I’ve had an awesome experience the last five years running instances for me and friends. So many nice interactions. I recommend running an instance for people you know well. It can still connect to everyone else, but you have your own little corner to feel more connected in.
Everyone else, as long as they don't defederate your server as petty tyrants.
Which has always been the drawback of the Fediverse.
Nostr has delivered what I had hoped to get from the Fediverse: actually decentralized, censorship proof social media (and then some), wherein you actually maintain full ownership of your own identity (as it's a keypair, not an account). Where if you get banned from one relay or other, you just move to a new one, and everything comes with you. Where if nobody wants to platform you, you can literally run your own relay on your PHONE and stay connected to the network.
And yea, there is at least one bridge between Nostr and Mastodon (Mostr), so you don't even have to give up on talking to your Mastodon buddies.
That it also does so much more than social media is icing on the cake. Really leverages its existence as a protocol rather than a platform to use the Internet as it was always meant to be.
I feel like there just something about "this thing is slightly difficult to get started using" that keeps normies out and keeps the place reasonable. It's the only way to prevent the Eternal September of a popular social network.
I felt a similar experience to this on a trip to Scotland recently. My partner and I visited Iona, and it was just amazing. I suspect it was such a pleasant experience because, while the place is about tourism, it's somehow not cliche shit. I suspect the difficult in accessing the island plays a big role.
> I feel like there just something about "this thing is slightly difficult to get started using" that keeps normies out and keeps the place reasonable.
I think about this when people say that contributing to Linux is difficult and they should adopt more user-friendly ways of accepting changes, rather than mailing patches from the command line.
The friction is a feature. You don't want too much, but no friction just invites the spammers and the trolls wasting everybody's time. If anything, as the Internet grows and machines compete with humans, you want even more friction than ever before.
> The only people I've ever heard complain about the slight difficulty are techies
Because everyone else has never heard of mastodon or this fediverse shit. Of course you don't hear complaints from people who don't know what it is.
> I'll take normies over
There are no "normies" as you call them using federated services. They don't want to need to think about server to server federation rules. They want a global central feed.
Eh. I'm not going to defend OP's use of the term "normies". It's pejorative and fundamentally othering.
> plenty of non-techies
Viewing the concepts and consequences of federation (no global search, disjoint moderation by instance owners) as "tech" is a fundamental category error.
I've seen plenty of "normal" and non "techie" people on Mastodon.
And the point is the complaints about the "complexity" of Mastodon - which isn't really that complex you can literally join an instance as easily as signing up for a subreddit - are disingenuous coming from this crowd.
People don't want to join "an instance". People don't want to care about what "an instance" is which also means being asked to be aware of things like instance-specific moderation rules.
And I don't know what it's like now, but cross-server following used to be quite annoying.
Being able to join an instance with its own culture, while still being able to connect outside that culture, is the only reason I use any social media at all.
I understand it can be confusing for people coming from Twitter or Facebook or wherever, the local instance culture is Mastodon’s greatest strength. That, of course, and the lack drive to turn a profit from users.
Facebook groups and subreddits became so popular because they're all on centralized websites so you can join many of them all in one place and you can talk to people in all of them through the same platform. Single service, single login domain, single thing to tell your grandparents, and, very very very importantly, single global search.
There are major differences between "subs"/"rooms" that are fundamentally joined and independently operated protocol hosts that are fundamentally not.
Those differences are not so complex and confusing that you need deep technical skill to figure them out. You can follow anyone from any instance (per the rules, if you're on someone else's instance) or follow hashtags or use relays if you run your own instance (for which numerous services exist.)
The most difficult part of Mastodon is linking to other instances but even that just involves using the search bar.
> Those differences are not so complex and confusing
One might ask why Bluesky has more sign-ups and monthly active users acquired in less time even without the facestagram login power funnel that Threads has. And of course Threads has waaaaaayyy more. The evidence of what people want from a social media service is right in front of us and very clear.
This reads to me very much like the timeless words of Seymour Skinner, "Am I so out of touch? No! It's the children who are wrong."
Bluesky is, as the article mentioned, basically trying to be old-Twitter. More people want that than want the fediverse. That doesn't mean that nobody wants the fediverse, and they won't necessarily appeal to quite the same audience.
Bluesky had the benefit of marketing, association with Twitter and the support of influencers and Threads is owned by Meta and is integrated into Facebook. What is that supposed to prove, beyond that advertising companies are good at advertising themselves?
The marketing people are the ones who tell you to not use terms like "federation," "instances," or "tooting" when designing a social networking product.
They're the ones who tell you not to force dark mode down everyone's throats by default, when usability studies going back to the 1980s say that's a bad idea.
The marketing people are sometimes wrong. But on the whole, not usually.
> Bluesky had the benefit of marketing, association with Twitter and the support of influencers
Everywhere that people have ever asked why people join Bluesky and not Mastodon, the objections to Bluesky are always philosophical (not actually decentralized, corporate overlords, and so forth) and the objections to Mastodon are always practical (signup sucks[ed?], search sucks[ed?], feed curation sucks[ed?]). Bluesky's selling point has always been "like Twitter, better control, none of the bullshit of Mastodon". That's exactly why any influencers went there and not to Mastodon. Look... I'm not telling you my opinion, I'm communicating the common message given over and over and over by everyone who looked and bounced and talked about it. And when people say over and over and over that Mastodon is frustrating, and people have indeed said that over and over and over, all you need to do is believe them instead of saying they're wrong. Threads has the trifecta of like Twitter, not Twitter, connected to maybe the biggest central platform in the world.
>Everywhere that people have ever asked why people join Bluesky and not Mastodon, the objections to Bluesky are always philosophical (not actually decentralized, corporate overlords, and so forth) and the objections to Mastodon are always practical (signup sucks[ed?], search sucks[ed?], feed curation sucks[ed?]).
Untrue. People complain about Mastodon's politics and make many of the same "philosophical" arguments as they do with Bluesky. People even argue Mastodon isn't even decentralized.
>Bluesky's selling point has always been "like Twitter, better control, none of the bullshit of Mastodon".
None of Bluesky's marketing has ever mentioned Mastodon as far as I'm aware.
>Look... I'm not telling you my opinion, I'm communicating the common message given over and over and over by everyone who looked and bounced and talked about it.
No, you are literally telling me your opinion. Your ever-increasing use of hyperbole rather than sources demonstrates that you're making an emotional argument grounded in hypotheticals.
>And when people say over and over and over that Mastodon is frustrating, and people have indeed said that over and over and over, all you need to do is believe them instead of saying they're wrong.
I think a lot of them are wrong, and are intentionally overstating how difficult Mastodon is because they view it as "leftist" and feel obligated to shit on it as much and as often as possible. I find it difficult to believe so many of the brilliant technically gifted minds on HN can't figure out how it works, but George Takei, random scientists, gardeners, musicians, authors and other "normal" people can. And a lot of those people also have accounts on Bluesky.
> overstating how difficult Mastodon is because they view it as "leftist"
That's an absurd/hilarious thing to say given the demographic breakdown of Bluesky users. Ain't no rightwingers promoting Bluesky because of their opposition to leftism, my friend.
> I find it difficult to believe so many of the brilliant technically gifted minds on HN can't figure out how it works
This is specious on multiple levels. First, "can't figure out" and "not willing to give energy to" are different things. Second, reading this website has no bearing on being either brilliant or technically gifted. Third, there's a big world outside of this website. Fourth, nobody is responsible for what you find difficult, not even you. Fifth, wait a minute, did you just say you find it difficult to believe the perspectives of others? Shouldn't brilliance and giftedness make it easy?
> People don't want to care about what "an instance" is which also means being asked to be aware of things like instance-specific moderation rules.
I can tell you how this reads to me: "I consider myself among peers with coders, scientists, and founders. Being asked to understand pretty simple concepts is too much for me."
I am a happy user of Lemmy. Was there more to understand than how to join Reddit? Yes. Is the fediverse simple enough to understand that people on HN should be viewed with incredulity when they make statements that it's too difficult / too much? Unless they're speaking about people who aren't HN commenters, also yes.
> "I consider myself among peers with coders, scientists, and founders. Being asked to understand pretty simple concepts is too much for me."
I think I can clarify the framing here. People of all walks are extremely uninterested in being told that they need to care about something that they do not care about. For most people, I bet almost all people, decentralization can really just get fucked, because decentralization is not what people are there for. Connection is. What federation offers is just not important to...as a percentage, almost anyone...in relation to what it removes.
Think about it this way: many things are too annoying for you to put up with, even if you technically are capable of dealing with them were you willing to give more energy than you believe is reasonable to give. See also, juice vs squeeze. See also, the iron imperative of writing ("don't waste the reader's time") applies to more than just writing.
Also...
> "I consider myself among peers with coders, scientists, and founders."
One might call it empathy to commiserate with the perspectives of people who are not those things. It's a judgement error to expect a platform to be something other than niche without that. One can also be all of those things and have zero patience for software that has an annoying user experience.
> People of all walks are extremely uninterested in being told that they need to care about something that they do not care about.
You don’t care. There it is. Just say it. It’s not a crime. I’m not judging you. I’m really not.
I care and it might not matter, but I do. It’s not for you. That’s ok. Don’t bag on it for reasons other than this. It’s not difficult and I don’t care if you don’t care. It’s fine.
I'm wondering if the context has been lost because of the length of the chain that this thread is a conversation about why people, especially non-technical and non-philosophically-motivated people, people for whom the concepts of federation and disjoint instances are actually detrimental rather than beneficial because they fundamentally erase some of the most useful features of social network platforms (e.g. global search), don't use Mastodon over something else.
> You don’t care.
Forget about me for a moment. We're talking about people. Most people, in fact. Actually the upstream comments use the term "normies", which is a term that I personally object to because it's pejorative and gross behavior. It's imperative that you evaluate this thread within the given context.
Side note on upstream calling people "normies": It's absolutely nuts to me that the groups most sensitive to othering will themselves engage in mindless othering. But anyway.
> It’s not difficult
To you. In fact one of the things that makes something difficult is how much a person is forced to deal with things that they don't want to deal with, especially when those things are the opposite of what they want from a service.
This is nicely written but I found some of the views strange. The most disturbing one to me is that the author wants news from social media and claims they have troubles getting news (e.g. criticizing the Washington Post). Not only is it obviously problematic to attempt to get news from social media and everybody knows that, it's also very bold to insinuate that there is lack of access to news. Maybe US citizens get this impression from TV news infotainment, which is indeed abysmal. Okay, I get that. Nevertheless, there are plenty of other sources, we're being swamped with news and know more about what's happening in the world than ever before. Normally, people also complain about the opposite, that they get anxiety from too much exposure to news. So I don't get that point.
The wire services are the source of practically all news. There are vanishingly few other actual news-gathering organizations. (One fewer with the Washington Post deciding that they don't want to be one, either.)
That's the news. Everything else is repackaging.
The actual truth (or as close to it as can exist) has been out there and readily accessible this whole time. People choose to get it through pre-digested outlets instead, and then get outraged that everyone else is ignoring "the" truth.
and isn't getting them anymore from US news outlets
but found them (surprisingly) in the fediverse
----
putting that aside finding news on social media isn't really that absurd but it highly depends on you algorithmic bubble/followers. Through a lot of it can be people sharing links to new.
the think is many smaller independent news outlets have very limited means of reaching (new) people by them self, so like everyone else trying to reach people they will use social media
then there are people which share/retweet news. Prefilled by quality and relevance based on their expertise. If you have enough media literacy to be able to judge their expertise you can follow those which have it and even know what bias is involved in their choices.
And sure all of that only works if you yourself have expertise and media literacy. And tends to work best for specialized/expert topics, not for "simplified" everyman news. But you kinda need that media literacy for any news today.
A example around Twitter was in the past one of, if not the, best ways to get tech. computer security news (about vulnerabilities, attacks etc.). That is iff you followed the right people.
Ironically the dynamics for that where very similar to what he describes: "Proper" news outlets being hardly usable. But other people with expertise sharing relevant news for the sake of the information, not for cloud, ads, propaganda etc. (Just the reasons differ. For tech. security news the problem is a. lacking specialized technical understanding of outlets and b. also that most news are too specialized(i.e. boring) for most of their audience.)
I want to know exactly how far the Iranians have gotten against the IGRC in the last 24 hours. I subscribe to WSJ but they don’t have that details. X and Reddit do, with some obvious caveats (I do find Community Notes on X very good though).
They're not popular, but going outside in a flurry of missiles isn't good for your health. It's not like the US has coordinated with anyone on the ground to plan a revolt. They seem to have just imagined one will materialize.
They still don't love the regime but today they share a common enemy.
This reminds me of the US soldiers after the Iraq invasion not understanding why the population didn't celebrate them as liberators. Even young Iraqis initially optimistic about the future were quickly disillusioned by the reality.
Two full decades in Afghanistan "liberating" the Afghani people from the Taliban, when you left it took less than a day to undo with zero resistance, that's how much the population appreciated your efforts to "bring them liberal democracy".
I suppose it's because the US public never had to reconcile their fantasies with reality in quite the same way as them.
I'll admit I don't understand the situation in Afghanistan. Rejecting liberal democracy isn't surprising, but the Taliban sucks and it's hard to imagine that it's actually popular.
Obviously it's not up to me to decide for them. It's not like we gave Aghanis the option to move out if they didn't like it. Still...
There’s a good chance that era will come back. With the overwhelming amount of AI slop coming down the pipeline, I think many people will seek content unapolagetically written by real people.
News used to be mostly neutral delivery of facts that occurred recently. It was not supposed to be following a narrative or whatever. But that is boring for many people and the American media found out they could make news much more interesting by adding their spicy takes on it, and it worked. Now people watch the news as a form of entertainment. I find that horrifying, the reason you should be informed about the world is so that you can participate in it effectively. News today is much more propaganda than information, and that gives the opposite effect of making you a more effective citizen.
Pretty much all US news is just blindly stating “what’s happening” which lends credence to the current admins (seemingly) illegal/poor behavior. Just accept that the president can start a war, no notes.
Pretty much all US news is the exact opposite of a broad and bare presentation of the facts. It’s a narrow set of facts presented through either a partisan lens or a purely business context, the difference is in what base facts are chosen to work from and none of the news agencies do a good job presenting even most of the relevant facts on any issue.
The Fediverse has one problem, concentration of users on few instances, mastodon.social being the largest.
And cancel culture.
Highly politically motivated cancel culture.
What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read?
That should be solely in the user's hand.
The irony of writing this in HN is ... whatever the right word is
Also, fragmentation and visibility.
It's neigh impossible to find interesting content if you're not on the main big instances.
I’m pretty close to being a free speech absolutist (side-eye to the guy who ruined the term), but IMO one of the worst things to happen to free speech is this conflation of “right to speak” with “right to be heard”.
People have a right to ignore speech, and to establish standards for speech on their private property. If there is market demand for a service that filters out content based on ideology, whether mastodon.social or Fox News, so be it.
It can be toxic and a social negative, but any fix is worse than the problem.
one of the worst things to happen to free speech is this conflation of “right to speak” with “right to be heard”
Thank you for this tight summary. As a greybeard, I'll note this conflation was present from very early on, and it was partly responsible for the heat death of Usenet. No amount of logical, prepared rebuttal budges people from the idea that the two things are the same. The conflation might be a human tendency, a cognitive bias that almost everyone has.
