I am convinced that some journalists are using the wrong signals to decide whether a social network is good. It's not the onboarding, it's how the experience goes a month, or even a year, in. But tech companies are focused on building the userbase which means they're figuring out the infrastructure after the fact. Because the fediverse is open and has figured out this part, onboarding isn't as much a priority, when in reality it's the final coat of paint, the thing house flippers use to distract from the poor foundation.

That has me convinced that there needs to be folks actually writing about this space in earnest as a phenomenon, because they're not getting it from their usual sources. I'm working on this now. If anyone here has thoughts on what that should look like, I'd love to hear.

No -- as any product or marketing manager could tell you, it is the onboarding.

Using any product is a "funnel" that starts when you open the website/app for the first time. Every piece of friction/confusion that results in lost users, well it results in lost users, period. And that's 100% the fault of the onboarding process. It's never the fault of users who won't stick it out for "a month" or "even a year" (!).

And journalists should be reporting on the experience of the average user. Sure, they should get the perspective and some quotes from die-hard fans as well, but you certainly can't expect a journalist to use a product for a year before writing an article about it that needs to be published tomorrow.

Additionally, social networks are not things you use just once or twice. I would argue that social media is defined by how it functions as a mature tool much more than the initial experiences. We have not had much in the way of social networks that seem to be designed for long-time users.

We focus too much on new users in a space where people use these tools for years, decades even.

Are you going to argue qBittorrent isn't a product because it's a "presentation of open protocols"? Of course it's a product too. Mastodon is an app on the Apple and Play stores, with a back end that's federated. You don't get much more "product" than that.

It's entirely possible to focus on a good onboarding experience for new users and a good long-term experience. It's not either/or, that's a false dichotomy.

And the idea that we don't have experience of social networks "designed for long-time users" is ludicrous. Virtually every social network out there wants its users to stay for a long time. And with Facebook and Twitter, there are many users out there using them for over a decade.

The idea that we "focus too much on new users" is just bizarre, when the reality is that Mastodon isn't focusing enough on that.

I'm not going to argue this point until I'm blue in the face with you. Because at some point this kind of stuff is why open protocols always lose.

If the motives aren’t engaging and delivering value to users, I’m not sure it has value beyond being a curiosity. If those are the motives, then it is a product. Not realising that is the classic trucks-versus-trains mistake. (Railroads didn’t initially see trucks as competition, because they were railroads, and trucks were trucks, while in reality, they were all freight. The railroads went bankrupt and were restructured.)

The monetary transaction is there

A highway is not a product, it's infrastructure. In the same way, Mastodon is infrastructure. If someone sells a Mastodon app, that's a product, just like someone selling traffic cones or a car is selling a product.

Not everything in the world is a product. We don't live in a world of products and the void.

It’s not a product the way email isn’t a product. gmail is a product, and gmail is email.

As long as there’s no gmail for mastadon, mastadon won’t reach its final form.

gmail is one of the main reasons why e-mail is mostly dead outside coroprations.

Yes, some old nerds (like me) still are subscribed to some mailing lists (like FreeBSD developers' ones), but it is mammoth turd, not life.

gmail killed good desktop clients (and it is only so-so client by itself, with unusable filters, absence of proper threads and many other advanced features of now-defunct proper e-mail clients), and it try to create closed garden instead of federation (if your emails from self-hosted server never was shadow-banned by gmail, you are very lucky men).

So your example is very... illustrative, so to say.

Gmail is one of the main reasons why email is used by almost everyone. Together. It made e-mail truly accessible, and made it so anyone can use email, and can email anyone else.

It was always used by corps (or universities), and some indie folk ram it themselves (I too tried running mine on-off for like 5 years and gave up recently). Gmail was one of the people that made it harder for indie folks, in the name of spam prevention, but it hardly killed e-mail.

Everyone has email now. It’s not a walled garden, it’s just productized and made palatable for the masses. Apple runs an e-mail service too, as does most major tech companies. There are plenty of third party clients, with plenty of features, gmail be damned. I use third party clients, and they solve my needs, so i know they exist, even if maybe the ones you wanted don’t exist.

> So your example is very... illustrative, so to say.

Yes. While I disagree with your view on the state of email, I think that if I’m right about a successful mastadon, we’ll have parallel opinions then too.

Are you sure? When do you receive e-mail from live person, not robot (yes, each online shop will spam your forever after one buy), neither notification from automated system neither forum and not related to you job?

I'm 45, and I'm using email from 1997, but I can not remember when I receive or send "personal letter" by e-mail for last, hmmm, five years? Yes, of course, there are tons of e-mails at my $job (but, again, mostly from automated systems, persons prefer Slack now!), there are ton of notifications, promotions, etc. Also, yes, I'm dinosaur and I'm using mailing lists for some "nerdy" and very old-skool projects, which is nearest thing to person-to-person communication in my inbox.

All real person-to-person communication with my (extended) family, friends, many groups of interest (not connected to IT, like hiking or off-road motorcycling) are in other media now - mostly Telegram groups. Not e-mail.

And before gmail (2004) I can not remember any person I want to communicate who was equipped with PC and didn't have e-mail. And ICQ. Which required e-mail to register, not phone number. Of course, my grandma didn't have e-mail in 2004, but she didn't have any device for it in 2004, either.

I’m not quite as old, and haven’t spent quite as much time using e-mail, but my memory says that I’ve basically always received vaguely the same amount of human emails, but the automated volume has continued to increase.

Native apps are a dying bread and email apps are incredibly complex, making it a terrible business with a few exceptions. Gmail also has the best search and filters you can find in any email app.

My new $job uses gmail-for-business as e-mail and it is very inconvenient. In HR process I've received each email from this company to my own domain, but not e-mails with meeting invitations. Why? Nobody knows. Nobody could debug. Because gmail. It was not problem on my side, my MTA didn;t get connections from gmail side for such messages. Plain text - Ok. Meeting invitation - go directly yo black hole. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE. I was forced to use my gmail account (which I use for garbage registrations on different sites) for this communication.

My own (and not only my) messages from self-hosted domains sometimes gives 450 on gmail. Why? Nobody knows. It looks like spam. From domain with crystal-clear history for 10+ years according to all anti-spam services. It could be 450 now ad 200 in hour. It could be 550 now and 200 when re-sended without changing any letter. And, worse of all, it could be 200 on SMTP level and never shown in recipient's inbox (including SPAM folder!). Shadow ban. For one message out of 10 this day. Why? Because google. So much for federation!

And now I need to use gmail at my new $job. Oh my. Filters are so primitive after sieve... And it can not be solved on client side, of course...

EDIT:

I have one simple question about "best filters" - how to create filter which will place message under label which is derived from content of "List-Id" header, not known beforehand? It is trivial task in sieve (including stripping common domains and creating hierarchical folders from long names with delimiters), but I can not find solution for gmail "best filters".

