Mastodon—and the pros and cons of moving beyond Big Tech gatekeepers
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Mastodon has close to 9 million users registered, however, the creator might be either giving old official numbers, or that's the average of active users all the time, which is still a lot.
It goes way, way up every time something terrible happens in the bird site, to the point that there's so many active users that a lot of instances disable registering.
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If you mention someone in a public channel in Slack, they get notified about it.
If you mention someone in a private channel or a (private) direct message, they will be none the wiser.
(And, I don't know if this has changed since I left the megacorp I used to work at, even the company's Slack admins on self-hosted instances couldn't even see DM's.)
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Under Musk, Twitter is no longer a comfortable place to be. Mastodon is a comfortable place to be. And the number of people who respond to your posts is amazingly higher on Mastodon, than on Twitter. I don't think I got more than 20 likes on Twitter in a decade. On Mastodon, today alone, I got about 30, and I just joined a couple of months ago.
The Twitter AI marginalizes you if it doesn't think you'll help bring in revenue. You are being shadow-banned. You don't realize this until being on Mastodon where no AI determines what you see, or who sees you.
Any Mastodon instance connects you to the entire Fediverse, so it doesn't matter which server you register with. And you can move your account to another Mastodon server, and your followers will update automatically. Smaller instances may have better performance. Many people leaving Twitter try to recreate their environment by trying to get onto large instances. This isn't always the best strategy. The whole system was designed to be broken down into a large number of smaller instances that communicate with each other. Everyone on one large mega-instance was never the idea nor is this preferred.
You want a comfortable instance to call your home with no annoying trolls and one that matches your moderation standards. This is important. Be sure to check the server rules to see if they fit what you like. Moderation is generally tighter on Mastodon so bots and trolls are kicked off quickly.
Jerry, admin at https://hear-me.social
The Twitter AI marginalizes you if it doesn't think you'll help bring in revenue. You are being shadow-banned. You don't realize this until being on Mastodon where no AI determines what you see, or who sees you.
Any Mastodon instance connects you to the entire Fediverse, so it doesn't matter which server you register with. And you can move your account to another Mastodon server, and your followers will update automatically. Smaller instances may have better performance. Many people leaving Twitter try to recreate their environment by trying to get onto large instances. This isn't always the best strategy. The whole system was designed to be broken down into a large number of smaller instances that communicate with each other. Everyone on one large mega-instance was never the idea nor is this preferred.
You want a comfortable instance to call your home with no annoying trolls and one that matches your moderation standards. This is important. Be sure to check the server rules to see if they fit what you like. Moderation is generally tighter on Mastodon so bots and trolls are kicked off quickly.
Jerry, admin at https://hear-me.social
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PetterOfCats
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
I mean that nearly all instances are linked together in the federation, however, I read there are some cases where entire instances have been blocked by other instances due to toxic behaviour. It's not very common and largely depends on the lack of moderation or just outright bad faith players from the "blocked" instance. Like imagine that an alt-right gang made their own instance and then started harassing people in other instances. Any instance that decided to could block that instance for all their users at the server level. It's rare, but I have read that it has happened.
For the most part, moderation with the instances is fairly good and there is always the ability of the individuals blocking toxic users individually as well as whole domains. Getting harassed by toxic people and they all come from the same domain? you as a user can block that whole domain from your account.
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VividVerism
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
@mentions ARE the signal you want to add someone to a conversation in a messenger format, though. It's deliberately used to get a person's attention in group discussions. It's natural if you're trying to get a user's attention, that you want them to be able to see the thing you're drawing their attention to. This is exactly analogous to adding their email in the recipients list. You are still free to mention (not @mention, just mention) their username in chat, just as you are free to put their email in the body of a message.
Or at least, that's how I understand the feature, having never used Mastodon.
I use O365 at work these days. I can't remember if it was Teams or Outlook, but when I added an @ to the body of my message a while back, it prompted to add that user to the recipients. This felt natural to me at the time, I was deliberately calling the user's attention to something, and Microsoft realized "hey they're not going to see this, it looks like you want them to, want us to make sure they can see it?"
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Not sure why 5 people voted this down. You're correct, it's part of the W3C standard.
https://www.w3.org/Submission/owl11-owl_specification/#2.2
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Because it's trivial to some extent, I guess. I should have probably noted then that the article is actually rather good aside from that gaffe.
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Active users vs total accounts. Some people don't stay and others move to accounts on a different server.
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It's still bad UX, though. @ mentions are a forums/facebook thing, not something all (especially older, and they shouldn't be excluded) people except from their prior experience elsewhere. Especially if the feature is called "direct message", not "group chat" (not sure how it's called, actually) and it adds the mentioned to the recipients without a prompt.
I'd even say O365 prompting you to add @ mention in the message body to the CC field or whatever is an UX blunder as well, if that's how it worked.
UX design should follow the expectations of the 99% "idiots", not the 1% tech savvy.
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VividVerism
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
I would counter that the "99% 'idiots'" would @mention someone in a group chat that person was not a part of, then get frustrated that the user never saw the message.
