
posted by cendawanita at 9:44 AM on November 30, 2022
Masto isn't one, yes, but web browsers is basically the reason why the janitorial staff at work and the seniors in my family ask for my help because the lack of digital literacy meant their phones are choked with browser spam baits and alerts. So from my end, i find mobile browsers to be about at par with mastodon in terms of what you need to do in making a thing useable. Otherwise much of the examples seem prevalent in iOS world? Android has different problems, though sideloading apps isn't one of them.
posted by cendawanita at 9:44 AM on November 30, 2022
> I think people are feeling pressured to join, and defensively complaining
> about the terrible complexity of picking a server in response.
Speaking only for myself (history in IT industry and higher ed) it's not that Mastodon is difficult to create an account on, it's something like I've spent many years curating a rewarding list of follows of people and topics that mean a lot to me. Maybe a quarter of what I follow on Twitter has migrated to Mastodon, so there's so far no much there there for me. And while I've tried reading through the local and federated feeds for new stuff, I have to admit finding almost nothing of interest to me. So it doesn't feel like home, esp. since I have gotten more than a few whiffs of "God, all these Twitter refugees, ugh," in the big feeds.
posted by aught at 9:50 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
> about the terrible complexity of picking a server in response.
Speaking only for myself (history in IT industry and higher ed) it's not that Mastodon is difficult to create an account on, it's something like I've spent many years curating a rewarding list of follows of people and topics that mean a lot to me. Maybe a quarter of what I follow on Twitter has migrated to Mastodon, so there's so far no much there there for me. And while I've tried reading through the local and federated feeds for new stuff, I have to admit finding almost nothing of interest to me. So it doesn't feel like home, esp. since I have gotten more than a few whiffs of "God, all these Twitter refugees, ugh," in the big feeds.
posted by aught at 9:50 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
I feel like there's a subtlety in what's been discussed above about smooth onboarding vis-a-vis "product being sold" that's worth removing from the more polarized vein of "is bad UX good actually? y/n" stuff that comes out in these discussions, which is:
Good UI/UX is good! Good smooth onboarding is good! But good smooth onboarding prioritized over figuring out everything else is a problem. Because it means vacuuming people in with a slick signup process (and probably some exploitative hype cycling, and gamification of signup throttling, and...)
And it's a problem associated with money-focused startup ventures in particular. That's the heart of the productizing question there: if the core focus of a new social media platform is growth and user capture rather than establishing a stable and well supported user space and all the complicated questions of ethos and controlled scale, that's a real bad sign. If that's being done by people with VC inclinations and bad politics, it's an especially bad sign.
So, no, it is not good that Mastodon's onboarding is confusing to a lot of people. That poor UI/UX stuff is not a virtue. But it is better that the onboarding be rough compared to the actual experience on the platform rather than vice versa. Because "it's hard to figure out" is a healthier option in terms of containing growth and keeping scale sane than "it's easy to sign up to an underbaked black box".
In my ideal world the onboarding process for Masto, and the commodity managed hosting solutions, mature and make it a less daunting prospect for a lot of people. I think as a (federation of) communities it is old enough to be able to support some more growth with less pain and still function well. But it's, for better and for worse, partly that it hasn't scaled up like crazy sooner that has allowed it to grow in a healthy way and explore some of it's problems at a reasonable, incremental pace instead of in one catastrophic, zero-governance hype rush.
posted by cortex at 9:52 AM on November 30, 2022 [14 favorites]
Good UI/UX is good! Good smooth onboarding is good! But good smooth onboarding prioritized over figuring out everything else is a problem. Because it means vacuuming people in with a slick signup process (and probably some exploitative hype cycling, and gamification of signup throttling, and...)
And it's a problem associated with money-focused startup ventures in particular. That's the heart of the productizing question there: if the core focus of a new social media platform is growth and user capture rather than establishing a stable and well supported user space and all the complicated questions of ethos and controlled scale, that's a real bad sign. If that's being done by people with VC inclinations and bad politics, it's an especially bad sign.
So, no, it is not good that Mastodon's onboarding is confusing to a lot of people. That poor UI/UX stuff is not a virtue. But it is better that the onboarding be rough compared to the actual experience on the platform rather than vice versa. Because "it's hard to figure out" is a healthier option in terms of containing growth and keeping scale sane than "it's easy to sign up to an underbaked black box".
In my ideal world the onboarding process for Masto, and the commodity managed hosting solutions, mature and make it a less daunting prospect for a lot of people. I think as a (federation of) communities it is old enough to be able to support some more growth with less pain and still function well. But it's, for better and for worse, partly that it hasn't scaled up like crazy sooner that has allowed it to grow in a healthy way and explore some of it's problems at a reasonable, incremental pace instead of in one catastrophic, zero-governance hype rush.
posted by cortex at 9:52 AM on November 30, 2022 [14 favorites]
It can be true that ease of use is important and also that it is expensive to create, so that it's sometimes worth dealing with frustration (if you can) to access less well funded parts of the internet...
Not that I have actually found Mastodon difficult to use personally. Certainly not as difficult as opting out of privacy violations on Facebook! That seems to take more tech savvy than I have got. (I access Facebook via the DuckDuckGo Mobile Brower mostly, deleted the app, have location permission turned OFF, have opted out of every tracking thing I can opt out of and lied to Facebook about my city, but it still serves me ads for businesses right down the street.)
posted by OnceUponATime at 9:55 AM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
Not that I have actually found Mastodon difficult to use personally. Certainly not as difficult as opting out of privacy violations on Facebook! That seems to take more tech savvy than I have got. (I access Facebook via the DuckDuckGo Mobile Brower mostly, deleted the app, have location permission turned OFF, have opted out of every tracking thing I can opt out of and lied to Facebook about my city, but it still serves me ads for businesses right down the street.)
posted by OnceUponATime at 9:55 AM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
It can be true that ease of use is important and also that it is expensive to create
Yeah, to elaborate on my comment above a little: one of the reasons you see slick onboarding for shiny new unproven, underbaked corporate social media ventures is that it's both expensive and, if you have money, relatively easy to build an onboarding process. If you can just throw the money at good design and code to tackle the specific domain of front end experience and signup flow, people will have a great initial impression of your new thing! Even if your new thing is shit under the hood, philosophically or politically or in terms of security practices or moderation staffing or or or. It's easy for someone with venture cash to pay for up-front polish. And its easy for polish to distract from an essential emptiness or worse.
Again, that doesn't make good UI/UX bad. It's just easier to make buy something slick than to build something ethically. None of the hardest and most important problems of a social media platform or online community can be fixed with interface polish, as much as good platforms deserve and can benefit from said polish.
posted by cortex at 10:01 AM on November 30, 2022 [11 favorites]
Yeah, to elaborate on my comment above a little: one of the reasons you see slick onboarding for shiny new unproven, underbaked corporate social media ventures is that it's both expensive and, if you have money, relatively easy to build an onboarding process. If you can just throw the money at good design and code to tackle the specific domain of front end experience and signup flow, people will have a great initial impression of your new thing! Even if your new thing is shit under the hood, philosophically or politically or in terms of security practices or moderation staffing or or or. It's easy for someone with venture cash to pay for up-front polish. And its easy for polish to distract from an essential emptiness or worse.
Again, that doesn't make good UI/UX bad. It's just easier to make buy something slick than to build something ethically. None of the hardest and most important problems of a social media platform or online community can be fixed with interface polish, as much as good platforms deserve and can benefit from said polish.
posted by cortex at 10:01 AM on November 30, 2022 [11 favorites]
The double-slap in this thread of "scold people who want to find something better than Mastodon" and "scold people who explain why Mastodon doesn't suit them" feels pretty gross to me.
^This right here^
The absolute disdain that a lot of posters have for folks who can't/won't/ use Mastodon is the whitest white guy ever vibe. Like, us peons just don't understand the genius.
I'll add that this attitude definitely has me rethinking if MeFi is somewhere I want to be full stop.
posted by Kitteh at 10:08 AM on November 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
^This right here^
The absolute disdain that a lot of posters have for folks who can't/won't/ use Mastodon is the whitest white guy ever vibe. Like, us peons just don't understand the genius.
I'll add that this attitude definitely has me rethinking if MeFi is somewhere I want to be full stop.
posted by Kitteh at 10:08 AM on November 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
> phones are choked with browser spam baits and alerts
While "you've been pwned" pop-ups are scary, I haven't had a window/tab hijack be persistent across app-kill... so far. Also, you can choose which websites you visit. The "sex only on roofs" enthusiast forum or mutual aid v. lockdowns info resource don't have to be burdened with adware/spyware.
And yes, side loading is great for freedom with Android, but it's more complicated. Progressive Web Apps are one URL away.
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 10:09 AM on November 30, 2022
While "you've been pwned" pop-ups are scary, I haven't had a window/tab hijack be persistent across app-kill... so far. Also, you can choose which websites you visit. The "sex only on roofs" enthusiast forum or mutual aid v. lockdowns info resource don't have to be burdened with adware/spyware.
