What will really get the ball rolling will be organizations such as governments, educational institutions, public libraries, or news agencies that create federated social infrastructure for their own membership.
Aren't these all vanity metrics? [1] Features are swell, and registered users are nice, in that it indicates somebody was at least curious. But how many of those 1,627,557 registered users are, say, active at least once a week for the last 3 months? What's the NPS of Mastodon users after 7, 30, and 90 days?
I'd love to see them succeed. But I think it's dangerous for programmers to focus on building a thing rather than serving their users.
> I think it's dangerous for programmers to focus on building a thing rather than serving their users.
It seems Mastodon is an example of programmers actually building something with real ambitions rather than just trying to make big money by trying to form an addiction for their users.
Sure, and that influences the choice of metrics. I think chasing things like user active minutes (UAM) can lead to pathological development. But for a social product, "real ambitions" must include people a) using it, and b) being happy they are using it. But my point is that features and signups can't be ends in themselves, as those are not real ambitions.
I understand what you're saying. The only counter point I'd put forward is it's purposefully playing to the ego mind for attention - arguably deserved or otherwise - to draw more people to trying it out. Likewise, you have to start somewhere. Hopefully over time they can start measuring and reporting on metrics with more meaning to them, which will require them also explaining that meaning to educate people - which will give us all an understanding as to what their understanding is. I still don't feel I understand the ecosystem well enough to say if I like it or not, I do like observing different models though to see how and if they work, what problems they solve or don't - so I am enjoying Mastodon seemingly gaining traction; it at minimum leads to discussion on HN.
Sure. Vanity metrics can be great for marketing or generating reasons to celebrate. There's nothing wrong with saying, "Wow, we have a million registered users!" as long as they also recognize that registration is only the first step. In a retrospective like this, I want to see them doing both.
>But I think it's dangerous for programmers to focus on building a thing rather than serving their users.
Dangerous for whom?
Mastodon isn't a product, it's an open source project. More active users is nice, but isn't fundamental to the project; it will continue as long as there are people interested in working on it.
Your theory here seems to be that usage isn't the point, that people writing code is all that matters.
I think that's a fair measure for a repository of code golf examples, or something where it's just a bunch of people scratching their own itches. But Mastodon is an inherently social product. I don't believe it has any meaning without usage. And clearly, the Mastodon people know that, which is why they talk about the number of registered users.
But the danger with vanity metrics is that a lot of effort can get wasted. That wasted effort can snowball. If a product has a lot of features that nobody uses, it can make future additions and product evolution harder. That can also discourage adoption. And I think the additional danger for Mastodon is that as the most prominent of the open-source social network alternatives, its success or failure will be seen as the success or failure of alternatives to Twitter, etc.
Sure, at a certain point it doesn't mean anything without usage. But I'd argue Mastodon passed that threshold a long time ago. There's a decent community around it at this point, and people seem to enjoy it.
>But the danger with vanity metrics is that a lot of effort can get wasted.
What makes someone's effort "wasted"? IMO, if the developers enjoy working on it, their effort wasn't wasted. Not every project (even if it's a social network!) needs to appeal to everyone in the world, not everyone needs to be out for world domination, and that's okay.
If the developers enjoy working on it and they have consciously chosen that as their only intent then the effort isn't wasted. But I don't think the Mastodon developers see the purpose of their software as some sort of technical onanism.
If you look at their web site, it's clear their goal is "social networking, back in your hands". Vanity metrics lead to wasted effort relative to goals like that.
I made a toot with 100 boosts the other day on a new account. The average is closer to 10-20. Tweets barely register on accounts with 10x the following. Mastodon might look small, but it's big where it counts.
I'm glad Eugen started it, and I'm glad it's thriving. It's like Twitter was before they went impression-obsessed after the 2013/2014 Situation showed them what was possible. And it's all funded by Patreons for the most part.
