I’ll be that techno neophyte and say that I don’t really understand how to use Mastodon properly. I’m able to get on and read posts but no idea if I’m where I want to be. I want to be on a very free speech and open server, even at the cost of having some human trash posting nonsense on there. What’s the best approach? I’m tired of seeing a handful of kids at Twitter decide what is appropriate to post or not.
The second-best approach is to run a managed instance via something like masto.host or spacebear (https://app.spacebear.ee/).
The third-best approach is to join an instance that is (a) neutral in its content and (b) not overbearing in its moderation policies. Most of those listed on joinmastodon fail this test.
I am running a instance at https://mastodon.communick.com, and my moderation policy is basically "don't post anything illegal and follow the Silver Rule - don't treat others in a way you wouldn't like to be treated".
Don't treat others in (a way you would not like to be treated).
You can parse the sentence by evaluating the parenthesis first, "a way you would not like to be treated.". Let's think of a few ways you would not like to be treated. I don't want other people to
* Scream at me
* Insult me
* Put words in my mouth.
Then it says "don't treat others" in such a way.
A gotcha here is that not liking something is not exactly logical inverse of liking something. Liking something means positive feelings. Not liking something means negative feelings. Feeling neutral is a third category, not included in either.
That's why it's the platinum rule. There are people who genuinely attempt to abide by this rule and they can be great assets to a community as long as they are not getting trampled over.
The worst thing about ActivityPub and federation is the hefty resources it costs to run them. Same issue with Matrix.
It’s impossible to make a profitable business hosting servers For people because of how horrifyingly inefficient they are.
$5 for the lowest tier for all apps on spacebear. If you want all apps that’s like $20 per month. This is the future the fediverse wants? That’s awful.
Decentralization is not resource-efficient and its cost per unit will be always higher than any centralized alternative. That is a given. It is the cost of having all that redundancy and flexibility. You can not reach economies of scale easily.
With that said, I believe prices will go down for B2C. A few reasons why I believe so:
- Some of these services will consolidate into larger offerings and make a more featureful service. Pixelfed is already experimenting with a different frontend where users can share more than just photos (UI-wise, it looks a lot like early/cool Tumblr)
- A larger number of professional providers that will run instances in the same way that people were running email providers. With Communick I can run Matrix, Mastodon and XMPP and I am charging $5/10 users/3 months during the "soft launch/beta" phase, which is basically $0.17/user/month and will let me hit break even point with less than a hundred paid accounts. I can increase this 10-fold and it still wouldn't be as expensive as any of the current major providers.
- Media storage costs completely dominate the rest of other infra expenses, and IPFS can save the day here. It's not hard to imagine an architecture where servers provide only a cache layer for media serving and the less-accessed data lives on users' clients.
- The real money is in hosting for business/enterprise/white-labeling anyway. As much as I want Communick to be successful and I hope I start getting more people to "get it", I am using it as lab to make sure that I can offer a reliable media presence / communication service for companies, and then "Communick B2C" would be mostly a loss-leader.
I absolutely agree. It’s just a messaging protocol. There’s no reason for all of these apps to be so niche.
And I agree that there’s no inherent reason that all of the current servers are terribad. Although it is strange that everyone interested in decentralization seems to also be interested in bad technology. Though of course this is slowly changing as reality sets in.
Communick sounds interesting. If you can really bundle all those apps together for that cheap? It makes me wonder why Element Matrix hosting is such a ripoff. Or why every other host is such a ripoff.
I agree about IPFS too. Specifically though I’d like to see Sia used as storage because it’s actually working today as opposed to Filecoin and all that which is not close to functioning yet.
> You know who will, and don't care about the resource usage? Organizations.
They won't because it's too inefficient to even make sense. You're running it as a loss. You're better off paying for a service that is profitable like Slack.
For example, a lot of people are pushing for colleges to run matrix and give every student an account, just like they do with email.
If they did that, they'd be sunk financially though lol.
Even if organizations did run fediverse servers, that defeats the whole point of the fediverse. I don't even know why I'm writing this comment though, because I'm proven right be the fact that the activitypub team is working to solve the very issues that I am talking about. So they clearly think it's a problem and agree with me.
I don't advertise my instance, it also blocks registrations from anyone outside of EU, but I have the same policy.