Arguably, the onboarding process for Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms is not great, but people are given so many opportunities (and quite often: coercion) to join, that they did so.

Google accomplished this for Google+ by hijacking its extant YouTube and Android registration-flow processes to create new G+ profiles. A platform with ~20m frequent users and perhaps 100--300m who'd ever participated in the platform ... boasted over 3 billion profiles. Because every person who registered a new Android device --- a necessary if not frictionless step in the chain of converting a $50 -- $1,000 brick to something remotely useful --- was captured by the network.

(Many of those devices also had pre-installed, non-removeable Facebook and Twitter apps on them.)

Critical mass, market power, and monopoly abuse also play critical roles here.

Throwing out federation because of immature onboarding is like tossing the baby with the bathwater.

Agreed. Onboarding is the main control of the boundary. The boundary (whether in a cell, in a community, in a company, in a fandom, etc) it controls what is "in" and "out", self and non-self.

Onboarding is the cell membrane of community. If you fail to onboard effectively, you are a different creature :)

If you aren't confused, you aren't learning. Get used to confusion or get used to stagnation. Your choice.

https://infosec.exchange/@eric_capuano/109570476711349840

You even called it a product, which it's not.

The article above was talking about you. You can't even conceive that it's different.

People will point you in the right direction (if you ask) but everyone is busy with something else and if you don't get email or your slack account on the first day, you'll have it by the time that it matters. You're expected to figure it out because you have your own motivations rather than needing to make it easy.

I'm very interested how journalists and others bounce off the platform. I get the sense that people are looking for some "hook" or that people used to 1000s of followers enter unenthused to the task of building things up with slightly different rules and none of the recruitment/support for "influencers".

But it all seems pretty straightforward to me -- boringly so almost

I hear people talk extensively about how difficult it is to get acquainted with Mastodon and how their onboarding is a big part of that problem.

What exactly is the problem? What solution does that problem have?

It seems to me that the issue with federated instances is that the first thing you need to do when you join is to choose an instance which is a huge choice. Mastodon starts off by explaining how federates instances work and then gives you a list of popular ones to choose from. What else should they be doing to decrease the friction here? The documentation exists and I doubt making it mandatory would help. Is it possible to make onboarding easy when learning about the federated server model and choosing an instance is an inherently difficult task?

What specifically does everyone think Mastodon is doing wrong here? Is it possible for an ActivityPub/federate instance model to replace something as big as Twitter?

Educating users can work if it is an indispensable service that people need to understand out of necessity. Someone mentioned driving a car as an example. Mastodon is far from indispensable.

So right now I am on Mastodon as if I am going to create a new account. Here is the list of approved servers I am being presented to choose from:

masto.nyc (for people living in New York City)

poweredbygay.social (LGBT+ server)

metalverse.social (server for metal music genre)

bark.lgbt (lgbt, furry server)

climatejustice.rocks (climate activism)

etc.

A majority of servers (including the largest ones capable of handling new users) are for special interests or otherwise have unique communities. Is the solution to hide this fact during sign-up and randomly assign only to most generic of instances?

I want you to be right here that there is a solution, but hiding what instances are or that they have special purposes seems to remove a lot of the point of Mastodon.

I remember when Reddit would default new users to a handful of "default subreddits" when they first signed up, but ended the practice because it typically destroyed these "default" communities while also hiding the actual purpose of signing up. Now Reddit (one of the largest sites on the internet) does what Mastodon does and forces new users to choose before using an account.

It doesn't though - creating an account doesn't tie you permanently to a particular subreddit. I would guess, without checking, that they will suggest some subreddits to subscribe to, and if you try to sign up from a particular subreddit's page then maybe it'll subscribe you to that subreddit. But if you joined the wrong subreddit at the start then you're fine - you can unsubscribe from that, and subscribe to another, and your account is still the same account.

In both situations it is a major interruption to the sign up process and forces you to confront what you want out of the platform before using your account though -- I just wonder if there's anyway around that, Reddit seems to have decided there isn't one.

It's not like email or a web site where you change your DNS records without any cooperation from the old server.

You can join Mastodon via this instance: Randomly chosen general-focus instance with reasonable admins

or choose a server dedicated to your interests: rest of them

Problem is that picking a server is actually a big deal. Most of the mastodon servers running today won’t be running in 3 years, many of the servers have crazy rules and unchecked moderators. Ideally you’d have your own server so you don’t have to worry about who the unknown person running it is.

Exactly, most websites just give you a box to put an email and password in. Whereas here we are trying to get people to understand new concepts with words and ideas that many are not familiar with. And after reading it they still don't necessarily know how to sign up.

> then gives you a list of popular instances to choose from

So I've got this big list, but how do I pick which one? Since I don't know any better, I'll just pick the most popular one. Oh wait, that one isn't accepting sign ups any more.... Should I just pick the next one? Or should I just give up? Does it matter which one I pick, what if I make a wrong choice? Why are the names so random - what do they mean? Do I need to go through and read a bunch before deciding which one to sign up to?

Again, compare this to most websites where you:

- Go to the website

- Are presented with an email/password form, which lets you make an account

This is kind of terrible.

Now instead of just putting in your emails you have to make an impactful choice that won't be terribly easy to reverse. Now you have to check which instances have sane moderation, which instances actually have funding so they won't just die on you, which instances are fast or slow, which instances have blocked which other instances, and all the other inevitable petty drama between them. And again, this is compared to just putting in your email and not thinking about it.

And this isn't even inherent to federation either! Matrix has an officially-endorsed default homeserver for people who just want to create an account (most people). You don't have to understand federation to use Matrix, it's available if you want it, but you could live without understanding any of it. This causes Matrix to have a much better on-boarding experience.

As far as I know, migrating servers is in fact very easy. I haven’t done it myself, but there’s a big button to click in the interface to do so.

Learning that removed a lot of the anxiety I had about being on the “wrong” server. Although I’ve been perfectly happy with my choice (mastodon.online), and even gave them a year subscription at about $9/mo.

i have, in fact, tried pressing that button. the experience is pretty terrible.

i made a backup of my original account's data, as suggested. went through all the steps. despite that, i lost all my posts, and all the accounts i was following that did not also follow me back. and that information did not exist in the backup i made.

(i am not arguing against mastodon, by the way! i am still a happy user. but it has a lot of warts.)

this is making me think that my contribution to the fediverse might be to write a tool that does a real migration, the way you would expect it to be done.

Nostr is similar to mastodon, but the servers have no role beyond making posts available to clients. The role of the server has been reduced as much as is easily possible. The question of who pays for these has not been solved, but at least users can switch between servers instantly, and even use many at once, so the choice is not very important.

As a techie person, that makes sense, but as a normal user, if the onboarding isn't simple and easy enough, users won't make it to a month or year of using the service.

If Mastadon is too complex to attract critical mass of users to achieve a competitive network effect, it will not replace Twitter.

