Mastodon

[touchingcloth]

It seems like a blocker for people adopting it fully is the lack of a centralised login, as it's reasonably painful to find and follow people on servers other than your own, and a complete ballache to actually be able to post on more than a single server.

If they managed to adopt an open source way of authenticating across different servers without needing to sign up afresh on each one (something like a Google/Apple/Facebook login, or Gravatar) that would change how easy it is to use.

That said, there's probably something very useful about only being able to see posts from people you have deliberately chosen follow, and probably a lot of the ills of Twitter are caused by their algorithms deliberately shovelling contentious posts in people's directions.

[Cuellar]

Is there a way to view all the posts made on a specific instance?

[touchingcloth]

Is there a way to view all the posts made on a specific instance?

The "Local" view is just all posts made on the instance you're currently on. It defaults to new posts appearing at the top in real time, but they have a "slow" mode which means you need to click to see posts since you loaded the page rather than it just being an endless torrent.

[Cuellar]

Yeah, but if I was on @mastodon.social for example, but wanted to see all the posts made on @econtwitter.net

[touchingcloth]

Yeah, but if I was on @mastodon.social for example, but wanted to see all the posts made on @econtwitter.net

From what I can work out, not without browsing to econtwitter.net and viewing the latest posts there.

There seems to be a lot of customisation options available to admins, though. Mastodon.social looks like it's the stock interface (or, at least, it looks the same as a lot of the other instances I've looked at), with Explore, Local, and Federated in the right sidebar:



The "explore" page on maastonapp.uk, though, looks like it's been customised and doesn't show the same layout as other instances I've seen:



It is possible for someone with an account on mastodon.social to follow someone on the mastodonapp.uk server by searching @<username>@mastodonapp.uk from the mastodon.social instance.

EDIT your econtwitter.net message came in as I was typing that lot. It looks like it has the same interface as mastodonapp.uk, and I can't find a way on either of those instances to just see a list of all posts in the order they came in. I don't have a login for either of those instances, though, so maybe it's different for someone who is signed in...

[first skeleton on mars]

If they managed to adopt an open source way of authenticating across different servers without needing to sign up afresh on each one (something like a Google/Apple/Facebook login, or Gravatar) that would change how easy it is to use.

I suspect this would be opposed by the Mastodon people, sounds rather contrary to the philosophy of a federated system

edit: what I mean by this is that I don't think it was ever intended that there be "Mastodon, the social network". Mastodon is software you can run on your website to create your own social network which is interoperable with other websites running Mastodon. You set the rules for your site and you are responsible for moderating your users.

Creating a centralised login makes it a very different animal.

[touchingcloth]

I agree. I personally prefer the more manual, non-centralised approach (I've been a member on multiple different forums for years, so it's no different from this really, with the added addition of some level of interoperability), but it seems like the one major difference that's likely to be a dealbreaker for those looking for a Twitter replacement. It's almost certainly for the best that there's not an algorithmically-generated endless feed, but for people used to Twitter as a time-filler and hooked on the dopamine hit that comes from that sort of thing, having to filter through multiple posts manually is quite a different thing - the difference between going to the library and reading through the day's papers versus having Fox pipe their opinions into your face.

[first skeleton on mars]

I could see some kind of third-party app which creates the illusion of centralisation on the user's end though. Collecting posts from different servers which interest you, transparently logging you in your servers... like using a proper email client instead of a bunch of webmail ones.

There may already be such a thing, for that matter.

[touchingcloth]

But even that would be one way - it would aggregate the posts you see, but probably not the posts you make (though it would be possible to make something which used separate user accounts on multiple servers and duplicated your posts on each one).

I wonder if an effect of widespread adoption of Mastodon would be on how people post, as well as how the read others' posts? I would assume with everyone being in the same place on twitter that there's an element of baiting, with rightwing people deliberately posting things they know will get the left's backs up and vice versa.

Maybe having things more segregated would lead to people not seeing those sorts of flamewars happening around them, and so they don't have the same temptation to bait others?