I'm as left as left gets, my family and friends are made up of several activists. But I also am annoyed with how hate speech and right wing people are moderated.
My opinion is that they should first of all be reasoned with. And if you can't reason with them then each user may block them on their own.
But to just block their entire instance, or "Gab", is to sweep a bunch of HUMANS under the carpet and not even attempt to communicate with them. That goes against my core principles.
I agree with you in theory, but in practice I just don't want to spend my time on social media arguing with someone so fundamentally ideologically opposed to me.
Sure, I could block the users individually, but I prefer to just use an instance that de-federates from cesspools of such users.
I know what you mean. I picked someone from the public timeline a few days ago and started to try and make sense of their argument.
Within just a few back and forths I realized that this person was either just bored and trolling, or I was unable to understand their perspective and it was relentless.
I still didn't block them, or their instance. I saw their message in the public timeline, it didn't arrive directly to me in any way.
I prefer to spend my time arguing with catgirls over the correct spelling of nya over spending that time seeing people discuss my extermination. You do you.
How do you reckon the seemingly contradictory statements in your post?
1) "...it also blocks registrations from anyone outside of EU"
2) "But to just block their entire instance...is to sweep a bunch of HUMANS under the carpet and not even attempt to communicate with them"
Unless your instance is specifically dedicated to taking action in EU politics are you not sweeping a bunch of humans under the carpet and not even attempting to communicate with them by blocking everyone outside of the EU from talking to you?
Forgive me if I missed something, I am just truly curious because you don't see some seemingly contradictory statements in close proximity often which makes it likely I am just missing some core fact.
My instance is a Swedish one, it's aimed at Swedish users. In the 1st few months of operation I was getting a lot of spam users registering and noticed this was a wide spread issue among instance admins.
So I made the decision to use a basic GeoIP block on the path used to register new accounts, blocking all IPs outside of EU to make the area wide in order to avoid blocking Swedes.
This caused my spam to go down to zero. At the same time I use several ActivityPub relay servers that make my public timeline so active that you can see posts appear every second. I'm quite happy with this solution and consider it a good method to use in general with federation.
I'd much rather see smaller localized communities using AP relaying to stay in touch with each other, than huge monolithic instances that vacuum up all the users.
What I mean when I say that you shouldn't block entire instances from federating just because of a few hateful users is that they're being blocked from the public timeline. Not being blocked from registering.
Mastodon is federated which means you want to pick an instance that follows the moderation principles you adhere to, the instance you are on determines your "local" timeline while the federation of all the instances is the "global" timeline. This link should be a good start to decide which instance you want to join https://joinmastodon.org/
The joinmastodon.org site curates the instances it recommends to only show ones that don't permit racism, sexism and transphobia. OP seemingly wants those on their instance so they won't find it there, and they also won't find them in the global timeline on the "mainline" fediverse because those instances are banned for obvious and good reasons.
You can, however, probably find links into the alt-right sphere fediverse on the chans. And they would be federating together so you can trace those instances to find one you, uh, want.
I don't think GP is looking for an alt-right instance, probably just one where you aren't treading on eggshells all the time. The people on the Fediverse do have a bit of a reputation for cancelling people who they disagree with, most notably Wil Wheaton [0].
Hearing about what happened to Wil Wheaton was a shock to me, when I first found out about half a year ago. I don't think this behaviour is all that common, though I'm (un)happy to be proven wrong.
Twitter is ruled by the will of the company and by extensions its shareholders and by extension of that the interests of capital.
The Fediverse broadly isn't really ruled, its about who you participate with. It is to the benefit of Mastodon et al that even though the mainstream deplatforms intolerance it doesn't actively prevent them from using the software, just from using their servers of it.
Yea, if you want to be in the mainstream Fediverse you need to play by the consensus rules of that space. But its just that, a consensus of server operators, rather than the will of a corporate entity.
If you disagree, you can run a server that doesn't follow consensus. The most common outcome is that you'll be blacklisted or atleast silenced by other instances (silenced meaning only people that deliberately follow see your posts).
People who agree with you and don't blacklist your instance can talk and interact with you.
That is basically as close to proper free speech as you get. I get my corner of the internet, where I will blacklist nazis and racism, you get yours were you don't.