In North Korea, you can’t start your own instance to say what you want. They will still jail you for what you say. That’s the actual point.
The fact that other people want to be on a system that blocks you is their business, not yours. The point of the fediverse is you get to choose your own censorship.
If you got to choose your own censorship it'd be nice. As it stands, other instances can decide to defederate with what you're on. Sometimes, even knocking off servers you had connectivity with that were indirect.
The Fediverse is to Nostr what the legacy telephone system was to the Internet.
>If you got to choose your own censorship it'd be nice. As it stands, other instances can decide to defederate with what you're on.
That is not censorship!
This conversation is frustrating exactly because people think a group “excluding” someone is “censoring” them. Except that's not what censorship is.
Censorship is about you not being allowed to say what you want on a sign outside your own bar.
You complaining about a different bar, not letting you in because they don’t like you. That’s not censorship, that’s just people being jerks to you… and that is allowed. Nobody has to listen to you if they don't like you. Nobody has to even let you in the door to where they hang out if they don't like you, especially if the reason they kicked you out was something you said.
It's 1 person, the instance admin, deciding what's good or bad for all their users.
And this is, I'm not sure what, but gives instance admins too much power to moderate content the way they like vs giving the individual user the choice to decide on their own.
Call it whatever you like.
"It's 1 person, the bartender, deciding what's good or bad for all their patrons. And this is, I'm not sure what, but gives bartenders at bars too much power to moderate bar conversation the way they like vs giving the individual patron the choice to decide on their own. Call it whatever you like."
It's called moderating the space you operate. This is literally why you can’t walk into a bar like you own the place. If you don't like it, start your own damn instance. You don't have any right to make people tolerate you if they don't want to.
If I've got a profile on let's say, mastodon.social, and I have a following, and people I follow across other servers, and then mastodon.social decides that due to a few people over on outrageousposts.social, I can no longer access their content, nor they mine, I am left with exactly two choices: write that portion of my network off as a complete loss, or create a completely new profile on a new instance, and build up a new network from scratch.
That anyone puts up with this state of affairs suggests to me that people just don't know Nostr solved this problem 3 years ago.
I get that compared to Facebook, Twitter, etc, Mastodon does seem like an improvement even with this state of affairs -- after all, you at least CAN just create a new profile rather than getting booted off of the network entirely. It was handy for a few years. But a better alternative has been created, and I for one won't be looking back.
Community members are a finite resource. Moderators are a downright scare resource.
When you let people spew hateful things you drive away the people you want in the community and are left with a toxic cesspool that no one wants to visit. Your moderators will burn out and leave as well. That's a very reliable way for your space to die.
Then there's the fact that it takes far more energy to refute bullshit than to spew it, and this asymmetry means that "just let them speak" means the toxic liars win.
> if you restrict moderation to stuff like gore and porn, then you don't need that many moderators.
Have you ever been involved with moderating even a small subreddit or Discord server? I'm on a server with one moderator and it routinely gets spammed while the guy is asleep.
> can't people just unfollow or block others whose opinions they don't want to see?
How do I block people BEFORE seeing the opinions I don't want to see? Trolls can roll up a new account for every single post they make, if they want to.
> there is no obligation to refute bullshit to begin with.
No, but if you're neither blocking nor refuting it, then your community is going to quickly become majority bullshit.
it seems to me that the networking design is flawed. just to give a simple example: whitelisting (only seeing content of friends and followees) versus blacklisting (seeing everything ranked by an algorithm). wouldn't whitelisting already solve most of those issues? that would actually be my preferred modus anyway.
No, because that puts the effort of fighting bad actors on everyone. It means that every day you have new trolls spewing hate in your comments, and that your users have to constantly keep blocking trolls who follow them (and who recruit other trolls to join them) until they get tired and leave the platform.
This isn't an academic debate, we've been seeing this play out online for at least 30 years. Probably longer - I wasn't around for Usenet's heyday but it wasn't immune either.
Only allowing posts between mutual friends is instant messaging, not a social network. Discovery, engagement, and platform growth comes from people wanting to hear from and interact with followers who they don't necessarily follow themselves.
i think you are trying to solve a problem that in my opinion should just be skipped. i don't want to be part of a social network where some algo decides what i see. all i care about is what my friends do and maybe the friends of my friends. and that's it. that was the golden era of social networks, when precisely this was just the norm until they discovered that they can make more money by messing with the feed. no incentive to mess with the feed is what i'd expect from a non-commercial solution like the fediverse. or - at least allow for configuring my feed. if somebody wants to be exposed to all sorts of people - do it. i don't.
That may work for you, but it does not work for anyone running a platform and dealing with the needs of all users. That requires real moderation for both legal and practical purposes, as previously described.
Because it overwhelmingly attracts a certain demographic of people who have a higher-than-average rate of various paraphilias as well as interest in software but such arguments are a bit taboo to discuss even if they are quite self-evident.
I liked the Internet better when it was all nerds and only code cared, rather than gender identity or listing neuroses in own's social media profile as if it was an audition for an echo chamber choir.
I’ve seen the Internet from the 1980’s until today. It has always had people exploring gender identities and public sharing of neuroses. Mostly nerds, though.
> what's there to win? there is nothing to win for anybody.
There are ideological battles to be fought by all sorts of parties - convincing groups to hate each other, to support or oppose the governments in power, to spread division and destroy societies.
There are trolls who consider it a battle to be won, and the more they succeed the more everyone else leaves the platform.
The party currently in control of the United States is there largely due to people who were fed divisive narratives (often in online channels) to make them hate other groups and a significant number of them consider it more important to "own the libs" and "hurt the right people" than to have the government actually improve their own circumstances. So yes, there's absolutely things to be won.
I listed some of the real world consequences already. Allowing disinformation to spread and assuming that people will figure out what's wrong on their own does not scale and does not work.
If a social network has an ACTUAL straight chronological feed of only accts you follow, or lists you curate, that works great.
Somebody posts abhorrent Nazi racist crap, or lies about what is happening, you shut them off, and they'll never be heard by you again. Yes, you need to see/hear the crap or propaganda once for each Nazi or liar, but that's it.
The problem is nearly every social platform needs to increase your engagement get you to click or scroll just another time so they get to show you more adverts and make more money and claim more 'engagement' to juice their stock price. So along with having to listen to the advertisements, you ALSO are REQUIRED to see/listen to the crap and lies.
The good solution — "you don't have to listen" — is not an actual option in the real world.
(NB: This is why Section 230 should only protect web providers if they have no algorithm. Once they have an algo, they exercise more editorial control than any newspaper or broadcast editor — they ARE responsible for the content, not because they posted it, their users did, but because they routed it to you.)
I don’t think that anyone has an issue with the block feature. The problem is when the platforms themselves decide to arbitrate which viewpoints are allowed. This was clearly visible during Covid, when divergent viewpoints were penalized aggressively.
Imagine, if you would, that the strict libertarians had much more influence in shaping the country. So much so that the roads are toll roads, the parks require a fee, and almost no libraries exist because the ROI just isn’t there.
Furthermore, there is no anti-trust legislation, and as a result, there are only a few companies that control all meeting places: the parks, the coffee shops, the roads, the pubs. And they have set up constant monitoring technology.
If you want to set up a protest on a street corner, it better align with the corporation’s views, or they will ban your access to the roads. If you want to talk with friends at the pub, don’t say anything out of line or you’re not coming back. Events can take place in parks, but make sure you only discuss the weather.
Of course, this is fine: you can always just meet at your own home and say what you think, because that is your own property.
…
I realize the analogy is overwrought, but there just doesn’t exist an online equivalent of a public space, and ideological enforcement is trivial. Comparing it to the rules we have for physical spaces mean we need to imagine what those physical spaces would be like if they operated like online spaces, and frankly the result is dystopian (in my opinion).
Surely the solution isn’t just to dismiss it as a non-problem? Or, I suppose, to stop looking for a solution because… solutions so far considered have negative side effects, which feels (practically speaking) the same to me.
Physical public spaces are regulated. Laws still apply there.
There are countless online spaces which operated like physical public spaces, where anything legal goes. Move off of the mainstream web and even the illegal stuff is allowed. You can literally run your own instance of whatever application on the Fediverse and follow whomever you want. No matter how radical or extremist your ideology is, someone will happily host it.
It's only a problem if one insists that all online spaces must be run under the same anarchic principles and must be forced to give anyone a platform, but that's far more dystopian than what we have now.
What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand.
Are they choosing what people can read, or are they choosing what they're willing to federate? No one is stopping people writing and publishing things on federated services. People are only choosing what they're willing to broadcast over the part of the service they run.
I think it should be ever so slightly more nuanced than that.
It doesn't matter which instance you join if you're just getting started, and don't know enough to make a meaningful decision about which instance to join.
After a week or a month, you might understand how it works a bit better, and also which communities exist, and might have an informed opinion about which community you resonate with.
Yeah, I also don't understand their take. HN also dictates what their users can and can't read. There's tons of stuff that can't be posted here without being removed. That's a good thing.
Nope. Air is static and no one has to pay to keep it there. A mastodon server is private property, and needs maintenance and money to stay on. You cannot force a private entity to host your speech. They always have a choice.
Mastodon is a federated service, like e-mail. Would you use an e-mail server where the admin reads messages delivered to your inbox and deletes the ones they don’t like?
I run a very small instance and have zero problems finding content. I have a constant stream of posts to the point where its hard to keep up with. It's pretty much a myth that there's no content unless you're on a large instance.
If you don’t like how your server is run, go to a different one! That’s the whole point of the thing. You can even set up your own without too much trouble. If you believe servers shouldn’t be doing this stuff then you can make it happen. Nobody owes it to you.
Instances often block users or other instances because their users have asked them to do that. They often have posted guidelines about what they will or won't allow. Users will hold them to it. Users can and do block other users on an individual basis. If a lot of people are blocking you, the problem might not be them.
They report content they don't agree with. And if the instance owner shared that, the federated user or even instance gets banned.
Most prominent example is the Ukraine.
Even if you post truthfully and in context, that the Ukraine did support the 3rd Reich with link to the Wikipedia article, you get banned, no warning.
So there is political censorship.
And the fediverse is super political.
The 3 big content areas in the Fediverse are politics, LGBT and nudes/nudes drawings including sadly CSAM.
Blocking (and reporting) an instance because of CSAM I can understand. But that too should happen at an individual level.
It's not practical for every user to choose each individual message to read. We allow others to help us filter. If you want the unfiltered version you go get it (and then try to find something under the torrent of spam).
The right to speak is not the same as the right to an audience. If users want to hear you they will seek you out. If not, you've said your peace, and that's all you're entitled to.
Fediverse on mastodon increase social bubbles. Especially when admin of instance has apathy to any kind of different opinions and censor anything like that.
I'm on infosec.exchange and there's plenty of content, especially since it federates so I get content from all over the fediverse. I don't mind that there are only several very large instances, since federating to them from a tiny or even personal instance is no problem.
I am talking about when instance X defederates with instance Y, so the users on X cannot see content from Y, even if they took no part in the decision.
Well, obviously you’re not going to be on a platform you dislike. I have signed up for Mastodon several times, but always ended up finding the instance dependency off-putting. I wish for a protocol where the instance mostly doesn’t matter and you can trivially switch to a different one, like with e-mail.
E-mail providers allow you to use a custom domain, so if the one you’re using suddenly goes away, you can just point your DNS records at the new one and that’s it. If the ActivityPub instance you’re using suddenly goes away, you can say goodbye to your account.
Unless I'm missing something, that's exactly the same.
If you're using someone else's email domain (like, eg. gmail.com), you cannot migrate to another provider. If you use your own domain, you can change who is hosting it.
Like email, there are plenty of Mastodon hosting companies. You can use your own domain, and migrate between them at will. If you use eg. mastodon.social, you can even migrate in most circumstances (but not if the instance vanishes).
The difference is that you cannot use someone else’s instance with your own domain. You have to get your own instance, which is much more expensive and creates a lot of duplication.
It would be nice to have a server that supported arbitrary domains. Perhaps https://jointakahe.org/ would suit?
OTOH, eg. (not an advertisement, just the first search result) masto.host offers managed Mastodon hosting for $6/month, which is on par with eg. Fastmail or Proton's base non-free plan.
> And cancel culture. Highly politically motivated cancel culture.
Most of the people who started on Mastodon are people of the LGBT+ community that were getting constantly harassed on other platforms. This 'cancel culture' is just a healthy attitude to having a zero tolerance policy on abuse, it is how it avoids being the enormous bigoted alt-right techbro mess that is now X.
Since Mastodon is federated, you can choose the instance you want to use, and what you see. Just don't expect other instances to actively want to engage there.
Not true. You cannot federate with tech news and bigoted alt-right techbro (based) instances. That decision is made for you by the janitors of the instances you federate with. Just like reddit, where the janitors of the subreddits decide what you're allowed to see. Your agency is gone.
Compare this to X, where if it's not illegal, you can choose to see or say it with no repercussions beyond an individual blocking you, which solves their problem of not wanting to see what you say. It's the perfect system!
> If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland.
On one hand the author recognizes the scope of the “protocol wars” as a rational thing being irrelevant in the actually relevant time span. On the other hand, the author swears that they can bring rationality to a deeply emotional matter through discourse.
you are aware that he doesn't actually believe that he "[...] could have convinced [..]"
it's a manner of speech
a instrument of telling a story
a way to express how completely absurd "US getting involved into Greenland" is for anyone who understands the land (geography/weather) and people even unrelated to geopolitical aspects like alienating allies
My argument stands whether the author meant to be read literally or not. Below the surface it’s still about the tension of rationality and irrationality within social settings.
I'm glad he found interesting people to follow, but since he didn't make any recommendations, it's not really actionable for anyone else. They would be starting from scratch. Results will vary.
Let's say that for news we need the "economic web", meaning no more "newspapers", but independent reporters with their own blogs and followers who micro-pay for individual articles by downloading and truly spreading them from a human to another instead of "many humans toward a network hub". This would solves the censorship problem, as you have thousands of scattered sources that are impossible to control or corrupt all at once, and it generates pluralism where the background noise is mitigated by personal scoring, like the WoT of GNUPG back in the day or Nostr now. The FLOSS foundation guarantees neutrality, while distributed sources like Radicle ensure it can't be censored.
But... for this to succeed, you need LOADS of participants; otherwise, the small amount of compensation collected isn't enough to live on or even maintain as a side hustle. It still works to some extent as long as people doing other things have their say in an interesting way, but it doesn't take off. To get a lot of people, you need to attract a lot of people.
Increasing censorship in recent times has made people migrate from Reddit and Discord to other things, but honestly, the alternatives out there are a bit of a mess. Personally, I set up Matrix for family and friends, only because XMPP doesn't seem to attract anyone, and both Matrix and XMPP are largely a pain to self-host properly if you want to include audio/video calls. The "fragmentation" of other tools is total. To attract people, you need a single, slick go get -able, cargo build -able, pip -able (and so on) application that does pretty much everything without a ton of dependencies. That way, someone discovers it, it's easy, they come for one or two features and discover others, providing enough mass to kickstart the spread. The Fediverse model does not offer that so far, Nostr is only a little bit better, ZeroNet is dead, ...
