LWN Is Now on Mastodon(lwn.net)
lwn.net
LWN Is Now on Mastodon
https://lwn.net/Articles/895898/
35 comments
Mastodon have a nice low key feel, less loud than Twitter
I don't know, my impression from a few years ago is that a lot of the worst, most exhausting people from Twitter got persuaded to use Mastodon, ironically on the grounds that it should do better job at moderation. Mix this with people who are in it for the decentralization and those who see decentralization as a means to withstand censorship, and the overall feel was ... not the best.
Mastodon is great. I tried Twitter the other week and it feels so much worse, like crappy RSS for celebrity gossip instead of a discussion platform.
They have a long road ahead of them to shake off the association of being a haven for CSAM and alt-right holdouts.
But the leaders of the project seem willing to take pretty drastic measures to, and it's good to see "neutral" communities adopt Mastodon as their platform.
But the leaders of the project seem willing to take pretty drastic measures to, and it's good to see "neutral" communities adopt Mastodon as their platform.
> They have a long road ahead of them to shake off the association of being a haven for CSAM and alt-right holdouts.
Considering the first time I even heard that was this very comment, I'd say they're doing pretty well on that front. Basically every nook and cranny of the Internet has had to shake similar associations at some point.
Considering the first time I even heard that was this very comment, I'd say they're doing pretty well on that front. Basically every nook and cranny of the Internet has had to shake similar associations at some point.
For a while, the biggest mastodon instances were japanese, (and potentially still are), and had a different approach to lolicon.
https://medium.com/@EthanZ/mastodon-is-big-in-japan-the-reas...
https://medium.com/@EthanZ/mastodon-is-big-in-japan-the-reas...
Noted but that's very much not CSAM.
Reminds me of Hideki Matsui's porn library. "Oh yeah, I've got tons of it! Wanna see?" American journalists: knuckles are practically bleeding from the intensity of the pearl clutching
My impression of the instances I've joined is that the network is largely populated by anime-fans, artists putting out questionably sfw drawings, and censorious progressive fiefdoms.
I run a small instance for myself, and there's a certain grim satisfaction in blocking entire instances full of trolls and pedos that can't be matched by the blocking capabilities of other social networks.
Funny, for me it always seemed that Mastodon has always be associated with the left/identity-politics/SJWs/progressives and Pleroma was chosen by the alt-right/shitposters/incels.
Ever wondered about the stack powering Gab?
Gab was Mastodon backend with a Soapbox frontend - Truth Social is the same, by the way.
But in both cases, Mastodon was just used because it was the most mature software, not because of its federation capabilities or even the user base culture. Gab barely was part of federation. At first, they were blocked. After, they got out by themselves. Truth Social is not even available outside of the US, much less federating with anything else.
But in both cases, Mastodon was just used because it was the most mature software, not because of its federation capabilities or even the user base culture. Gab barely was part of federation. At first, they were blocked. After, they got out by themselves. Truth Social is not even available outside of the US, much less federating with anything else.
Sure, Gab used it... and was promptly, aggressively banned by virtually every other host. That evidence does not support your claim, at least if addressing the ecosystem.
"they".. Really on the fediverse it's very much on an instance by instance basis. really it's like saying that email is a haven for some group or other. Don't shoot the protocol!
Yeah, I've been on it since roughly 2017 and that's not at all the prevailing cultural association with Mastodon in my experience.
Numerous communities have decided to move off of Twitter and on to mastodon, including lgbtq folks, furries, sex workers, FOSS enthusiasts. My understanding is that on the most popular instances, there's active exclusion and de federating extremist content, and those things live on repurposed versions of the underlying Mastodon software but are not at all connected to the community.
Numerous communities have decided to move off of Twitter and on to mastodon, including lgbtq folks, furries, sex workers, FOSS enthusiasts. My understanding is that on the most popular instances, there's active exclusion and de federating extremist content, and those things live on repurposed versions of the underlying Mastodon software but are not at all connected to the community.
Protocols can encourage rogue or unsustainable behaviour.
That's largely what happened with Usenet, and seems to be well-in-process with email.
Mastodon is an implementation of the ActivityPub standard. I've been on the platform since 2017, five years now, and have watched it go through various teething and growing pains, including mutually-incompatible cultures (e.g., Japanese Lolicon vs. World, also attempts by Gab and similar groups to join, largely rejected). There are strengths, including instance-level controls over moderation and peering / federation. That's scaled acceptably to a few thousand instances, but would likely be stressed were the network to grow to even a small fraction of the world's largest social networks. Given a one-tier model (users -> instances -> network), 10^10 active participants and balancing users to instances would require on the order of 10^5 users per instance, and 10^5 instances --- which is to say, 10^5 peering relations.
