Mastodon

[canadagoose]

Who's using it? Do you think it will take off this time or remain relatively niche? I've started using it again but I don't know too many folk on there.

[olliebean]

Saw this on twitter and thought, I'm too old for this shit.

[touchingcloth]

What is it?

[Captain Z]

I've never seen one before, no one has, but I'm guessing it's a Tweet hole.

[touchingcloth]

A Tweet hole?

[DocDaneeka]

I've been using it for a while.

S'alright, basically like twitter but with a local timeline(the people on the same server as you) and federated timeline (loads of random shite from people you don't follow).

A big difference is there aren't any celebs, famous journalists or ads.

I don't think it will be a permanent thing for most twitter people as the whole quoting people to dunk and argue thing is frowned upon and the content warning culture may be too much for them.

[first skeleton on mars]

What is it?

It's a lot of little Twitters, hosted on different websites, that can talk to each other. Kinda like email.

[Mobius]

Why is it called that

[olliebean]

Cos it's (hoping to be) big and powerful?

[first skeleton on mars]

cos it's (going to go) extinct with its only surviving relatives being symbols of the US Republican party

[Cloud]

I registered on a few servers and I like it, especially the tighter rules most servers have against being a dick, and the content warning/filter system. But I don't think it'll go anywhere until either

a) They fix the account fragmentation issue and find a way to just have one account

or

b) One particular mastodon server (or instance or whatever they're called) becomes extremely popular to the point that all the other ones are irrelevant

As it stands, people just look it up, come to that first Google result that says "sure, here are some popular servers in a random order, pick one" and run for the hills.  Beyond a few of us nerds no one has the time for that, especially those who are kind of "proudly too thick" and declare themselves as such.

[touchingcloth]

I heard that your name becomes @touchingcloth@serverifirstsignedupon.mastodon

So I signed up on the blandest-sounding and shortest-named server I could see.

I've just posted a picture of my morning motion, what next?

[bgmnts]

Do people really need social media this much?

[touchingcloth]

Oh dear, I've just accidentally started a race war on here :(

[touchingcloth]

Do people really need social media this much?

I still really like the forum model. Niche interest and closed system, with long-form posts and replies on specific topics by people who are into that particular niche, and with intrusions from people outside the niche being vanishingly rare.

From what I've seen, Mastodon, Reddit, and Discord all offer something that is similar to that model, but implemented less well.

Probably the thing that really turns me off those platforms is just the sheer weight of posts and posters. A place like CaB feels more social in the truest sense - I know the names and avatars of 99% of the most frequent posters here, whereas those other platforms (and some forums, to be honest) that have a much higher rate of activity (whether through a huge number of users posting a small amount each, or a small number of massively prolific ones) feel less social because of that. The difference between living in a small band of hunter-gatherers and in an enormous city, but writ large and digitally.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Thought this was an interesting description of what Mastodon is.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I still really like the forum model. Niche interest and closed system, with long-form posts and replies on specific topics by people who are into that particular niche, and with intrusions from people outside the niche being vanishingly rare.

From what I've seen, Mastodon, Reddit, and Discord all offer something that is similar to that model, but implemented less well.

Dunno, I think reddit is more like web front end to Usenet (although online bulletin boards were supposed to be the replacement for that) and Discord is functionally a skin for IRC.

Part of the problem is people expect them to be like forums but both have weird time-sensitive constraints that make finding or posting to older stuff more difficult.

[Huxleys Babkins]

Pterodactyl! Triceratops! Sabretooth Tiger! Tyrannosaurus!

[touchingcloth]

Dunno, I think reddit is more like web front end to Usenet (although online bulletin boards were supposed to be the replacement for that) and Discord is functionally a skin for IRC.

Part of the problem is people expect them to be like forums but both have weird time-sensitive constraints that make finding or posting to older stuff more difficult.

Yeah, IRC is a good model for Discord, and seems to be useful for similar reasons - warez, and not much else.

Reddit's only real benefit versus forums is a centralised search and single login, but those things aren't worth its idiosyncratic approach to threading replies.

[seepage]

Pterodactyl! Triceratops! Sabretooth Tiger! Tyrannosaurus!

mmm... I was going to say Sabretooth Tiger is the odd one out, but a pterodactyl isn't a dinosaur

[Huxleys Babkins]

mmm... I was going to say Sabretooth Tiger is the odd one out, but a pterodactyl isn't a dinosaur

They are all dinosaurs because they are all from dinosaur times. Even a 3 year old could tell you that.

[Sonny_Jim]

IRC is a good model for Discord, and seems to be useful for similar reasons - warez, and not much else.

I dunno, plenty of Youtube channels I follow have an accompanying Discord.  Also it's great for niche shit like pinball and retrogaming and the like. 