I personally find Twitter’s centralization, despite the obvious inherent downsides, to be its defining feature. To be able to have a real-time feed of everything that is being tweeted by anyone in the world on a given keyword or topic is really amazing, as well as the (reasonable) certainty that I’m following/tweeting at the “real” @celebrityaccount. Otherwise, I’d be happy to stick to blogging and Google searches. That said, it’s great to see a community-driven open source social media project and watch its ongoing development. Really loved the reflection from the developer here:
> I’m very happy with Mastodon’s accomplishments. Overseeing such a large project has its ups and downs, as it’s impossible to keep everyone happy all the time when people have conflicting desires. Irregardless, I consider these to be the two best years of my life, as work on Mastodon is incredibly fulfilling and interacting with all the interesting people on the platform is very fun.
Even though Mastodon is decentralized, the interface has a federated timeline that shows toots from all instances that the server federates with. I have found this to feel similar to a centralized, real-time stream of posts like Twitter.
The user can still follow hashtags/keywords from most of the users out there. Many of the more popular instances do not federate with a few of the more toxic, anything-goes servers, so the federated timeline won't be completely universal. While that might be true much of the stuff posted on those instances being censored wouldn't be tolerated on a platform like Twitter anyway.
Mastodon instances are not public spaces. Users can pick how much they want to engage in political discussions by picking their instance or, if they can, hosting their own. (The second part of the argument is flawed because most people can't just throw up a rails app and maintain it, be it cost or lack of knowledge)
What most people don't get about "bubbles", mostly because it doesn't affect them, is that sometimes, if your mere existence is political, getting some rest from it can be quite hard.
When they tell me I'm living in a bubble because I use an instance with rules and instance blocks, what they want is for the street preacher to be able to chase me down the sidewalk yelling fire and brimstone at me. "I wouldn't personally do that," they insist, "but people should be able to!"
They want to be able to harass people online the way they do offline, and on less advanced social networks. It's as ideological as all the opinions they reject as ideology.
One of the ways instance blocks are used, in practice, is to discourage other instances from enforcing boundaries. For example, one of the biggest and oldest Mastodon instances recently blocked an entire up-and-coming instance because they banned one person who has a trail of allegations that they solicited underage kids for sex. A number of other, smaller instances also block instances that ban another alleged serial rapist.
Does the functionality of blocking just a single user from an instance not exist with Mastodon?
This does bring up an important point however, in that the largest instances that will exist may not be the one that curates and manages the instance/ecosystem/users on the ecosystem as well or as reasonably, however creates a space (or bubble) of popular reaction - say being only "80%" compassionate vs. fully understanding. For example, what if a convicted rapist has done their prison time? I feel this would have very different responses based on the nation and culture and how much or how little actual rehabilitation and treatment people receive, if that society trusts the outcome of the system or not. I believe that keeping "unhealthy" people separate from "healthy" people will prevent them from learning - and of course has the potential to allow the unhealthy to learn further bad behaviours or reenforce ones they already have; this doesn't mean we should design for a free-for-all system like Twitter and Facebook are various degrees of. It comes down to compassion - which includes not dismissing or forgetting about people, even if they're not people we'd want as our friends or family.
In the case of a user who simply has a "trail" of accusations for unacceptable behaviour, do we foster "guilty until proven innocent" as an acceptable behaviour - blocking that user from society's online interactions - or should we foster more of a "innocent until proven guilty" - while perhaps keeping an eye on people who are accused of certain behaviour? If the a little girl accuses her brother of stealing the cookie from the cookie jar, however the boy claims it didn't happen - and there's no proof, it's not fair to me if to punish either child until there's proof: either the sister took the cookie and is lying, or the brother took the cookie and is lying; you could ban them from the kitchen with the cookie jar, though if they're ever left alone and there's no evidence like video to check back on, then either child could still take another cookie.
I then wonder though, if there become more trusted and larger instances that do put the effort (and cost) into curation and managing the community (the family of society), then smaller instances will and can tap into that network - however then not contributing or covering any of the cost. How does this imbalance balance out, or does it need to, even? Does it become a question as to whether people who want accountability are willing to pay a small amount to pay the costs of such moderation vs. people simply hoping someone else deals with it - a bystander effect?