Given that most present admins are managing their peering / blocking relationships in their heads with a very minimal configuration system, that scaling problem seems unlikely to succeed.
My suspicion is that more tiers of relationships will appear, effective a hub-and-spoke system, of members, instances, and hubs, with roughly 1,000 of each on average. (This gives you about 1 billion total participants.)
What a "hub" means, or does, and how it interacts ... raises interesting questions. Which are entirely unaddressed so far as I'm aware.
(Note that in meatspace, we typically have geographic aggregations of people -> cities -> counties/states/provinces -> countries, or fourt to five levels of aggregation. This gives, in theory, roughly 100 members within each category. Clearly that's very rough, with cities often having far more people, and counties / states / provinces frequently having far fewer cities than the model would suggest. A large country might have ~100 major cities (again, some more, some fewer), and there are, counting as a physicist does, about 100 countries in the world (195 per worldometers).)
I've been largely pretty happy with Mastodon. I'm under no illusion that its success is guaranteed, or that it is inherently resistant to abuse or misuse.
That's largely what happened with Usenet, and seems to be well-in-process with email.
Mastodon is an implementation of the ActivityPub standard. I've been on the platform since 2017, five years now, and have watched it go through various teething and growing pains, including mutually-incompatible cultures (e.g., Japanese Lolicon vs. World, also attempts by Gab and similar groups to join, largely rejected). There are strengths, including instance-level controls over moderation and peering / federation. That's scaled acceptably to a few thousand instances, but would likely be stressed were the network to grow to even a small fraction of the world's largest social networks. Given a one-tier model (users -> instances -> network), 10^10 active participants and balancing users to instances would require on the order of 10^5 users per instance, and 10^5 instances --- which is to say, 10^5 peering relations.
Given that most present admins are managing their peering / blocking relationships in their heads with a very minimal configuration system, that scaling problem seems unlikely to succeed.
My suspicion is that more tiers of relationships will appear, effective a hub-and-spoke system, of members, instances, and hubs, with roughly 1,000 of each on average. (This gives you about 1 billion total participants.)
What a "hub" means, or does, and how it interacts ... raises interesting questions. Which are entirely unaddressed so far as I'm aware.
(Note that in meatspace, we typically have geographic aggregations of people -> cities -> counties/states/provinces -> countries, or fourt to five levels of aggregation. This gives, in theory, roughly 100 members within each category. Clearly that's very rough, with cities often having far more people, and counties / states / provinces frequently having far fewer cities than the model would suggest. A large country might have ~100 major cities (again, some more, some fewer), and there are, counting as a physicist does, about 100 countries in the world (195 per worldometers).)
I've been largely pretty happy with Mastodon. I'm under no illusion that its success is guaranteed, or that it is inherently resistant to abuse or misuse.
I've been an instance admin myself for some months, and except for one instance populated with profiles with swastikas (which I promptly blocked) I found Mastodon to be the most inclusive social network I've seen in a while.
I'm not sure if it's only my experience, but at least half of the profiles I bump into have an LGBTQ flag or belong to some minorities (sometimes I suspect that I'm the only white straight guy there), and so far I haven't witnessed any episodes of intolerance that got way too familiar on Facebook and Twitter.
I think that the structure of the Fediverse in general facilitates inclusiveness and moderation and it prompts people to be "nicer". If you're an intolerant jerk or a fascist, expect yourself to be muted/blocked. If you run a whole instance of intolerant jerks, expect other instance admins to mute/block your instance.
Eventually, they'll still be able to vomit their intolerance or conspiracies with their buddies on their own instance, and maybe find a couple of like-minded instances to buddy with. But they'll be basically isolated from the rest of the Fediverse, because most of the people don't like to read that shit, and most of the other admins will filter out their content.
And that's the best of the two worlds: intolerants and bigots have the freedom of speech that they crave so much, but very few are willing to listen to what they say.
However, it could also be that things are like this because the Fediverse is still relatively small compared to the major social media. 3-5 million people isn't exactly small, but it's still three orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook. It's still a bit of a green field mostly populated by geeks, scientists, open-source enthusiasts and instances specifically dedicated to hobbies. Maybe we just need to make sure that it remains like this? Just in case, I won't share a sign up invite with my parents...