And yes, side loading is great for freedom with Android, but it's more complicated. Progressive Web Apps are one URL away.
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 10:09 AM on November 30, 2022
more than a few whiffs of "God, all these Twitter refugees, ugh," in the big feeds
I have also seen this attitude all over tumblr, and it is deeply annoying. Yeah, you're getting influxes of lots of people who are unhappily trying something new, messily interacting with it and trying to figure out the rules, but people on a social network are a net resource: they're, you know, potential sources of positive interaction.
I realized typing this that perhaps the disconnect is that to me, all people are potential resources and sources of positive connection, even people who don't appear immediately to have lots to contribute. I don't necessarily want to personally interact with all people, but I think that having a critical mass of people willing to engage on your platform of choice is totally crucial for finding the people you want to have conversations with. Good UX and accessibility is difficult. But it's worth investing in because a big, diverse, easy-to-access platform lets groups flourish and do interesting things, or connect us to people who have interesting conversation. It is impossible [for me] to predict a priori who will have interesting things to say, so I find it useful to have a big party full of chattering conversations that I can metaphorically walk through until something neat catches my ear.
(I also realized while typing that my thinking is also influenced by the reality that we all need both private and public social networks, and for me, Discord fulfills my desire for private networks pretty effectively while being totally devoid of any public-facing option. Public spaces are how we make new friends and integrate them into private networks, whereas private spaces are for enriching and deepening connection. Because Discord and its wealth of private space exists to shunt private interactions into, that's... why I'm absently just shunting aside the concerns that Mastodon provides no private space in which to interact. Huh.)
posted by sciatrix at 10:11 AM on November 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
I have also seen this attitude all over tumblr, and it is deeply annoying. Yeah, you're getting influxes of lots of people who are unhappily trying something new, messily interacting with it and trying to figure out the rules, but people on a social network are a net resource: they're, you know, potential sources of positive interaction.
I realized typing this that perhaps the disconnect is that to me, all people are potential resources and sources of positive connection, even people who don't appear immediately to have lots to contribute. I don't necessarily want to personally interact with all people, but I think that having a critical mass of people willing to engage on your platform of choice is totally crucial for finding the people you want to have conversations with. Good UX and accessibility is difficult. But it's worth investing in because a big, diverse, easy-to-access platform lets groups flourish and do interesting things, or connect us to people who have interesting conversation. It is impossible [for me] to predict a priori who will have interesting things to say, so I find it useful to have a big party full of chattering conversations that I can metaphorically walk through until something neat catches my ear.
(I also realized while typing that my thinking is also influenced by the reality that we all need both private and public social networks, and for me, Discord fulfills my desire for private networks pretty effectively while being totally devoid of any public-facing option. Public spaces are how we make new friends and integrate them into private networks, whereas private spaces are for enriching and deepening connection. Because Discord and its wealth of private space exists to shunt private interactions into, that's... why I'm absently just shunting aside the concerns that Mastodon provides no private space in which to interact. Huh.)
posted by sciatrix at 10:11 AM on November 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
While "you've been pwned" pop-ups are scary, I haven't had a window/tab hijack be persistent across app-kill... so far. Also, you can choose which websites you visit.
Please assume *I* know this.
Re: discord - I wish I can actually get into discord but age & regional trends mean my needs are served by WhatsApp tho I'm still part of that metacrafts discord, i just never remember to check the app.
posted by cendawanita at 10:20 AM on November 30, 2022
Please assume *I* know this.
Re: discord - I wish I can actually get into discord but age & regional trends mean my needs are served by WhatsApp tho I'm still part of that metacrafts discord, i just never remember to check the app.
posted by cendawanita at 10:20 AM on November 30, 2022
Surprised to see so much disdain for web browser based social media.
It's not disdain for it (and contrary to the rest of your comment, the alternative isn't iOS for most of the world, at all) it's an acknowledgement of the reality of how most people use the Internet these days. It's not an endorsement, it's an observation.
Like, I do not use any apps other than messaging and a browser, effectively. I will not use sites that try and force an app on you. But it's still tilting at windmills to try and get everybody else to do what I do. It's just not how the modern ecosystem of users works. People are telling you what it's like out there, and you're tilting against windmills and shooting the messenger.
posted by Dysk at 10:22 AM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
It's not disdain for it (and contrary to the rest of your comment, the alternative isn't iOS for most of the world, at all) it's an acknowledgement of the reality of how most people use the Internet these days. It's not an endorsement, it's an observation.
Like, I do not use any apps other than messaging and a browser, effectively. I will not use sites that try and force an app on you. But it's still tilting at windmills to try and get everybody else to do what I do. It's just not how the modern ecosystem of users works. People are telling you what it's like out there, and you're tilting against windmills and shooting the messenger.
posted by Dysk at 10:22 AM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
A dear friend of mine was lamenting the loss of Twitter because she'd carefully curated a 1000+-follow firehose of information tailored to her personal and professional interests, and resetting that literally anywhere is a tremendous amount of work. Conveniently, she'd recently hired me to do some PA stuff for her - she has two full-time jobs and some of the less mission-critical but still important stuff was getting dropped - and I spent several hours finding 30 or 40 accounts across her list of twelve catagories on Mastodon to begin to recreate it. It's no joke how difficult the transition is, even aside from the challenges of learning new UI. Especially since we're all doing it at once and the landscape of any given service changes every day. I like Mastodon and have gotten my feed to a pleasant place, but I use it mostly for personal amusement and professional curiosity, not to try do do a public-facing job that has zero institutional support, like many of the writers, artists, and freelance journalists (among others) of my acquaintance.
(Incidentally, if anyone has found cat rescues on Masto that reliably post lots of pictures of adorable kittens, please pass them along! Weather twitter and energy policy twitter moved en masse complete with spreadsheets, but cat rescue twitter appears to be more... catlike in its organizational structure.)
posted by restless_nomad at 10:23 AM on November 30, 2022 [13 favorites]
(Incidentally, if anyone has found cat rescues on Masto that reliably post lots of pictures of adorable kittens, please pass them along! Weather twitter and energy policy twitter moved en masse complete with spreadsheets, but cat rescue twitter appears to be more... catlike in its organizational structure.)
posted by restless_nomad at 10:23 AM on November 30, 2022 [13 favorites]
They're all just posts. Posts. Posts posts posts. Shit, now "posts" sounds weird.
TEETH, TEETH, TEETH!
posted by neuron at 10:35 AM on November 30, 2022
TEETH, TEETH, TEETH!
posted by neuron at 10:35 AM on November 30, 2022
If people are concerned that using Mastodon is hard, then I have news for you... using MetaFilter from a new person's perspective is (at least) equally hard. I have been here for over 20 years and still find much of the site culture confusing, the navigation a cluttered mess, the wiki is on a different server, etc, etc. And we need to grow the user base.
Oh, it's easy, you just click to this subsite which is a different color and has different navigation and scan to find a link or button to post (seriously, why is new question/post in the top of the navigation?) ... and then learn some basic HTML to make a link, and, and... then stuff happens. And in some cases the mefi hall monitors (someone used that term above for Mastodon people who try to explain the culture) come in and tell you your post sucks, and your favorite band sucks, or your favorite new decentralized social media sucks.
Granted MeFi seems to have started making more of an effort to be more welcoming, but my experience with Mastodon has been great when it comes to nice people. I explain it as IRC meets old school blogging.
It is only easy for us on MetaFilter because many of us have been here for decades and the changes/adaptation is gradual. I have been on Mastodon since 2018, and have migrated instances 3 times (mastodon.social > hackers.town > my own instance > chinwag.org). And each time I did, my follows and followers were migrated and my bookmarks and block lists and my mutes, etc all migrated. I have joined mefi.social and vermont.masto.host to communicate specifically with those communities -- even though I can cross community with them if I wish.
If anyone is interested in joining Mastodon and aren't sure which server to join, I suggest https://mefi.social where you will know almost everyone -- my profile here has my profile there. If you have specific questions, feel free to MeMail me.
posted by terrapin at 11:07 AM on November 30, 2022 [20 favorites]
Oh, it's easy, you just click to this subsite which is a different color and has different navigation and scan to find a link or button to post (seriously, why is new question/post in the top of the navigation?) ... and then learn some basic HTML to make a link, and, and... then stuff happens. And in some cases the mefi hall monitors (someone used that term above for Mastodon people who try to explain the culture) come in and tell you your post sucks, and your favorite band sucks, or your favorite new decentralized social media sucks.
Granted MeFi seems to have started making more of an effort to be more welcoming, but my experience with Mastodon has been great when it comes to nice people. I explain it as IRC meets old school blogging.
It is only easy for us on MetaFilter because many of us have been here for decades and the changes/adaptation is gradual. I have been on Mastodon since 2018, and have migrated instances 3 times (mastodon.social > hackers.town > my own instance > chinwag.org). And each time I did, my follows and followers were migrated and my bookmarks and block lists and my mutes, etc all migrated. I have joined mefi.social and vermont.masto.host to communicate specifically with those communities -- even though I can cross community with them if I wish.
