by betwixthewires on 10/22/21, 12:22 AM
People interested in this stuff should check out alternate software as well. Hometown is a fork of mastodon that has a few extra features but one very interesting one in particular: you can post to the local server only, which is an excellent community building feature.
There's also pleroma, which I've run and is pretty great and low on resource requirements. And there are tons of other social UX paradigms like link aggregators and even Peertube which is a tube site server on the same network as mastodon using the same ActivityPub protocol.
I'd love to see people implement novel types of social sites besides functional clones of existing social media, there are some significant architectural and UX differences in a distributed, federated social architecture that can be leveraged to great effect.
by kixiQu on 10/21/21, 11:05 PM
I admin and use a Mastodon instance. It takes a while to get used to the differences from Twitter, but it's far more polished than people seem to expect. The reading I tend to recommend if people have questions is Darius Kazemi's
https://runyourown.social/by messo on 10/22/21, 6:48 AM
Mastodon was hard to "sell" to my peers when I tried to explain how it works. Recently I changed my approach by not explaining all the great technical features related to federation, and instead focused on the fact that it is ad-free, do not use an algorithm (feed is chronological) and is community run. Mastodon is what Twitter once was, before it got ruined by ads and algorithms.
A friend who is an artist was frustrated with the experience on Instagram, and finally signed up on an art-related community in the fediverse, and found it to be a breath of fresh air, with more meaningfull interactions, not just likes.
by commoner on 10/21/21, 9:54 PM
by mathnmusic on 10/21/21, 10:11 PM
How do things stand on account portability? If I sign up at a mastodon server, build an audience and network there, but later if the server admin changes its policies in unfavorable directions, can I migrate to a new server with all my contacts and reputation intact - even without the old admin's cooperation?
by riffic on 10/21/21, 10:50 PM
I'm one of the moderators of the /r/Mastodon subreddit, and folks are more than welcome to stop by and share their experiences using and operating this software.
by PaybackTony on 10/21/21, 10:03 PM
Background: I've been building a growing commercial social network. There are things about what I want to do that made that the better option for what my target market is.
With that said, I really like what Mastodon has done and as far as federated and open social networks go (ActivityPub!). It's in a class of its own IMO.
by keb_ on 10/22/21, 12:23 AM
As much as I'd love to use Mastodon, both times I tried, I got bored and gave up because I couldn't find interesting people to follow. All of the people I do find interesting are only on Twitter.
by SavantIdiot on 10/21/21, 11:05 PM
I've been trying to set this up for years and it continues to defeat me. Even the Docker method is still fraught. I hope they can dumb it down at some point, or clean up the docker setup. There's a LOT of different frameworks & tooling at play in this ecosystem to debug when things go wrong. But I guess it is close to rocket science.
by Zababa on 10/21/21, 10:11 PM
There are lots of files at the root level, which means I have to do 5/6 complete scrolls to get at the beginning of the readme. I see this pattern a lof with Go project. I've always wondered if it has an impact on the popularity of the project. If anybody from Github is reading this, that could be a blog post idea. Something like an invisible pixel at the top of the readme, and the number of top level files + directories, and see if there's any correlation.
by FalconSensei on 10/21/21, 11:07 PM
I really wanted to like it, but it's just so difficult to actually find people and content, considering you can only search for hashtags and all...
by makeworld on 10/21/21, 9:56 PM
by sitzkrieg on 10/22/21, 3:27 AM
beware mastodon downloads and mirrors all federated media to instance users, which is whatever,
but the admin tools do not correctly keep track of removing old media. hell, if an instance goes offline without nuking itself proper, mastodon will leave all of the media on your drive. it requires a ton of babysitting to run on bound storage, and the issues around this are still open.
i highly highly recommend pleroma over it, it uses 1/10th the system resources and doesn't download federated accounts data locally
by EGreg on 10/22/21, 3:05 AM
by EamonnMR on 10/22/21, 1:16 AM
Anyone have a tutorial on how to use mastodon as an end user? Are there servers worth joining? Does the fediverse make the server you join irrelevant? Has SDF got an instance? Are there clients people prefer? I'd love an alternative social media platform but when I join them they often end up dead (wt.social, etc)
by EleanorKonik on 10/22/21, 2:32 AM
What's the best way to find interesting people if you've already got an account and don't want to switch instances but your local instance is a little slow these days and you'd like to liven up your feed?
by zekrioca on 10/21/21, 11:20 PM
Does anyone know if there is a client to automate and (timely) measure operations (i.e., add user, add comment, add like, etc) in a local Mastodon server?
by DoItToMe81 on 10/23/21, 5:08 AM
I love the concept of Mastodon, but I feel it inherits many of the problems of Twitter. I only used it for about a month, but I encountered far too much mob mentality and pearl clutching for my health and left. I like free discussion, and I feel the current Mastodon userbase means I'd have to host my own echo chamber to avoid theirs.
by russdpale on 10/22/21, 3:14 AM
I want to like mastodon, but it needs a single sign on feature and usually every server I look at it is totally dead.
by wombatmobile on 10/22/21, 10:10 AM
From slate.com
Everything That Went Wrong With Donald Trump’s New Social Network in the First 24 Hours
> Truth Social will be a lot like Twitter, with the primary interface consisting of a feed of short posts from users you follow. However, these posts will be called “truths” instead of “tweets,” and reshares will be known a “retruths.” While the platform wasn’t supposed to have its soft launch until next month, users found a way to access the site and were setting up accounts within hours of the announcement. (One vandal claimed the @donaldjtrump handle and posted a picture of a pig with extremely large testicles.) Truth Social eventually cut off access, though screenshots of the interface taken before then suggest that the platform is basically just a fork of Mastodon, the open-access software that allows users to make spinoff social media networks. Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko has said that he will be seeking legal counsel since Truth Social appears to be breaking his product’s terms of use by not sharing the code or license with the public. Truth Social’s terms further claim that the source code is proprietary, which could also violate Mastodon’s license.
https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/donald-trump-true-socia...
by crate_barre on 10/21/21, 10:12 PM
by crocodiletears on 10/22/21, 4:11 AM
Are there any actively maintained Activitypub/Mastodon clients that don't integrate their own blacklists? Someone recommended Husky to me, but it's been dead for a minute.
by nathias on 10/22/21, 7:12 AM
Federation really seems to combine the downsides of centralization with the downsides of decentralization.
by adminscoffee on 10/22/21, 3:32 AM
now mix it with pion and we're cooking
by indig0g0 on 10/21/21, 10:56 PM
Right after read an article on WAPO about Truth Social likely violating Mastodon's license, I hop on HN and find this as the first post.