[first skeleton on mars]

Even between people on the same "side" Twitter seems to have an undercurrent of mean-spirited antagonism. If people actually enjoy that about Twitter I think they'd either recreate it on the Mastodon server they migrate to, or get bored and leave.

If one server did become a wildly popular Twitter clone with all the nastiness that implies, the smaller communities might collectively cut them off. That's how they handled Gab.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I agree. I personally prefer the more manual, non-centralised approach (I've been a member on multiple different forums for years, so it's no different from this really, with the added addition of some level of interoperability), but it seems like the one major difference that's likely to be a dealbreaker for those looking for a Twitter replacement. It's almost certainly for the best that there's not an algorithmically-generated endless feed, but for people used to Twitter as a time-filler and hooked on the dopamine hit that comes from that sort of thing, having to filter through multiple posts manually is quite a different thing - the difference between going to the library and reading through the day's papers versus having Fox pipe their opinions into your face.

I like forums too and they tend to lead to in-depth discussions in a way twitter doesn't. But for me it's not either/or I think twitter has allowed me to dip my toe into pools I wouldn't otherwise, even if I'm passively observing. I think in some cases if I joined forums I'd feel an interloper.

[touchingcloth]

Even between people on the same "side" Twitter seems to have an undercurrent of mean-spirited antagonism.

In my (brief) stint on twitter, the assumption of bad faith seemed pretty rife, so I'd post about, I dunno, how I preferred red Leicester to cheddar and an army of people I'd never heard of before would pile in with YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF METROPOLITAN MIDLAND ELITE VIOLENCE TOWARDS THE WEST COUNTRY

[first skeleton on mars]

it was that though wasn't it

[touchingcloth]

I like forums too and they tend to lead to in-depth discussions in a way twitter doesn't. But for me it's not either/or I think twitter has allowed me to dip my toe into pools I wouldn't otherwise, even if I'm passively observing. I think in some cases if I joined forums I'd feel an interloper.

I've tried using twitter for that sort of thing in the past, but found that it wasn't really set up well for that sort of thing - difficult to find a list of posts in date order and sift through it yourself instead of the algorithms giving you what they think you should see, for instance.

I could see something like Mastodon potentially being better for that sort of thing, but I haven't started looking through for servers in areas that I'm interested in.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Twitter has the option to show latest instead of the algorithm. As a bonus it seems to reduce noise as in that mode it doesn't show other people's likes.

[touchingcloth]

Is that a recent option? From memory I couldn't just follow a set of accounts and see all of the posts by those accounts in order without getting a load of instances of people quoting those accounts interleaved with the posts made by the accounts directly.

[Pauline Walnuts]

Thought this was an interesting description of what Mastodon is.

He appears to have posted that on Twitter, the ironing is delicious!

[olliebean]

I guess one big difference is if you want to know what's going on in the twitterverse, you can look at what's trending and there it is, which is what makes twitter so good for breaking news. Whereas if you want to know what's going on in the Mastoverse, you probably have to know what server it's going on in first.

[touchingcloth]

I guess one big difference is if you want to know what's going on in the twitterverse, you can look at what's trending and there it is, which is what makes twitter so good for breaking news. Whereas if you want to know what's going on in the Mastoverse, you probably have to know what server it's going on in first.

I get this trending area in my server, and when I click on them I see posts by users from mastodon.social, which isn't my server. So it looks like it's somehow possible for things to get aggregated across rather than within servers

[Bently Sheds]

I was enjoying it until Emma Kennedy rocked up on the instance I'm on and then Richard Herring and Neil Gaiman started stinking up my feed.

The famous people will get bored because the algorithm doesn't push them in front of everybody, they won't get the equivalent of quotetweets or retweets, favouriting means nothing.

I can imagine Limmy absolutely detesting it, it's no place for his sort of hijinks.