I'm not sure if it's only my experience, but at least half of the profiles I bump into have an LGBTQ flag or belong to some minorities (sometimes I suspect that I'm the only white straight guy there), and so far I haven't witnessed any episodes of intolerance that got way too familiar on Facebook and Twitter.
I think that the structure of the Fediverse in general facilitates inclusiveness and moderation and it prompts people to be "nicer". If you're an intolerant jerk or a fascist, expect yourself to be muted/blocked. If you run a whole instance of intolerant jerks, expect other instance admins to mute/block your instance.
Eventually, they'll still be able to vomit their intolerance or conspiracies with their buddies on their own instance, and maybe find a couple of like-minded instances to buddy with. But they'll be basically isolated from the rest of the Fediverse, because most of the people don't like to read that shit, and most of the other admins will filter out their content.
And that's the best of the two worlds: intolerants and bigots have the freedom of speech that they crave so much, but very few are willing to listen to what they say.
However, it could also be that things are like this because the Fediverse is still relatively small compared to the major social media. 3-5 million people isn't exactly small, but it's still three orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook. It's still a bit of a green field mostly populated by geeks, scientists, open-source enthusiasts and instances specifically dedicated to hobbies. Maybe we just need to make sure that it remains like this? Just in case, I won't share a sign up invite with my parents...
Not sure if the siloization of thought is the correct direction. Do we really just want another internet hugbox/echochamber?
It's a bit different in this case. I mean, if an admin wants to run their own silos (maybe a private instance with family/colleagues, or an instance on invite), they're free to do it. But most of the people who run their instances have their interest in those instances being discoverable, and most of the people who sign up have their interest in following and be followed by people on other instances. So no matter if there are many instances, you won't have silos if content is well discoverable. Having an account on a Fediverse instance is like having an email address: no matter if it's Gmail, Hotmail or your own SMTP server, you can still communicate with other people as long as you have their addresses.
However, this is still a bit of theoretical talk. In practice, nowadays the solutions proposed for inter-instance discoverability (relays and user directories) are still immature. The former has no filtering criteria, it's prone to spam, and many relays come and go within days/weeks. The latter is still operating at very small scales, but it's promising.
I believe that with better curated relays and user directories we can have the best of the two worlds: decentralized small instances that are easy to curate and moderate, but also well connected and discoverable. I'm considering running my own relay with instances dedicated to science and tech, but even the software for relays isn't that stable yet...
However, this is still a bit of theoretical talk. In practice, nowadays the solutions proposed for inter-instance discoverability (relays and user directories) are still immature. The former has no filtering criteria, it's prone to spam, and many relays come and go within days/weeks. The latter is still operating at very small scales, but it's promising.
I believe that with better curated relays and user directories we can have the best of the two worlds: decentralized small instances that are easy to curate and moderate, but also well connected and discoverable. I'm considering running my own relay with instances dedicated to science and tech, but even the software for relays isn't that stable yet...
I've been using the fediverse occasionally for the last few years, and more actively in the last month or so (running my own instance). While I have heard of instances with objectionable moderation policies (and by extension, objectionable content), I have yet to encounter any myself.
> CSAM and alt-right holdouts
You've succinctly described Twitter's 2023 roadmap
You've succinctly described Twitter's 2023 roadmap
Wonderful news! Here are a few other relevant accounts that have jumped aboard and been active on Mastodon:
- https://mastodon.online/@thunderbird
- https://mastodon.art/@inkscape
- https://fosstodon.org/@bitwarden
- https://mastodon.xyz/@nextcloud
and many more!
- https://mastodon.online/@thunderbird
- https://mastodon.art/@inkscape
- https://fosstodon.org/@bitwarden
- https://mastodon.xyz/@nextcloud
and many more!
kinda would have expected them to run their own instance of sorts
It might come to that at some point; it would be a nice thing to offer to our reader community! But we'd have to maintain it and would have another thing to moderate and ... For now we're just getting our toes wet.
There's a tangible benefit to being discoverable without effort (no friction for users); other "famous" FOSS projects are part of the fosstodon.org instance such as https://fosstodon.org/@mate - kind of makes sense to me as a generic user. $0.02
Discoverability is a bit of an issue with the Fediverse in general. Those who run their own instances are initially quite "isolated" and hard to find, unless they advertise themselves on other channels.
Relays are supposed to make federated content more easily discoverable, but right now they're still far from being what I expect them to be (i.e. curated lists of instances categorized by topic, like an OPML that aggregates multiple feeds/channels based on some criteria), and they're instead saturated and endless streams of zillions of instances with no filtering/aggregation criteria and plenty of spam/adult content. And if you run your instance they're going to fill up your database storage FAST. After joining to the largest relay I immediately got my federated timeline flooded by erotic anime toots in Japanese and filled up 50 MB of db storage in an hour.