It's a toolkit for building communities. People will join because the communities they want to participate in are there (which eliminates the supposed dilemma of "which instance should I join?" - this is only a problem for people fleeing Twitter and looking for safe harbor, not for people discovering it organically). They'll stay because it's a good toolkit and they want to join more communities.

Or those things won't turn out to be true and it will fade away, nothing is guaranteed, but if you judge it based on whether it is Twitter, you're missing the value proposition.

In my view, having everyone in the same tent is one of the mistakes Twitter made; it doesn't need to be replicated. It created opportunities for messages intended for a certain community at a certain time to be taken out of that context and misinterpreted to fuel flamewars. It made it possible for there to be this spectacle of the "main character" who was ridiculed for day and then tossed aside.

Facebook's founding premise wasn't easy onboarding. It was getting laid at Harvard.

And then getting laid by someone who knew someone at Harvard, or another selective-admissions university.

The initial founding cohort was one that engendered strong aspiration of others to join that group, though of course, in others joining the group, the specific appeal waned. A loss in per node value however was offset largely by the network value of the group as a whole.

(I've argued that this dynamic of balancing network value with network costs is key to how social networks grow, are limited, and ultimately decline. In particular, each new member adds a variable value (not all nodes are created equal) but a fairly uniform cost, in the form of additional friction, information overload, and the like. A large-scale network attacks those costs ruthlessly through hygiene functions, including content moderation and the like.)

What I think of when I hear about people wanting a Twitter alternative, is to join a global social network and just start messaging people. At its best, I can find a VR content creator I really like and a transit advocate I think is cool and ask them questions or send them content off-the-cuff. In a more community-oriented Mastodon world, VR content creators would be on a VR specific instance and transit folks on an urban planning instance. Nothing is stopping me from making an account on another instance and following/messaging them, but there's all sorts of friction that taints the experience. Is the VR content creator on instance A the same person I want to talk to, or are they on instance B? What if I join an instance C that's been blocked by instance A, but allowed by instance B? Do I trust the admin of instance C to not read my posts? Is membership on instance C even open right now?

Again, to those looking for community-oriented socializing, these are all features and not bugs. Why would I care about talking to VR content creators if I'm in a transit community? If the community doesn't want me (invites are disallowed), why would I even enter? But Twitter does present (among other things) the idea of having a "globally addressed social network", which Mastodon is not. Moreover there are many vibrant tools out there for community social networks, ActivityPub is one of many.

When Twitter was small, it didn't offer mass-scale socialising. What it did offer is far more comparable to Mastodon now.

When Twitter did develop sufficient critical mass, at least within a specific context, it became compelling in ways that compensated for any onboarding difficulties. That occurred in niches initially: tech early-adopters, the Arab Spring (a/k/a the Twitter Revolution, seen then as a Good Thing), and in particular, journalists, who live and die on hot takes and quick access.

(I'm watching the accommodation of the latter to Mastodon / the Fediverse with interest and amusement. Some factors that created strong appeal on Twitter are (still) lacking on Mastodon.)

When Facebook opened to everyone last September, it became relatively easy for any high school student to join (and then they simply had to get permission to join their high school network). This meant that many more high school teens did join, much to the chagrin and horror of college students who had already begun writing about their lack of interest in having HS students on "their" site. Still, even with the rise of high school students, Facebook was framed as being about college. This was what was in the press. This was what college students said. Facebook is what the college kids did. Not surprisingly, college-bound high schoolers desperately wanted in.

In addition to the college framing, the press coverage of MySpace as dangerous and sketchy alienated "good" kids. Facebook seemed to provide an ideal alternative. Parents weren't nearly as terrified of Facebook because it seemed "safe" thanks to the network-driven structure. (Of course, I've seen more half-naked, drink-carrying high school students on Facebook than on MySpace, but we won't go there.)

As this past school year progressed, the division around usage became clearer. In trying to look at it, I realized that it was primarily about class.

<http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html>

Bad onboarding and complexity was a growth feature.

Feature by feature, how does this compete with Discord? Because if it isn’t competing with Twitter, then what you describe is competing with Discord. (And there remains a niche for Twitter, which benefits from network effects and economies of scale.)

Discord, on the other hand, is a superior method of onboarding among many demographics, if only because it has more inertia in that role and reduces their community onboarding to "add a new Discord". If they join a Discord and a community member says "we also have a Mastodon", that is their probable onboarding to Mastodon - not the server browser.

Discord also acts as a backup for the technology, a secondary point of contact.

And I'm convinced that Mastodon does not need to be a Twitter replacement to be a success. That is an important distinction that we should concede. It just needs to be a vibrant network that lots of people like using to succeed.

This is an issue that neither a centralized service nor a pure p2p service has (e.g. Patchbay/SSB).

This might be an example of the Vote phenomena where only people quite unhappy with the previous big place leave, which means the new place will end up with a very big skew...

Another good one seems to be https://sciences.social/public/local

And, honestly, if you look at the "anti-musk" "left-wing" journalists who are on there. All they seem to do is complain that it's not twitter and demand changes to accommodate them and their ilk better.

I think they just want to be intellectuals in John Mastodons court, where they feel they have access to power and can enjoy it vicariously. Then they can tell us breathlessly about how John is going to revolutionise the world and "make it a better place" all over again.

I'm not surprised an app with no profit motive behind it doesn't focus on this kind of work. It's very hard to motivate yourself to do it if it's not your job.

One could argue that pre-2010 Twitter itself is proof that not having the slickest onboarding path is not something that will prevent success. Onboarding can be improved and reinforced over time. Infrastructure is much more complex and building it first prevents a fake-it-until-you-make-it mindset.

(And BTW that's really a low bar. A friend of mine was talking the other day about "the pain of switching from Twitter to Mastodon" and I had to stop him. You just click some buttons and type a bit. You don't even have to get out of your chair!? I am always reminded of the Jetsons arguing over who is going to push the button to make dinner. Anyway...)

> If Mastadon (sic) is too complex to attract critical mass of users to achieve a competitive network effect,

I would say it already has attracted critical mass of users, eh?

> it will not replace Twitter.

Question the assumption that it should?

I recently joined Post and although they currently have the annoying "request access -> wait a week -> get email allowing access", the process was familiar and straightforward enough that I doubt the average Twitter user would fall out of the funnel. With Mastodon, they start by making users make a decision they neither understand nor want to make. It's an onboarding slaughterhouse.

In these regards, the OP article is yet another example of journalism from the last few weeks gushing about and/or bashing on "Mastodon" without really understanding what it is and conflating it with the underlying network, which existed before Mastodon and will probably exist after it.

Yes, we could take the time to explain that "the Internet" isn't just the web -- but you'll just lose your original point.

I'd rather accept "Mastodon" as a (maybe temporary) moniker while we bootstrap familiarity.