If anyone is interested in joining Mastodon and aren't sure which server to join, I suggest https://mefi.social where you will know almost everyone -- my profile here has my profile there. If you have specific questions, feel free to MeMail me.
posted by terrapin at 11:07 AM on November 30, 2022 [20 favorites]
When you choose a place to live, you think about your local environment, your immediate neighbors, things like that. This is your "instance" and will dictate what you see on your local timeline.
[ . . . ] you can very easily meet up with (follow) people in other neighborhoods or cities.
See, that's the thing - the "other neighborhoods or cities" part - that I think is the Mastodon/other social media stumbling block for a lot of non-tech, non-minority folks. (I've never had a Twitter account, but I did spend a lot of time browsing and reading Twitter posts & threads from oh, '16 til about '20. (Now I can't get far without a pop-up blocking me unless I sign up.)) Of course you CAN carefully curate and prune stuff on Twitter, but I bet a lot of people didn't, or didn't do much of that, so mostly they just got the firehose of whatever hashtags and posts were hot worldwide at any given moment. Obviously this had some drawbacks, but that's I think also how a lot of journalists found it useful - tag your Tweet #Trumpeached, and it gets seen by millions, and your Vox.com article gets read.
Browsing Mastodon without an account, it sure looks like you'll only see the hot general stuff if your local instance allows it. Otherwise you have to make an effort to follow certain people. So it's not actually all that "easy" to visit other neighborhoods, because you're used to just opening up Twitter and getting fed cute cat videos because the algorithm noticed that you like them. Mastodon doesn't seem to do that, at least not universally.
Clearly the fact that pruning and curating already happens is a feature not a bug for many folks, but I do suspect that's the root of people going, "OK, I'm signed up for Mastodon, now what?" They're not used to really having to put in much effort to visit other places.
posted by soundguy99 at 11:15 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
[ . . . ] you can very easily meet up with (follow) people in other neighborhoods or cities.
See, that's the thing - the "other neighborhoods or cities" part - that I think is the Mastodon/other social media stumbling block for a lot of non-tech, non-minority folks. (I've never had a Twitter account, but I did spend a lot of time browsing and reading Twitter posts & threads from oh, '16 til about '20. (Now I can't get far without a pop-up blocking me unless I sign up.)) Of course you CAN carefully curate and prune stuff on Twitter, but I bet a lot of people didn't, or didn't do much of that, so mostly they just got the firehose of whatever hashtags and posts were hot worldwide at any given moment. Obviously this had some drawbacks, but that's I think also how a lot of journalists found it useful - tag your Tweet #Trumpeached, and it gets seen by millions, and your Vox.com article gets read.
Browsing Mastodon without an account, it sure looks like you'll only see the hot general stuff if your local instance allows it. Otherwise you have to make an effort to follow certain people. So it's not actually all that "easy" to visit other neighborhoods, because you're used to just opening up Twitter and getting fed cute cat videos because the algorithm noticed that you like them. Mastodon doesn't seem to do that, at least not universally.
Clearly the fact that pruning and curating already happens is a feature not a bug for many folks, but I do suspect that's the root of people going, "OK, I'm signed up for Mastodon, now what?" They're not used to really having to put in much effort to visit other places.
posted by soundguy99 at 11:15 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
If people are concerned that using Mastodon is hard, then I have news for you... using MetaFilter from a new person's perspective is (at least) equally hard.
Did anyone claim otherwise? I feel like that's a fairly well-acknowledged 'failing' of metafilter (which, for all the growth targets right now, isn't trying to be a replacement for one of the most popular Web services ever, or being pushed as such). Nobody is in this thread arguing that mefi is easy.
But you know, English is really hard too, so um, check mate, nerds?
posted by Dysk at 11:28 AM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
Did anyone claim otherwise? I feel like that's a fairly well-acknowledged 'failing' of metafilter (which, for all the growth targets right now, isn't trying to be a replacement for one of the most popular Web services ever, or being pushed as such). Nobody is in this thread arguing that mefi is easy.
But you know, English is really hard too, so um, check mate, nerds?
posted by Dysk at 11:28 AM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
The problem is less that Mastodon is hard and more that most sites that are basically doing the same thing as Mastodon are easy. I mean, you can write with a manual typewriter if you want, or a crayon, or a severed shark's tooth dipped in manta blood, but most people are just gonna open Word.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 11:52 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by kittens for breakfast at 11:52 AM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
Post seems suspiciously like a Potemkin village. And given its owners, that's suspicous.
Call me cynical, but if Andreessen Horowitz built an actual hotel and started welcoming everyone in through its spit-shined lobby and well-appointed front desk, I'd be looking for the floor drains and blood sluices. You just know there is nothing good that's going to happen in the back rooms of that place. Best case, maybe they're just going to videotape you wanking in the shower and sell it, maybe steal a kidney if you have too many drinks at the bar. Worst case, we all end up voting the way the brain parasites tell us to, and Marc Andreessen becomes God Emperor of America.
Take the free shit from the venture capitalists if you must, but for the love of god, keep your eyes on the exits.
More seriously: if either Post or Hive was serious about being "the next Twitter", they'd be going around and hiring up as many former Twitter moderators and compliance people as they could, and I haven't heard of that happening.
Because it's moderation and governance that are the real hard parts. User onboarding flows, UX stuff like "toot" vs "post", native apps vs. mobile web... those are all solved problems, plus or minus time and money. You can literally buy books on designing user onboarding flows. You can cookbook it.
There's no cookbook for content moderation at scale. Twitter seemed to be making an honest effort at it, and still kinda sucked on an average day. Facebook has let actual genocide be coordinated on its platform, despite having a corporate budget the size of a small country's GDP.
It's beyond irresponsible for outfits like Hive or Post to just create a slick lil' app and toss it out there, without having thought through moderation or controls--and it doesn't look like they have, at all.*
* FWIW, I share this side-eye with the admins of bigger Mastodon instances, who have seemingly allowed signups far in excess of what I believe is their ability to moderate them, and seem to be pushing towards becoming 'too big to fail' systemic risks to the network. But at least there's a mechanism there for cutting them out when they become cesspools, and for users to move around; it'll just be real messy.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:55 AM on November 30, 2022 [11 favorites]
Call me cynical, but if Andreessen Horowitz built an actual hotel and started welcoming everyone in through its spit-shined lobby and well-appointed front desk, I'd be looking for the floor drains and blood sluices. You just know there is nothing good that's going to happen in the back rooms of that place. Best case, maybe they're just going to videotape you wanking in the shower and sell it, maybe steal a kidney if you have too many drinks at the bar. Worst case, we all end up voting the way the brain parasites tell us to, and Marc Andreessen becomes God Emperor of America.
Take the free shit from the venture capitalists if you must, but for the love of god, keep your eyes on the exits.
More seriously: if either Post or Hive was serious about being "the next Twitter", they'd be going around and hiring up as many former Twitter moderators and compliance people as they could, and I haven't heard of that happening.
Because it's moderation and governance that are the real hard parts. User onboarding flows, UX stuff like "toot" vs "post", native apps vs. mobile web... those are all solved problems, plus or minus time and money. You can literally buy books on designing user onboarding flows. You can cookbook it.
There's no cookbook for content moderation at scale. Twitter seemed to be making an honest effort at it, and still kinda sucked on an average day. Facebook has let actual genocide be coordinated on its platform, despite having a corporate budget the size of a small country's GDP.
It's beyond irresponsible for outfits like Hive or Post to just create a slick lil' app and toss it out there, without having thought through moderation or controls--and it doesn't look like they have, at all.*
* FWIW, I share this side-eye with the admins of bigger Mastodon instances, who have seemingly allowed signups far in excess of what I believe is their ability to moderate them, and seem to be pushing towards becoming 'too big to fail' systemic risks to the network. But at least there's a mechanism there for cutting them out when they become cesspools, and for users to move around; it'll just be real messy.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:55 AM on November 30, 2022 [11 favorites]
but most people are just gonna open Word.