Fediverse user directories like those run by @FediFollows are good ideas for discovering new content, but they're still small (we're talking of a few hundreds profiles so far).
But I also believe that it's worth the effort of running your own instance. Right now most of the folks are on mastodon.social or mastodon.online. Fosstodon itself already has 21k users. The purpose of the Fediverse is to be as decentralized as possible, because smaller communities are easier to moderate, aggregate and federate. If everybody ends up signing up to 5-6 big instances, and the long tail is left to pick the crumbs, we'll have again the centralization problem that we were trying to solve.
Relays are supposed to make federated content more easily discoverable, but right now they're still far from being what I expect them to be (i.e. curated lists of instances categorized by topic, like an OPML that aggregates multiple feeds/channels based on some criteria), and they're instead saturated and endless streams of zillions of instances with no filtering/aggregation criteria and plenty of spam/adult content. And if you run your instance they're going to fill up your database storage FAST. After joining to the largest relay I immediately got my federated timeline flooded by erotic anime toots in Japanese and filled up 50 MB of db storage in an hour.
Fediverse user directories like those run by @FediFollows are good ideas for discovering new content, but they're still small (we're talking of a few hundreds profiles so far).
But I also believe that it's worth the effort of running your own instance. Right now most of the folks are on mastodon.social or mastodon.online. Fosstodon itself already has 21k users. The purpose of the Fediverse is to be as decentralized as possible, because smaller communities are easier to moderate, aggregate and federate. If everybody ends up signing up to 5-6 big instances, and the long tail is left to pick the crumbs, we'll have again the centralization problem that we were trying to solve.
I liked reddit more back in the day. I like lobste.rs more than HN. I'm starting to think that forums are better with less people.
Intimacy does not scale.
Conversation is an intimate activity.
Conversation is an intimate activity.
I used to think that it was not only this, but the rate at which a group grows. Lobste.rs used to be interesting, but it either grew too much or the rate exceeded some point, but it has been moderation issue for a while now. I don't know if a more complicated moderating system would help (having some kind of a priority invite system, limiting the number of invitations per month).
Failure to grow, or at least to turn over users with time, is also a problem. Ultimately you end up with a dominant cohort which ages through the system.
For various reasons, Diaspora* seems quite prone to this. I have a number of suspicions as to why, though stagnent development and either intentional or incidental decisions which have made the platform almost perfectly opaque to general web search seem to be likely factors.
Mastodon, by contrast, seems to acquire a new major group of new adopters every year or two, that I've noticed.
(I'm active on both platforms.)
For various reasons, Diaspora* seems quite prone to this. I have a number of suspicions as to why, though stagnent development and either intentional or incidental decisions which have made the platform almost perfectly opaque to general web search seem to be likely factors.
Mastodon, by contrast, seems to acquire a new major group of new adopters every year or two, that I've noticed.
(I'm active on both platforms.)
> Mastodon, by contrast, seems to acquire a new major group of new adopters every year or two, that I've noticed.
Could you give an example?
Could you give an example?
I came on board with the April 2017 contingent.
There was another group that showed up ~July/August 2018. Notable amongst those was the actor Wil Wheaton, who discovered Mastodon had trolls too, and left shortly after. (Mastodon's anti-abuse practices and tools evolved as a result. Sorry, Wil.)
There was a group of Indian users who came aboard following oppression of opposition groups in that country, a few years ago.
Musk's Twitter bid has initiated yet another.
There may be others, and there seems to be a general secular growth trend.
Retention amongst new adopters varies --- there's definitely a fall-off curve. But on balance, the trend for now seems to be growth, and the result is an evolution of participants rather than a static set.
There was another group that showed up ~July/August 2018. Notable amongst those was the actor Wil Wheaton, who discovered Mastodon had trolls too, and left shortly after. (Mastodon's anti-abuse practices and tools evolved as a result. Sorry, Wil.)
There was a group of Indian users who came aboard following oppression of opposition groups in that country, a few years ago.
Musk's Twitter bid has initiated yet another.
There may be others, and there seems to be a general secular growth trend.
Retention amongst new adopters varies --- there's definitely a fall-off curve. But on balance, the trend for now seems to be growth, and the result is an evolution of participants rather than a static set.
https://fosstodon.org/@LWN.rss
Which is a nice feature a social network can have when it isn't trying to achieve user capture.