The worst that happens is people ask if something else is "compatible with Mastodon" which may end being a good baseline anyway if Twitter or another company try an Embrace-and-extend move

It's also fine if most of the public doesn't understand Mastodon.

Maybe it's even true, but it doesn't matter.

What is your advice on this? I signed up and mostly saw people complaining about Twitter, which I can get from pretty much every news outlet, and also from Twitter.

I also offered to answer any questions they had.

Not realising is the time tested recipe for going DoA.

What I see going on in Mastodon world — let’s just limit it to that for the time being because terms like fediverse, activity-pub, instances confuse users even more — is likely to be a massive missed opportunity, much bigger than that of WhatsApp exodus.

So the UX and its aspects like onboarding have to change and be as welcoming as it gets.

People writing about how beautiful or pure this thing’s backend and spec are is not going to change anything except like echos for fellow enthusiasts.

It’s disappointing, if you ask me.

Mastodon onboarding has gotten much better but still could be improved, especially in third-party apps.

"For some reason, people who would never read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Procter and Gamble acquiring a new shampoo company will devour content about Microsoft acquiring a tech startup they’ve never heard of."

This is so true. I've known people who get this instant passion for an area they know nothing about, if it brushes up against an area they do know something about, and want to start analyzing it like baseball card stats or something. But they're basically reading a card that's a square kilometre in size about a sport they have never played or watched for any amount of time longer than it takes to momentarily look at, and then flip past, a PBS cricket match (if you're North American and have no British relatives).

edit: Only modification I would make to the article would be to emphasize that not only does Mastadon work in a way that is antithetical to contemporary understandings of how the internet works, it more importantly embodies the way that the Internet worked before capitalism showed up.

I gave up on slogans as a means of social change decades ago, but I would love to see "Protocols Not Platforms" get more traction in the zeitgeist.

See also every HN thread about nutrition, sleep, health, exercise.

But take say, Facebook buying Oculus. Oculus revived an effectively dead technology. Facebook gave them the ability to build much better tech, sell much more of it, and then coupled it with Facebook's love for sucking in private data. It absolutely had a huge effect on that part of the industry.

Remember, most people care about friends, family, work and things that come up relevant to those, and they mostly don’t care about work.

I do miss when it seemed almost everyone you talked to was a hacker in their own way but at the end of the day... you have everyone from kids on tablets to your grandma being able to use it now.

There are endless high-profile examples, such as the time that Stephen Fry, having just recently achieved some major follower milestone (million I think), got very upset about being called out on some faux pas or other - in retrospect, a minor offense and a failed attempt at cancellation, if it was even an attempt - and decided to leave the internet, with this long almost-crying essay about the internet he had gotten onto, which made it sound like some sort of Victorian fairy glade where the air was laden with cocaine and he got to make out with Oscar Wilde, vs the stinky plebian unsubtle and bestial place it had become. It was an overreaction worthy of Chris De Burgh, and one he obviously didn't follow through on in the long run. But even as I was loling at the tone of his rejection letter, I also recognized an emotional stream of my own in it.

I have a somewhat different view of AOL than you. I was firmly middle class, neither monied elite nor genuine nerd, but my family could afford to buy me a C64 and as a young adult I bought myself a 386, strictly for the fun of it. I also started out on BBSes and was a sysop on both 8-bit and 32-bit systems, but I did have an uncle who logged me into the local U's mainframe as a kid, and I found my way to the early, command line internet before the WWW was born, though I mostly just hung out on irc, I was no leet hackz0r.

But once the winsock era ramped up and that "invasion" of AOL kiddies happened, I have to say, I had a very good few years in alt.music.ween as well as some groups centred on my local community. a.m.ween had quite a few great contributors from AOL, actually, so for that group, it was a net benefit. The band also pioneered direct interaction by participating in the group, at one point doing an all-request livestream (this is maybe 2000 I'm talking about, very early, and it was awesome) which newsgroup members voted on. Deaner, the guitarist, was especially active in internet fan engagement, and would phone in from on tour using AOL as an easy onramp. Nothing salesy or memey, he'd just do your typical "tour diary" letters like any band of the time might have done for a fan club, which we more or less were.

Perhaps places with too wide a net, such as rec.pets.cats, took the brunt of it in ways that niche bands or interests didn't have to. I recall a great war between them and alt.tasteless, many casualties.

I was also put in a room once, this would be in the late 90s, to see if I could in any way help a woman who had complained some time previously to local media about porn on early usenet, and it ended with a newsgroup created by trolls called alt.sex.herlastname; mostly I had to reassure her, after looking at the content of the group, that there was no troll army keeping tabs on her movements, it was a totally dead group that someone probably created in a moment of f-you energy and never looked at again, but the internet never forgets.

Not that I could have done more than that anyways, other than maybe send emails to every usenet admin I could find begging them to blacklist the group. But that incident, which I could definitely dig up some receipts about but I don't want to revive that part of her life for her, there are some undeniable resonances with Gamergate, are there not? The truth is, this place is exactly the same place it always was, just bigger and more dangerous, and that was inevitable when people came.

That being said, I would say that there was definitely a pre-capitalist Internet, which had a certain culture and - say it with me - netiquette. I don't know, and could not begin to speculate, where the line is between the pre-capitalist internet and now. If I was going to put forward a candidate for when Capitalism "arrived" here, I think one good candidate would be, whatever day it was that Joshua Quittner handed over mcdonalds.com to the McDonalds corporation.

I said something wrong once and was mortified by it so I’ve avoided public forums ever since. If I do post it’s anonymously. So I’ve always watched the broader internet culture from an outsiders perspective.

The Eternal September was no surprise, the thing people said was going to happen happened. For me the internet took a noticiable turn for the worse when Facebook opened up and absorbed so many niche communities. These days I lament the intentional manipulation of search, it’s like I’m being algorithmically gaslit.

At first they made you manually select it every time you loaded the screen (user hostile design intended to corral you into accepting their algorithmic Ludivico Machine), and eventually they eradicated it entirely, and that is when the problems really started - only took a few more years before Steve Bannon was ready to make his move.

I'm guessing that is what OP ment

[0] PBS is more like a network (the S is for ‘service’) that provides member stations with a common identity and a shared pool of programmming. They’re usually non-profits, and so would not be able to afford a national news bureau (etc) on their own.

So all through my Canadian youth I would flip through channels and periodically happen upon a Dr Who episode, or a British sport like Cricket, and wonder at the strangeness of my ancestral line (I'm extremely British, genetically speaking, and my family were both heavy socialists and also kind of cryptically proud of being part of the Empire. But they never admitted that, even to themselves I think...).

It's no surprise that it was hard to key into why Dr Who - for one example of a show I came to love as an adult - is so cool. I would read about it in Starlog, here and there, and the doctor sounded like a real badass on paper, but when I came across Tom Baker for the first time, he was no Han Solo, shall we say. Which is great, cause there are aspects of Star Wars that I kinda hate now (mostly the fans), but maybe not so much when you're 8 years old and have been watching laser blasts and ships exploding and whatnot. Even godawful tripe like Jason Of Star Command was more captivating at the time.