I wonder if the Mastodon community or founder have any thoughts or beliefs to this? Likewise, what happens if you have a whole bunch of instances where people are in their bubble of communities, perhaps with less critical thinking time spent and more indoctrination, where then propaganda can easily be distributed without any potential to filter it out and protect the whole as easily; of course solid in-person, real-life community and connectedness is the only way to counter this, including developing deep trust with individuals who you trust are thoughtful and such.
I'm still not sold on that decentralized is the safest option, however it perhaps can help counter against bad actors who seek control of systems; in fact it could act as a canary if the powers that be attempt to make decentralized systems illegal - as part of an effort to control (and perhaps censor). However, so long as the community is educated as a whole, and is hyperaware of these characteristics and readies to counter it in full, to hold the line for peace and justice, then we're on the right path. In contrast to decentralization, if we look at Apple's ecosystem, trust and governance and good design, forethought, plays an important role in success - though everyone in that ecosystem is "paying their dues" via profit Apple receives. And contrasting that further to Facebook, whereby they profit off of the manipulative aspect of ads and with practically no vetting or oversight.
this is a huge wall of text and I haven't necessarily read it all because I'm tired (I'll bookmark this I swear) but the case mentioned is a person with repeated persistent confirmed-by-lots-of-people manipulative bad behavior with at least two independent rape accusations on top of that.
If you're building a purely general purpose instance or a free speech themed one it's fine to not block this sort of instance.
It's okay to have this "net split". It's a system of curation. It encourages smaller instances.
Mastodon is also heavily used by minority / LGBT communities that deal with abuse and harassment a lot, often for merely existing. And often a "free speech" instance or worse a "no moderation" instance will attract that sort of person.
While I guess there are arguments for not banning users just because they have a whole bunch of nasty accusations against them, or for requiring high standards of evidence to do so, that wasn't the actual justification from what I can tell. (Indeed, I think arguing that rape accusations shouldn't automatically be believed is probably a bannable offence on all the instances involved.) It's more like they don't think community insiders should be held to the same standards as other people, and reckon any outsiders who do so are so obviously in the wrong as to justify banning the entire instance.
I'm not only thinking about political bubbles here, but linguistic or cultural ones. For example, when I joined a server here, it was federated only with a few other small Japanese servers, resulting in a fairly miserable experience. Another set had multiple languages but was just devoted to art. It's incredibly difficult (or was a year ago) to find servers that are general purpose and federated with both Japanese and English servers.
It's actually kind of interesting that me mentioning bubbles resulted in an immediately political assumption; I guess it shows how out of touch I am with mainstream Twitter.
I think you use "federated with" in a different sense than most people do in these discussions.
A newly created Mastodon instance by default federates with everyone in that allows messages and following from and to every other instance.
But it's federated timeline has no posts from other instances, because that view only shows posts that the instance actually sees. It only shows what people on the same instance actually follow, because otherwise there is no reason for the posts to be sent to it.
That would explain a lot of things and also clears up a lot of things for me, too! Thank you. I guess a better phrase for what I'm trying to describe is a lack of discoverability, then.
I only know one instance (awoo.space) that does whitelisting instead of blacklisting. Mastodon can't even do it out of the box (although pleroma can).
My instance bans the sort of instance described in the sibling comment to yours, like qoto (who advertised their Mastodon as "free speech twitter"... on twitter ads)
I'm finding Mastodon (I'm at https://nerdculture.de/@kragen at the moment) to be much more pleasant than Twitter, and much richer than IRC. The vicious culture war stuff on Twitter almost doesn't show up in my Mastodon timeline at all.
Wil is inside a reality distortion field. Someone got him with a low blow joke and he started reporting everyone from that instance (which was named after another joke of the type, bofa.lol)
Of course it doesn't show up: most if not all Mastodon servers ban you for having the wrong political ideology, it's in the server rules of most of them.
As an example, that one will ban extreme (and not so extreme) right-wingers. But you also have the opposite in other servers. And of course those servers refuse to federate with others. So there obviously are no flame wars like on Twitter... All ideologies are separated.
The reason there are no flame wars is not that Mastodon users are somewhat enlightened, as opposed to the Twitter rabble. Instead, clashes are avoided by having (and enforcing) rules and banning ideologies. The catch here is that this would never scale; this only works because there are only a few users.