Yeah, well, a typewriter's ribbons sure are easier to figure out! Bam, Microsoft Word 2013 just got told
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 12:07 PM on November 30, 2022
Yeah, well, a typewriter's ribbons sure are easier to figure out! Bam, Microsoft Word 2013 just got told
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 12:07 PM on November 30, 2022
I find this odd. Twitter was confusing and hard to understand in the early years and there were the same issues about Where is the content? until you followed enough people and figured it out. I know many people who tried it, didn't understand the appeal, and left. There are a ton of those people! That's why Twitter at its peak was still a minority platform. But beyond that, I think many of Twitter's power users forget the first few days of fumbling.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:14 PM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:14 PM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
more than a few whiffs of "God, all these Twitter refugees, ugh," in the big feeds
Did you ever stop to think about why some people are reacting that way? Mastodon has a culture which doesn't prioritize one group of people over another, or put corporations over individuals, unlike Twitter. Quite a few people joined Mastodon because they strongly disliked Twitter's aggressive culture and poor moderation and felt unsafe there, and that's pre-Elon. There's a real fear that Twitter-style discourse, values and behaviour is going to take over Mastodon. Masto in general is much more left-leaning, gentle, and quirky than Twitter. The instance style set-up means that there are pockets of safe little online havens for people of all types. Instance admins and moderators aren't paid. Large influxes of new people means more work from admins and mods, especially if even a small percentage of those new users are used to spewing hate everywhere and attacking each other. And keep in mind that Mastodon's user count went from around 300,000 to around 2,600,000 since Elon Musk bought Twitter. That is a massive change.
posted by Stoof at 12:23 PM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
Did you ever stop to think about why some people are reacting that way? Mastodon has a culture which doesn't prioritize one group of people over another, or put corporations over individuals, unlike Twitter. Quite a few people joined Mastodon because they strongly disliked Twitter's aggressive culture and poor moderation and felt unsafe there, and that's pre-Elon. There's a real fear that Twitter-style discourse, values and behaviour is going to take over Mastodon. Masto in general is much more left-leaning, gentle, and quirky than Twitter. The instance style set-up means that there are pockets of safe little online havens for people of all types. Instance admins and moderators aren't paid. Large influxes of new people means more work from admins and mods, especially if even a small percentage of those new users are used to spewing hate everywhere and attacking each other. And keep in mind that Mastodon's user count went from around 300,000 to around 2,600,000 since Elon Musk bought Twitter. That is a massive change.
posted by Stoof at 12:23 PM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
FWIW, I am not seeing a ton of "ugh Twitter people" on my Mastodon feed(s), but I think this post by @baldur@toot.cafe is representative of the zeitgeist among the folks I follow:
From their perspective, it would be as though Reddit suddenly closed down and a whole bunch of Redditors joined Metafilter. On one hand, that's cool! New people to talk to! But on the other hand, they're not interested in turning their place into something more like the places they intentionally left, or had no interest in joining in the first place.
Also: hearing the Twitterati complain about Mastodon makes me smile a bit. Twitter was the butt of jokes for years, between its laughable instability, poor architecture, borrowed-from-SMS character limits, complete lack of nice-to-have features (no threading, no retweets, no images, no URL shortening -- these were all emergent behaviors or 3rd party services at first), and its general association with self-absorbed people who "thought everyone cared about what they were eating for lunch". It did not emerge fully-formed as some respectable place to go for breaking news coverage, or even as a place that an average or even Moderately Online person would go.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:01 PM on November 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
The fediverse doesn’t need to win over anything else. It does not need to challenge, threaten, or dominate any other community or service. All it needs to do is serve its existing members and be a good place for new people to join. Becoming a safer space is much more likely to contribute to its longevity than ‘winning’ mass adoption from ex-Twitter users in the short term.I think it's fair to say that many longtime users believe that the winning move is not to play, or at least not to change how they've been playing all along.
From their perspective, it would be as though Reddit suddenly closed down and a whole bunch of Redditors joined Metafilter. On one hand, that's cool! New people to talk to! But on the other hand, they're not interested in turning their place into something more like the places they intentionally left, or had no interest in joining in the first place.
Also: hearing the Twitterati complain about Mastodon makes me smile a bit. Twitter was the butt of jokes for years, between its laughable instability, poor architecture, borrowed-from-SMS character limits, complete lack of nice-to-have features (no threading, no retweets, no images, no URL shortening -- these were all emergent behaviors or 3rd party services at first), and its general association with self-absorbed people who "thought everyone cared about what they were eating for lunch". It did not emerge fully-formed as some respectable place to go for breaking news coverage, or even as a place that an average or even Moderately Online person would go.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:01 PM on November 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
As far as I can tell, Mastodon is IRC.
I've been fairly tech adjacent since C:\Install_Jacen.exe but mastodon does not sound inherently user friendly. And the more Mastidoers talk about the service, the less I understand. The less I want to understand. I am pretty sure the service isn't for me, but there's a disconnect somewhere.
I'm back to thinking Mastodon is a fancy IRC/Reddit hybrid. I didn't like IRC much and I already reddit.
Wait, does mastodon offer dating services? I like intelligent women so that actually might be a use case for the service.
posted by Jacen at 1:26 PM on November 30, 2022
I've been fairly tech adjacent since C:\Install_Jacen.exe but mastodon does not sound inherently user friendly. And the more Mastidoers talk about the service, the less I understand. The less I want to understand. I am pretty sure the service isn't for me, but there's a disconnect somewhere.
I'm back to thinking Mastodon is a fancy IRC/Reddit hybrid. I didn't like IRC much and I already reddit.
Wait, does mastodon offer dating services? I like intelligent women so that actually might be a use case for the service.
posted by Jacen at 1:26 PM on November 30, 2022
Because it was a giant thing that a lot of people were on (not everyone; I know a lot of people who aren't on Twitter) and a lot of institutions also on, Twitter became a big thing. But the people who were on it used it for what they wanted and developed ways of using it that were suitable to their personal/community needs. A lot of people used it professionally; a lot of people used it for breaking news; a lot of people used it for communicating with RL or online social circles.
I'm surprised that people think there will be a one-size-fits-all service springing up, particularly full-featured, that will fill all the roles Twitter filled for a lot of people, never mind how many people are downright mad that it's not happening or that a service some people like (Mastodon is the one that gets this here but I've seen this same tendency about other services in other communities, especially ones where people are trying to replace Facebook) doesn't fill all the needs/desires other people have.
I've said elsewhere that Twitter's ongoing collapse reminded me a lot of livejournal. Livejournal is still there, but a lot of people have moved elsewhere (Dreamwidth, Tumblr, Twitter, Pillowfort, various discords, etc.). Communities have fragmented, people have fallen out of touch. It's a source of grief for people I know even now and LJ started falling apart fifteen years ago.
It would be really cool if everybody we wanted to interact with went to one service but it's not going to happen. Anger is a part of that grief but maybe being mad at people who have found a service they like (Mastodon or Post or Cohost or whatever) that doesn't suit your needs isn't a great way to deal with that grief.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 1:31 PM on November 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
I'm surprised that people think there will be a one-size-fits-all service springing up, particularly full-featured, that will fill all the roles Twitter filled for a lot of people, never mind how many people are downright mad that it's not happening or that a service some people like (Mastodon is the one that gets this here but I've seen this same tendency about other services in other communities, especially ones where people are trying to replace Facebook) doesn't fill all the needs/desires other people have.
I've said elsewhere that Twitter's ongoing collapse reminded me a lot of livejournal. Livejournal is still there, but a lot of people have moved elsewhere (Dreamwidth, Tumblr, Twitter, Pillowfort, various discords, etc.). Communities have fragmented, people have fallen out of touch. It's a source of grief for people I know even now and LJ started falling apart fifteen years ago.
It would be really cool if everybody we wanted to interact with went to one service but it's not going to happen. Anger is a part of that grief but maybe being mad at people who have found a service they like (Mastodon or Post or Cohost or whatever) that doesn't suit your needs isn't a great way to deal with that grief.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 1:31 PM on November 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
It would be really cool if everybody we wanted to interact with went to one service
This is a nightmare. I'm just so tired. Of centralized big debates about what is important, what can be said, how it can be said, what needs to be heard.
If these new things can stay small then bless them for what they are.
The world doesn't need a global chatroom operated out of the US and regulated by the EU. If you want one and you're on it good for you. But if my local and national government, civil society and journalism culture is on it or defined by it, then bad for me.
The open web, and to a different extent the fediverse and decentralization have their problems, but they also have advantages that are unique.
The attitudes displayed here of embracing a civil society built and operated by American big tech grosses me out.
posted by Wood at 2:02 PM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
This is a nightmare. I'm just so tired. Of centralized big debates about what is important, what can be said, how it can be said, what needs to be heard.
If these new things can stay small then bless them for what they are.
The world doesn't need a global chatroom operated out of the US and regulated by the EU. If you want one and you're on it good for you. But if my local and national government, civil society and journalism culture is on it or defined by it, then bad for me.
The open web, and to a different extent the fediverse and decentralization have their problems, but they also have advantages that are unique.
The attitudes displayed here of embracing a civil society built and operated by American big tech grosses me out.
posted by Wood at 2:02 PM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
The thing: if there is one place you log in to talk to everyone, then the one group that controls that place controls how everyone talks. That's straight up bullshit. No system operator can be omnibenevolent because vastly different groups of people have vastly different needs plus the actual occurence that People With Guns (and National Security Letters) will force the system operator to do things against the best interest of the users of the system. Plus capitalism, plus advertising, plus racist/fascist/narcissistic system operators, etc etc etc.
It sucks that learning something new, e.g. federation, is discomforting. It's for the best, though. I believe we can all figure it out.
posted by seanmpuckett at 2:13 PM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
It sucks that learning something new, e.g. federation, is discomforting. It's for the best, though. I believe we can all figure it out.
posted by seanmpuckett at 2:13 PM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
Did you ever stop to think about why some people are reacting that way?