It seems that recent/young developers can't grasp this, so caught up as they are in what they do at work, the "zero barrier to entry" of living on someone else's servers, which hamstrings every FLOSS project. Creating countless separate applications useful for selling services in a commercial model, but it's a recipe for failure in FLOSS. No idea to integrate client and server in a single app to solve even if DHT and alike are there since decades...
The mind is one, so the application must be one and integrated to cover the bulk of needs in a single environment. Emacs understood this a long time ago, Smalltalk workstations even earlier; today, it seems most people still can't wrap their heads around it...
Mastodon is extremely technologically stagnant, with one and only one player controlling the entire technical ecosystem.
There is a huge lack of interesting apps or innovation. The protocol is very narrowly defined, and does not have any Postel's Law characteristics. You have to use the limited API offered in the Mastodon form.
There is starting to be some interest from ActivityPub in defining their own client APIs. But this gathering together of people is only just starting, and it's unknown where that effort will go or when it will see traction in adoption.
It also sucks being moderated by whatever Fedi you are on. And the very poor state of account portability sucks.
There's also internally a very aggressive culture, against devs doing fun and interesting things with the social media data. The social rules of engagement seem to be that you can only enjoy Mastodon as a feed that goes by, and you cannot download or analyze deeply. You can't index or search, except with strong carved out cases. People building search or indexing tools are harassed and abused.
Atproto has none of these issues, and has a rich ecosystem of devs building neat tools like RSS readers (skyboard), writing (greengale), book reading (bookhive), trail making (side trail), annotations (margin.at), events (smoke signal), chat (roomy), social/research bookmarking (semble), video streaming (Streamplace), media watching (pop feed), key attestation (keytrace), git (tangled), and yes, devs: containers (atcr).
I'm sorry but Mastodon is a dead end, a bad design, going no where, bereft of interesting dev engagement, with data that is hard to share & make interesting use of, data that is extremely narrowly constrained in shape/form.
I am envious of the dev-centric culture there. But it astounds me that devs would choose to exist on a place that is so technologically unalive & so low potential.
It’s weird that you think a social network needs to have some sort of technological drive or entrepreneurial spirit to be relevant. If anything, this will lead to its inevitable enshittification, as you can plainly see in Twitter and Facebook.
I agree that the sprawl of objective, trying to cover more and more, is quasi horrific in the ways we have seen it: seen through market captures and monopolization and acquisitions of Instagram, etc.
But for computing, not having a network fabric that is adaptable to purpose has kept people from having any starting point to play with. Every time you want to build a social system, you start with your own website (or go even lower level to reinvent), with your own bespoke back end, your own unique internal and or external API, rather than having set protocols you can adapt.
This isn't strictly true. There have been many attempts to build more good protocols, with endurance and reuse and adaptability. RemoteStorage, inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, HyperCore/Swarm, or Dat (which atproto cto @pfrazee built a browser for, Beaker). (Mastodon was never one of these & is not now.) This is not the place for writing a Speaking for the Dead for each of these, (and none of them are dead beyond grasp), but so far this question of what gets the most use, what has seen the most apps built upon it, the most end user adoption: it has a clear answer and it's atproto.
Atproto layers social networking right. You are self sovereign to a data store that you control (absolute authority, can-move/credible exit), that has your records in it (https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/). It makes syndication cheap & easy. It makes relays that aggregated PDS's while presenting a like API surface to the individual user, to facilitate syndication en masse. It layers indexers (appviews) that provide aggregation etc. This mirrors a functional social network system, goes beyond protocols to be a complete system, that is imminently individually maintainable, at scale.
It provides a platform that anyone can use to be creative, in a connected fashion. Your phrasing hints at the whiff of terror that these large companies bring, the reign they have over our lives. The drive they have is to saturate, to take our attention. I see the role of atproto & it's drive as a network technology layer to allow new social technology layers to be created at very low cost. It allows individuals to build amazing services, very lightweight and client only / isolated web apps that speak the protocols and which can put or retrieve records or appviews, for any kind of social network technology.
That to me lacks the scariness you speak of. There is not one overarching drive or ambition. It is not centralized or directed intent, working cohesively to capture society. Both are expansive & space filling, but their characteristics are as far apart as I can imagine.
@pfrazee distilled it well in Atmospheric Computing (https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/atmospheric-computing), a lovely post. That to me resonated strongly everywhere but especially the cold start problem. That it used to be hard for people to make connected things. And now it's not. That's the essence of the cold start problem. And rather than control the things we create, the role of the creator is different: they facilitate creating records, tools to help people build Abramov's Social Filesystem (previous link). They don't nor should they want to own the network, the protocols, the data, the users, the accounts. Those are atmospheric ambient systems that exist.
> It’s weird that you think a social network needs to have some sort of technological drive or entrepreneurial spirit
I perceived a noted lack of techno-social substrait upon which individuals or entities could collaboratively build or explore. The systems humanity has built have been dead end systems, built for narrow set purposes. There has been a missing General Systems Research component to computing for decades. There has never been a successful General Network Research effort, beyond the web itself (what a hit), and the vision TBL had for the web as a bidirectional writable author able medium never materialized. BlueSky corporation has me at least convinced that nothing can stop credible exit, that this is not their network, and independent actors like BlackSky have somewhat proven that out already in astoundly sophisticated end to end fashion, with incredible thought to their own moderation systems etc.
Tl:dr: actual humans have lacked the means to explore and build the techno-social, and it is absolutely nuclear hot fire that I have all this from little apps a bunch of creative friendly awesome neat people built that lets me capture this stuff (https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:zjbq26wybii5ojoypkso2mso/). This is proof that we have a general social networking system right here today available for use, experiment, & play. Not proof, but imho the roots are strong & good. This is how we escape the capture-entrepreneurialism. We have lacked fertile soil & good foundation for new things to get started on. I'd characterize the distinction as alive, adaptable, usable systems, versus stagnant dead systems, and imo, stagnant fixed systems aren't serving us well now, and over time decay & en-badification to serve us worse. Hence my advocacy of aliveness & possibility. (And my disdain for Mastodon as barren anti-ecosystem.)
I just tried to check out the Fediverse and found utter confusion. I'm not saying its bad-- I'm saying I am bewildered. There are communities I can join, but I can't tell how I should choose a community. I could find no way to search for communities that might be a fit. Apparently there are a lot of different kinds of social media under the broad banner of the Fediverse. How should I choose, and what are the implications of choosing?
I suppose I could pick a random community. But what's the point? I don't know.
It’s a little wild to read comments like this because this was just how the Internet worked before Twitter got popular. I still get “happy birthday” emails from forums I joined 20+ years ago.
Communities used to be themed. Honda forums. Programming. Gardening. Video games. Etc. We've been spoiled in the era of Reddit where all these communities could be found in the same place. Lemmy tried to replicate that experience by having a video games community in every instance. This has caused a lot of confusion and fragmentation. It's very difficult to figure out where to discuss video games (or any other topic). I think it would have made a lot more sense to theme instances instead of making instances Reddit clones.
I still host one of those 20+ year old forums. The Fediverse is different. With forums (and HN/Reddit) you immediately had good sense of them being for you or not. With the Fediverse to have to commit to servers and even then you don't know if they are right for you unless you try and spend time customizing your feeds/follows. It's a lot of work and you don't know if it will pay off. I tried again today and so much of it has no focus at all. It reminds me of this exchange from the Good Place TV show:
Chidi Anagonye: So, making decisions isn't necessarily my strong suit.
Michael: I know that, buddy. You-you once had a panic attack at a make-your-own sundae bar.
Chidi Anagonye: There were too many toppings, and very early in the process, you had to commit to a chocolate palette or a fruit palette. And if you couldn't decide, you wound up with kiwi-Junior Mint-raisin, and it just ruins everyone's night.
How did you get that 'good sense' with forums back in the day? I did that by reading into the community. Just look around on the server, see the posts on there, and see if there's a connection.
You can do that with Mastodon servers too.
And it's not that high stakes. You are not stuck on that server, if you find out that it's not quite the right fit, you can move to another server.
In fact, if I were to look at my following list, I think I see more people from outside the mastodon server I joined than people from the same server.
For forums you can look at them for a minute or less and figure it out. It's same with HN and sub-reddits. They are information dense and don't require signing up or customization to figure out if you can curate them into something you might like.
Compare that to mastodon, step 1 is pick a server https://joinmastodon.org/servers
Very few are actually topic focused. Even the ones with themes have a lot of deviation. Even picking the popular safe choice - https://mastodon.social/ , I can't tell if I would ever like it. I don't like what I normally see but considering I can see 2 posts at a time and a significate portion are animals or other topics I wouldn't visit a forum about, it doesn't feel like I would.
And the animal thing is common across most of the servers. I understand it, I have dogs. But it's a side effect of the medium not having a coherent focus. It feels like I'd have to spend so much time to turn it into something that I'd like that I'd be better off staying with forums.
Mastodon seem great if you want to follow people and be social which is kind of the point of social media. I want to follow areas of interest, not people.
If you don't want to choose, install the official mastodon app. It should direct you to create an account on mastodon.social, unless you go out of your way to pick something different.
I suspect the sign up flow has changed since you last tried.
How did you choose the provider of your email address?
For Mastodon, you can check https://joinmastodon.org/servers to figure out what server you want to join. But joining one server doesn't mean you can't access people and communities from other servers.
It's one big network, but with many different access points (the mastodon servers), each access point has their own niche. These access points each can have their own rules, so be sure to read them before joining.
What the point of joining the fediverse is, I can't answer that for you, that's different for everyone. The only thing I can tell you is that there's a wealth of information available there.
“It’s one big network” People say that as if its meaning is self evident. I don’t know what that means. Does it mean that I can do one search and find anything on any server? If it’s one big network, why does it matter what server I choose?
Can you do one search on one server, and find any email address that exists anywhere? (not that I know of)
Can you send email regardless of what server the email lives on? (with some exceptions, but mostly yes)
Federation is not infinite or unlimited, so no, there is no "one search to rule them all" within the confines of a single instance. (But then there's no way to access all email, or search all email addresses across mail servers to find someone.) Still if you're on an instance, and go out and find people on the internet that interest you, regardless of how you find them or what instance you are on, you can follow them, and their content will begin to be federated into your feed, on the instance you use.
The server you choose matters, but it's also not something you can't change. (Like getting a new email address.) If you use Gmail, but someone uses a mail server that has been blacklisted because of bad players using a domain name or IP address, you probably can't get email sent from those servers.
But initially, you can either go with the biggest instance, or the first one you see on https://joinmastodon.org/servers that seems fine and then try it out for a while. It's not a single decision you have to make for the rest of your life. It's just something new, and a new way to have access to some people connected to each other through some instances, topics, follows, etc.
I don’t want to run my own server. But perhaps there is a server I want to join. There seems to be no clear way to search for them. You are referring to Mastodon, but the Fediverse is not just Mastodon.
Certainly. I have dipped my toes in a few other Fediverse pools.
Of course, like email / domain names, there's no universal search for picking them. Big ones get network affects or advertise. Small players have to be found organically.
That's a big flippin' list of Fediverse networks. But "a clear way to search" being layered on top of "decentralized" and "anyone could theoretically bring up a server at any time"... there's always going to be friction.
Whether you join any of them... well that's up to you to decide if you're curious enough, you suspect there's value there, etc.
The monetization and network affects of corporate social networks has always lent itself to incentivizing popularity contests and "emotional" content that pulls people in. If you want to escape the bad sides of those, there's also compromises on the independently funded networks.
This is a big turn off for me too. I don’t want to “figure it out for myself”. That’s why I became catholic as an adult.
With the fediverse I have an overwhelming fear of missing out if I pick the wrong communities. I feel like it needs aggregation which defeats the purpose.
> We all need pointless hobbies, but I care about YouTube stars like I care about distant stars dying. It’s interesting to someone somewhere but those people don’t talk to me. I mostly use social media as a place to waste time, not a platform to form para-social relationships to narcissists. I prefer my narcissism farm to table. I’d rather dig a grave with a rusty spoon than watch a Twitch “star”.
I don’t really care about the substance of this article, but the style is entertaining. Curious for anyone who writes in a similar style - do people actually compose like this breathlessly, or are these kinds of lines wrought over several revisions? I know everyone’s different, but I can’t imagine writing like this on a first pass.
If you grew up writing (and reading) a lot, it's quite natural to have a "voice." It makes sense too: it's akin to having spent a lot of time with a certain person.
Although, I do not know if this is really that shining of an example of anything, although a fine blog post!
If you are surprised, I wholeheartedly recommend just reading more. Something clicks after 1000 pages of Swann's Way, or Infinite Jest, or even the Gnus manual where you simply must reckon with a certain kind natural voice that can be cultivated and exhibited without exertion, without even a "thought."
And I know the implication here is maybe underhanded, and that you feel its "entertaining" as a party trick is; where one compensates for content with flowery prose. That might be fair, but I see this charge more and more, and I just worry one day everyone is just going to deem reading and writing itself as a waste, as a compensation for some unnamed other thing we should all be doing (optimizing productivity). Which is why I must defend every labored, silly metaphor I read now to my death from all yall editors that popped up three years ago.
AI? I just read it and remembered how I got busted for writing papers for friends. Style and voice are tangible and I'm getting an uncanny valley creepy crawlies from the opening of this article. edit, maybe some AI segments, I would guess the author is young and will write differently in a few years.
> If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. We’re not tough enough as a people to survive in Greenland, much less “take it over”. Greenlandic people shrug off horrific injuries hundreds of kilometers from medical help with a smile. I watched a Greenlandic toddler munch meat from the spine of a seal with its head very much intact. We aren’t equipped to fuck with these people, they are the real deal.
The US has long since wanted to purchase Greenland, not "fight" them, for strategic reasons. I'm not sure why there is this fantasy that the US is going to fight the Greenland people? Honestly.
It's a bit ironic that I want to point people so badly to Edward S. Herman and Chomsky's work on the propaganda model to explain why the current war propaganda in the west in support of Operation Epstein's Fury is nothing new.
Yeah, no, getting out of the Fediverse was my best decision, or perhaps second only to getting out of Twitter.
I think the model itself of following people (instead of, e.g. following topics) is basically irredeemable, you either:
a) follow only people with whom you 100% agree, which is very dangerous;
b) follow only people who post cat pictures or anything else as unobjectionable;
c) get a lot of negative emotions from all the nonsense in the feed.
It was the latter for me, I still have nightmares from having to ban the #NixOS tag from my feed, from my entire feed approving of the murder of some random insurance CEO, from the endless "AI is scam" takes, etc., etc...
And I can't really unfollow someone who posts 75% of nonsense if they post 25% of interesting technical stuff. Because then my entire feed is gone. You can /technically/ follow topics on Mastodon, but that doesn't really work as it should.
Besides:
> So in this complete breakdown of the press came in the Fediverse. It became the only reliable source of information I had.
Like, no. Getting news from social media is a dead end, is this not obvious just from looking at people who get their news from Twitter? In the very best case one might follow reliable journalists, but then one should follow the places they work. What's more likely is that the author has found a very comfortable bubble.