Does it really? I miss the internet of the late 90s and early 2000s, but Mastadon feels like precisely none of that.

Mastadon is a DIY app/platform, which constitutes one of any number of implementations of ActivityPub, which is the underlying protocol, and can speak to any of the other implementations without limitation, save those imposed by the protocol and self-imposed by the two implementations currently speaking to each other.

There are multiple types of SMTP/POP/IMAP servers out there, but they all implement the same protocols, which means that my email client can reach your email client no matter what our clients, or the servers we connect to, look like. This is how the internet works; platforms will always be a limited subset of this fundamental reality. It's also how ActivityPub works, you can wrap whatever user interface you want around it, Mastadon or otherwise, but the protocol, not the platform, defines what is and is not an ActivityPub packet.

Platforms, FB, Twitter, Tiktok, Insta, none of these work this way, they are closed platforms that you enter through secure gates and must play according to their rules, and they will always decide who gets amplification and who does not based on what makes them money, and good luck taking anything back out to the open internet with you, even if it's 100% your work. If you put it there, don't expect to get it back easily, and forget about control. It is a fundamentally hostile user relationship that cannot be improved without removing the profit motive. There have been other recent posts on HN about User Hostile software design. It's a thing and it's a bad thing.

Mastadon is... tofu dogs. Mastadon is an attempt to feed healthy, protocol-based internet food to people who have been subsisting on bad, algorithmically-manipulated corporate internet food (the aforementioned user-hostile platforms) in a way that feels familiar to them while they get used to the idea of not consuming the internet equivalent of Twinkies and Pork Rinds and Liquor for the rest of their lives.

It doesn't taste as good as Twitter, sure. Maybe that's not the most important thing.

Mastadon is hand-rolling cigarettes instead of buying them at the gas station. Brewing gin in your bathtub, instead of going to a liquor store.

Cause in the end, the endless-scroll mode of internet use should really just be looked at the same way we look at Crack: sure, some people can handle it, but ultimately, why does anyone do this anyways?

“Health” food made with one of the most common subjects of severe food allergies, and which tastes like crap compared either to what it imitates or well-made, less-allergy-producing, plant-based food that doesn't attempt the same imitation?

I never had a Twitter account and so never migrated from Twitter to Mastodon, and hadn't checked it out otherwise either.

But this comment is the first thing I've heard that makes me think I might love it. I loved the message subs on bbs networks.

The fact that an ordinary user/commenter conveyed that useful essential impression that all those journalists never did in the years since it's been newsworthy, would seem to fit right in with the article's point.

This article itself also finally presented some useful "what is the point? why might I want this?" points too about no algorithm manipulation.

Mostly all I've seen are vague stuff that it's not Twitter and that it's federated kind of like email. But that really doesn't say anything useful. If it's like email, we already have email. How is email an alternative to Twitter and Facebook? They really have failed to write effectively about it.

It's the MBAs (that HN hates) that turn "the internet" into a product that makes money- or that they can convince investors will make money some day.

I really want it to succeed but the current landscape isn’t going to cut it.

Mastodon will be no exception with high likelihood. Choose it over eg Twitter if you prefer where it's going _as a platform._ I actually prefer where Twitter seems to be going, but to each his own

I think it's hard to say where things are heading though. We had RSS before, and that didn't stand up to American tech giants. I have my doubts this iteration of ActivityPub and the "fediverse" will, but I do think we need a decentral protocol like it if we want an interesting internet going forward. I mean, which of your centralized social media feeds are interesting in 2022? Even HN is becoming a page I visit on a weekly basis rather than on a daily basis, and this is the SoMe I use the most aside from mastodon and LinkedIn. Maybe I'm just the oddball, but at least in my circle of influence things like Facebook are now solely used to arrange things like Blood Bowl tournaments.

A lot of subreddits went so far as to make a bot that will ban users for posting on other subreddits. With mastodon that’s more or less “built-in.”

You’re right though. Social media in general seems to be going downhill. Can’t really put my finger on “why” but “uninteresting” being a word I wouldn’t disagree with.

I've personally been "mass-banned" from a string of local sub reddits because I had an argument with a mod about the weather. (not global warming, literally about humid vs dry heat)

Don’t you choose who you follow? I’m not sure how that is related to decentralisation anyway, other than the revelations in the Twitter Files about manipulation of the network. Still, the Mastodon network isn’t free from that kind of censorship either so it seems I’m still at a loss.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-...

Twitter has kept this policy under Musk: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-law-e...

> Twitter may seek reimbursement for costs associated with information produced pursuant to legal process and as permitted by law (e.g., under 18 U.S.C. §2706).

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2706

> a governmental entity obtaining the contents of communications, records, or other information under section 2702, 2703, or 2704 of this title shall pay to the person or entity assembling or providing such information a fee for reimbursement for such costs as are reasonably necessary and which have been directly incurred in searching for, assembling, reproducing, or otherwise providing such information

$3M out of about $5,000M worth of annual revenue, and again, it’s reimbursement.

I mean, I’ve seen some terrible tweets, even some that I’d consider criminally bad. But 3 million dollars to police bad tweets doesn’t strike me as the optimal way to allocate citizen’s money.

And it’s fair to ask, what results were achieved with that 3 million? If it were not a misallocation, certainly they could point to a high profile criminal, cartel or gang that they’ve prosecuted as the result of those record requests.

But we don’t hear that. We hear crickets. Their response seems to be, “how dare anyone ask!”

Certainly law enforcement is important. I think so. Most citizens do.

But shouldn’t we hold law enforcement accountable? Ought not there be public oversight when millions of dollars are being spent, millions of dollars spent, supposedly, on our behalf?

Perhaps you believe in more unchecked authority. Maybe crime has gotten so out of control that we should loosen some of the strictures put in place by the constitution. These are dangerous times. There are plenty of bad guys out there.

Personally, I think the citizens deserve to know, and have some say in how millions of dollars are spent. Absolute, unconstrained authority tends towards abuse. It’s quite well documented.

$3M is a small team of devs, legal, and support staff - maybe ten people at California salaries. If anything, it’s less than I’d expect.

Presumably, a large company with high paid lawyers who are former FBI, like Twitter, Facebook, etc. would be able to pushback against quasi-constitutional requests. Clearly the FBI was able to get their way with Twitter, despite the big guns in the legal department.

Will they be paying mastodon “operators” (or whatever they’re called) the same amount?

I suspect they will not.

It’s probably not worth the paperwork if you get one every three years.

What’s the saying, “if you get it for free, you’re the product.”

...vs., jumping over to Ars Technica (called out in these comments for having 80% of commenters assume that Mastodon is a for-profit Twitter competitor), and their "20 Most-read Stories of 2022" article - gosh, maybe three stories of their Top 12 fit any of those templates.