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No mention of Reddit at all ?, is group based and Moderated on Topics. Think sometimes some things get created to reinvent the wheel, when the tires, and rims are there, just missing the spokes. Happy New Year Arsians !
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Yeah, but with twitter, only people that are contractually obligated to uphold privacy have access. A random sysadmin or ceo can't just decide to give access to some random journalist because he wants to... totally not... (and if that would happen, there would probably be trouble with the FCC or some other agency...)
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] or something?)Unless you give specifics, no one here can judge whether you or the moderation team had the more reasonable position. Especially since you only have 12 posts over 2 years on Ars.
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As always on Ars, good article and godzillatons of good information and discussion in the comments.
Thank you all!
Thank you all!
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Another vote for hachyderm.io. Mostly programmers and people in adjacent fields, with a good admin team.
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How is it intrinsically more dangerous than having your own group blog with a list of contributors and their email addresses?
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That's exactly the difference, right? Reddit is group/topic/subreddit-based. Twitter and the Fediverse are based on individuals. When I was still on Twitter, I often used it to find out what a particular person had to say on an issue. When I want more general information or discussion on a topic, I go to Reddit. There is certainly overlap, especially with cute animal/funny video subreddits and corresponding twitter accounts, but the basics of the platforms are different.
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Welp, if they (politicians) get Section 230 repealed we could be right there with you...
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Nah, being truly 'hard core' means coming to work with your own pre-charged laptop (battery must be able to last you through the day) and your own data plan with lots of GB, in addition to bringing your own personal toilet paper. Remember: Real 'hard core' employees can work from an abandoned warehouse (and if Elon keeps randomly selling off office furniture and skipping on paying necessary bills, Twitter's offices will start looking like one too).
The only rational explanation I think of is that Elon is running his own personal variant of the military practice of "hazing", and he is doing so because he wants to have a small (read: easy to payroll) team of employees that are loyal to him and only him no matter what, even if they aren't the best and brightest, while forcing everyone with an ounce of common sense to quit for better places to work. This also explains other nonsensical demands such as demanding code to be printed out and presented to him.
This also ties to my previous observations that Elon Musk wants to run Twitter as his personal fiefdom (even if he isn't technically CEO and hires a frontman), because he is addicted to the power and celebrity status Twitter brings him. It's also why I personally believe Elon Musk will sell off as much Tesla and Space X stock required to maintain his power and celebrity addiction.
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If the comment that you posted on YouTube is anything to go by I would say that the Mastodon instance made a good call. The perpetual victim - it's always someone else's fault.
On a happier note, I have noticed more high profile people making their way to Mastodon. The only ones I have seen complaining about Mastodon are those who use Twitter for clout chasing and dunking on people via the use of quote tweeting. Yes, there is no algorithm and that star is a pat on the back rather than a way to amplify your message and acquire more clout. I guess the question is whether you're on social media to be social or simply on it because it is a platform where you can accumulate clout (or social capital some might say) to further some career goal of being an 'influencer'.
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Wow. I mean, I assumed he was a shitty troll on that instance or whatever, but I never thought we'd have hard evidence where he admitted to it.
So yeah, the system is working as designed.
I'm curious as to what video this was posted on.
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I found it here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx...aABAg&lb=UgkxFJA9dqhzVQ56wHFFj6pcrFwum4v3dOci
Here is a screenshot of the surrounding posts if he tries to delete the post:
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If you don't believe in going online to talk to people, I'm having a bit of a tough time figuring out why you're in this comment section.
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Hmm, the whole idea reminds me of the USENET system I loved in the eighties before it was filled with spammers and other unpleasant personas like the notorious Serdar Argic (who even was mentioned by Charles Stross in a novel). And some real-time IRC-like real-time interaction.
I don't know if it'll succeed, but it may be nice to break out of the "walled garden" ideal that has accommodated so many people over the last three decades. And there's also the question of permanence/archival in such a distributed system, besides the privacy etc. mentioned already.
N.F.
I don't know if it'll succeed, but it may be nice to break out of the "walled garden" ideal that has accommodated so many people over the last three decades. And there's also the question of permanence/archival in such a distributed system, besides the privacy etc. mentioned already.
N.F.
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I've run into a little of the described issue when I first signed on, but it seems to have possibly been a result of too many people migrating at one time. It seems to have been mostly resolved.
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Yeah, I definitely do this too. One account for my “true” self where I whine, complain, snark, and talk politics, personal stuff, queer shit, etc., and then another with my real name that’s more just for random thoughts on my industry that is fairly sanitized.None of this is required or even de rigeur on the Fediverse, even less so pre Musk tantrum. In fact the recent influx of Twitteroids has seemed weird to all the old hands because of their tendency to use well-scrubbed headshots for avatars and to put their real names in their handle/bio.
The Fediverse, which includes Mastodon, started off as mostly people who crafted their identities as abstract entities in cyberpunk adjacent style. And many of us still exist, and we're the ones who've been there the entire time. And some of us further intend to quite deliberately keep it friendly toward people who like to play that way on social media.