I have hope that there can be some actual truth-seeking information aggregation algorithm that can finally replace the very imperfect media system, but so far it's not even close. It's very ironic that "a fascist high on ketamine" has, against all odds, managed to produce Community Notes, which is the best attempt so far, but it's like, a few orders of magnitude off being capable of replacing the so-called "legacy media".
Why do you follow people on the Fediverse? You can follow hashtags instead, or some mix of that. That's what I do. That way I get what I'm looking for without getting all the unrelated cruft of following people who post on a wide variety of topics.
> See I had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism. To thrive in capitalism one must be amoral. Now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value. Either you accept a lower share price and don’t commit atrocities or you become evil. There is no third option.
A platinum rule might be that everything has a lifecycle.
Trading the morals for gold might drag out the demise by buying some time, but the real point is to preserve the morals and re-invent the tech, or take the money and run and let, e.g., an Elon Musk assume the Slim Pickins position and ride the tech to its detonation.
But Elon Musk literally made the website unusable because now it no longer shows profiles in chronological order and posts are now essentially just screenshots. 12 years of using twitter without an account and in a few months he made the site completely unusable. Ignoring anything else this is a massive change that was implemented shortly after he took over and now I cannot use the site anymore.
That's not been my experience at all. I only view the "Follow" list because I don't care about the "algorithm". I keep my follow list pretty tight and am pretty aggressive about removing people that post too frequently or without focus. It works just fine for me, but I'm very casual in my usage.
Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about. But if you enjoy a babbling endorsement. However you will be left hanging about what corner of the largely inscrutable "fediverse" the author is bleating about. Make no mistake, mastodon feeds are prone to shameless promotions, scams, and attention whoring that infects all social media, but it's still marginal and so seems quaint.
To get a sense of this skim
sfba.social
which is a feed of trending posts with a U.S. west coast vibe.
> mastodon feeds are prone to shameless promotions, scams, and attention whoring
My mastodon feed contains only the users I follow. If they post unwanted things I unfollow them. Mastodon doesn't force you to see content from people you don't follow.
The sfba trending list has engagement-bait, but you shouldn't look there (on any social media site) if you don't want that sort of content.
For me, having been on fedi for like 7 years now, there are cool places, and there are not so cool places.
I might be more lucky than most in that I barely need to curate my time there, cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too
> cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too
Maybe offtopic but I was reading something on hackernews and thought about something like this yesterday as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y that perhaps its up to the average person to share the list of cool people/things they know.
But I don't think that a follow itself might be the largest indicator of showing others what cool people are.
Yesterday, I tried linkhut (https://ln.ht) and added it to my profile. It just has cool things that I found online and I have written minor notes below it on why I think the things are cool or not.
I am curious to know but can some idea like this take off within the fediverse community/ say personally for you?
Can you have a linkhut profile that I can just see which can have cool people that you found and why you think that they are cool? And if I think that you are cool, then I can have some of that coolness be transferred to people you think cool too?
I used to be on fediverse and I think that there are some very cool people on fediverse, its just very hard to find them sometimes.
I've had a vague idea rattling around in the back of my brain for a while now, for some kind of endorsement system using public keys and signatures, so I can apply an endorsement to a particular site (perhaps with some kind of hash of the content so that it expires if the site changes), and get recommendations from others doing the same. When visiting a new site I can see a reputation score based on how many people have endorsed it and how much overlap there is between me and them. Users would also be able to endorse each other, and exclude either other from the algorithm, too - so hopefully networks effects would form organically around topics of interest - and more loosely between topics.
archive.org + website + linkhut search + username? (Endorsements can work by having the link of ln.ht profile itself being part of another user's Linkhut profile)
For example: Suppose you went to fluxer.gg (Open source Discord alternative that I found cool)
You can even endorse me by having my username linkhut be within your linkhut profile for example and I think I am seeing some social aspect of it in the frontpage of linkhut as well although I don't particular appreciate that right now.
Linkhut also is open source/have public API's
I found Linkhut only yesterday fwiw but its really cool and want to vouch for it. So does this work for the use case that you are mentioning?
Plus another point about Linkhut which I have talked in another comment is the note functionality. It allows me to reason (why?) I liked a particular website of say any project or any person and allows me to add words to it as well. This might be the feature I like the most because it allows me to use words to sort of actually have word-of-mouth for any cool things that we find on internet.
And this way you can also find reasonings for other websites that a person may've vouched for in a way too. I found this whole idea really elegant.
Edit: Oh btw there is also the concept of tags. So suppose you wanted more discord alternative. You could search #discord and it can for example lead you to stoat, matrix etc. from other people too.
I am not sure if there is already an extension that does it but an extension could be made to really simplify some aspects of it. I definitely feel this and there is some maybe small community on linkhut so you're not starting from scratch and also the merits of linkhut in general seem to me be good enough for average person to use.
It sounds really good - though obviously less automated than what I had in mind. What's needed is something with less friction - which could be achieved using a browser extension - but also needs something to prevent shilling and other forms of abuse. (Or, more to the point, a method by which any user who shills can be easily canned by other users.)
> though obviously less automated than what I had in mind. What's needed is something with less friction - which could be achieved using a browser extension
Yes, I completely agree with that but I suppose making a browser extension (for linkhut) is infinitely easier than the previous attempt and something which is more easily doable
There is already an extension which can do the first part of adding a website into linkhut simpler (its named linkput[0]) for firefox and its open source. had to search it up.
> but also needs something to prevent shilling and other forms of abuse. (Or, more to the point, a method by which any user who shills can be easily canned by other users.)
I am not quite able to think of what you mean by that but I do think that there are some ways to do it but its a problem that internet faces at large of abuse in general and its a careful line between privacy and abuse.
That being said, I am happy to help you find this cool project haha :D
I think that if you build something like an extension for linkhut, it would be interesting so good luck with making that hopefully! Glad I could help.
> I am not quite able to think of what you mean by that but I do think that there are some ways to do it but its a problem that internet faces at large of abuse in general and its a careful line between privacy and abuse.
My main goal is that my deciding that someone's recommendations aren't valuable to me should only affect the recommendations seen by people with similar interests to mine. There's not as much objective truth about what's valuable content and what isn't as many people would like to believe: I have no interest in seeing some influencer-led product recommendation but my niece very well might want to see that. Meanwhile she'd have no interest at all in some deep-dive into TMDS signalling and TERC4 codes!
My gut feeling is that, if we could get that system right, it would effectively "shadow ban" (for want of a better term) anyone whose content you don't want to see - but just for you and (to a lesser extent) those who hold your recommendations in good standing.
(I should also mention that my original idea here wasn't so much about discovering new stuff as getting an at-a-glance idea of whether a given page has high-quality content or just low-effort surface-level SEO-farming slop - in an age where the former is being drowned out by the latter.)
> as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y...
I gravitate toward what I consider authenticate/consistent people which for me at least has seemed to work out as I also try to be that way.
> Can you have a linkhut profile...
It doesn't really work that way, you can see other peoples public conversations to see how they interact, as a metric for their personalities, which, might be more work. It's network effects moreso.
as for https://ln.ht, I can see it working for some people, but personally I think there's a bit too much going on, sensory overload.
> as for https://ln.ht, I can see it working for some people, but personally I think there's a bit too much going on, sensory overload.
I do understand the sensory overload aspect. I personally don't use the social aspect of it that much.
Essentially the idea that I want to say was that even the people that I follow (say on bluesky) etc. sometimes I don't know why I follow them exactly either or any idea of giving this info to the world for that matter.
The idea of linkhut interests me especially with their note section: I can have a profile of cool things/people I found and I can share it to world and I can try to explain the "why cool?" so that people can judge things on that aspect and it gives more info, that's all.
Unfortunately even for fediverse/ all social media. You really can't end up writing the exact reason you follow someone as a comment everytime you follow someone. Sometimes sure but not always and those comments can get muddled up with other comments that you write while using the platform itself.
> It doesn't really work that way, you can see other peoples public conversations to see how they interact, as a metric for their personalities, which, might be more work. It's network effects moreso.
I suppose so. But I think the idea to me for using something like linkhut isn't for people to offload searching how people interact/the metric as you mention but rather the fact that we are unable to find these people/products in the first place!
There has been too much stuff going on in the world in social media that there are genuinely cool people/projects that you don't even see. My point is similar to outlinks in the sense of sharing some visibility to those who don't have such visibility in the darkness of internet sometimes.
I only sort of found it yesterday so but that's my take on it. I am curious to hear yours though.
The win for mastodon is that it's a choice to view those feeds at all. Some have none by default (e.g. librem.one), you only see who you follow. Same with bluesky. "Discover" is there by default, but can be removed. It's a tad annoying in some places, like when your feed is "empty", they still show it at the bottom, but it's a big banner which, for me, is a perfect indicator to stop scrolling. You can also hide "Trending Tooics".
Yeah, the choice of title is indeed strange. But it does convey a personal point of view about the platform very well. Largely inscrutable? Compared to what?
> Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about
His article mostly talks about other things but I think his title is sufficient. He says that he never thought that the news would become so unreliable that he would end up getting his news from randos on Bluesky who simply share what they know without an intention to monetize it.
Very much the puff piece of someone living in a social media bubble. The real problem is how the fediverse is going to survive the onslaught of laws related to social media age verification, data retention, data privacy, data not-privacy (breaking e2e encryption and retaining data for a really long time to spy on users), etc. There are a lot of problematic laws right now, but the velocity of new laws is alarming.
One can make an argument that compliance is possible -- but it isn't free. I don't see how small, independent websites will survive. Operators chose not to follow the laws (which sometimes conflict with each other.) As long as you don't scale too much or the operators or anonymous they can probably get away with it.
I use Mastodon. I use Twitter. Twitter is still fine as long as you keep your follow list clean. That means unfollowing people who post noise, which somehow people haven't figured out 17 years later?? Only view the chronological feed. Could this all have just been RSS feeds? Probably.
He asserts to being wrong about the Fediverse being as bad as all the rest, because the Fediverse is full of real people instead of corporatized bullshit.
Why would I be interested in random people's opinions on various things?
I wasted a few minutes of my life reading this rant. It was a total loss. I haven't been entertained by it and I couldn't find anything useful in it. Just the ramblings of a bitter person with which the Internet is filled.
[0]:(I recently bought it and it was idling around, your comment made me think what I should add on it so I did. I hope you evaluate that you were being bitter in your comment as well)
> Why would I be interested in random people's opinions on various things?
Sadly, if you are asking such question, I don't think that the blog post was intended for ya.
I’ve had an awesome experience the last five years running instances for me and friends. So many nice interactions. I recommend running an instance for people you know well. It can still connect to everyone else, but you have your own little corner to feel more connected in.
Everyone else, as long as they don't defederate your server as petty tyrants.
Which has always been the drawback of the Fediverse.
Nostr has delivered what I had hoped to get from the Fediverse: actually decentralized, censorship proof social media (and then some), wherein you actually maintain full ownership of your own identity (as it's a keypair, not an account). Where if you get banned from one relay or other, you just move to a new one, and everything comes with you. Where if nobody wants to platform you, you can literally run your own relay on your PHONE and stay connected to the network.
And yea, there is at least one bridge between Nostr and Mastodon (Mostr), so you don't even have to give up on talking to your Mastodon buddies.
That it also does so much more than social media is icing on the cake. Really leverages its existence as a protocol rather than a platform to use the Internet as it was always meant to be.
Then I don’t really care about them if they don’t want to hang out with me. It works as intended.
I feel like there just something about "this thing is slightly difficult to get started using" that keeps normies out and keeps the place reasonable. It's the only way to prevent the Eternal September of a popular social network.
I felt a similar experience to this on a trip to Scotland recently. My partner and I visited Iona, and it was just amazing. I suspect it was such a pleasant experience because, while the place is about tourism, it's somehow not cliche shit. I suspect the difficult in accessing the island plays a big role.
> I feel like there just something about "this thing is slightly difficult to get started using" that keeps normies out and keeps the place reasonable.
I think about this when people say that contributing to Linux is difficult and they should adopt more user-friendly ways of accepting changes, rather than mailing patches from the command line.
The friction is a feature. You don't want too much, but no friction just invites the spammers and the trolls wasting everybody's time. If anything, as the Internet grows and machines compete with humans, you want even more friction than ever before.
[flagged]
> The only people I've ever heard complain about the slight difficulty are techies
Because everyone else has never heard of mastodon or this fediverse shit. Of course you don't hear complaints from people who don't know what it is.
> I'll take normies over
There are no "normies" as you call them using federated services. They don't want to need to think about server to server federation rules. They want a global central feed.
I suppose define 'normies'? There are plenty of non-techies, but they're often primarily using it for a specific community.
Eh. I'm not going to defend OP's use of the term "normies". It's pejorative and fundamentally othering.
> plenty of non-techies
Viewing the concepts and consequences of federation (no global search, disjoint moderation by instance owners) as "tech" is a fundamental category error.
I've seen plenty of "normal" and non "techie" people on Mastodon.
And the point is the complaints about the "complexity" of Mastodon - which isn't really that complex you can literally join an instance as easily as signing up for a subreddit - are disingenuous coming from this crowd.
People don't want to join "an instance". People don't want to care about what "an instance" is which also means being asked to be aware of things like instance-specific moderation rules.
And I don't know what it's like now, but cross-server following used to be quite annoying.
Being able to join an instance with its own culture, while still being able to connect outside that culture, is the only reason I use any social media at all.
I understand it can be confusing for people coming from Twitter or Facebook or wherever, the local instance culture is Mastodon’s greatest strength. That, of course, and the lack drive to turn a profit from users.
It sounds like we're on the same page. :)
People join "rooms", "lobbies", "boards", "subs", "groups", "servers" and the like all the time, and deal with moderation rules.
Facebook groups and subreddits became so popular because they're all on centralized websites so you can join many of them all in one place and you can talk to people in all of them through the same platform. Single service, single login domain, single thing to tell your grandparents, and, very very very importantly, single global search.
There are major differences between "subs"/"rooms" that are fundamentally joined and independently operated protocol hosts that are fundamentally not.
Those differences are not so complex and confusing that you need deep technical skill to figure them out. You can follow anyone from any instance (per the rules, if you're on someone else's instance) or follow hashtags or use relays if you run your own instance (for which numerous services exist.)
The most difficult part of Mastodon is linking to other instances but even that just involves using the search bar.
> Those differences are not so complex and confusing
One might ask why Bluesky has more sign-ups and monthly active users acquired in less time even without the facestagram login power funnel that Threads has. And of course Threads has waaaaaayyy more. The evidence of what people want from a social media service is right in front of us and very clear.
This reads to me very much like the timeless words of Seymour Skinner, "Am I so out of touch? No! It's the children who are wrong."
Bluesky is, as the article mentioned, basically trying to be old-Twitter. More people want that than want the fediverse. That doesn't mean that nobody wants the fediverse, and they won't necessarily appeal to quite the same audience.
Bluesky had the benefit of marketing, association with Twitter and the support of influencers and Threads is owned by Meta and is integrated into Facebook. What is that supposed to prove, beyond that advertising companies are good at advertising themselves?