Conclusion: Article author's mental image of "tech journalist" is actually "tech gossip columnist" - for people who want to sound cool & informed, but wouldn't actually want to know anything useful about tech.

But then the article was syndicated from somewhere and not at the normal Ars level either.

Linky to article: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/mastodon-is-hurt...

> And administrators must comply with not only their local laws, but laws that exist anywhere their server is accessible.

This is bullshit and they have to know it's bullshit. Why? Because their servers are accessible in Thailand, but nobody pretends they have to abide the lèse-majesté laws Thailand enforces. Ditto the various laws in force in other countries Ars doesn't care about.

Plus, they don't look into why Twitter complies with the GDPR: Twitter has assets in Europe that the EU could seize. A local Mastodon instance operator doesn't, so they don't have to care. Vice-versa in the converse, of course: A small European Mastodon instance operator doesn't have to care about any laws in North or South America.

(Just be clear, I don’t mean literal website ads, I mean posts that advertise products and businesses, whether it be obvious or not.)

The idea of empowering, democratic, relatively "low" tech that doesnt abuse its users has been expunged so effectively from the public consciousness (and tech journalism and others are so complicit) its not a mystery this new narrative doesnt fit

But maybe its a blessing in disguise. As the fediverse is still rather immature, too much attention from ill-wishers might turn the baby into a stillborn

It’s a UX problem not a conspiracy

It isnt just that, its also the fact that the media's conversation around moderation is childishly underdeveloped and nuanced. Moderation IS the hard problem of social networks, you cant automate moderation away, you cant not have moderation but any moderation policy you choose is going to have edgecases and problematic instances and the distortions those cause are going to threaten to overwhelm the spirit of the moderation (which is, dont be a dick). Also, people stuck at those edgecases (someone talking about their experience as a victim of an illegal crime for example) are going to get banned or silenced in extremely harmful ways.

The reason Mastodon is the future is that it attempts to solve this moderation problem by having many different communities with different moderation policies that have unique wordings, red lines for behavior and different moderators enforcing the established policies. When different communities federate, they do so on the basis of similar philosophies about moderation. When more and more communities with similar value systems federate the edgecases of any one particular moderation policy begin to become less important as a vulnerability or exploitation point since any one particular community is small and the shared spirit of the moderation policies ("dont be a dick) becomes more important as a guiding principle in moderation disputes. Also the red line of unnaceptable behavior is different for each community which creates a fuzzy region of more and more unacceptable behavior that trolls cant exploit the way they can tip toe justtt around the edge of a singular red line.

No moderation system is sustainable since it will by definition have edgecases which will cause problems or be exploited by trolls. No moderation isn't an option. Mastodon/the Fediverse is the third option nobody knew we had and really I have NO idea how corporate social networks with monolithic moderation policies projected across millions of people have any capability of adapting this innovation. It is the massive elephant in the room for corporate social media companies and yet tech journalism is still stuck on "should we have no moderation or a single moderation policy?" which Mastodon is FAR past at this point onto more interesting questions like how do instance admins negotiate moderation disputes? What does that look like and how can it be improved? There have been disputes between predominantly black communities and predominantly white queer communities on the fediverse and it gets absurdly complicated and nuanced fast but there is the capacity for that conversation to happen and different people to make their own choices and part paths (defederate) that makes Mastodon undeniably a far more advanced social technology than any other corporate social media platform where it just becomes person A is right or person B is right.

Its a radical paradigm shift: from adtech to modtech. Building platforms not geared towards user addiction and "engagement" but towards effective moderation and healthy communities.

I said that the fediverse is still immature precisely because standards and tools around moderation are still missing. E.g. the celebrated activitypub protocol, while a key enabler in other ways, knows nothing about it.

Its not a wild goose chase. Frictions and strife and trying to control others are core to the human existence and so are the antidotes. We just need to make sure that our social networks are no worse than the rest of society 8-)

Centralized services drove massive adoption of consumer technology (see: Hotmail/Gmail for email). They paved the way… via marketing, customer support, design, infrastructure (even OSS services will probably run on AWS), etc. That all takes big investments that OSS typically can’t compete with.

So it’s a good thing they paved the roads for which OSS can take over.

All services and companies eventually stagnate or mess up, with rare exceptions. If OSS can eventually mature enough to legitimately compete in terms of UX/UI/features then there will always be opportunities in the various market to transition in that direction.

People haven’t been trained or brainwashed to hate OSS, they just saw what was offered and aren’t willing the make the various sacrifices that typically come with most services like Mastodon. At least until the gap in offerings narrows.

People also got the concept of emails quite easily way before gmail existed or hotmail was popular. I don't think having a lot of providers was much of an issue. A lot of people still use providers which are not as big as google or hotmail, at least where I live.

So I wonder if centralization was really something that helped people that much or it was more of a business strategy that was efficient for quick growth and that is the reason we are in this situation.

I want it to work and be successful, but trying to think of is anything but a curiosity until it’s more user-friendly for non-techies is a pretty fair argument…

Try explaining to your mom why she needs to sign up again on a different URL, its no walk in the park (especially if you want to keep your old ‘tweets’ via backups):

https://nerdschalk.com/how-to-switch-servers-on-mastodon-eve...

If Mastodon grows bigger and blacklists grow, it could easily Balkanize, and it will be clear it’s more of a competitor or add-on to existing niche forums/communities. Something not really in the spirit of public social networks like Twitter. Which is totally fine, just different.

…assuming they figure out the UX/UI issues to help it “cross the chasm” (which I’m skeptical will happen soon, that usually takes core leadership, good design is rarely tacked on afterwards). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm?wprov=sfti1

Maybe do a bit of research and don't sign up at shitty instances? The only reason I have seen for blocking instances if they're alt-right, racist, transphobic or harassing people

How different is this from explaining switching from AOL to GMail?

And asking your mom to switch email addresses/providers and learn a whole new interface is probably not the example you want to use... People clung to Hotmail/AOL for YEARS, sometimes a decade.

"Tech journalism" by and large exists to boost industry insiders or act as the journal of record for collective schadenfreude. Nothing has changed.

Plus, I have seen this "federated"/distributed type of services. I am cautiously observing how it turns out because I have been burned before. Account lockouts, bad moderation, hostile servers, reliability,etc... I hope they get it to work though but what scares me is lack of commercial motivation, can you pay for a mastodon account or host ads on mastodon? And is there a good/standardized way where I can find out who is running an instance to hold them accountable?

Ok, most of you who are not very young probably remember the golden days of IRC right? Need I say more?

Hadn't stopped them.

These options sound better than trusting a corporation.

> The instance operator can see everything because there's no encryption.

What additionally is an instance operator seeing that isn't already public? Are you referring to direct messages and privacy/blocklist settings? Regardless it's no different than having a corporation see (and mine, or sell) this data.