One cool thing about the federated model is that it subtly encourages "sharding" of one's online identity if one is creative / talkative / terminally online enough to want to do so. Instead of a single account where you discuss all manner of interests, you can have any number of accounts which are more or less topical, and they might even be on topic-related instances (eg for art, infosec, etc).
For example, on my main, I talk about software a lot. I also like to rant about politics, but the overlap of people who want to hear from me on software vs on politics is not that big. So I sharded my politics discussion out to a different alt, and now have two largely different followings on each one, and the people who like to read my software snark don't have to suffer thru my political discourse.
This isn't super common but people definitely do it, and I know for a fact that some people appreciate me doing it because they've told me they're grateful to not hear my bad opinions
I don’t want my thoughtless void screaming to reflect poorly on me, and not sure my friends and colleagues want to know quite that much about me.
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Several years ago, I ran a newsgroup on Google Groups. This group was as niche as it could get — programmable calculators — and had under 100 users. And already the misinformation, stupid fights, and paranoid conspiracy theories became such a nuisance to deal with that I ended up shutting it down after just a couple of years.
I wouldn't touch an open social media server with a barge pole, unless I got paid enough to make it my actual job. And maybe not even then... I'm a coder, and as bad as corporate software development is, there is typically a lot less BS to deal with.
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Now I'm curious about the conspiracies that exist around programmable calculators.
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I logged into my Mastodon account for the first time in ages. Things have improved, but there's still a fair bit of clunkiness/friction when compared to something like Facebook/Twitter if you're dealing with other instances.
For example, I can't (directly) see who someone I'm following is following if they're on another instance, I have to click a separate link that takes me to a separate page, and then if I want to follow one of them, I have to copy and paste their URL in my search field back on my home page, and then I can follow them.
It's oddly jarring and clunky, and is unfortunately probably more of an issue for new users looking to follow new people (one way to discover who to follow, is to see who the people you follow, follow).
I don't know much about the underlying architecture - is this a conscious decision, or some fundamental limitation of the separation into different instances? It seems to me that if you can just search for a particular URL from your home page and follow from there, you should also be able to follow from just clicking a button.
It's not a dealbreaker - for me - but for someone like my aged parents, grandparents or other non-techies, it would likely be and, if not a deal breaker, it would certainly reduce their usage in the beginning.
For example, I can't (directly) see who someone I'm following is following if they're on another instance, I have to click a separate link that takes me to a separate page, and then if I want to follow one of them, I have to copy and paste their URL in my search field back on my home page, and then I can follow them.
It's oddly jarring and clunky, and is unfortunately probably more of an issue for new users looking to follow new people (one way to discover who to follow, is to see who the people you follow, follow).
I don't know much about the underlying architecture - is this a conscious decision, or some fundamental limitation of the separation into different instances? It seems to me that if you can just search for a particular URL from your home page and follow from there, you should also be able to follow from just clicking a button.
It's not a dealbreaker - for me - but for someone like my aged parents, grandparents or other non-techies, it would likely be and, if not a deal breaker, it would certainly reduce their usage in the beginning.
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The HP-50G was never discontinued. It was actually turned into a black op at NSA based upon alien technology to further their ability to break encryption that everybody else thinks is secure.
/s (but man, I do kinda miss my 48G, even if I no longer have any particular need for its capabilities given that I dropped engineering after second year in favour of computer science.)
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Captain Trips
Smack-Fu Master, in training
People into crypto seem to be good at inflating numbers. So this mismatch doesn't seem like a surprise.
Probably a more mundane explanation - there can be so many Mastodon instances, and there is no centralization, that I suspect it is hard to keep an up to date count.
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Captain Trips
Smack-Fu Master, in training
Yeah, but Twitter is "hard core" - that is soooo much more important than anything else like number of employees.
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Mastodon is definitely weird like that with searches, if you know that the object you're looking for exists (as in, you typed @username@instance.tld, or pasted a URL you already have, into the search box) ... if it's feeling oppressed, sometimes the second or third search will work when the first one didn't.
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Thank you so much for the shout out! It's been fun typing up what I know, hopefully a few people find something cool as a result
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There's no "to" field in DMs. Recipients are parsed by looking for @username (for local users) or @username@instance.tld (for remote users).
If you want to gossip about @dorkface@dorks.shop in a DM to @defcool@cruisecontrol.space, the text of your DM could look something like:
@defcool@cruisecontrol.space Hey have you seen @/dorkface@dorks.shop's posts lately? What a tool!
Or any other way of not typing the actual user identifier into the DM, such as saying "dorkface at dorks dot shop"
It's definitely possible to have a brainfart and tag somebody in on a DM who you wanted to talk about but not tag in like this, but in practice it's not really a problem, especially if you use the network even somewhat often. It's just obvious that everyone tagged in any message will receive a notification (unless they've silenced them), so you just don't tag them in such cases.
So again - possible to screw up - probably happens once in a blue moon - but it doesn't impact users negatively in the day-to-day, and given that there is no "to" field in DMs, not something that can really be fixed without major design changes.
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