Yes? I assumed that it was obvious that an influx of stressy, overwhelmed, crabby people showing up on your front door trying to figure out how things work here would be at least mildly irritating and obnoxious. Especially when they're all mourning the old way they had before a terrible thing happened and they had to leave, which is never really the state I personally want to meet new people in.
I was making an explicit argument for tolerating the messiness, empathizing with the distress of moving, and helping newcomers integrate into new services without being a dick about the annoyance (or at least ignoring them aggressively while they acclimate) rather than bitching about it or trying to drive them off. Bear in mind I was also talking about the response to twitter refugees on Tumblr, which has its own relationship with Twitter that is quite different from Mastodon's--as well as its own barriers to joining and incomprehensible site norms.
My point is that it's worth viewing influxes of messy, stressed, mourning people at their messiest and their crankiest and most confused as potential future community resources rather than as current community annoyances, in much the same way as I view literal refugees as potential future resources. People do their best when you invest some patience into them when they're struggling. If they stick around as they acclimate, a larger functioning community pouring attention and dialogue and investment into a space grows the collective resources of everybody.
posted by sciatrix at 2:14 PM on November 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
Yes? I assumed that it was obvious that an influx of stressy, overwhelmed, crabby people showing up on your front door trying to figure out how things work here would be at least mildly irritating and obnoxious. Especially when they're all mourning the old way they had before a terrible thing happened and they had to leave, which is never really the state I personally want to meet new people in.
I was making an explicit argument for tolerating the messiness, empathizing with the distress of moving, and helping newcomers integrate into new services without being a dick about the annoyance (or at least ignoring them aggressively while they acclimate) rather than bitching about it or trying to drive them off. Bear in mind I was also talking about the response to twitter refugees on Tumblr, which has its own relationship with Twitter that is quite different from Mastodon's--as well as its own barriers to joining and incomprehensible site norms.
My point is that it's worth viewing influxes of messy, stressed, mourning people at their messiest and their crankiest and most confused as potential future community resources rather than as current community annoyances, in much the same way as I view literal refugees as potential future resources. People do their best when you invest some patience into them when they're struggling. If they stick around as they acclimate, a larger functioning community pouring attention and dialogue and investment into a space grows the collective resources of everybody.
posted by sciatrix at 2:14 PM on November 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
Hive is reported to be riddled with security holes.
posted by credulous at 2:33 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by credulous at 2:33 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
It sucks that learning something new, e.g. federation, is discomforting. It's for the best, though. I believe we can all figure it out.
I consider myself to be pretty technologically optimistic, but I don't think that decentralization protocols will ever serve as effective replacements for sites like Twitter. And that's OK! I prefer my Internet heterogeneous to begin with. But I think that people who see Twitter's potential collapse as an opportunity for a more fundamentally decentralized web to emerge aren't accurately diagnosing the challenges to create an environment like Twitter in the first place.
To start: Metcalfe's Law, which states that the value of a given network is exponentially proportional to the number of people using it, remains in effect. People, I suspect, underestimate how much of social media's traffic was generated by social media, rather than a rerouting of traffic that already existed on the World Wide Web. The decentralized Internet existed after social media emerged, after all—it's just that the size of social media positively dwarfed any audience that came before it. People freaked out when MySpace hit 50 million users, because before MySpace it was considered astonishing that sites like Gaia Online had hit 10 million posts, let alone users. And 50 million would be considered minuscule today, at least by corporate social networking standards.
The question is whether or not a decentralized protocol will enable a potential conglomerate community larger than the kind of communities that existed pre-Twitter. And I'm not sure that the answer is yes. Social media is not the same as email or even RSS: even when RSS was at its most social, it effectively served as a series of small community hubs. Email, of course, is made up of even smaller "hubs." And decentralized protocols work well for that—because they're not dealing with the most challenging part of building for social media, which is the architecture needed to handle high-volume usage. (Leaving user moderation aside, which is a whole nother can of worms.)
The challenge is, the more accessible you want any one user to be to any other user, the more demanding your technical requirement will be. The amount of requests a social network has to make in order to generate even a relatively small feed of users is enormous compared to the requests RSS feeds make of individual sites—and even so, RSS got to be enough of a problem for some sites that feeds still occasionally throttle traffic to them. Decentralizing hypothetically helps with this, but it presents two serious challenges for any site that deals with scale:
You can say that that doesn't matter, or that having sites as large as Twitter is fundamentally bad for society or the web, or that it's better to have more limited platforms that communicate with each other to begin with. And I wouldn't necessarily disagree! But if that's the case, then there's no sense thinking of Mastodon as an "alternative" to Twitter. Because now you're talking about decentralization in the sense that the World Wide Web is already decentralized: if the point is to have a bunch of isolated individual communities, perhaps with a way of tracking and aggravating data between them, you've just reinvented forums, blogs, and RSS. You've added a new form factor into the mix, but the challenges you're facing are the same—both the technical ones that arise when you try to eat your cake and have it too, and the social ones that arise from Metcalfe's Law.
After all, sites like Twitter and Reddit and Facebook already function more like decentralized sets of networks as-is. That's how social networking works: you're given a centralized medium that allows you to create your own private little hub. That metaphor falls flat on a number of levels—including, again, user moderation and community management—but the place where it matters is that, paradoxically, centralization helps those "decentralized" networks form, by providing a unified user experience in ways that ease the frictions already inherent to social networking as a function.
That's not necessarily a bug. As cortex said, in many ways that can be a feature. And I love seeing open standards emerge, just as I enjoy seeing new kinds of community medium develop. As with chaos theory, even small changes to a social platform can result in drastically different outcomes.
But I think it's important to keep track of the many ways in which centralization provides advantages both to the people who offer services like this and to the people who use those services to begin with. And when it comes to generating realistic expectations about what comes next, nobody benefits from ignoring the elephant in the room. I don't think that what we've seen are the only possible options: I think it's possible for us to develop much better ways of forming communities online. But we are also going to develop far worse ones, and those will largely develop the way any opportunistic enterprise does: by identifying the structureless voids in which people want something nonexistent, and seizing the opportunity to build something big and powerful and ultimately destructive. Our only recourse is to think about the same opennesses, the same points of failure, and devise ways to build that space out more communally, before a would-be tyrant seizes that ground first. If the goal is just for people who already use alternatives to be happy, then nothing needs to change—hell, I bet some folks still use Diaspora, too. But if the goal is to imagine something better, merely hoping for the dissatisfaction to gradually dissolve is—and I'd love to be wrong about this—futile. The dissatisfaction is there for a reason. And there's a reason why Twitter, the brainchild of the folks who started off building Blogger (with RSS and email integrations! open architecture!), not only centralized and walled itself off but increased how true that was over time. (Twitter used to support RSS, and then it didn't. It went backwards. And the reasons for that were not just greed.)
Again, I'm not offering this up in some attempt to shit on Mastodon, or to be pessimistic about its future or its potential. I like it for what it is. I just think there are things that it isn't, and I suspect that it ultimately will not be Twitter's replacement. I'm skeptical of Post and Hive too, but the Internet will be content to muddle forward in chaos for a few years before a true successor comes along. That happened with social networks pre-Facebook, it happened with search engines pre-Google, and it will absolutely happen again.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 3:13 PM on November 30, 2022 [11 favorites]
I consider myself to be pretty technologically optimistic, but I don't think that decentralization protocols will ever serve as effective replacements for sites like Twitter. And that's OK! I prefer my Internet heterogeneous to begin with. But I think that people who see Twitter's potential collapse as an opportunity for a more fundamentally decentralized web to emerge aren't accurately diagnosing the challenges to create an environment like Twitter in the first place.
To start: Metcalfe's Law, which states that the value of a given network is exponentially proportional to the number of people using it, remains in effect. People, I suspect, underestimate how much of social media's traffic was generated by social media, rather than a rerouting of traffic that already existed on the World Wide Web. The decentralized Internet existed after social media emerged, after all—it's just that the size of social media positively dwarfed any audience that came before it. People freaked out when MySpace hit 50 million users, because before MySpace it was considered astonishing that sites like Gaia Online had hit 10 million posts, let alone users. And 50 million would be considered minuscule today, at least by corporate social networking standards.
The question is whether or not a decentralized protocol will enable a potential conglomerate community larger than the kind of communities that existed pre-Twitter. And I'm not sure that the answer is yes. Social media is not the same as email or even RSS: even when RSS was at its most social, it effectively served as a series of small community hubs. Email, of course, is made up of even smaller "hubs." And decentralized protocols work well for that—because they're not dealing with the most challenging part of building for social media, which is the architecture needed to handle high-volume usage. (Leaving user moderation aside, which is a whole nother can of worms.)