I don't assume, I just explain what I do and what I see most commonly done. I don't allow racism and that's not censorship, it's my personal, private choice and my users agree with it (if they don't they are free to take their data off my server and go elsewhere with no interference on my part)
You seem to be confused and think that censorship has to come from government or some other orgs? You’re suppressing political topics (e.g. all of migration policy is racist by definition), which lands squarely in the censorship camp. It’s not any less censorship if your users agree with it.
Well, the thing is that I'm not forcing you to use my instance. If I tried to prevent you from saying specific things on all instances then I would call it censorship. But as long as you can go elsewhere for your speech, it's not censorship, it's free speech, just like it's a free market of ideas.
You seem to be confused and think that free speech means everyone has to listen to your speech, otherwise it is censorship. Before the internet and connectivity, people were perfectly free to stand on a soapbox and say their speech, just as everyone around them as free to ignore them, ostracize them or throw rocks at them. Censorship requires things to be surpressed or prohibited but I alone on my mastodon instance cannot prohibit or surpress these things on my own. I can ban them on my instance but people can go elsewhere, so the speech is neither prohibited nor surpressed, just not welcome in this place.
Censorship largely, IMO, can only be done by the government or large corporations like Facebook. It is censorship when speech is forbidden that has no other place to go.
On the other hand, racism and hatespeech should be censored, they're not welcome and this "sunlight is the best desinfectant" bs people like to repeat like it's a bible quote doesn't help.
I mean, that's basically why the comment agrees with what I wrote, I think. You're free to federate with whoever you want and other people are free to federate with you or not. Nobody is forced to listen to what you have to say, it's entirely voluntary. Ie, actual free speech.
The operative word is "force" which tends to translate to threatening harm or violence. At which point, one tends to contest the prerogative of dominant authority which is usually a sovereign nation state. Depending on where you live, this prerogative is legitimized through a democratically elected mandate and codified in a constitution.
This principle sanctions a state to prosecute private citizens exerting violence against each other over differing opinions, beliefs and so on in front of a court of law (separation of powers!)
The 1st amendment is the cornerstone, in that it protects private citizens from that same legitimate authority trying to curtail freedom of speech by passing laws that do so, or by sanctioning violence against people who hold particular opinions.
... which is why I posted the cartoon.
The 1st amendment doesn't shield anyone from criticism, feedback or being ignored by others. If Mastodon instances block or blacklist each other, the principle of free speech wasn't violated. What really happened is different groups of private individuals deciding to stop listening or acknowledging other groups of individuals.
Is this a morally right or even healthy thing to do? That's highly debatable, depends heavily on the context and who you're talking to and I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Your mileage may vary, as is always when confronted with murky human behaviour.
All this says is that you can't force people to listen to your speech. If you disagree, the only other option is to force people to listen, which is just fascism.
> All this says is that you can't force people to listen to your speech.
Erm, no, this comic explicitly says it's OK to be kicked off a platform for the things you say. Which is essentially mob-rule, or an arbitrary rule a community can invent on the spot to justify kicking you out. That's what you call authoritarian when someone/groups makes a decision to censor you on the basis of you having a different opinion.
In mastodon the individual platforms are run by individual administrators, who decide what is permissible and what not. You can't force them to have to list or federate with your instance just like you can't force someone to listen to what you have to say.
It's not authoritarian, it's free speech as a principle. You can say what you want and everyone who is willing can listen. Everyone else doesn't have to listen. That is free speech.
You aren't kicked of the platform, you can still be part of the fediverse, in fact, there is plenty of instance that are willing to uphold the "no moderation free speech" fake principle to host trolls and alt-right who federate with everything that is legal.
It’s not free speech as a principle if a small group of administrators decide what a much larger community is allowed to see.
It’s even more insidious than the power that Reddit moderators have because at least you can see that comments were deleted.
A platform designed specifically around federating giant censorship networks has nothing to do with free speech. The only free speech their is that someone can setup their own instance, but that’s no different than phpbb, which doesn’t make such a grandiose claim about free speech.
There is no small group of administrators that meets up to decide what everyone can see. Every instance can on their own decide what they see and what not. The larger community doesn't have a "council of true moderation", most instances just tend to have common rules like "be nice to eachother" and "don't be racist", so the larger network is fairly cohesive.