The way Reddit presents comment threads is it's best feature and worst aspect.  It's great for bringing the funny and insightful comments up to be more visible, but at the same time it does force a massive kind of 'group think'.  I get nervous posting anything which I know might end up with a negative rating, which is total balls because it's just all fake internet points.  Reddit is shit for basically everything, how it shows pictures/videos, how comments are presented etc.  It's a small wonder that anyone actually uses it, but that's inertia I guess.

[touchingcloth]

Living outside of the UK now, Reddit is the most consistently easy way to find files of TV shows that don't tend to hit the torrent sites. Very weird that the same website can host both pirated versions of Masterchef The Professionals and professional incels all under the same roof.

[olliebean]

They are all dinosaurs because they are all from dinosaur times. Even a 3 year old could tell you that.

The plesiosaur is an insect, and it lives on bananas.

[Jerzy Bondov]

I still really like the forum model. Niche interest and closed system, with long-form posts and replies on specific topics by people who are into that particular niche, and with intrusions from people outside the niche being vanishingly rare.

From what I've seen, Mastodon, Reddit, and Discord all offer something that is similar to that model, but implemented less well.

Probably the thing that really turns me off those platforms is just the sheer weight of posts and posters. A place like CaB feels more social in the truest sense - I know the names and avatars of 99% of the most frequent posters here, whereas those other platforms (and some forums, to be honest) that have a much higher rate of activity (whether through a huge number of users posting a small amount each, or a small number of massively prolific ones) feel less social because of that. The difference between living in a small band of hunter-gatherers and in an enormous city, but writ large and digitally.

I love CaB but I like to have something else to go alongside it because of the self promotion rules here. Not that I'm trying to get rich and famous at all but I'd like my work to find people who like it.

Mastodon confuses me. Cohost seems great but the wait to get your account activated is very long now.

[zomgmouse]

does this mean you have to register an account on every server you want to be a part of? seems odd

[touchingcloth]

does this mean you have to register an account on every server you want to be a part of? seems odd

I think it's more complicated than that. Something like you can post on other servers than the one you registered on if that server allows it, but not quote from that server onto your home one. I get the impression it's somewhere between Twitter (where everything happens on the same site, and all users can read and be seen by all other users), and forums (where if you're a member of CaB and want to post on Mumsnet you need to have two separate accounts, and any references between the two places would need to be copied text rather than anything integrated).

[zomgmouse]

I think it's more complicated than that. Something like you can post on other servers than the one you registered on if that server allows it, but not quote from that server onto your home one. I get the impression it's somewhere between Twitter (where everything happens on the same site, and all users can read and be seen by all other users), and forums (where if you're a member of CaB and want to post on Mumsnet you need to have two separate accounts, and any references between the two places would need to be copied text rather than anything integrated).

thanks for the explanation. seems a little maladroitstodon

[olliebean]

b) One particular mastodon server (or instance or whatever they're called) becomes extremely popular to the point that all the other ones are irrelevant

My google search led me straight to mastodon.social, which describes itself as "The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit," so would seem to be a good candidate for a general-purpose catch-all server. However: "Creating an account on mastodon.social is currently not possible."

The main website (joinmastodon.org) offers a selection of 36 servers, none of which look particularly inspiring to me. I thought it would be like CIX used to be, with loads of interest groups, but it doesn't look like it has anything like the scale to be a twitter alternative atm.

[touchingcloth]

thanks for the explanation. seems a little maladroitstodon

Their own documentation says that

From every Mastodon Instance it is possible to interact with users who are on other Instances. It works exactly like e-mail does (you can send an e-mail from Gmail to Yahoo, right?). That's because all the Instances can be mutually interconnected.

Every Instance administrator can choose to silence or to completely block a user of his own or another Instance, but also to block another Instance as a whole (for example because it has bad moderation and allows trolling).

I've just been having a play with it, and it looks like if you were signed up on the Cookd instance and I was signed up on the Bombd one, then:

- I can only make posts and follow people by signing in on the Bombd server. Trying to use my credentials on Cookd gives a "username or password incorrect" message
- I can follow you by first signing into the Bombd server, then searching for @zomgmouse@cookd
-- This brings your posts into my timeline when I'm logged into the Bombd server
- If I want to make a post that is visible on the Cookd server I can either:
-- Post in the Bombd server, but tagging the specific people from the Cookd server I want to see the message ("Hey, @zomgmouse@cookd! Come and do a Bombd."
-- Create a separate account on the Cookd server, then my posts there will be visible to anyone on the Cookd server who looks at the "Local" view

As well as that Local view, there are "Explore" and "Federated" ones. The latter I think shows the most recent posts from all of the other instances that the administrators of your own instance have linked with OR from instances containing users followed by one or more users from your instance, while the former shows popular posts from "all" instances globally. I can't work out if this is really "all" instances, or there is some filtering that happens based on how the admins have setup your server, or from a selected set of servers picked by Mastodon's global admins (this site for instance is managed by the project, and only shows servers that follow their code of conduct - https://joinmastodon.org/servers).