The challenge is, the more accessible you want any one user to be to any other user, the more demanding your technical requirement will be. The amount of requests a social network has to make in order to generate even a relatively small feed of users is enormous compared to the requests RSS feeds make of individual sites—and even so, RSS got to be enough of a problem for some sites that feeds still occasionally throttle traffic to them. Decentralizing hypothetically helps with this, but it presents two serious challenges for any site that deals with scale:
- First, there's the obvious fact that any server might function as a point of weakness. Any individual instance that runs into problems delivering data creates unreliability. And the fact that the whole system might not go down at once might even be worse than something like the Fail Whale. People are complaining a lot about how Twitter is currently failing to generate new results with its algorithmic post viewer; the less a user feels like they can trust what they're seeing, the less likely they are to use the service even when it's up.
- Second, the decentralized nature of the content means there's no good way to aggregate the data a user is loading—especially not in real time. Every website I know of that deals with a significant mass of users finds that a substantial amount of its technical effort going towards developing tricks of providing the content someone expect to see at rapid speeds. I'm not sure that's possible with a decentralized protocol, because no one server is going to have the control over all the data it expects to aggregate that it would need in order to produce performant results.
You can say that that doesn't matter, or that having sites as large as Twitter is fundamentally bad for society or the web, or that it's better to have more limited platforms that communicate with each other to begin with. And I wouldn't necessarily disagree! But if that's the case, then there's no sense thinking of Mastodon as an "alternative" to Twitter. Because now you're talking about decentralization in the sense that the World Wide Web is already decentralized: if the point is to have a bunch of isolated individual communities, perhaps with a way of tracking and aggravating data between them, you've just reinvented forums, blogs, and RSS. You've added a new form factor into the mix, but the challenges you're facing are the same—both the technical ones that arise when you try to eat your cake and have it too, and the social ones that arise from Metcalfe's Law.
After all, sites like Twitter and Reddit and Facebook already function more like decentralized sets of networks as-is. That's how social networking works: you're given a centralized medium that allows you to create your own private little hub. That metaphor falls flat on a number of levels—including, again, user moderation and community management—but the place where it matters is that, paradoxically, centralization helps those "decentralized" networks form, by providing a unified user experience in ways that ease the frictions already inherent to social networking as a function.
That's not necessarily a bug. As cortex said, in many ways that can be a feature. And I love seeing open standards emerge, just as I enjoy seeing new kinds of community medium develop. As with chaos theory, even small changes to a social platform can result in drastically different outcomes.
But I think it's important to keep track of the many ways in which centralization provides advantages both to the people who offer services like this and to the people who use those services to begin with. And when it comes to generating realistic expectations about what comes next, nobody benefits from ignoring the elephant in the room. I don't think that what we've seen are the only possible options: I think it's possible for us to develop much better ways of forming communities online. But we are also going to develop far worse ones, and those will largely develop the way any opportunistic enterprise does: by identifying the structureless voids in which people want something nonexistent, and seizing the opportunity to build something big and powerful and ultimately destructive. Our only recourse is to think about the same opennesses, the same points of failure, and devise ways to build that space out more communally, before a would-be tyrant seizes that ground first. If the goal is just for people who already use alternatives to be happy, then nothing needs to change—hell, I bet some folks still use Diaspora, too. But if the goal is to imagine something better, merely hoping for the dissatisfaction to gradually dissolve is—and I'd love to be wrong about this—futile. The dissatisfaction is there for a reason. And there's a reason why Twitter, the brainchild of the folks who started off building Blogger (with RSS and email integrations! open architecture!), not only centralized and walled itself off but increased how true that was over time. (Twitter used to support RSS, and then it didn't. It went backwards. And the reasons for that were not just greed.)
Again, I'm not offering this up in some attempt to shit on Mastodon, or to be pessimistic about its future or its potential. I like it for what it is. I just think there are things that it isn't, and I suspect that it ultimately will not be Twitter's replacement. I'm skeptical of Post and Hive too, but the Internet will be content to muddle forward in chaos for a few years before a true successor comes along. That happened with social networks pre-Facebook, it happened with search engines pre-Google, and it will absolutely happen again.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 3:13 PM on November 30, 2022 [11 favorites]
I signed up using my web browser on https://maston.social and then downloaded the app from the Google app store and logged in
This was my experience too. It really was easy! I couldn't pick an instance so I just went with the biggest one. I'm already familiar from livejournal, dreamwidth and tumblr with social media that doesn't automatically suggest people for you to follow though, so the fact that my original timeline was empty and I had to find things to put there didn't deter me.
The mefi.social experience was even easier - since I commented in the thread I got an invite. I was suggested people to follow and followed all of them. Some of them followed me back. I haven't posted anything yet bc I'm still figuring out what I want to use this for, since I already have tumblr for fandom stuff, dreamwidth/facebook for posting updates on RL stuff and this very site for keeping up with the news and commenting on news articles. I'll figure it out eventually, I guess.
But the timeline is good, I enjoy reading it. I didn't have to do anything special to create it. Once I opened it up on my phone and the phone automatically suggested an app for me to download and the app works great.
I don't want to be one of those "actually it's easy" people because I know that behind the appearance of ease, is my nearly 20 years of experience of signing up for web things that are a lot more complicated than this including like those times I did video editing, learned adobe indesign to make a zine, found other people's tumblr and livejournal custom skins and followed directions to customize my site, had a friend set up wordpress on the web domain they host for me and then did my own customizations there, etc etc etc not to mention I'm already on discord so "servers" isn't some big scary thing, and the years and years of commenting on metafilter which mean I've already put in my social time and I feel good about being on a mefi mastodon instance.
But the technical hurdles aren't the hard part of joining mastodon. The social hurdles - recreating whatever social graph you have on a new website - is the difficult part.
posted by subdee at 3:25 PM on November 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
This was my experience too. It really was easy! I couldn't pick an instance so I just went with the biggest one. I'm already familiar from livejournal, dreamwidth and tumblr with social media that doesn't automatically suggest people for you to follow though, so the fact that my original timeline was empty and I had to find things to put there didn't deter me.
The mefi.social experience was even easier - since I commented in the thread I got an invite. I was suggested people to follow and followed all of them. Some of them followed me back. I haven't posted anything yet bc I'm still figuring out what I want to use this for, since I already have tumblr for fandom stuff, dreamwidth/facebook for posting updates on RL stuff and this very site for keeping up with the news and commenting on news articles. I'll figure it out eventually, I guess.
But the timeline is good, I enjoy reading it. I didn't have to do anything special to create it. Once I opened it up on my phone and the phone automatically suggested an app for me to download and the app works great.
I don't want to be one of those "actually it's easy" people because I know that behind the appearance of ease, is my nearly 20 years of experience of signing up for web things that are a lot more complicated than this including like those times I did video editing, learned adobe indesign to make a zine, found other people's tumblr and livejournal custom skins and followed directions to customize my site, had a friend set up wordpress on the web domain they host for me and then did my own customizations there, etc etc etc not to mention I'm already on discord so "servers" isn't some big scary thing, and the years and years of commenting on metafilter which mean I've already put in my social time and I feel good about being on a mefi mastodon instance.
But the technical hurdles aren't the hard part of joining mastodon. The social hurdles - recreating whatever social graph you have on a new website - is the difficult part.
posted by subdee at 3:25 PM on November 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
I do think, if you weren't around for the early web, mastodon can seem daunting. Tumblr seems daunting to people used to tiktok, because, again, it's doesn't didn't suggest people for you to follow so you had to make your own timeline, yourself. AO3 seems daunting to people used to WattPad because you have to wait for an invite and then there's no "dashboard" view so you have to go to the specific pages for things you want to see, and use the search function with search filters to find the results you want.
But in the grand scheme of web things, we complain about algorithmic filtering all the time and social media companies putting things on your timeline for their own obscure, ad-selling reasons and undermining democracy while they're at it. This is an example of what a platform designed not to do that could look like. From my perspective it still has a ton of web 2.0 conveniences (AO3, for instance, does not have an app).
posted by subdee at 3:31 PM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
But in the grand scheme of web things, we complain about algorithmic filtering all the time and social media companies putting things on your timeline for their own obscure, ad-selling reasons and undermining democracy while they're at it. This is an example of what a platform designed not to do that could look like. From my perspective it still has a ton of web 2.0 conveniences (AO3, for instance, does not have an app).
posted by subdee at 3:31 PM on November 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
Wow, look at all the traffic in this thread. Reminds me of the old days, it does.
Yeah it sounds really weird in 2022 to be hearing people say "use the web site, not the app on your phone"
It doesn't to me. Web sites have proven to be a durable technology, but wow apps have not. All the apps that I used just a few years ago either have a big corp behind them or have vanished from the app stores. Mobile apps have proven themselves to be, for the most part, disposable software. Of course, as I have learned very well lately, web sites vanish every day, but they tend to last longer than the standard app.
>Why? They make no money off of you. You’re still acting like you’re a product to be sold, and should be valued as such.
I'm loving the ass backwards logic of this.