It's also untrue that an instance you run will be like phpbb, even if you don't get federated by larger mastodon instances, there are plenty of instances that federate with anyone who's not hosting illegal content or spam. And you can join those instances if you don't want to host.
This is free speech as a principle; nobody has to host you and you get an audience of poeple who are willing to listen. Nobody who doesn't want to listen has to listen. That second part is integral in true free speech.
And I would also point out that Mastodon or Pleroma work just fine federating small networks, they don't have to be "censorship networks", which I think is begging the question a bit.
It's only mob rule and authoritarian if you look at yourself and such a community in isolation. That is: when you get kicked out, you land utterly alone in a void. Much like being banished in old days from a tiny village.
But on line communities don't exist in isolation. They are embedded in a larger, complex, modern society where social identity is based on a layers of many social connections, and where your rights and freedoms are anchored in an established legal and constitutional framework. You also still very much belong to your family, close friends, work, school, neighbourhood and so on. (Unless you migrate and end up in a legal limbo; or live in a strict and authoritarian society)
Sure, you can claim authoritarian or censorship because someone isn't willing to listen to your opinion. But, depending where you live, that doesn't mean your constitutional rights in general were violated. Not by a long stretch. All it means is that a particular person or group of people are done listening to you. You're still very much free to go out and find like minded people.
You're also not entitled to admittance. Why? Because the vast majority of servers - whether that's IRC, Mastodon or Reddit - you'll join are managed privately. It means that you are a guest and your presence is allowed by the host as a courtesy. Much like you are also a guest when you enter a shop, a bar, a restaurant, a movie theater, a theme park,... The notion of private property implies that the owner - whether that's a person or a legal entity - is free to kick you off it if they feel the need to do so.
You could argue that you getting kicked out is an act of violence. But then the only entity that could conclusively assert your claim is a court of law. Any judge will verify your claim against a touchstone which is the prevailing legal framework such as it is. Since free speech only applies to the government, any claim between private citizen referring to this right won't hold in a court. Getting denied entrance or admission to a group won't be seen as violent either: private property owners have that right.
The only way forward would be to demonstrate intent in a way that you getting cancelled becomes a legal infraction: you got kicked out because of a clear, demonstrable discrimination against your identity: colour, race, creed, religion,... Which is extremely hard to establish before a court of law.
There's actually a paradox at the heart of all of this. Karl Poppers' Paradox of Tolerance. It states that a society that allows far reaching freedoms also comes with an individual moral responsibility to act tolerant towards differences between peoples. Sadly, some people will peruse those freedoms to promote intolerance and division. In order to protect freedom and basic rights, it's necessary to show intolerance against such intolerance.
The issue with this paradox is that it doesn't state where the line is to be drawn between what's acceptable and what's unacceptable. Worst case is that by being overzealous in showing intolerance against intolerance... society ends up curtailing the very freedoms and basic rights it purports to uphold.
It's exactly why it's so hard to legally assert that the intent with which you were kicked out from an on line community was discriminatory. Such a ruling needs to be extremely carefully considered as it might create a legal precedent that curtails other basic rights and leads to other, unintended, forms of legal inequality.
And so, it's important to have an ongoing debate and figure out a common moral framework to manage this conundrum. It's equally important to be activist in that regard and find well-founded arguments against ideas and beliefs that target basic human rights or outright dismiss the notion of a common understanding and respect towards fellow humans. The fine print with all of this, then, is that you have to be extremely careful not to become the very thing you purport to fight... which is exactly the kind of perception your statement about mob rule and authoritarianism risks creating.
Arguably, you're legal rights aren't violated if you don't get admitted to a private party in the analogue world. Neither are your rights violated if someone disagrees with you or if you disagree with someone else.
In places where principles of government with respect for basic human rights are upheld by representative, mandated legal, executive and judicial bodies, you are free to contest that someone's opinion has damaged you before a court of law who will then assert your claim against a legal touchstone: the rule of law.
Libel, damaging the integrity, inciting violence against a particular, concrete group of identifiable persons or a single person, committing a prosecutable crime,... If a court of law finds that some party has overstepped their bounds, they will award civil compensation, or a corrective punishment (e.g. fines, prison time,...) None of that, however, is considered curtailing free speech rights unless you can make your case before a constitutional court.