Bluesky had the benefit of marketing
The marketing people are the ones who tell you to not use terms like "federation," "instances," or "tooting" when designing a social networking product.
They're the ones who tell you not to force dark mode down everyone's throats by default, when usability studies going back to the 1980s say that's a bad idea.
The marketing people are sometimes wrong. But on the whole, not usually.
> Bluesky had the benefit of marketing, association with Twitter and the support of influencers
Everywhere that people have ever asked why people join Bluesky and not Mastodon, the objections to Bluesky are always philosophical (not actually decentralized, corporate overlords, and so forth) and the objections to Mastodon are always practical (signup sucks[ed?], search sucks[ed?], feed curation sucks[ed?]). Bluesky's selling point has always been "like Twitter, better control, none of the bullshit of Mastodon". That's exactly why any influencers went there and not to Mastodon. Look... I'm not telling you my opinion, I'm communicating the common message given over and over and over by everyone who looked and bounced and talked about it. And when people say over and over and over that Mastodon is frustrating, and people have indeed said that over and over and over, all you need to do is believe them instead of saying they're wrong. Threads has the trifecta of like Twitter, not Twitter, connected to maybe the biggest central platform in the world.
>Everywhere that people have ever asked why people join Bluesky and not Mastodon, the objections to Bluesky are always philosophical (not actually decentralized, corporate overlords, and so forth) and the objections to Mastodon are always practical (signup sucks[ed?], search sucks[ed?], feed curation sucks[ed?]).
Untrue. People complain about Mastodon's politics and make many of the same "philosophical" arguments as they do with Bluesky. People even argue Mastodon isn't even decentralized.
>Bluesky's selling point has always been "like Twitter, better control, none of the bullshit of Mastodon".
None of Bluesky's marketing has ever mentioned Mastodon as far as I'm aware.
>Look... I'm not telling you my opinion, I'm communicating the common message given over and over and over by everyone who looked and bounced and talked about it.
No, you are literally telling me your opinion. Your ever-increasing use of hyperbole rather than sources demonstrates that you're making an emotional argument grounded in hypotheticals.
>And when people say over and over and over that Mastodon is frustrating, and people have indeed said that over and over and over, all you need to do is believe them instead of saying they're wrong.
I think a lot of them are wrong, and are intentionally overstating how difficult Mastodon is because they view it as "leftist" and feel obligated to shit on it as much and as often as possible. I find it difficult to believe so many of the brilliant technically gifted minds on HN can't figure out how it works, but George Takei, random scientists, gardeners, musicians, authors and other "normal" people can. And a lot of those people also have accounts on Bluesky.
> overstating how difficult Mastodon is because they view it as "leftist"
That's an absurd/hilarious thing to say given the demographic breakdown of Bluesky users. Ain't no rightwingers promoting Bluesky because of their opposition to leftism, my friend.
> I find it difficult to believe so many of the brilliant technically gifted minds on HN can't figure out how it works
This is specious on multiple levels. First, "can't figure out" and "not willing to give energy to" are different things. Second, reading this website has no bearing on being either brilliant or technically gifted. Third, there's a big world outside of this website. Fourth, nobody is responsible for what you find difficult, not even you. Fifth, wait a minute, did you just say you find it difficult to believe the perspectives of others? Shouldn't brilliance and giftedness make it easy?
> People don't want to care about what "an instance" is which also means being asked to be aware of things like instance-specific moderation rules.
I can tell you how this reads to me: "I consider myself among peers with coders, scientists, and founders. Being asked to understand pretty simple concepts is too much for me."
I am a happy user of Lemmy. Was there more to understand than how to join Reddit? Yes. Is the fediverse simple enough to understand that people on HN should be viewed with incredulity when they make statements that it's too difficult / too much? Unless they're speaking about people who aren't HN commenters, also yes.
> "I consider myself among peers with coders, scientists, and founders. Being asked to understand pretty simple concepts is too much for me."
I think I can clarify the framing here. People of all walks are extremely uninterested in being told that they need to care about something that they do not care about. For most people, I bet almost all people, decentralization can really just get fucked, because decentralization is not what people are there for. Connection is. What federation offers is just not important to...as a percentage, almost anyone...in relation to what it removes.
Think about it this way: many things are too annoying for you to put up with, even if you technically are capable of dealing with them were you willing to give more energy than you believe is reasonable to give. See also, juice vs squeeze. See also, the iron imperative of writing ("don't waste the reader's time") applies to more than just writing.
Also...
> "I consider myself among peers with coders, scientists, and founders."
One might call it empathy to commiserate with the perspectives of people who are not those things. It's a judgement error to expect a platform to be something other than niche without that. One can also be all of those things and have zero patience for software that has an annoying user experience.
> People of all walks are extremely uninterested in being told that they need to care about something that they do not care about.
You don’t care. There it is. Just say it. It’s not a crime. I’m not judging you. I’m really not.
I care and it might not matter, but I do. It’s not for you. That’s ok. Don’t bag on it for reasons other than this. It’s not difficult and I don’t care if you don’t care. It’s fine.
I'm wondering if the context has been lost because of the length of the chain that this thread is a conversation about why people, especially non-technical and non-philosophically-motivated people, people for whom the concepts of federation and disjoint instances are actually detrimental rather than beneficial because they fundamentally erase some of the most useful features of social network platforms (e.g. global search), don't use Mastodon over something else.
> You don’t care.
Forget about me for a moment. We're talking about people. Most people, in fact. Actually the upstream comments use the term "normies", which is a term that I personally object to because it's pejorative and gross behavior. It's imperative that you evaluate this thread within the given context.
Side note on upstream calling people "normies": It's absolutely nuts to me that the groups most sensitive to othering will themselves engage in mindless othering. But anyway.
> It’s not difficult
To you. In fact one of the things that makes something difficult is how much a person is forced to deal with things that they don't want to deal with, especially when those things are the opposite of what they want from a service.
Every single comment on your profile's first page is political, usually invective. Please review the HN guidelines.
You're a racist and a fascist, kindly eat me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515813
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141183
Oh no, not an ist! Anyway...
This is nicely written but I found some of the views strange. The most disturbing one to me is that the author wants news from social media and claims they have troubles getting news (e.g. criticizing the Washington Post). Not only is it obviously problematic to attempt to get news from social media and everybody knows that, it's also very bold to insinuate that there is lack of access to news. Maybe US citizens get this impression from TV news infotainment, which is indeed abysmal. Okay, I get that. Nevertheless, there are plenty of other sources, we're being swamped with news and know more about what's happening in the world than ever before. Normally, people also complain about the opposite, that they get anxiety from too much exposure to news. So I don't get that point.
The wire services are the source of practically all news. There are vanishingly few other actual news-gathering organizations. (One fewer with the Washington Post deciding that they don't want to be one, either.)
That's the news. Everything else is repackaging.
The actual truth (or as close to it as can exist) has been out there and readily accessible this whole time. People choose to get it through pre-digested outlets instead, and then get outraged that everyone else is ignoring "the" truth.
he doesn't want news from social media
he wants somewhat reliable news
and isn't getting them anymore from US news outlets
but found them (surprisingly) in the fediverse
----
putting that aside finding news on social media isn't really that absurd but it highly depends on you algorithmic bubble/followers. Through a lot of it can be people sharing links to new.
the think is many smaller independent news outlets have very limited means of reaching (new) people by them self, so like everyone else trying to reach people they will use social media
then there are people which share/retweet news. Prefilled by quality and relevance based on their expertise. If you have enough media literacy to be able to judge their expertise you can follow those which have it and even know what bias is involved in their choices.
And sure all of that only works if you yourself have expertise and media literacy. And tends to work best for specialized/expert topics, not for "simplified" everyman news. But you kinda need that media literacy for any news today.
A example around Twitter was in the past one of, if not the, best ways to get tech. computer security news (about vulnerabilities, attacks etc.). That is iff you followed the right people.
Ironically the dynamics for that where very similar to what he describes: "Proper" news outlets being hardly usable. But other people with expertise sharing relevant news for the sake of the information, not for cloud, ads, propaganda etc. (Just the reasons differ. For tech. security news the problem is a. lacking specialized technical understanding of outlets and b. also that most news are too specialized(i.e. boring) for most of their audience.)
I want to know exactly how far the Iranians have gotten against the IGRC in the last 24 hours. I subscribe to WSJ but they don’t have that details. X and Reddit do, with some obvious caveats (I do find Community Notes on X very good though).
Iranians are not rebelling against the IRGC because why would they? Generally an outside attack makes the government more popular, not less.
They're not popular, but going outside in a flurry of missiles isn't good for your health. It's not like the US has coordinated with anyone on the ground to plan a revolt. They seem to have just imagined one will materialize.
They still don't love the regime but today they share a common enemy.
This reminds me of the US soldiers after the Iraq invasion not understanding why the population didn't celebrate them as liberators. Even young Iraqis initially optimistic about the future were quickly disillusioned by the reality.
Two full decades in Afghanistan "liberating" the Afghani people from the Taliban, when you left it took less than a day to undo with zero resistance, that's how much the population appreciated your efforts to "bring them liberal democracy".
I suppose it's because the US public never had to reconcile their fantasies with reality in quite the same way as them.
I'll admit I don't understand the situation in Afghanistan. Rejecting liberal democracy isn't surprising, but the Taliban sucks and it's hard to imagine that it's actually popular.
Obviously it's not up to me to decide for them. It's not like we gave Aghanis the option to move out if they didn't like it. Still...
> Rejecting liberal democracy isn't surprising
I wonder what you think that means and why they rejected it?
Yes they are. Or they were. That’s what the 30-50K dead people four weeks ago was.
Love that writing. I didn’t expect a full size blog post like that based on the title. That makes me very nostalgic of the old blog era
There’s a good chance that era will come back. With the overwhelming amount of AI slop coming down the pipeline, I think many people will seek content unapolagetically written by real people.
>I want news I don’t want your endless meta commentary on the news.
I want commentary on the news. We should be critiquing the news and it's way more interesting that just uncritically accepting mainstream narratives.
News used to be mostly neutral delivery of facts that occurred recently. It was not supposed to be following a narrative or whatever. But that is boring for many people and the American media found out they could make news much more interesting by adding their spicy takes on it, and it worked. Now people watch the news as a form of entertainment. I find that horrifying, the reason you should be informed about the world is so that you can participate in it effectively. News today is much more propaganda than information, and that gives the opposite effect of making you a more effective citizen.
Pretty much all US news is just blindly stating “what’s happening” which lends credence to the current admins (seemingly) illegal/poor behavior. Just accept that the president can start a war, no notes.
Pretty much all US news is the exact opposite of a broad and bare presentation of the facts. It’s a narrow set of facts presented through either a partisan lens or a purely business context, the difference is in what base facts are chosen to work from and none of the news agencies do a good job presenting even most of the relevant facts on any issue.
The Fediverse has one problem, concentration of users on few instances, mastodon.social being the largest. And cancel culture. Highly politically motivated cancel culture. What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand.
The irony of writing this in HN is ... whatever the right word is Also, fragmentation and visibility. It's neigh impossible to find interesting content if you're not on the main big instances.
I’m pretty close to being a free speech absolutist (side-eye to the guy who ruined the term), but IMO one of the worst things to happen to free speech is this conflation of “right to speak” with “right to be heard”.
People have a right to ignore speech, and to establish standards for speech on their private property. If there is market demand for a service that filters out content based on ideology, whether mastodon.social or Fox News, so be it.
It can be toxic and a social negative, but any fix is worse than the problem.
one of the worst things to happen to free speech is this conflation of “right to speak” with “right to be heard”
Thank you for this tight summary. As a greybeard, I'll note this conflation was present from very early on, and it was partly responsible for the heat death of Usenet. No amount of logical, prepared rebuttal budges people from the idea that the two things are the same. The conflation might be a human tendency, a cognitive bias that almost everyone has.
I have no problem getting blocked but my only block on the Fediverse was accompanied by a block for all users on the same instance as me.
This info is useless without the details;
Which instance are you referring to? Who specifically blocked you?
A single user’s action doesn’t represent the entire Fediverse.
So start your own instance. You have the right to speak, not the right to be heard.
You are missing the point.
Why where all the others on the same instance blocked?
They did nothing and their only connection to me is we are registered on the same instance.
BTW You have the right to speak, not the right to be heard is nonsense.
By that logic even North Korea has freedom speech.
Freedom of speech just doesn’t mean unlimited reach and limitless speech
In North Korea, you can’t start your own instance to say what you want. They will still jail you for what you say. That’s the actual point.
The fact that other people want to be on a system that blocks you is their business, not yours. The point of the fediverse is you get to choose your own censorship.
If you got to choose your own censorship it'd be nice. As it stands, other instances can decide to defederate with what you're on. Sometimes, even knocking off servers you had connectivity with that were indirect.
The Fediverse is to Nostr what the legacy telephone system was to the Internet.
>If you got to choose your own censorship it'd be nice. As it stands, other instances can decide to defederate with what you're on.
That is not censorship!
This conversation is frustrating exactly because people think a group “excluding” someone is “censoring” them. Except that's not what censorship is.
Censorship is about you not being allowed to say what you want on a sign outside your own bar.
You complaining about a different bar, not letting you in because they don’t like you. That’s not censorship, that’s just people being jerks to you… and that is allowed. Nobody has to listen to you if they don't like you. Nobody has to even let you in the door to where they hang out if they don't like you, especially if the reason they kicked you out was something you said.
It's 1 person, the instance admin, deciding what's good or bad for all their users. And this is, I'm not sure what, but gives instance admins too much power to moderate content the way they like vs giving the individual user the choice to decide on their own. Call it whatever you like.
"It's 1 person, the bartender, deciding what's good or bad for all their patrons. And this is, I'm not sure what, but gives bartenders at bars too much power to moderate bar conversation the way they like vs giving the individual patron the choice to decide on their own. Call it whatever you like."
It's called moderating the space you operate. This is literally why you can’t walk into a bar like you own the place. If you don't like it, start your own damn instance. You don't have any right to make people tolerate you if they don't want to.
"Market demand."
If I've got a profile on let's say, mastodon.social, and I have a following, and people I follow across other servers, and then mastodon.social decides that due to a few people over on outrageousposts.social, I can no longer access their content, nor they mine, I am left with exactly two choices: write that portion of my network off as a complete loss, or create a completely new profile on a new instance, and build up a new network from scratch.
That anyone puts up with this state of affairs suggests to me that people just don't know Nostr solved this problem 3 years ago.
I get that compared to Facebook, Twitter, etc, Mastodon does seem like an improvement even with this state of affairs -- after all, you at least CAN just create a new profile rather than getting booted off of the network entirely. It was handy for a few years. But a better alternative has been created, and I for one won't be looking back.
why not let people say whatever they want? you already hinted the appropriate solution which is that you don't have to listen.
Community members are a finite resource. Moderators are a downright scare resource.
When you let people spew hateful things you drive away the people you want in the community and are left with a toxic cesspool that no one wants to visit. Your moderators will burn out and leave as well. That's a very reliable way for your space to die.
Then there's the fact that it takes far more energy to refute bullshit than to spew it, and this asymmetry means that "just let them speak" means the toxic liars win.