But it isn't, really? Those of us who are using and enjoying Mastodon don't need to evangelize. A good number of people who were on Twitter, including George Takei and foone and Chad Loder (who was banned from Twitter for antifa sympathy, it seems, as well as a number of leftist journalists!), and following them is fine. There is a sense that, even if it never becomes as big as Twitter, Mastodon is still fine being what it is.
So far what I've learned from this thread is that Mastodon is horrific to use (and especially sign up for) in the mode that must people use social media (mobile app) and that the major main instance allows transphobia, while it is all but impossible to meaningfully participate in the "fediverse" without also accepting transphobia.
Hold on now, I have never seen transphobia on Mastodon. In fact, it's a lot easier to avoid it, because you don't have posts from people you don't follow thrust into your timeline. If you follow the public trending feature I guess you might encounter some, but it hasn't happened to me. I'm sure this may come off as "It hasn't happened to me so it must not exist," but I really want to see examples of this. It's completely at odds with my experience with it, on any of the four servers I've been on. Meanwhile Twitter regularly has trending hashtags that put odious things into that terrible "What's Happening" sidebar, that sidebar that just doesn't exist on Mastodon.
Now, lest I seem like I'm over lauditory of Mastodon, I feel like I should mention a couple of caveats. Mastodon is open source, meaning anyone can change it. It's (relatively) easy to change instances now because instances talk to each other behind the scenes to manage the transfer of followers, but it seems like it's only a matter of time before some instance engages in user capture, purposely breaking the transfer feature to keep people on their server or being dicks in other ways.
And one of the best bits of the conversation was learning that Cohost has zero intention of getting very big.
That is going to limit their reach then. Twitter is big and became the internet's town square because people all the world use it, and that enabled it to hit critical mass. Bigness is kind of the point of social media, it's really why anyone is still sticking with Twitter.
An extreme [WHY NOT USE THE APP?] loathing for having [WE USE COOKIES!] my interaction with anything [PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR AD BLOCKER] interrupted by intrusive [DO YOU WANT TO JOIN OUR MAILING LIST?] popups has made me increasingly [HERE'S SOMETHING ELSE YOU MIGHT LIKE!] reluctant to find out if a site [STILL NO ON THE MAILING LIST?] works in a mobile browser in the [HEY DON'T GO!] first place.
That is true of many big websites and I HATE that, but it isn't of Mastodon. Mastodon has none of these problems.
Mastodon is more like going to a club meeting. Fun but a limited circle of stuff. Less chance of random cool things.
It depends on who you follow. foone is on Mastodon now, for instance. It feels like work could usefully be done listing interesting people on the fediverse to follow, one problem with Mastodon is that discoverability is worse. But there's also no algorithm. Those two things could be related.
Masto isn't one, yes, but web browsers is basically the reason why the janitorial staff at work and the seniors in my family ask for my help because the lack of digital literacy meant their phones are choked with browser spam baits and alerts.
Lack of digital literacy is also why their phones get clogged with badly-written apps that slow their devices down and are overloaded with ads. I don't think apps are the solution to obnoxious technology, in fact they have the power to be much more obnoxious, which is why Apple has to be so draconian in curating their App Store.
posted by JHarris at 5:06 PM on November 30, 2022 [11 favorites]
Yeah it sounds really weird in 2022 to be hearing people say "use the web site, not the app on your phone"
It doesn't to me. Web sites have proven to be a durable technology, but wow apps have not. All the apps that I used just a few years ago either have a big corp behind them or have vanished from the app stores. Mobile apps have proven themselves to be, for the most part, disposable software. Of course, as I have learned very well lately, web sites vanish every day, but they tend to last longer than the standard app.
>Why? They make no money off of you. You’re still acting like you’re a product to be sold, and should be valued as such.
I'm loving the ass backwards logic of this.
But it isn't, really? Those of us who are using and enjoying Mastodon don't need to evangelize. A good number of people who were on Twitter, including George Takei and foone and Chad Loder (who was banned from Twitter for antifa sympathy, it seems, as well as a number of leftist journalists!), and following them is fine. There is a sense that, even if it never becomes as big as Twitter, Mastodon is still fine being what it is.
So far what I've learned from this thread is that Mastodon is horrific to use (and especially sign up for) in the mode that must people use social media (mobile app) and that the major main instance allows transphobia, while it is all but impossible to meaningfully participate in the "fediverse" without also accepting transphobia.
Hold on now, I have never seen transphobia on Mastodon. In fact, it's a lot easier to avoid it, because you don't have posts from people you don't follow thrust into your timeline. If you follow the public trending feature I guess you might encounter some, but it hasn't happened to me. I'm sure this may come off as "It hasn't happened to me so it must not exist," but I really want to see examples of this. It's completely at odds with my experience with it, on any of the four servers I've been on. Meanwhile Twitter regularly has trending hashtags that put odious things into that terrible "What's Happening" sidebar, that sidebar that just doesn't exist on Mastodon.
Now, lest I seem like I'm over lauditory of Mastodon, I feel like I should mention a couple of caveats. Mastodon is open source, meaning anyone can change it. It's (relatively) easy to change instances now because instances talk to each other behind the scenes to manage the transfer of followers, but it seems like it's only a matter of time before some instance engages in user capture, purposely breaking the transfer feature to keep people on their server or being dicks in other ways.
And one of the best bits of the conversation was learning that Cohost has zero intention of getting very big.
That is going to limit their reach then. Twitter is big and became the internet's town square because people all the world use it, and that enabled it to hit critical mass. Bigness is kind of the point of social media, it's really why anyone is still sticking with Twitter.
An extreme [WHY NOT USE THE APP?] loathing for having [WE USE COOKIES!] my interaction with anything [PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR AD BLOCKER] interrupted by intrusive [DO YOU WANT TO JOIN OUR MAILING LIST?] popups has made me increasingly [HERE'S SOMETHING ELSE YOU MIGHT LIKE!] reluctant to find out if a site [STILL NO ON THE MAILING LIST?] works in a mobile browser in the [HEY DON'T GO!] first place.
That is true of many big websites and I HATE that, but it isn't of Mastodon. Mastodon has none of these problems.
Mastodon is more like going to a club meeting. Fun but a limited circle of stuff. Less chance of random cool things.
It depends on who you follow. foone is on Mastodon now, for instance. It feels like work could usefully be done listing interesting people on the fediverse to follow, one problem with Mastodon is that discoverability is worse. But there's also no algorithm. Those two things could be related.
Masto isn't one, yes, but web browsers is basically the reason why the janitorial staff at work and the seniors in my family ask for my help because the lack of digital literacy meant their phones are choked with browser spam baits and alerts.
Lack of digital literacy is also why their phones get clogged with badly-written apps that slow their devices down and are overloaded with ads. I don't think apps are the solution to obnoxious technology, in fact they have the power to be much more obnoxious, which is why Apple has to be so draconian in curating their App Store.
posted by JHarris at 5:06 PM on November 30, 2022 [11 favorites]
That is going to limit their reach then
Well, yes. That's rather the point. You can't have huge reach without huge resources. But it's totally possible to have a pleasant, healthy, sustainable community without huge reach. It won't be Twitter, because it's not supposed to be Twitter. Not everything needs to be As Big As Possible - there are many, many uses of Twitter that do not require infinite reach, and smaller sites giving people a place for some of those is a good thing.
posted by restless_nomad at 5:44 PM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
Well, yes. That's rather the point. You can't have huge reach without huge resources. But it's totally possible to have a pleasant, healthy, sustainable community without huge reach. It won't be Twitter, because it's not supposed to be Twitter. Not everything needs to be As Big As Possible - there are many, many uses of Twitter that do not require infinite reach, and smaller sites giving people a place for some of those is a good thing.
posted by restless_nomad at 5:44 PM on November 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
(I really do sympathize with the difficulties of losing a large global communication platform, but I think a lot of the human costs - particularly for me, surprise surprise, the moderation and trust and safety teams, who we know had a high rate of PTSD and work-related mental health issues) often aren't weighed very highly in these conversations. Those are real, quantifiable human costs and I think absolutely need to get weighed against the advantages of large-scale solutions that seem to have no new approach to mitigate them.)
posted by restless_nomad at 6:08 PM on November 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by restless_nomad at 6:08 PM on November 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
Heheh, in the meantime, I've just been approved for Post, so lemme go set that up and check it out at lunch later.
posted by cendawanita at 6:18 PM on November 30, 2022
posted by cendawanita at 6:18 PM on November 30, 2022
A good read about sustainability on mastodon.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:32 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:32 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
Also: hearing the Twitterati complain about Mastodon makes me smile a bit. Twitter was the butt of jokes for years, between its laughable instability, poor architecture, borrowed-from-SMS character limits, complete lack of nice-to-have features [...]
It did not emerge fully-formed as some respectable place to go for breaking news coverage, or even as a place that an average or even Moderately Online person would go.
I kinda expect Boeing, or even an enthusiastic amateur, to do a significantly nettet job of building a plane than the Wright Brothers did. The standards of today, the tools and knowledge available, the lessons already learned, today is not the same environment as when Twitter launched as the first social-media-adjacent* microblogging platform.