The fallacy is assuming that Mastodon is (a) interchangeable with the fediverse (b) a single large unifying platform (c) a silver bullet solution which, contrary to centralized social media platforms, enables an utopian community devoid of human conflict.
Another fallacy is assuming that the public debate takes place in one big homogeneous public space. It does not. In the analogue world, there are countless clubs, associations, groups, factions, parties,... with their own meeting places, books, publications, journals, newspapers, periodicals and so on. For better or worse. The convergence of digital media into a few large platforms inadvertently have created such a perception, and capitalized on that perception as it served their private, business interests first and foremost.
Furthermore, subsequent scandals regarding large social media platforms created the backdrop for an alternative to come to the stage. Several technology outlets picked up on Mastodon. Created as a one-man effort by this young, idealistic developer, it fitted the narrative perfectly as an alternative that would break the dominance of big platforms over the public debate such as it is.
However, even though the software is published under an open source license, that doesn't negate intellectual ownership over one's creation. All it does is give license to use, modify and re-distribute the software under the same conditions. The original creator is still very much free to decide how to move forward implementing features, and espousing their own opinion freely. And you deciding to freely use of the software doesn't entitle you to a decisive vote on how the software evolves. For better or worst, the creator is perfectly free to say "Nope. Ain't doing that."
If anything, you are free to set up their own instance and decide to which instances to connect. You are free to fork Mastodon and change features to your own liking. You are free to build your own implementation of ActivityPub. You are free to promote your own implementation, set up your own network and recruit your own community. You are free to do all these things in many sovereign nations across the world who's constitution and legal framework provide those rights.
Of course, what makes all the difference is how people fundamentally treat each other. It's one thing to call out those who refer to others in derogatory, discriminatory and downright rejectable terms. It's quite another thing to assume that your free speech rights are being violated because another private person, or group of private persons, is unwilling to listen, let alone accept, your opinions.
Edit: I took the time and effort to clarify myself. I would like to ask for the courtesy to come up a proper argument in return, instead of a downvote which leaves everything and nothing to the imagination
OP only said they want more free speech, not the extremism that you’re quick to assume, which is why they probably want that freedom in the first place.
What could you possibly want to post that might get taken down by twitter? Unless you post actual nazi propaganda or violence or something, it's a pretty free place. Remembering that freedom means people get to tell you to shut up, of course.
> I want to be on a very free speech and open server
Mastodon and most of fediverse is very conservative in that regard. Chinese "communist" propaganda is fine though, so it's very much controlled by handful of vocal kids.
It's the same project that has two different block buttons and yet has a rule against replying to people who indicate that they don't want to be replied to lol
There are chill instances though — look for smaller niche ones that don't focus political discussions.
Ah, so this is why there is a seemingly-random post to Pleroma on the front-page as well.
Competition is good. I just wish this competition stays healthy and these projects cooperate more to fight against the centralized social networks instead of each other.
Honestly I was just randomly going around the Internet and found a Pleroma instance and thought it looked cool, so submitted it. I didn't see the Mastodon submission beforehand, which I'm also a fan of. I do think it seems decently collaborative for now, so not too worried. Getting normal users to use anything other than the large winner in an area (Twitter, Reddit, Discord, etc) is what the true challenge is imo.
I like the personal note feature. Somewhat CRM-esque, and i can see it being quite handy. I'm a pleroma user (run my own single-person instance), and before that used/ran a gnu social instance, but i have always felt that what gargron and the early mastodon folks have done for bringing more attention to the fediverse for laypeople is a wonderful thing! Kudos to the mastodon folks for this update! The more options that exist for the fediverse, the less relevant the centralized silos become (i know, there's a looooong way to go, but still).
Does anyone know how I can filter out non-english posts from Mastodon? I set up an account and followed some people back in 2017, but it's unusable for me now since I can't read 70% of the content in any of my timelines.
In your account Preferences, under "Other" there's a checklist where you can specify what languages you want to see on timelines. If you don't select any, there's no filtering.
It does work but not 100% which makes it feel like it doesn't. Language detection is very far from totally accurate (we use the CLD3 library), so sometimes it gives the wrong language. People can also just select which language they post in because when that's done in good faith it's more reliable than language detection, but of course it can also lead to some posts not being in the language they're supposed to be in. Using language filters cuts down on a lot of posts though, even if some slip through.