People adapt. Radio dials. BBSs. AOL short-names or something like that. URLs. And so on.

it could be if signup and user discovery processes was much more frictionless; once you get past that, it's not any harder to use than other social networks. If there's anything the core devs should apply their efforts to resolving, it's that.

I have not given up on Twitter. I decided to pay for it and I am curious how a mostly paid for social media platform might evolve. People like Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan seem enthusiastic still about Twitter, but it is after all a large platform for them. Joe Rogan is interesting in part because of how much he advocates for other people, an example been his saying very complimentary things recently about Krystal and Saagar’s independent news channel (well, they are awesome).

(These are genuine questions, I've not used Twitter, am not participating in Fediverse, and could be missing something)

There have been ways to communicate and receive feedback from that communication for quite a while. They're not particularly cool, or sexy, or whatever you want to call them. And that's fine.

The real value here is the people you connect with, the network effect as it's been named. It was blogging years ago, then centralised social media took over. Maybe it's time for the next thing.

Re: Mastodon - ActivityPub is the protocol and maybe the secret sauce, but it looks to me that Mastodon is the case of an overnight success 5 years in the making. I remember opening a Mastodon account in 2017 and not giving it much importance, but now that conditions have changed, I see it with much more value than 5 years ago.

This is what happens when a new community springs up. It finds and audience, it grows because it’s a safe, interesting place, it gets critical mass, and then people become desperate to exploit it - because it’s where everyone is. It’s a newly discovered mine full of ore.

It’s not that no one is trying to hack users attention, or advertise. They just haven’t figured out how to do it yet. Because of its nature, Mastodon might end up being a little more resilient, but who knows. The instance I’m on is fairly small and they’re already feeling the pinch of hosting expenses.

It’s normal for journalists to look for human narratives. He makes it sound like it’s some conspiracy that an OSS project lacks a good PR team to craft & communicate a good narrative. Journalists can still dig in to find the stories… even when the projects are hostile to it.

Just look at the Dwarf Fortress: a small project that’s hacker made w/ an anti-gaming mainstream UI and not backed by monied elites but still has multiple fascinating journo friendly stories about it.

And after some publicity, people who wanted to try Linux were no longer just the usual nerds who would download it or get a copy from a friend, but were folks used to paying for software so who were happy to pay someone to send them a disk with a distro on it.

Hell I explained this to my elderly mother and she got the idea straight away. So no I don't see how the confusion is obvious.

And acknowledge that social questions are messy. “Which cafeteria table should I sit at?”

Yeah, I have explained to my dad many times that he can check the same email account from his tablet and his PC but he just doesn't get it. To him, his gmail is only on his tablet and his Comcast email is only on his PC and that's that.

Is comparing Mastodon to email a good comparison? Isn't email a protocol and isn't Mastodon a piece of software?

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...

Most journalists fall into this category.

is where journalism left the building. Not because of "ads". But because of "us". The article is subjective.

What problem is he talking about? The problem of Mastodon not getting enough attention? Maybe Mastodon just isn't newsworthy (yet).

If it gets big, it will be driven into the ground and become utter garbage.

So enjoy it while it's small.

Why do we accept services that cannot, by definition, work well as they grow?

All social media have two options for their future, and it all comes down to control of their content:

1: Relatively laissez-faire. This is the more "free speech" oriented options. Inevitably, these sites gain reputation for bad behavior and poor conduct in some of their sub-communities. (Racism, sexism, antisemitism, some attempt at illegal activities like piracy, etc, etc) Radical individuals flock to these places. This lack of strong control over what appears on their site leads to wary advertisers and a lack of investors.

A site with no advertisers and investors will not grow, period. Hardware costs money. Software costs money. Everything costs money. If lucky, some of these sites manage to stick around - but they are always very niche. Donations don't support a site with 100+ million users and lots of advanced features.

2: Strongly control content. This leads to a very "sanitized" site. Because it's a safe place to do so, investors and advertisers will flock to it if it hits a critical mass. More and more growth is desired, so the site needs to gain mass-market appeal. Over time, it becomes more and more accessible and generic, which erodes whatever original character the site had. Because of the nature of the "average" person when you have such a low gate of entry, the site quickly becomes just another facebook/twitter/reddit. The massive size also leads to enormous amounts of bots, spam, propaganda, etc. You cannot fight these - they are inevitable.

Those are your two options. Social media that cannot grow and remains niche, and social media that's filled with generic, low effort garbage content, spam, bots, etc.

Mastodon is has a usability problem in the concept of Federation and many other things.

It's complicated, they don't provide a clear path to usability or understanding.

I mostly agree about the problem in journalism, but it's not a Mastodon problem, moreover, there are ways to fit Mastodon into basic narratives.

I also don't think that WSJ articles matter that much with respect to influencing tech trends.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/mastodon-p...

However what will cause Mastodon to remain as a niche network is that the networks you want are not over there.

Ask yourself this…

Which server are most of these people on?

Are they scattered on multiple instances?

How can you reach most of them without too much effort?

That’s the reason I’ve not even been over there.

Tech journalism does just fine with open standards/software/platforms like e-mail, domain names, torrenting, Linux, crypto. None of these fall into commercial startup narratives, yet journalists cover these things just as well as everything else.

> The media seems to be regarding Mastodon as a bizarre curiosity, something that the general public couldn’t possibly grasp. Sure, the guys with a Linux server in their basement might geek out on it, but this thing isn’t for the masses.

I mean, that's pretty accurate. It's easy to sign up for Twitter, it follows all of your expectations of how apps work. Not only is it hard to sign up for Mastodon, but it's hard to even figure out how to figure it out. Mastodon isn't for the masses in its current state.

So as far as I can tell, the tech journalists are covering it quite appropriately.

It's super easy to sign up for Mastodon. I read a blog from the creator of Mozilla and it seemed pretty straightforward to me.

Simply Google it and then click "Create Account."

Now choose one of myriad instances without having any idea what it the topic of that instance means for your user experience.

If you requested an invite and never received it, or they aren't taking new members, just choose one of the other instances and join there.

After you get suspended-- without any explanation whatsoever how you violated the short, vague ToS-- just go ahead and sign up on some other instance and try again. You should be getting good at this now!

When your posts start to pick up some traction, watch as your blog gets hammered by a zillion requests at once simply to display a website preview in the posts. Is the load too hot for your personal site? Don't worry-- that's the federation working it's magic![1]

> Mastodon isn't for the masses in its current state.

Summoning OG FOSS mailing list energy...

Which part exactly? Did you file a bug about this? Read the fucking manual?

OR

That's actually a feature, not a bug.

Edit:

1: Also, why aren't you just using Cloudfare? Poor website configurations are hardly Mastodon's problem. In fact this is a feature, not a bug: it will cause enough problems for small website users to force them to just use Cloudfare. So good news, small time users-- Mastodon is for you! You're welcome. Also, fix your websites, small time users.