> Moderators are a downright scare resource.
if you restrict moderation to stuff like gore and porn, then you don't need that many moderators.
> When you let people spew hateful things you drive away the people you want in the community
can't people just unfollow or block others whose opinions they don't want to see?
> Then there's the fact that it takes far more energy to refute bullshit than to spew it
there is no obligation to refute bullshit to begin with. it's a personal choice about how to spend your time.
> and this asymmetry means that "just let them speak" means the toxic liars win.
what's there to win? there is nothing to win for anybody. there's only something to lose and that's time.
> what's there to win? there is nothing to win for anybody. there's only something to lose and that's time.
If there's nothing to win and you're only losing time around here... why are you here in the first place?
Stop losing by trying to convince us how cool it is to lose... because all of your suggestions amount to urging good men to do nothing.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"
> if you restrict moderation to stuff like gore and porn, then you don't need that many moderators.
Have you ever been involved with moderating even a small subreddit or Discord server? I'm on a server with one moderator and it routinely gets spammed while the guy is asleep.
> can't people just unfollow or block others whose opinions they don't want to see?
How do I block people BEFORE seeing the opinions I don't want to see? Trolls can roll up a new account for every single post they make, if they want to.
> there is no obligation to refute bullshit to begin with.
No, but if you're neither blocking nor refuting it, then your community is going to quickly become majority bullshit.
it seems to me that the networking design is flawed. just to give a simple example: whitelisting (only seeing content of friends and followees) versus blacklisting (seeing everything ranked by an algorithm). wouldn't whitelisting already solve most of those issues? that would actually be my preferred modus anyway.
No, because that puts the effort of fighting bad actors on everyone. It means that every day you have new trolls spewing hate in your comments, and that your users have to constantly keep blocking trolls who follow them (and who recruit other trolls to join them) until they get tired and leave the platform.
This isn't an academic debate, we've been seeing this play out online for at least 30 years. Probably longer - I wasn't around for Usenet's heyday but it wasn't immune either.
I feel like a simple reverse-recommendation algorithm could fulfill the role of auto blocking content.
“It looks like you hated that Nickleback song! You’ll probably also hate this Chad Kroeger solo project!”
You would see comments from random trolls under a whitelist model. You would only see stuff from your friends.
"friends and followees"
Only allowing posts between mutual friends is instant messaging, not a social network. Discovery, engagement, and platform growth comes from people wanting to hear from and interact with followers who they don't necessarily follow themselves.
i think you are trying to solve a problem that in my opinion should just be skipped. i don't want to be part of a social network where some algo decides what i see. all i care about is what my friends do and maybe the friends of my friends. and that's it. that was the golden era of social networks, when precisely this was just the norm until they discovered that they can make more money by messing with the feed. no incentive to mess with the feed is what i'd expect from a non-commercial solution like the fediverse. or - at least allow for configuring my feed. if somebody wants to be exposed to all sorts of people - do it. i don't.
That may work for you, but it does not work for anyone running a platform and dealing with the needs of all users. That requires real moderation for both legal and practical purposes, as previously described.
> all i care about is what my friends do and maybe the friends of my friends. and that's it.
Genuine question, then: why are you here, in the Hacker News comments section?
None of the things that you listed are stated goals of fediverse networks. In fact, they explicitly avoid them.
if you restrict moderation to stuff like gore and porn, then you don't need that many moderators.
On mastodon, porn-like content is mostly welcomed. Especially with anime or fox characters. Not sure why.
Because it overwhelmingly attracts a certain demographic of people who have a higher-than-average rate of various paraphilias as well as interest in software but such arguments are a bit taboo to discuss even if they are quite self-evident.
I liked the Internet better when it was all nerds and only code cared, rather than gender identity or listing neuroses in own's social media profile as if it was an audition for an echo chamber choir.
I’ve seen the Internet from the 1980’s until today. It has always had people exploring gender identities and public sharing of neuroses. Mostly nerds, though.
> what's there to win? there is nothing to win for anybody.
There are ideological battles to be fought by all sorts of parties - convincing groups to hate each other, to support or oppose the governments in power, to spread division and destroy societies.
There are trolls who consider it a battle to be won, and the more they succeed the more everyone else leaves the platform.
The party currently in control of the United States is there largely due to people who were fed divisive narratives (often in online channels) to make them hate other groups and a significant number of them consider it more important to "own the libs" and "hurt the right people" than to have the government actually improve their own circumstances. So yes, there's absolutely things to be won.
most of those dynamics are basically just in your head. for example: why would someone care if a troll considers a "battle" won?
I listed some of the real world consequences already. Allowing disinformation to spread and assuming that people will figure out what's wrong on their own does not scale and does not work.
If a social network has an ACTUAL straight chronological feed of only accts you follow, or lists you curate, that works great.
Somebody posts abhorrent Nazi racist crap, or lies about what is happening, you shut them off, and they'll never be heard by you again. Yes, you need to see/hear the crap or propaganda once for each Nazi or liar, but that's it.
The problem is nearly every social platform needs to increase your engagement get you to click or scroll just another time so they get to show you more adverts and make more money and claim more 'engagement' to juice their stock price. So along with having to listen to the advertisements, you ALSO are REQUIRED to see/listen to the crap and lies.
The good solution — "you don't have to listen" — is not an actual option in the real world.
(NB: This is why Section 230 should only protect web providers if they have no algorithm. Once they have an algo, they exercise more editorial control than any newspaper or broadcast editor — they ARE responsible for the content, not because they posted it, their users did, but because they routed it to you.)
the context here is the fediverse and not social platforms based on financial incentives.
Another example of "everything before the word but is horse ****".
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Free speech does exist in the law, not just as an ethical ideal. The law states that the government can’t infringe on your speech.
Anyone who is not the government is free to block your ass if they don’t like you or what you’re saying.
Not all speech is worth defending. The only people who benefit from free speech absolutism are the ones with only horrible things to say.
I don’t think that anyone has an issue with the block feature. The problem is when the platforms themselves decide to arbitrate which viewpoints are allowed. This was clearly visible during Covid, when divergent viewpoints were penalized aggressively.
The union of everything considered horrible by significant fractions of the American public over the years suggests otherwise.
I am fine with blocking. However, it should be me who decides whose speech I don’t want to see, not someone else.
So run your own instance.
Using someone else’s instance is just outsourcing your decisions.
Other people might be ok with or even enthusiastic about that, but that shouldn’t be your problem.
Imagine, if you would, that the strict libertarians had much more influence in shaping the country. So much so that the roads are toll roads, the parks require a fee, and almost no libraries exist because the ROI just isn’t there.
Furthermore, there is no anti-trust legislation, and as a result, there are only a few companies that control all meeting places: the parks, the coffee shops, the roads, the pubs. And they have set up constant monitoring technology.
If you want to set up a protest on a street corner, it better align with the corporation’s views, or they will ban your access to the roads. If you want to talk with friends at the pub, don’t say anything out of line or you’re not coming back. Events can take place in parks, but make sure you only discuss the weather.
Of course, this is fine: you can always just meet at your own home and say what you think, because that is your own property.
…
I realize the analogy is overwrought, but there just doesn’t exist an online equivalent of a public space, and ideological enforcement is trivial. Comparing it to the rules we have for physical spaces mean we need to imagine what those physical spaces would be like if they operated like online spaces, and frankly the result is dystopian (in my opinion).
Surely the solution isn’t just to dismiss it as a non-problem? Or, I suppose, to stop looking for a solution because… solutions so far considered have negative side effects, which feels (practically speaking) the same to me.
Physical public spaces are regulated. Laws still apply there.
There are countless online spaces which operated like physical public spaces, where anything legal goes. Move off of the mainstream web and even the illegal stuff is allowed. You can literally run your own instance of whatever application on the Fediverse and follow whomever you want. No matter how radical or extremist your ideology is, someone will happily host it.
It's only a problem if one insists that all online spaces must be run under the same anarchic principles and must be forced to give anyone a platform, but that's far more dystopian than what we have now.
What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand.
Are they choosing what people can read, or are they choosing what they're willing to federate? No one is stopping people writing and publishing things on federated services. People are only choosing what they're willing to broadcast over the part of the service they run.
Exactly. Each instance is deciding who to federate with and each user is deciding which instance to join
Despite that, Fediverse promoters love to say “It doesn’t matter which instance you join”.
I think it should be ever so slightly more nuanced than that.
It doesn't matter which instance you join if you're just getting started, and don't know enough to make a meaningful decision about which instance to join.
After a week or a month, you might understand how it works a bit better, and also which communities exist, and might have an informed opinion about which community you resonate with.
Yeah, I also don't understand their take. HN also dictates what their users can and can't read. There's tons of stuff that can't be posted here without being removed. That's a good thing.
You are entitled speech, but not to force a theatre company to give you their stage from which their captive audience has to hear it.
Mastodon does not have content promotion. It’s more analogous to the air that transmits your voice than a theater stage.
Nope. Air is static and no one has to pay to keep it there. A mastodon server is private property, and needs maintenance and money to stay on. You cannot force a private entity to host your speech. They always have a choice.
Mastodon is a federated service, like e-mail. Would you use an e-mail server where the admin reads messages delivered to your inbox and deletes the ones they don’t like?
Mastodon is exactly like email. Try running a nazi newsletter off of Gmail and see what happens.
Gmail, maybe. There are a plenty of providers that respect your privacy and don’t read your e-mails.
Also, I’d like to see if anyone has ever been banned from Gmail for sending an e-mail saying that hating all men is not nice.
Uh, you mean like a spam filter? I would not use an e-mail service without one.
No. A spam filter still allows you to view the e-mails and reply to them if you want to.
Also, I would certainly not want an e-mail service where the spam filter is based on the admin’s political opinions.
I run a very small instance and have zero problems finding content. I have a constant stream of posts to the point where its hard to keep up with. It's pretty much a myth that there's no content unless you're on a large instance.
If you don’t like how your server is run, go to a different one! That’s the whole point of the thing. You can even set up your own without too much trouble. If you believe servers shouldn’t be doing this stuff then you can make it happen. Nobody owes it to you.
Instances often block users or other instances because their users have asked them to do that. They often have posted guidelines about what they will or won't allow. Users will hold them to it. Users can and do block other users on an individual basis. If a lot of people are blocking you, the problem might not be them.
that's incorrect.
They report content they don't agree with. And if the instance owner shared that, the federated user or even instance gets banned.
Most prominent example is the Ukraine. Even if you post truthfully and in context, that the Ukraine did support the 3rd Reich with link to the Wikipedia article, you get banned, no warning.
So there is political censorship. And the fediverse is super political. The 3 big content areas in the Fediverse are politics, LGBT and nudes/nudes drawings including sadly CSAM.
Blocking (and reporting) an instance because of CSAM I can understand. But that too should happen at an individual level.
It’s not actually that concentrated.
https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
It's not practical for every user to choose each individual message to read. We allow others to help us filter. If you want the unfiltered version you go get it (and then try to find something under the torrent of spam).
The right to speak is not the same as the right to an audience. If users want to hear you they will seek you out. If not, you've said your peace, and that's all you're entitled to.
Fediverse on mastodon increase social bubbles. Especially when admin of instance has apathy to any kind of different opinions and censor anything like that.
I'm on infosec.exchange and there's plenty of content, especially since it federates so I get content from all over the fediverse. I don't mind that there are only several very large instances, since federating to them from a tiny or even personal instance is no problem.
'cancel culture' is when you decline to federate content users don't want, I guess?
No, it’s when you decline to federate content that some users don’t want (and many do).
If the users wanted the content it's accessible, I'm not sure what your issue is. Do you use mastadon or is this a feelings issue?
I am talking about when instance X defederates with instance Y, so the users on X cannot see content from Y, even if they took no part in the decision.
“and many do”
Yeah, that’s definitely citation needed.
If many people did not want to read other people’s controversial opinions, we wouldn"t be having this whole debate.
It seems like most of the people complaining about this aren't actually on Mastodon.
Well, obviously you’re not going to be on a platform you dislike. I have signed up for Mastodon several times, but always ended up finding the instance dependency off-putting. I wish for a protocol where the instance mostly doesn’t matter and you can trivially switch to a different one, like with e-mail.
How is ActivityPub instance migration worse than switching email providers?
E-mail providers allow you to use a custom domain, so if the one you’re using suddenly goes away, you can just point your DNS records at the new one and that’s it. If the ActivityPub instance you’re using suddenly goes away, you can say goodbye to your account.
Unless I'm missing something, that's exactly the same.
If you're using someone else's email domain (like, eg. gmail.com), you cannot migrate to another provider. If you use your own domain, you can change who is hosting it.
Like email, there are plenty of Mastodon hosting companies. You can use your own domain, and migrate between them at will. If you use eg. mastodon.social, you can even migrate in most circumstances (but not if the instance vanishes).
The difference is that you cannot use someone else’s instance with your own domain. You have to get your own instance, which is much more expensive and creates a lot of duplication.
It would be nice to have a server that supported arbitrary domains. Perhaps https://jointakahe.org/ would suit?
OTOH, eg. (not an advertisement, just the first search result) masto.host offers managed Mastodon hosting for $6/month, which is on par with eg. Fastmail or Proton's base non-free plan.
The only true fascists are the ones who insist that actions should have consequences....
> And cancel culture. Highly politically motivated cancel culture.
Most of the people who started on Mastodon are people of the LGBT+ community that were getting constantly harassed on other platforms. This 'cancel culture' is just a healthy attitude to having a zero tolerance policy on abuse, it is how it avoids being the enormous bigoted alt-right techbro mess that is now X.
Since Mastodon is federated, you can choose the instance you want to use, and what you see. Just don't expect other instances to actively want to engage there.
> you can choose ... what you see
Not true. You cannot federate with tech news and bigoted alt-right techbro (based) instances. That decision is made for you by the janitors of the instances you federate with. Just like reddit, where the janitors of the subreddits decide what you're allowed to see. Your agency is gone.
Compare this to X, where if it's not illegal, you can choose to see or say it with no repercussions beyond an individual blocking you, which solves their problem of not wanting to see what you say. It's the perfect system!
> If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland.
On one hand the author recognizes the scope of the “protocol wars” as a rational thing being irrelevant in the actually relevant time span. On the other hand, the author swears that they can bring rationality to a deeply emotional matter through discourse.
you are aware that he doesn't actually believe that he "[...] could have convinced [..]"
it's a manner of speech
a instrument of telling a story
a way to express how completely absurd "US getting involved into Greenland" is for anyone who understands the land (geography/weather) and people even unrelated to geopolitical aspects like alienating allies
My argument stands whether the author meant to be read literally or not. Below the surface it’s still about the tension of rationality and irrationality within social settings.
I'm glad he found interesting people to follow, but since he didn't make any recommendations, it's not really actionable for anyone else. They would be starting from scratch. Results will vary.
True, although I wonder if that was one of the points he is trying to make.
In any case, you could go to his Mastodon account listed at the bottom of the article and check out who he is following.
Let's say that for news we need the "economic web", meaning no more "newspapers", but independent reporters with their own blogs and followers who micro-pay for individual articles by downloading and truly spreading them from a human to another instead of "many humans toward a network hub". This would solves the censorship problem, as you have thousands of scattered sources that are impossible to control or corrupt all at once, and it generates pluralism where the background noise is mitigated by personal scoring, like the WoT of GNUPG back in the day or Nostr now. The FLOSS foundation guarantees neutrality, while distributed sources like Radicle ensure it can't be censored.