I'm on few international instances and always had German and French pop up even-though I have only english checked; Could it be that the instances themselves are faulty here?
I guess it makes sense that the filter would be confused on tech based talk as it includes a lot of english loan-words though it's a bit irritating when browsing public timelines.
Language detection is more accurate on longer texts, short messages have a lot of false positives and many English loan-words would only worsen the situation indeed.
I agree that perfect translation might require GAI, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good. An AI just needs to be better than existing approaches to be somewhat useful.
It certainly is a valid use-case, but if you want something that is simpler to manage, look at pleroma and the Soapbox frontend. Pleroma takes way less resources and you'd be able to run on a Raspberry PI.
Another thing to consider, though, is to not run something like a social network and instead just get matrix and create group rooms for your family? Everyone would still be able to share updates and even call each other. Not only you eliminate the need of Facebook, but also WhatsApp/Messenger.
Yeah, I spent a couple hours today trying to get pleroma installed on a pi4. Pleroma unhappy about the elixir version, elixir unhappy about erlang version. What a mess. Simple is not a word I think can be associated with it.
Yep. There are even settings to require a login to view any content, designed for private instances such as for classrooms, which effectively locks down the instance. That’s how I use it for my family.
It’s a rails app. I love rails (and activitypub), and I use rails for work frequently, but it comes with substantial operational load (postgres, redis, worker nodes, process supervision, media storage, backups, high ram use, etc).
If that doesn’t scare you off, then go for it!
If you don’t want the federation, I’d suggest looking for something lighter.
It’s a little heavy, but I can say it runs fine in a 1 GB VPS, with the addition of a 1 GB swap file to compile the front end during installation and upgrade.
I'd go a little bit further here: I run Mastodon on a 1 GB VPS as well, but I found I had to make the swap file permanent to stop it from running out of memory. It's not super heavy but it is heavy, and even though swap is slow, it still runs fast enough.
I'm happy there is a way to get people off of Twitter, but I do not see Mastodon having a (good) long term future.
I have tried Mastodon off and on several times. For the few amount of good posts I've found in my interests (art and music), venturing out of those interests feels as if I'm wading into a toxic sludge of angry children who can't see beyond their nose.
It seems to be that the Twitter format leads itself into being a great place for angry people to constantly barrage their woes at the immovable world [0].
I understand that the world is cruel and unfair, but I also do not want a constant 24/7 cry of lament that only people who meet every criteria of every type of victim-hood can have a bad day and anybody else is an evil pig who doesn't deserve to live, let alone speak. This can be seen in both to the left-wing and right-wing instances as they both see themselves as perpetual victims from those in power (police, companies, government, soceity on the left, and media, companies, government, society on the right).
This kind of vitriol is already seen enough on Twitter. Seeing it even more so in self-enclosed echo chambers like some Mastodon instances just drives away any potential for normalcy, and therefore realistic ideas or normal conversation coming into their community. The loudest voices drown out others, claiming to have the right answer before they know the question, and not hearing out any arguments or facts that could possibly counter them.
I wish the best for those who join, but hope we find better means of communication than what is currently here. Perhaps a method where there is more talking and hashing out ideas rather than following trends and hashtags.
This gets very apparent when you take a peek at ruleset of many instances. For example my instance mastodon.technology just added a rule:
* No unsolicited advice to strangers.
when someone asked what's wrong with recommending alternative software to people who complain about software the reply was:
> sometimes people just want to scream into the void
Which summarizes this micro-blog screamverse perfectly. The fact that this sort of behavior is _encouraged_ is actually quite disgusting in my honest opinion.
I've never used much Twitter but to me it already seems that Mastodon is just as toxic as Twitter and it seems to be by design.
That's such a strange rule to have for a tech instance. Is there really no better reason for it than that people want to bitch about things without actually wanting a suggestion on how to solve their issues?
- it's often noise because you can't act on it (because you need to use X)
- it's often noise because you already have done your research and are aware of the options. Especially since many people reply even if they don't have particularly novel information or even know a lot less than the person that made the original post. Some people find it grating to get repeated trivial "recommendations" on everything - on Twitter exasperated replies of "guys, I can google myself!" aren't uncommon)
- it's often entirely predictable (i.e. whatever Desktop OS you use, for sure there's someone asking why you aren't using Linux/FreeBSD/MacOS/Windows10+WSL instead (strike the one you are currently complaining about))
- it's repetitive, and especially for more prominent people a large volume of comments
> - it's often noise because you can't act on it (because you need to use X)
"screaming into the void" is noise; replying to those screams with suggestions if anything would be an attempt to denoise the network by promoting actual conversation.