Clicked on Hank Green's link from his Twitter profile. This is the only way you'll ever get me to sign up, by linking me to content, I'm not going to be googling to sign up for mastodon just because. So wherever I land better have an easy way to sign up.

There's a create account form right there, super easy stuff. I was ready to agree with you. After creating the account I didn't appear to be logged in. Checked my email for a verification link, nothing there.

At this point both the Log In and Create Account button don't do anything. They just refresh the page with no error. An hour later I tried again on, same issue. Realized I should check the spam folder, and that's where the verification link is, with a big red scary UI. The email is from "trumpet" which I don't recognize myself.

I click it, and that makes it so the log in button actually logs me in.

This wasn't worth it to find out if I want to have a mastodon account. Simple fix though, the UI should tell me to check my spam folder instead of making the login and create account buttons do nothing except refresh the page.

edit: There's more. I try to go back to it to check it out again and end up at mast.to which directs me to some foreign website, takes me a while to figure out it was mas.to that I signed up on. I decide using the browser maybe ain't it for this, so I install the iOS app instead. It wants to know which server I signed up on, which luckily is the thing I just worked out. I type mas.to to find my server in the iOS app, frankly a concept I shouldn't ever have to care about if you want me as a user, but OK. And all I get is a pop up that says HTTP 200 OK.

I'm stuck again with zero indication of the error or how to progress. This is bullshit.

Not because I'm not interested in the technology.

But because the technology isn't the point.

People use twitter because it's NOT inherently segregated. It is a place to find things organically. Aside from Facebook, which had an initial purpose of networking your friends and family, social networks that do this are largely more successful than the ones which federate themselves because users aren't having to explicitly search for conversations that interest them.

Mastodon is just a modern interpretation of Usenet with more moderation.

Signing up for mastodon is a series of hurdles with some extra steps in between. Conceptually it's pretty far from what people are familiar with.

It's a classic trap of tech nerds being way, way off base thinking that others would enjoy jumping through obscure hoops just like they do. Most people really don't.

(This is coming from someone who grew up on dialup / bbs / sweaty underground diskette auctions)

Someone explained how to sign up and the first instance I found said it was shutting down soon and to migrate off. A few others I tried said they weren’t accepting new users and eventually I gave up. The funny thing is I swear I figured it out a few years back and don’t remember it being like that but maybe I just had more patience.

Is there a reason you can’t just create your own identity, without an instance?

It looks like Mastodon has aimed for total decentralization like email, rather than the kind of decentralization that IRC does that still keeps identities centrally managed with nick servers (e.g., how irc.libera.chat works).

Presumably, managing identity verification would be much cheaper than managing the content, so Mastodon or something like it should be able to scalably do it centrally, while still federating separate instances for the content.

I am disincentivized to run my own instance, aka "distribute". It pushes for centralization. On multiple fronts. Why? Well for starters the protocol as i'm aware of does not efficiently federate to smaller instances compared to bigger instances.

I also fear that instances will eventually be plagued by spam / attacks from foreign small instances and will be pushed towards whitelisting federation rather than blacklisting. As the general philosophy of federation seems to match that of Email. Email.. tbh, feels like a failed technology. Yes i know, i love email and we all use it.. but it's incredibly centralized and insanely vulnerable to massive amounts of spam. The protocol almost pushes people to centralize to deal with problems that the Email protocol doesn't manage - spam. I fear Mastodon will eventually follow the same path.

I use it, but i have to ignore the protocol and my desire to decentralize.. because otherwise i just get frustrated.

I was looking for an instance and they listed their server specs. They were very small servers. Would they be susceptible to simple DDOS?

It took me here:

https://joinmastodon.org/servers

Where it seems the majority of servers are overtly political and require an "application."

I do see a few where I can create an account and look generic enough to where my entire identity/first impression isn't too niche. I may give that a try.

I genuinely don't understand this point at all. You pick an instance – any instance, provided it's open for new users. Then you fill out 4 fields and confirm your email. That's it, you're now a proud citizen of the Fediverse. Does it get any easier than this?

(Not trying to be toxic here or anything, just actually curious.)

> provided it's open for new users

This in itself is a massive point of confusion for most users. I've had all my friends and family ask me about this very point and I didn't know what to say. Especially when Elon fired everyone, literally none of the instances on the Mastodon page were accepting anyone. It's much better now but this alone confuses people into thinking they're locked into their instance. Why would my father, a retired mechanical engineer, join an infosec instance? Or my friends join a French instance when none of us are remotely French?

I realise that’s kind of intrinsic to how mastodon works, but asking people to select an instance out of a whole load of them somehow feels like I’m signing up to be part of a cohesive group, which is unappealing to me.

I don’t use any social media because I think they’re unhealthy, but a few people I’ve spoken to have had the same stumbling block with having to pick an instance.

Trust the admin? Trust them how? Why? Doesn’t all of Mastodon abide by the same rules?

All of Mastodon, or more accurately, the Fediverse, runs on the same communications protocol. By analogy, think of the World Wide Web (HTML), email (SMTP), or the cell-phone network (IMSI, amongst others).

A difference for the Fediverse from the World Wide Web is that Websites largely don't communicate with each other, but rather respond to specific requests from a Web client (e.g., a web browser), in a client-server model. The Fediverse, like email or the cellphone network, consists largely of peer-to-peer (p2p) communications between individuals, mediated by servers.

Specific instances vary tremendously in standards. My home instance (toot.cat) has a specific code of conduct:

<https://mew.toot.cat/mw/Toot.cat/CoC>

There are instances with highly incompatible rules and standards. Many of these are moderated (varying degrees of limiting interactivity, listed here:

<https://toot.cat/about>

Instance administration which is sufficiently unacceptable can result in near-total defederation of that instance, that is, few if any other instances follow it. Two notable cases involve a service operated by a former US political figure, and of a neo-nazi group (I'm not naming them, they're easy enough to find should you choose to do so).

Most mainstream Mastodon instances do follow reasonably compatible codes of conduct, though there can be regional differences. For example, some Japanese instances permit comic content (loli) which is categorically illegal in numerous other jurisdictions, and face limited interactivity on that basis. There are numerous other grounds for limiting interaction beyond that.

Again: this is similar to other p2p communications platforms in which abusive practices tend to give rise to limitations: Do Not Call registries, and under a phenomenal onslaught of robocalls, denying interconnects between telephony systems.

While you don't understand these issues, you can either rely on somebody else's advice for that, or join a server at random and see what happens. Unless you've joined the new Gab, you should be okay – if anything goes wrong you can just migrate to another server.

As for the things you've mentioned: you shouldn't assume your communication is private anywhere on Mastodon (there's some encryption proposals, but that's a long road from now), and you definitely should use different passwords for different websites.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079

What group of people are you talking about and what sorts of rules do you expect them to follow?

I don't think most people feel they "chose" their email at all.