But... for this to succeed, you need LOADS of participants; otherwise, the small amount of compensation collected isn't enough to live on or even maintain as a side hustle. It still works to some extent as long as people doing other things have their say in an interesting way, but it doesn't take off. To get a lot of people, you need to attract a lot of people.
Increasing censorship in recent times has made people migrate from Reddit and Discord to other things, but honestly, the alternatives out there are a bit of a mess. Personally, I set up Matrix for family and friends, only because XMPP doesn't seem to attract anyone, and both Matrix and XMPP are largely a pain to self-host properly if you want to include audio/video calls. The "fragmentation" of other tools is total. To attract people, you need a single, slick go get -able, cargo build -able, pip -able (and so on) application that does pretty much everything without a ton of dependencies. That way, someone discovers it, it's easy, they come for one or two features and discover others, providing enough mass to kickstart the spread. The Fediverse model does not offer that so far, Nostr is only a little bit better, ZeroNet is dead, ...
It seems that recent/young developers can't grasp this, so caught up as they are in what they do at work, the "zero barrier to entry" of living on someone else's servers, which hamstrings every FLOSS project. Creating countless separate applications useful for selling services in a commercial model, but it's a recipe for failure in FLOSS. No idea to integrate client and server in a single app to solve even if DHT and alike are there since decades...
The mind is one, so the application must be one and integrated to cover the bulk of needs in a single environment. Emacs understood this a long time ago, Smalltalk workstations even earlier; today, it seems most people still can't wrap their heads around it...
> I want news I don’t want your endless meta commentary on the news.
And you expected to find this on a decentralized social media platform?
Mastodon is extremely technologically stagnant, with one and only one player controlling the entire technical ecosystem.
There is a huge lack of interesting apps or innovation. The protocol is very narrowly defined, and does not have any Postel's Law characteristics. You have to use the limited API offered in the Mastodon form.
There is starting to be some interest from ActivityPub in defining their own client APIs. But this gathering together of people is only just starting, and it's unknown where that effort will go or when it will see traction in adoption.
It also sucks being moderated by whatever Fedi you are on. And the very poor state of account portability sucks.
There's also internally a very aggressive culture, against devs doing fun and interesting things with the social media data. The social rules of engagement seem to be that you can only enjoy Mastodon as a feed that goes by, and you cannot download or analyze deeply. You can't index or search, except with strong carved out cases. People building search or indexing tools are harassed and abused.
I strong recommend this excellent write up, which does a far better treatment than I could offer, on Mastodon: https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr156-share-where/
Atproto has none of these issues, and has a rich ecosystem of devs building neat tools like RSS readers (skyboard), writing (greengale), book reading (bookhive), trail making (side trail), annotations (margin.at), events (smoke signal), chat (roomy), social/research bookmarking (semble), video streaming (Streamplace), media watching (pop feed), key attestation (keytrace), git (tangled), and yes, devs: containers (atcr).
I'm sorry but Mastodon is a dead end, a bad design, going no where, bereft of interesting dev engagement, with data that is hard to share & make interesting use of, data that is extremely narrowly constrained in shape/form.
I am envious of the dev-centric culture there. But it astounds me that devs would choose to exist on a place that is so technologically unalive & so low potential.
It’s weird that you think a social network needs to have some sort of technological drive or entrepreneurial spirit to be relevant. If anything, this will lead to its inevitable enshittification, as you can plainly see in Twitter and Facebook.
I agree that the sprawl of objective, trying to cover more and more, is quasi horrific in the ways we have seen it: seen through market captures and monopolization and acquisitions of Instagram, etc.
But for computing, not having a network fabric that is adaptable to purpose has kept people from having any starting point to play with. Every time you want to build a social system, you start with your own website (or go even lower level to reinvent), with your own bespoke back end, your own unique internal and or external API, rather than having set protocols you can adapt.
This isn't strictly true. There have been many attempts to build more good protocols, with endurance and reuse and adaptability. RemoteStorage, inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, HyperCore/Swarm, or Dat (which atproto cto @pfrazee built a browser for, Beaker). (Mastodon was never one of these & is not now.) This is not the place for writing a Speaking for the Dead for each of these, (and none of them are dead beyond grasp), but so far this question of what gets the most use, what has seen the most apps built upon it, the most end user adoption: it has a clear answer and it's atproto.
Atproto layers social networking right. You are self sovereign to a data store that you control (absolute authority, can-move/credible exit), that has your records in it (https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/). It makes syndication cheap & easy. It makes relays that aggregated PDS's while presenting a like API surface to the individual user, to facilitate syndication en masse. It layers indexers (appviews) that provide aggregation etc. This mirrors a functional social network system, goes beyond protocols to be a complete system, that is imminently individually maintainable, at scale.
It provides a platform that anyone can use to be creative, in a connected fashion. Your phrasing hints at the whiff of terror that these large companies bring, the reign they have over our lives. The drive they have is to saturate, to take our attention. I see the role of atproto & it's drive as a network technology layer to allow new social technology layers to be created at very low cost. It allows individuals to build amazing services, very lightweight and client only / isolated web apps that speak the protocols and which can put or retrieve records or appviews, for any kind of social network technology.
That to me lacks the scariness you speak of. There is not one overarching drive or ambition. It is not centralized or directed intent, working cohesively to capture society. Both are expansive & space filling, but their characteristics are as far apart as I can imagine.
@pfrazee distilled it well in Atmospheric Computing (https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/atmospheric-computing), a lovely post. That to me resonated strongly everywhere but especially the cold start problem. That it used to be hard for people to make connected things. And now it's not. That's the essence of the cold start problem. And rather than control the things we create, the role of the creator is different: they facilitate creating records, tools to help people build Abramov's Social Filesystem (previous link). They don't nor should they want to own the network, the protocols, the data, the users, the accounts. Those are atmospheric ambient systems that exist.
> It’s weird that you think a social network needs to have some sort of technological drive or entrepreneurial spirit
I perceived a noted lack of techno-social substrait upon which individuals or entities could collaboratively build or explore. The systems humanity has built have been dead end systems, built for narrow set purposes. There has been a missing General Systems Research component to computing for decades. There has never been a successful General Network Research effort, beyond the web itself (what a hit), and the vision TBL had for the web as a bidirectional writable author able medium never materialized. BlueSky corporation has me at least convinced that nothing can stop credible exit, that this is not their network, and independent actors like BlackSky have somewhat proven that out already in astoundly sophisticated end to end fashion, with incredible thought to their own moderation systems etc.
Tl:dr: actual humans have lacked the means to explore and build the techno-social, and it is absolutely nuclear hot fire that I have all this from little apps a bunch of creative friendly awesome neat people built that lets me capture this stuff (https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:zjbq26wybii5ojoypkso2mso/). This is proof that we have a general social networking system right here today available for use, experiment, & play. Not proof, but imho the roots are strong & good. This is how we escape the capture-entrepreneurialism. We have lacked fertile soil & good foundation for new things to get started on. I'd characterize the distinction as alive, adaptable, usable systems, versus stagnant dead systems, and imo, stagnant fixed systems aren't serving us well now, and over time decay & en-badification to serve us worse. Hence my advocacy of aliveness & possibility. (And my disdain for Mastodon as barren anti-ecosystem.)
I just tried to check out the Fediverse and found utter confusion. I'm not saying its bad-- I'm saying I am bewildered. There are communities I can join, but I can't tell how I should choose a community. I could find no way to search for communities that might be a fit. Apparently there are a lot of different kinds of social media under the broad banner of the Fediverse. How should I choose, and what are the implications of choosing?
I suppose I could pick a random community. But what's the point? I don't know.
It’s a little wild to read comments like this because this was just how the Internet worked before Twitter got popular. I still get “happy birthday” emails from forums I joined 20+ years ago.
Communities used to be themed. Honda forums. Programming. Gardening. Video games. Etc. We've been spoiled in the era of Reddit where all these communities could be found in the same place. Lemmy tried to replicate that experience by having a video games community in every instance. This has caused a lot of confusion and fragmentation. It's very difficult to figure out where to discuss video games (or any other topic). I think it would have made a lot more sense to theme instances instead of making instances Reddit clones.
I was on Compuserve and Usenet, both of which were no more difficult to use than Reddit. That was in the late eighties.
In 1986 I ran a FIDO server, which is like what the Fediverse is now, I guess. I had, maybe, 50 users?
I know how things used to be.
I still host one of those 20+ year old forums. The Fediverse is different. With forums (and HN/Reddit) you immediately had good sense of them being for you or not. With the Fediverse to have to commit to servers and even then you don't know if they are right for you unless you try and spend time customizing your feeds/follows. It's a lot of work and you don't know if it will pay off. I tried again today and so much of it has no focus at all. It reminds me of this exchange from the Good Place TV show:
Chidi Anagonye: So, making decisions isn't necessarily my strong suit.
Michael: I know that, buddy. You-you once had a panic attack at a make-your-own sundae bar.
Chidi Anagonye: There were too many toppings, and very early in the process, you had to commit to a chocolate palette or a fruit palette. And if you couldn't decide, you wound up with kiwi-Junior Mint-raisin, and it just ruins everyone's night.
How did you get that 'good sense' with forums back in the day? I did that by reading into the community. Just look around on the server, see the posts on there, and see if there's a connection. You can do that with Mastodon servers too. And it's not that high stakes. You are not stuck on that server, if you find out that it's not quite the right fit, you can move to another server. In fact, if I were to look at my following list, I think I see more people from outside the mastodon server I joined than people from the same server.
For forums you can look at them for a minute or less and figure it out. It's same with HN and sub-reddits. They are information dense and don't require signing up or customization to figure out if you can curate them into something you might like.
Compare that to mastodon, step 1 is pick a server https://joinmastodon.org/servers Very few are actually topic focused. Even the ones with themes have a lot of deviation. Even picking the popular safe choice - https://mastodon.social/ , I can't tell if I would ever like it. I don't like what I normally see but considering I can see 2 posts at a time and a significate portion are animals or other topics I wouldn't visit a forum about, it doesn't feel like I would.
And the animal thing is common across most of the servers. I understand it, I have dogs. But it's a side effect of the medium not having a coherent focus. It feels like I'd have to spend so much time to turn it into something that I'd like that I'd be better off staying with forums.
Mastodon seem great if you want to follow people and be social which is kind of the point of social media. I want to follow areas of interest, not people.
If you don't want to choose, install the official mastodon app. It should direct you to create an account on mastodon.social, unless you go out of your way to pick something different.
I suspect the sign up flow has changed since you last tried.
How did you choose the provider of your email address?
For Mastodon, you can check https://joinmastodon.org/servers to figure out what server you want to join. But joining one server doesn't mean you can't access people and communities from other servers. It's one big network, but with many different access points (the mastodon servers), each access point has their own niche. These access points each can have their own rules, so be sure to read them before joining.
What the point of joining the fediverse is, I can't answer that for you, that's different for everyone. The only thing I can tell you is that there's a wealth of information available there.
I run my own mail server, thank you.
“It’s one big network” People say that as if its meaning is self evident. I don’t know what that means. Does it mean that I can do one search and find anything on any server? If it’s one big network, why does it matter what server I choose?
You could run your own Fediverse server.
Can you do one search on one server, and find any email address that exists anywhere? (not that I know of)
Can you send email regardless of what server the email lives on? (with some exceptions, but mostly yes)
Federation is not infinite or unlimited, so no, there is no "one search to rule them all" within the confines of a single instance. (But then there's no way to access all email, or search all email addresses across mail servers to find someone.) Still if you're on an instance, and go out and find people on the internet that interest you, regardless of how you find them or what instance you are on, you can follow them, and their content will begin to be federated into your feed, on the instance you use.
The server you choose matters, but it's also not something you can't change. (Like getting a new email address.) If you use Gmail, but someone uses a mail server that has been blacklisted because of bad players using a domain name or IP address, you probably can't get email sent from those servers.
But initially, you can either go with the biggest instance, or the first one you see on https://joinmastodon.org/servers that seems fine and then try it out for a while. It's not a single decision you have to make for the rest of your life. It's just something new, and a new way to have access to some people connected to each other through some instances, topics, follows, etc.
Thanks for the deep response.
I don’t want to run my own server. But perhaps there is a server I want to join. There seems to be no clear way to search for them. You are referring to Mastodon, but the Fediverse is not just Mastodon.
Certainly. I have dipped my toes in a few other Fediverse pools.
Of course, like email / domain names, there's no universal search for picking them. Big ones get network affects or advertise. Small players have to be found organically.
https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse
That's a big flippin' list of Fediverse networks. But "a clear way to search" being layered on top of "decentralized" and "anyone could theoretically bring up a server at any time"... there's always going to be friction.
Whether you join any of them... well that's up to you to decide if you're curious enough, you suspect there's value there, etc.
The monetization and network affects of corporate social networks has always lent itself to incentivizing popularity contests and "emotional" content that pulls people in. If you want to escape the bad sides of those, there's also compromises on the independently funded networks.
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This is a big turn off for me too. I don’t want to “figure it out for myself”. That’s why I became catholic as an adult.
With the fediverse I have an overwhelming fear of missing out if I pick the wrong communities. I feel like it needs aggregation which defeats the purpose.
Are you not afraid of having picked the wrong community when choosing Catholicism ?
> We all need pointless hobbies, but I care about YouTube stars like I care about distant stars dying. It’s interesting to someone somewhere but those people don’t talk to me. I mostly use social media as a place to waste time, not a platform to form para-social relationships to narcissists. I prefer my narcissism farm to table. I’d rather dig a grave with a rusty spoon than watch a Twitch “star”.
I don’t really care about the substance of this article, but the style is entertaining. Curious for anyone who writes in a similar style - do people actually compose like this breathlessly, or are these kinds of lines wrought over several revisions? I know everyone’s different, but I can’t imagine writing like this on a first pass.
If you grew up writing (and reading) a lot, it's quite natural to have a "voice." It makes sense too: it's akin to having spent a lot of time with a certain person.
Although, I do not know if this is really that shining of an example of anything, although a fine blog post!
If you are surprised, I wholeheartedly recommend just reading more. Something clicks after 1000 pages of Swann's Way, or Infinite Jest, or even the Gnus manual where you simply must reckon with a certain kind natural voice that can be cultivated and exhibited without exertion, without even a "thought."
And I know the implication here is maybe underhanded, and that you feel its "entertaining" as a party trick is; where one compensates for content with flowery prose. That might be fair, but I see this charge more and more, and I just worry one day everyone is just going to deem reading and writing itself as a waste, as a compensation for some unnamed other thing we should all be doing (optimizing productivity). Which is why I must defend every labored, silly metaphor I read now to my death from all yall editors that popped up three years ago.
It’s a British newspaper columnist style. Read anything from AA Gill if you like it.
There are probably parallels with rap artists. There are those that improvise and flow.
(the rest of us edit and re-edit)
AI? I just read it and remembered how I got busted for writing papers for friends. Style and voice are tangible and I'm getting an uncanny valley creepy crawlies from the opening of this article. edit, maybe some AI segments, I would guess the author is young and will write differently in a few years.