*(Anything based around one-to-many communications and with follows that are non-mutual is just media in my book, not social media)
posted by Dysk at 8:06 PM on November 30, 2022
It did not emerge fully-formed as some respectable place to go for breaking news coverage, or even as a place that an average or even Moderately Online person would go.
I kinda expect Boeing, or even an enthusiastic amateur, to do a significantly nettet job of building a plane than the Wright Brothers did. The standards of today, the tools and knowledge available, the lessons already learned, today is not the same environment as when Twitter launched as the first social-media-adjacent* microblogging platform.
*(Anything based around one-to-many communications and with follows that are non-mutual is just media in my book, not social media)
posted by Dysk at 8:06 PM on November 30, 2022
I don't see how Mastodon is similar to Boeing? Maybe a home-built plane or something, but it's not like it's corporate or anything.
posted by sagc at 8:16 PM on November 30, 2022
posted by sagc at 8:16 PM on November 30, 2022
I guess I'm not sure that "it's not as good as it could be, and I imagine it could be done better" is a particularly useful critique. The people involved in Mastodon are, in fact, working hard on this? I'm sure they could have cloned twitter exactly in a day but they presumably didn't want to do that.
posted by sagc at 8:29 PM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by sagc at 8:29 PM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
Sure, but the notion that this is as hard a problem today as it was back then? It's not.
posted by Dysk at 8:30 PM on November 30, 2022
posted by Dysk at 8:30 PM on November 30, 2022
But... It is? Twitter wasn't a utopia, and a lot of the decisions that the developers/maintainers of Mastodon have made are considered choices to try to avoid that.
It's not like they just picked federation, etc. out of thin air, or like they weren't aware of the prior art.
I'd say that it's exactly as hard a problem as it ever was, given the state of the internet today. It's a problem with a lot of different attempted solutions, but it's not like it's been solved.
You seem to be implying that they made obviously-ignorant choices with the aerospace analogy, and I just don't see that.
posted by sagc at 8:34 PM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
It's not like they just picked federation, etc. out of thin air, or like they weren't aware of the prior art.
I'd say that it's exactly as hard a problem as it ever was, given the state of the internet today. It's a problem with a lot of different attempted solutions, but it's not like it's been solved.
You seem to be implying that they made obviously-ignorant choices with the aerospace analogy, and I just don't see that.
posted by sagc at 8:34 PM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
The clunky interface and UX does not feel like a considered decision. There are things they have done well, challenges they have because they're doing things differently, and then there's making excuses for some of their shortcomings because the people who blazed the trail found it hard back then, and a lot of lessons weren't learned. All of the above are going on here.
posted by Dysk at 8:38 PM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Dysk at 8:38 PM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
cendawanita> Please assume *I* know this.
Dysk> People are telling you what it's like out there, and you're tilting against windmills and shooting the messenger.
Yep, I see what I did there. Sorry to both of you.
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 9:23 PM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
Dysk> People are telling you what it's like out there, and you're tilting against windmills and shooting the messenger.
Yep, I see what I did there. Sorry to both of you.
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 9:23 PM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
Ok so I made a new Mastodon-specific FPP: here you go.....
posted by cendawanita at 9:37 PM on November 30, 2022
posted by cendawanita at 9:37 PM on November 30, 2022
I'd appreciate links to notes, videos, blog posts, etc. by Post users about what they distinctly like about it, especially written/made by people from historically marginalized groups.
posted by brainwane at 9:49 PM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by brainwane at 9:49 PM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
Yep, I see what I did there. Sorry to both of you.
No hard feelings! :)
posted by Dysk at 9:53 PM on November 30, 2022
No hard feelings! :)
posted by Dysk at 9:53 PM on November 30, 2022
Mastodon is off-puttingly unusable to most people
I just don’t think this is true.
I mean I just spent 5+ minutes trying to find a way to create an account and join the mefi instance, but had to come back here to figure out what I was doing wrong. I'm not a developer or anything but have been online for a long time. When even the sign up process is a pain like that I'm not sure how much traction there will be? And I'm motivated to join, I miss the Twitter experience I used to have and would love to get back to that with mastodon or another service.
posted by Carillon at 10:24 PM on November 30, 2022
I just don’t think this is true.
I mean I just spent 5+ minutes trying to find a way to create an account and join the mefi instance, but had to come back here to figure out what I was doing wrong. I'm not a developer or anything but have been online for a long time. When even the sign up process is a pain like that I'm not sure how much traction there will be? And I'm motivated to join, I miss the Twitter experience I used to have and would love to get back to that with mastodon or another service.
posted by Carillon at 10:24 PM on November 30, 2022
In your workflow, did you plan to do an account and then choose an instance? Yeah, that's the part that feels counterintuitive because Mastodon is being understood as a single platform where platform = hosting (in this case, 'instance'). That's a consequence of current understanding of social media platforms, so you're not in the wrong to expect so. You need an instance first, either by open application or with an invite code. It's like setting up a blog back in the day: do you want geocities, lycos, or tripod etc? Then you set up a website account and name etc.
posted by cendawanita at 10:30 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by cendawanita at 10:30 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
And heck, even in my analogy, that process is folded into one step from a human point of view -- if you want to open a geocities site, of course when you register there you automatically get a site! The mastodon ecosystem breaks that into more visible decision-making components.
posted by cendawanita at 10:32 PM on November 30, 2022
posted by cendawanita at 10:32 PM on November 30, 2022
Anyway! Poor dobbs - please feel free to continue venting about Mastodon hereeeee---
posted by cendawanita at 10:34 PM on November 30, 2022
posted by cendawanita at 10:34 PM on November 30, 2022
Mastodon: its like twitter crossed with email.
Like email because its lots of servers that talk to each other. You have to join a specific server, but you can still see messages from the other servers.
Like twitter because lots of small messages visible to followers.
posted by Ansible at 10:49 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
Like email because its lots of servers that talk to each other. You have to join a specific server, but you can still see messages from the other servers.
Like twitter because lots of small messages visible to followers.
posted by Ansible at 10:49 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
That skeptical Nieman labs article about Post linked above is excellent, a really well-done look at the issues, with some good links to other skeptical takes. Post's business model seems to me deeply unserious (and flying in the face of past history), and the moves its made so far do not inspire confidence. Surprising to see smart media critics like Kara Swisher pushing it so hard (though not so surprising when you realize Swisher's podcast partner is deeply invested in Post).
posted by mediareport at 4:42 AM on December 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by mediareport at 4:42 AM on December 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
Surprising to see smart media critics like Kara Swisher pushing it so hard (though not so surprising when you realize Swisher's podcast partner is deeply invested in Post).
I think Upton Sinclair had something to say about the difficulty of getting someone to understand something, when their paycheck depends on not understanding it.
In the last few years I have been somewhat disappointed to discover that the number of smart, "respectable" people who will shill for companies with obviously unsustainable business models (see also: cryptocurrency schemes) is much higher than I realized or assumed.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:28 AM on December 1, 2022 [4 favorites]
I think Upton Sinclair had something to say about the difficulty of getting someone to understand something, when their paycheck depends on not understanding it.
In the last few years I have been somewhat disappointed to discover that the number of smart, "respectable" people who will shill for companies with obviously unsustainable business models (see also: cryptocurrency schemes) is much higher than I realized or assumed.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:28 AM on December 1, 2022 [4 favorites]
Most of the people I cared to keep up with from Twitter have moved to mastodon already. At least for my community of data viz/mapping/civic tech folks it has already won the day, and has a great community vibe already!
posted by yuletide at 10:03 PM on December 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by yuletide at 10:03 PM on December 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
Some people have moved not from choice. Chad Loder, one of the lions of antifa reporting, was outright banned. 4am, tireless worker to preserve Apple II software, was banned some time back, well before the era of Elmo, when an algorithm misidentified an image as being problematic content and Twitter refused to reverse it.
posted by JHarris at 5:48 AM on December 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by JHarris at 5:48 AM on December 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
Post.news is built on top of the OpenWeb platform (not actually open source), which I think is primarily intended to be a commenting system for news websites. From what I can gather from their marketing doublespeak, they seem to be focussed on collecting community data to help with synergising actionable metrics or something like that. Not to be confused with Open Web or Open Web.
posted by Lanark at 10:52 AM on December 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Lanark at 10:52 AM on December 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
One of my former colleagues is (still) working in Twitter, and is tweeting somewhat below the radar (he doesn't have many followers). It's an ... interesting ... timeline. Through it I learned that Twitter are auctioning off various "surplus" equipment. (by "surplus", it's chairs to sit on, tech needed for presentations, and kitchen equipment as they appear to be winding down catering services). Here's the auction.
posted by Wordshore at 9:12 AM on December 13, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Wordshore at 9:12 AM on December 13, 2022 [3 favorites]
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posted by sagc at 5:53 PM on November 29, 2022 [17 favorites]