The problem here is as I've pointed out that some people clearly don't want to have a conversation — what the value in that? Why post something on public forum if you don't want to have a discussion?
Especially when mastodon supports private toots — if you really want to went start a journal or toot "unlisted" or "followers only".
When mastodon just started out federated and public timelines was a joy to read but now it's just constant screaming and yelling and utter thought vomit to the point where I'm certain that nobody browses federated or even public timelines anymore.
At the end of the day it seems that it's a design flaw of twitter that promotes toxic screaming rather than structured discussion and Mastodon as a platform hasn't really done anything to address this.
Thanks. It was really bugging me that I couldn't think of optimistic reasons for that policy. I still don't agree with it, but I suppose anyone who doesn't can just make their own instance or find one with different rules.
Remember that having that rule doesn't stop people from asking for advice. If someone wants to say, "this sucks! What's a better way of doing it?" they still can. The rule-as-written doesn't even preclude a replier from asking, "I've got a suggestion, if you're interested?" (although that might still be frowned upon, it still comes across a lot better than "have you tried this?")
I've used Twitter for 13 years and Mastodon for 4... and have seen almost zero toxicity or arguments on Mastodon (in stark contrast with Twitter, of course). That said, I'm on a smaller instance and I don't "browse the fediverse" much, I stick to my crew of "locals", mostly. It's easy to filter out stuff you don't want to hear about, but honestly I haven't even found the need. More and more frequently I'm considering just closing my Twitter account -- as many of my friends have already done.
> Perhaps a method where there is more talking and hashing out ideas rather than following trends and hashtags.
I have limited experience with Mastodon but I share many of your sentiments about Twitter and the current state of conversation on the internet. I think part of the problem is that Twitter (and Mastodon), are not optimized for actual realtime conversation, and additionally we need more competition.
I'm working on a new chat-based discussion site that I hope will add another option for people looking to have real conversations, in a very open, sharable, and simple experience that's easy for anyone to hop into and talk. Feel free to check it out, cheers! https://sqwok.im
You are unfortunately describing things that are separate from any "social network", they are unhealthy and detrimental behaviors that have metastasized and are manifest in society today in general, mirrored and amplified online where people can find whatever pity party echo chamber they fall into, which will then only be amplified through self-reinforced "moderation", aka censorship.
It's actually precisely why we need free speech more than ever, because those who withdraw into self-censored echo chambers need to hear things that are not their favorite things to hear even more than those who demand free speech. Not doing so will only end poorly.
For those that dont agree (downvoters), feel free to self host mozilla sync server and for added fun, try to do it on freebsd - then you will understand my point. For developers on mastadon - I hope you did get my point and will improve this as it might considerably increase your usage base.
My biggest problem with all "those" platforms is that I want to have it self hosted. I expect one directory/executable (no, not docker) with everything I need to run it, instead of fishing for different parts all over package managers etc. I will exclude database from this. Or nginx/apache proxy configuration.
Same issue as matrix - i would love to run it but what is too much is too much. Maybe once the golang engine is finished, if they dont blew it and make a huge dependency tree for nodejs.
I am so sorry but if I proceed with the philosophy that projects have for the deployment, I will run out of storage and spend my whole life just updating packages. Not to mention if I decide to not use it.
I think that all complex projects are doing the same mistake for last 20 years: they always ignore the "packing" or the end distribution form that their project will have at the end - a huge number of different blobs with 3rd party dependencies are created and it is just expected that this is trivial for end user to set up and maintain.
I set up Mastodon to give it a try a few months ago and I share your pain, as someone used to old-school unix sysadmin it seems pretty ridiculously complicated and you basically have to input a bunch of docker commands and hope that whatever tutorial you're following doesn't open too many security vulnerabilities.
That being said that's just the modern webdev bloated and unoptimized stack. Go fast, break things and if it doesn't work you can probably solve it by adding another layer or three on top of it.