I tried following https://pl.smuglo.li/users/roka (an anti-Semite who posts porn) and got a nondescript error. How can I tell if this is due to a blacklist, and if so, if it's on my instance or theirs?
In any case, you should contact the admins of your instance, but most probably they have blocked that instance, as it appears on blocklists for being a free speech zone.
https://pl.smuglo.li/notice/5986711 is pretty vicious antisemitism. Apparently I have succeeded in following this person now though. I'll see if I end up seeing their posts.
https://mastodon.technology is chock full of geeks, so the local timeline is all people's hacks and bugs and side projects. It's one of the older instances, and it's maintained by this guy: https://ashfurrow.com/
Do you know of any people with cool side-projects to follow? The current timeline on the front page is just people's randomness, which is to be expected.
BTW, maybe exists something like to the "Awesome-Mastodon-Instances" for IT? BSD have instance, Ruby have instance, but how about Python, Linux, Computer Graphics, Game Development and so on. :-)
I picked https://mstdn.io/ because it's a medium-size instance hosted in Europe, the sysadmin seems very competent, and the site rules seemed reasonable (especially where it says "We only block/silence foreign accounts and instances for legal reasons.").
There are quite a few instances where a capricious admin gets to decide what content is acceptable for all their users. Even less transparent and less accountable than corporate censorship.
I'm really glad I set this up. Mastodon is an interesting platform; like one big lopsided chatroom. You do have to follow a lot of strangers to get started (unless you can convince a bunch of your friends to join).
People also go pretty ban crazy on there. I've been called a "Nazi stooge" and been flagged and reported once ... which went to my instance admin .. which is me. A lot of instances ban entire instances (instances like sealion.club tend to get banned and bofa.lol recently imploded). So running your own ensures you control what you see and not be censored by an instance admin.
I'd be interested in following more HN users. I suggest putting your ActivityPub address in your HN profile.
On bans, there are frequent waves of new users who migrate away from Twitter to mastodon because they're told that mastodon has instances that are more suited to their personal (typically) political inclinations, and that the other side isn't permitted here and that discussion is more reasoned.
It's not really true. What really happens is that people are told that mastodon is the land of milk and honey, and people of all stripes migrate over, and continue to clash. Mastodon brings better tools to deal with it, but the same people import the same negative behaviours but end up on instances that typically reinforce their beliefs.
I really hoped that mastodon would be better, but it's really the same noise as twitter but worse - people end up on hyper-polarised instances where war is waged with blocks, bans, and federation filters. At least on twitter you have to share a home with people you don't agree with, here you can build all the walls you want to isolate yourself from anyone who doesn't completely agree with you.
> people end up on hyper-polarised instances where war is waged with blocks, bans, and federation filters
> here you can build all the walls you want to isolate yourself from anyone who doesn't completely agree with you
Shouldn't isolation of opposing viewpoints lead to less war overall? If everyone is interacting in the same space, every controversial post can potentially provoke an aggressive reply, and each response draws in more followers to participate in the battle. On HN, that is counteracted by having too many comments weigh down a submission (the famed flamewar detector), but on engagement-based platforms like Twitter, the fighting never ends.
If everyone chooses an instance with people that think alike and that filters content they strongly disagree with, it's not going to lead to more people changing their minds; but at least they won't constantly see things that make them mad and draw them into useless fights.
No, it can lead to a protected bubble of indoctrination and propaganda spreading efficiently without any countering - which then spreads into the real-world, where real clashes and violence is materialized. Even if the populations were on both or could both move to their own isolated islands, eventually a bad actor is likely to try to take control for their own benefit (and then perpetuated, whether by something like a military-industrial complex, or other); and when land isn't an issue then populations can stay separate enough, however yeah, someone always seems to want more and invade, and so at minimum you have to plan to protect against such potential threats - and without using fear tactics to control or manipulate a population.
Mastodon IS better ... at not stuffing ads in my face. So it's not the same noise as Twitter, in that I don't have to share a home with a billboard in every room.