Weird sentiment to have for some guy that says "uncanny valley creepy crawlies." Did you get your friends good grades??
> If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. We’re not tough enough as a people to survive in Greenland, much less “take it over”. Greenlandic people shrug off horrific injuries hundreds of kilometers from medical help with a smile. I watched a Greenlandic toddler munch meat from the spine of a seal with its head very much intact. We aren’t equipped to fuck with these people, they are the real deal.
Wow.
I laughed so hard. The whole articles tone is really enjoyable to me.
Like anyone is going to listen to anything for 20 minutes.
Partisanslop podcast would work. I hear Joe Rogan is quite successful nowadays.
The US has long since wanted to purchase Greenland, not "fight" them, for strategic reasons. I'm not sure why there is this fantasy that the US is going to fight the Greenland people? Honestly.
The president of the United States literally said that they were going to get Greenland, one way or another.
If I were to say "I'm going to get Dionian's house, one way or another" would you not prepare yourself for an invasion?
“But we need it really for international, for world security, and I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it,”
-- Donald Trump, March 4, 2025
Because the US was threatening to take over Greenland by force maybe? There's a reason Denmark rushed soldiers there.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyg1jg8xkmo
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/10/politics/us-will-take-gre...
> So of course media corporations became bargaining chips for the oligarchs' actual businesses.
I stopped reading here.
This line shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the world and essential blindness to author’s own biases.
Media corporations ALWAYS have been bargaining chips to the oligarchs’ actual business, whoever the current politician in power is.
It's a bit ironic that I want to point people so badly to Edward S. Herman and Chomsky's work on the propaganda model to explain why the current war propaganda in the west in support of Operation Epstein's Fury is nothing new.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
Yeah, no, getting out of the Fediverse was my best decision, or perhaps second only to getting out of Twitter.
I think the model itself of following people (instead of, e.g. following topics) is basically irredeemable, you either:
a) follow only people with whom you 100% agree, which is very dangerous;
b) follow only people who post cat pictures or anything else as unobjectionable;
c) get a lot of negative emotions from all the nonsense in the feed.
It was the latter for me, I still have nightmares from having to ban the #NixOS tag from my feed, from my entire feed approving of the murder of some random insurance CEO, from the endless "AI is scam" takes, etc., etc...
And I can't really unfollow someone who posts 75% of nonsense if they post 25% of interesting technical stuff. Because then my entire feed is gone. You can /technically/ follow topics on Mastodon, but that doesn't really work as it should.
Besides:
> So in this complete breakdown of the press came in the Fediverse. It became the only reliable source of information I had.
Like, no. Getting news from social media is a dead end, is this not obvious just from looking at people who get their news from Twitter? In the very best case one might follow reliable journalists, but then one should follow the places they work. What's more likely is that the author has found a very comfortable bubble.
I have hope that there can be some actual truth-seeking information aggregation algorithm that can finally replace the very imperfect media system, but so far it's not even close. It's very ironic that "a fascist high on ketamine" has, against all odds, managed to produce Community Notes, which is the best attempt so far, but it's like, a few orders of magnitude off being capable of replacing the so-called "legacy media".
Why do you follow people on the Fediverse? You can follow hashtags instead, or some mix of that. That's what I do. That way I get what I'm looking for without getting all the unrelated cruft of following people who post on a wide variety of topics.
Holy shit that’s a lot of windows
> See I had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism. To thrive in capitalism one must be amoral. Now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value. Either you accept a lower share price and don’t commit atrocities or you become evil. There is no third option.
A platinum rule might be that everything has a lifecycle.
Trading the morals for gold might drag out the demise by buying some time, but the real point is to preserve the morals and re-invent the tech, or take the money and run and let, e.g., an Elon Musk assume the Slim Pickins position and ride the tech to its detonation.
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sadly many such cases, I think some are just predisposed to it more than others
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But Elon Musk literally made the website unusable because now it no longer shows profiles in chronological order and posts are now essentially just screenshots. 12 years of using twitter without an account and in a few months he made the site completely unusable. Ignoring anything else this is a massive change that was implemented shortly after he took over and now I cannot use the site anymore.
That's not been my experience at all. I only view the "Follow" list because I don't care about the "algorithm". I keep my follow list pretty tight and am pretty aggressive about removing people that post too frequently or without focus. It works just fine for me, but I'm very casual in my usage.
I don’t have a follow list because I never had a twitter account. Over 12 years of using the site without an account and now that isn’t possible.
> Elon Musk literally made the website unusable
If it's literally unusable, how are millions of people still using it?
I used Twitter for over a decade without an account and now you essentially are unable to do so without jumping through significant hoops.
That is how he made the website unusable. Like a billion people have Facebook/Instagram accounts but Facebook is equally unusable without an account.
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Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about. But if you enjoy a babbling endorsement. However you will be left hanging about what corner of the largely inscrutable "fediverse" the author is bleating about. Make no mistake, mastodon feeds are prone to shameless promotions, scams, and attention whoring that infects all social media, but it's still marginal and so seems quaint.
To get a sense of this skim
sfba.social
which is a feed of trending posts with a U.S. west coast vibe.
> mastodon feeds are prone to shameless promotions, scams, and attention whoring
My mastodon feed contains only the users I follow. If they post unwanted things I unfollow them. Mastodon doesn't force you to see content from people you don't follow.
The sfba trending list has engagement-bait, but you shouldn't look there (on any social media site) if you don't want that sort of content.
For me, having been on fedi for like 7 years now, there are cool places, and there are not so cool places. I might be more lucky than most in that I barely need to curate my time there, cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too
> cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too
Maybe offtopic but I was reading something on hackernews and thought about something like this yesterday as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y that perhaps its up to the average person to share the list of cool people/things they know.
But I don't think that a follow itself might be the largest indicator of showing others what cool people are.
Yesterday, I tried linkhut (https://ln.ht) and added it to my profile. It just has cool things that I found online and I have written minor notes below it on why I think the things are cool or not.
I am curious to know but can some idea like this take off within the fediverse community/ say personally for you?
Can you have a linkhut profile that I can just see which can have cool people that you found and why you think that they are cool? And if I think that you are cool, then I can have some of that coolness be transferred to people you think cool too?
I used to be on fediverse and I think that there are some very cool people on fediverse, its just very hard to find them sometimes.
I've had a vague idea rattling around in the back of my brain for a while now, for some kind of endorsement system using public keys and signatures, so I can apply an endorsement to a particular site (perhaps with some kind of hash of the content so that it expires if the site changes), and get recommendations from others doing the same. When visiting a new site I can see a reputation score based on how many people have endorsed it and how much overlap there is between me and them. Users would also be able to endorse each other, and exclude either other from the algorithm, too - so hopefully networks effects would form organically around topics of interest - and more loosely between topics.
archive.org + website + linkhut search + username? (Endorsements can work by having the link of ln.ht profile itself being part of another user's Linkhut profile)
For example: Suppose you went to fluxer.gg (Open source Discord alternative that I found cool)
You searched it upon ln.ht: https://ln.ht/?query=fluxer.gg
You can then find the username who uploaded it there (in this case, its me): https://ln.ht/~imafh
You can then for example, find another thing that I uploaded there about a song/musician that I found really cool :-
Fuji Gateway - Tuesdays, Am I Right? (Official Lyric Video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijjb_0RW28c
You can even endorse me by having my username linkhut be within your linkhut profile for example and I think I am seeing some social aspect of it in the frontpage of linkhut as well although I don't particular appreciate that right now.
Linkhut also is open source/have public API's
I found Linkhut only yesterday fwiw but its really cool and want to vouch for it. So does this work for the use case that you are mentioning?
Plus another point about Linkhut which I have talked in another comment is the note functionality. It allows me to reason (why?) I liked a particular website of say any project or any person and allows me to add words to it as well. This might be the feature I like the most because it allows me to use words to sort of actually have word-of-mouth for any cool things that we find on internet.
And this way you can also find reasonings for other websites that a person may've vouched for in a way too. I found this whole idea really elegant.
Edit: Oh btw there is also the concept of tags. So suppose you wanted more discord alternative. You could search #discord and it can for example lead you to stoat, matrix etc. from other people too.
I am not sure if there is already an extension that does it but an extension could be made to really simplify some aspects of it. I definitely feel this and there is some maybe small community on linkhut so you're not starting from scratch and also the merits of linkhut in general seem to me be good enough for average person to use.
I am curious to hear your thoughts on this.
It sounds really good - though obviously less automated than what I had in mind. What's needed is something with less friction - which could be achieved using a browser extension - but also needs something to prevent shilling and other forms of abuse. (Or, more to the point, a method by which any user who shills can be easily canned by other users.)
> though obviously less automated than what I had in mind. What's needed is something with less friction - which could be achieved using a browser extension
Yes, I completely agree with that but I suppose making a browser extension (for linkhut) is infinitely easier than the previous attempt and something which is more easily doable There is already an extension which can do the first part of adding a website into linkhut simpler (its named linkput[0]) for firefox and its open source. had to search it up.
> but also needs something to prevent shilling and other forms of abuse. (Or, more to the point, a method by which any user who shills can be easily canned by other users.)
I am not quite able to think of what you mean by that but I do think that there are some ways to do it but its a problem that internet faces at large of abuse in general and its a careful line between privacy and abuse.
That being said, I am happy to help you find this cool project haha :D
I think that if you build something like an extension for linkhut, it would be interesting so good luck with making that hopefully! Glad I could help.
[0]: https://git.sr.ht/~silasjelley/linkput
> I am not quite able to think of what you mean by that but I do think that there are some ways to do it but its a problem that internet faces at large of abuse in general and its a careful line between privacy and abuse.
My main goal is that my deciding that someone's recommendations aren't valuable to me should only affect the recommendations seen by people with similar interests to mine. There's not as much objective truth about what's valuable content and what isn't as many people would like to believe: I have no interest in seeing some influencer-led product recommendation but my niece very well might want to see that. Meanwhile she'd have no interest at all in some deep-dive into TMDS signalling and TERC4 codes!
My gut feeling is that, if we could get that system right, it would effectively "shadow ban" (for want of a better term) anyone whose content you don't want to see - but just for you and (to a lesser extent) those who hold your recommendations in good standing.
(I should also mention that my original idea here wasn't so much about discovering new stuff as getting an at-a-glance idea of whether a given page has high-quality content or just low-effort surface-level SEO-farming slop - in an age where the former is being drowned out by the latter.)
sounds like a anti-block list ;)
> as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y...
I gravitate toward what I consider authenticate/consistent people which for me at least has seemed to work out as I also try to be that way.
> Can you have a linkhut profile...
It doesn't really work that way, you can see other peoples public conversations to see how they interact, as a metric for their personalities, which, might be more work. It's network effects moreso.
as for https://ln.ht, I can see it working for some people, but personally I think there's a bit too much going on, sensory overload.
> as for https://ln.ht, I can see it working for some people, but personally I think there's a bit too much going on, sensory overload.
I do understand the sensory overload aspect. I personally don't use the social aspect of it that much.
Essentially the idea that I want to say was that even the people that I follow (say on bluesky) etc. sometimes I don't know why I follow them exactly either or any idea of giving this info to the world for that matter.
The idea of linkhut interests me especially with their note section: I can have a profile of cool things/people I found and I can share it to world and I can try to explain the "why cool?" so that people can judge things on that aspect and it gives more info, that's all.
Unfortunately even for fediverse/ all social media. You really can't end up writing the exact reason you follow someone as a comment everytime you follow someone. Sometimes sure but not always and those comments can get muddled up with other comments that you write while using the platform itself.
> It doesn't really work that way, you can see other peoples public conversations to see how they interact, as a metric for their personalities, which, might be more work. It's network effects moreso.
I suppose so. But I think the idea to me for using something like linkhut isn't for people to offload searching how people interact/the metric as you mention but rather the fact that we are unable to find these people/products in the first place!
There has been too much stuff going on in the world in social media that there are genuinely cool people/projects that you don't even see. My point is similar to outlinks in the sense of sharing some visibility to those who don't have such visibility in the darkness of internet sometimes.
I only sort of found it yesterday so but that's my take on it. I am curious to hear yours though.
Like this one: https://www.immibis.com/outlinks/
IDK about Linkhut. Why should I use a whole SaaS to manage a single page list of links?
Outlinks are great too. It's just that I have found it easier with Linkhut and yea.
Linkhut is open source and seems nice to me that's all.
The win for mastodon is that it's a choice to view those feeds at all. Some have none by default (e.g. librem.one), you only see who you follow. Same with bluesky. "Discover" is there by default, but can be removed. It's a tad annoying in some places, like when your feed is "empty", they still show it at the bottom, but it's a big banner which, for me, is a perfect indicator to stop scrolling. You can also hide "Trending Tooics".
Yeah, the choice of title is indeed strange. But it does convey a personal point of view about the platform very well. Largely inscrutable? Compared to what?
> Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about
His article mostly talks about other things but I think his title is sufficient. He says that he never thought that the news would become so unreliable that he would end up getting his news from randos on Bluesky who simply share what they know without an intention to monetize it.
Very much the puff piece of someone living in a social media bubble. The real problem is how the fediverse is going to survive the onslaught of laws related to social media age verification, data retention, data privacy, data not-privacy (breaking e2e encryption and retaining data for a really long time to spy on users), etc. There are a lot of problematic laws right now, but the velocity of new laws is alarming.
One can make an argument that compliance is possible -- but it isn't free. I don't see how small, independent websites will survive. Operators chose not to follow the laws (which sometimes conflict with each other.) As long as you don't scale too much or the operators or anonymous they can probably get away with it.
I use Mastodon. I use Twitter. Twitter is still fine as long as you keep your follow list clean. That means unfollowing people who post noise, which somehow people haven't figured out 17 years later?? Only view the chronological feed. Could this all have just been RSS feeds? Probably.
Thank you for your opinion.
He asserts to being wrong about the Fediverse being as bad as all the rest, because the Fediverse is full of real people instead of corporatized bullshit.
>sfba.social
Seems pretty cool TBH
Reads like an intro to a Portlandia remake, only its 2010 nostalgia mixed with heavy handed Reddit-tier remembrances and jibes.
Your 'social media' purity is still some network engineers bastardization of bits. Forums, Usenet, irc, email groups,...
Lamenting what was or what could have been is useless when there is still work to be done directing the outcome.
Vent. Move on.
Why would I be interested in random people's opinions on various things?
I wasted a few minutes of my life reading this rant. It was a total loss. I haven't been entertained by it and I couldn't find anything useful in it. Just the ramblings of a bitter person with which the Internet is filled.
Says the person commenting on a site where random people give their opinions about various things..
Ok random person with opinion on a thing.
> Just the ramblings of a bitter person with which the Internet is filled.
https://mirror.forum [0]
[0]:(I recently bought it and it was idling around, your comment made me think what I should add on it so I did. I hope you evaluate that you were being bitter in your comment as well)
> Why would I be interested in random people's opinions on various things?
Sadly, if you are asking such question, I don't think that the blog post was intended for ya.
“So when Twitter was accidentally purchased by a fascist high on ketamine” was enough to predict the rest of