We can complaint all we want about it but clearly modern web developers prefer to work with these technologies (and sometimes for very good reasons), it's not like we can force them to do things our way.
You might be interested in something like Cabal[0] or Secure Scuttlebutt[1]... Take a look at least, if you haven't heard of them already. Even if you don't dive in, still super interesting regardless!
You say "no, not docker" but once you wish for "one directory/executable with everything I need to run it" you're halfway to containers already. Why not just go with Docker?
It does look great though now that I think of it I've never seen anyone share audio on mastodon before; maybe this new change could help build musician communities on Mastodon.
I still can’t believe they expect anyone to take Mastodon seriously when the main action in the app is called “tooting”. Yes devs, we get it, it’s a hilarious fart joke and you’re so clever.
True but it doesn't really matter. When your brand name is synonymous with something unpleasant, most people won't try to decide whether it's intentional or not. There's a reason why you typically wouldn't pick words that have offensive/unpleasant meanings when branding commercial products.
Something I read on the internet the other day:
Rails is so old technology and it does not scale. It's days are numbered but until then, let's use mastodom for private social network, host our projects on github.com, use stripe for our payments, get funded on kickstarter, stream our videos on twitch.
You were being sarcastic , not sure why you're downvoted.
Yes, it's pretty ignorant to say you can't build stuff of scale with Rails, there are so many multi billion companies running on Rails it's getting ridiculous. Shopify is slowly becoming the size of Oracle in terms of market cap.
So the next argument is yes you can build it with Rails but why not choose something productive AND performant like (Go / Elixir / Kotlin / Crystal / Node etc etc).
I think you can build anything with anything nowadays. Rails is still one of the leading options, it's a productive, battle tested, mostly stable, well maintained and overall nice framework to build on. Can you build product X with something other than Rails? Yes you can. Does that mean X is definitely superior to Rails ? No it doesn't.
My Mastadon experience: click fediverse, try to filter out sheets and sheets of scrolling chinese, japanese (both authentic and weeaboo), spanish terrorist propaganda, whore ads "in the bay area", anime style drawings of nude underage girls, bots spamming their sensor readings, teens pouring their hearts out into long poetry or whining about their sleep schedule, looking for anything interesting. Sometimes I come across a bot that infrequently posts some interesting art or news, or the account of some geniune productive person who isn't into self-aggrandizement, but those are few and far between.
1. Find the genuine productive people you are interested in following and follow them.
2. Don't use/ignore the fediverse timeline, especially if you are on a big instance. That would be like trying to use twitter by checking the firehose.
What is the point of Mastodon if its creators practice the very censorship that centralized platforms like Twitter and Reddit practice? I feel like I can’t trust a platform/protocol whose controllers harbor anti free speech views.
https://reclaimthenet.org/mastodon-blocks-gab/
It’s decentralized censorship. Run your own and you’re free to accept anything you like. Be warned that if your instance’s about page says you’re all for “free speech”, a lot of other admins will casually block your entire instance if you and/or your users start violating their rules of behavior, what with a general tendency for “free speech” instances to end up as havens for trolling and racism.
Can I setup my own instance that peers with 5 of the top servers by user count at the same time? So pawoo.net, mastodon.social, switter.at, joindiaspora.com and gab.com?
You are fundamentally missing the point. That mentality though perfectly exemplifies the inherent and likely existential flaw in Mastodon or any other alternative technology that says "diversity" and "equality" and "inclusion" out of one side of their mouth, while out of the other side comes "your color and views are unacceptable and contrary facts are not allowed" … and it's all said, totally without even a shred of self-awareness of their tyrannical, let alone hypocritical nature.
I have been on the internet since the days when newsfroups ruled the earth, and it is my experience that unmoderated spaces claim to be havens for free speech, but usually end up being havens for people racing for the ethical bottom and recruiting each other into, at best, mass-trolling other sites; at worst, you’ll get people going from cosplaying nazis “for the lulz” to being actual neo-nazis.
"if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong."
>I can't trust an open protocol and platform that lets me set up a server and peer with Gab today with no restriction
It's Gab that didn't get the point of Mastodon, thinking they could somehow monopolize (and monetize) the Fediverse, and then getting mad when they found out a decentralized peering system doesn't mean a captive audience they could firehose.