The appearance of ads is not the only metric that matters for people. The fact that no one is yet apparently spamming or otherwise attempting to profit from Mastadon is more a reflection of how little it is currently used, rather than something inherent to the service.
This is my concern as well. It may be what will naturally be though (yin-yang and all that), and thankfully there are ways to get eyes into a bubble even if it's protected to get intelligence on what violent activities may be attempting to be rallied. The interesting and perhaps other fortunate piece to these communities being online is that everyone is quickly mobile (unless under strict watch and censorship locally through physical communication channels) - and so people are less stuck in a community if they realize it is a bubble - and are also more easily able to be reached. I just posted more related thoughts in a comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18213574
I run deadinsi.de. I wrote some kubernetes definitions and they work, but in the end there was too much overhead, uncertainty about storage stability and cost to keep it running on k8s.
It includes a storage provider I wouldn't trust all too much yet and the docs are sparse, but you should be able to get it running if you know Kubernetes.
I’ve been enjoying the use of Mastodon, though it’s not fully replaced Twitter for me. There’s a few TV/Movie & Video game related things I enjoy Twitter for.
While I’ve settled into two instances on Mastodon the one problem I’m finding is that you do kind of need multiple instances. Some instances, even with decent user bases, just don’t have the correlating activity. That or the user base skews to a time zone which can shift the discussion time.
The upside is being able to mute/block from the get go. This helps keep the federated timeline much more quiet. There’s a ton of bots & hashtag heavy people posting reblog kind of stuff. Things that aren’t really much value to a discussion so being able to just declutter that out has been helpful.
My only issue with Mastodon is that it does not solve the issue of authenticity - you can't verify that a post sent by a user was not forged or modified by one of the servers in the federation. This is where public key crypto could help.
This is untrue, Actors have a keypair and inbox POSTs are signed with that key to ensure authenticity. For boosts (Announce), mastodon uses a complex signing algorithm based on JSON-LD, and pleroma just re-requests the post from the original instance and uses that, discarding the relayed object.
It also (now) can verify that the @my_cool_username@mastodon.social is the same person/group as runs my_cool_web.site, by using a rel=me link on my_cool_web.site. So it ties verification to DNS, which is centralized enough to serve for that kind of verification. You can also prove that you hold both a mastodon identity and an identity on another social network, if the other social network lets you post rel=me links in your profile.
That sort of depends on what you use Twitter for. I used both for a while, but eventually found myself checking Twitter less and less and discovered I didn't really care. Basically just Mastodon and Reddit for me now
Does Mastodon suffer from the same problems as Reddit in terms of censorship? I've been part of a few communities that have been banned or quarantined. I'm looking for a platform where freedom of speech is something everyone can have, regardless of opinion.
Reddit is a centralized proprietary product, Mastodon is not. The worst that can happen to a user in terms of censorship is:
* Your instance banning you, which means you can just join another instance. The hardest thing about Mastodon is chosing an instance whose administration you can trust. The reason the service is valuable and important is that barring any instance being trustable to you you can always start your own.
* Another instance banning you (or your entire instance) which just means users on that instance don't see you in the fediverse. This can lead to complications where swarms of instances cooperate their ban lists and thus getting banned from one of them can see you cut out of a swathe of the network, but in practice those using mastodon pride themselves on not centralizing and thus there is limited interest in centralizing moderation like this in the first place.
Of note there are degrees of that second kind of ban. The lightest form is that you or your instance just doesn't show up in timelines - users can still find you by other means and follow you. The most severe is the total noop communication with that instance server which means its users don't exist to the instance doing the banning.
I mean, it successfully created a social network I find enjoyable enough to be my primary social network, and which is sufficiently active + growing that I don't see it dying out the way Diaspora did, so regardless of whether they accomplished a lot, they certainly have accomplished enough
Oh yeah. I think Gargron accomplished a lot when he launched the initial version. Just wondering what this list is supposed to communicate. I'd hope for more active development on the critical issues.
https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub
What will really get the ball rolling will be organizations such as governments, educational institutions, public libraries, or news agencies that create federated social infrastructure for their own membership.