[touchingcloth]

This was an interesting read from a long-time Mastodon-er about the Twitter influx, comparing it to Usenet when ISPs started making it easy for muggles to get onto the service - https://www.hughrundle.net/home-invasion/

If the people who built the fediverse generally sought to protect users, corporate platforms like Twitter seek to control their users. Twitter claims jurisdiction over all "content" on the platform. The loudest complaints about this come from people who want to publish horrible things and are sad when the Twitter bureaucracy eventually, sometimes, tells them they aren't allowed to. The real problem with this arrangement, however, is what it does to how people think about consent and control over our own voices. Academics and advertisers who want to study the utterances, social graphs, and demographics of Twitter users merely need to ask Twitter Corporation for permission. They can claim that legally Twitter has the right to do whatever it wants with this data, and ethically users gave permission for this data to be used in any way when they ticked "I agree" to the Terms of Service. This is complete bullshit of course (The ToS are inpenetrable, change on a whim, and the power imbalance is enormous), but it's convenient. So researchers convince themselves they believe it, or they simply don't care.

This attitude has moved with the new influx. Loudly proclaiming that content warnings are censorship, that functionality that has been deliberately unimplemented due to community safety concerns are "missing" or "broken", and that volunteer-run servers maintaining control over who they allow and under what conditions are "exclusionary". No consideration is given to why the norms and affordances of Mastodon and the broader fediverse exist, and whether the actor they are designed to protect against might be you. The Twitter people believe in the same fantasy of a "public square" as the person they are allegedly fleeing. Like fourteenth century Europeans, they bring the contagion with them as they flee.

[olliebean]

I get this trending area in my server, and when I click on them I see posts by users from mastodon.social, which isn't my server. So it looks like it's somehow possible for things to get aggregated across rather than within servers

Ah, right - it's called Explore on my server, although #pmqs only has posts from 45 people in the last two days, so I guess it's not connecting to as many other servers as yours is.

[first skeleton on mars]

This was an interesting read from a long-time Mastodon-er about the Twitter influx, comparing it to Usenet when ISPs started making it easy for muggles to get onto the service - https://www.hughrundle.net/home-invasion/

well worth reading, thanks

[Cloud]

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.

There's another official one I think it's mastodon.online but yeah this is the issue

Wow I remember CIX. Showing our age here

[touchingcloth]

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.

The selection of topics on joinmastodon.org suggests that it's not really for the same set of interests as a mass commercial platform like twitter just yet:

-All topics
-General
-Regional
-Technology
-Activism
-Gaming
-LGBTQ+
-Music
-Art
-Furry
-Food

I suspect at a high level, twitter accounts would probably include categories of news, politics, science, and religion before getting to Furry.

[olliebean]

The fragmentation of servers is a bit of a problem. You find someone interesting, then you have to click through to whatever server they're on to see more than a couple of their messages, which opens in a separate tab, then you find the Follow button doesn't work because you don't have an account on that server so you have to go back to the original tab to follow them... it's not the most user-friendly system. Also found that people who have accounts on a different server don't show up in a search for their name, so it's near impossible to find anyone unless you already know their username and server. There's a page somewhere that links to your Twitter account and supposedly searches Mastodon for people you follow, but it fails to find the two people I know for a fact are on there (no idea if anyone else I follow is).

[touchingcloth]

I'm not sure how true any of that is?

Someone upthread mentioned Neil Gaiman. I searched on my instance for "Neil Gaiman", and it showed me an account under his name on mastodon.social, which isn't my instance. I can click on his profile and it loads a view of his posts within my instance, and I can follow his account without ever leaving my instance.

His account isn't a good example for looking at the post limits you mention, as his account shows that he has made 9 posts, but regardless of which instance I view it from I can only count 4 posts.

Clicking onto a different random account from a foreign instance I can see that when viewed on my instance, I can only go back 4 days (not sure if it's a date range limit or a number of posts one), and to view older posts I need to click the message at the bottom of their feed that says

Older posts from other servers are not displayed.
Browse more on the original profile

That loads up their profile in a new tab with the URL being that of their instance, but the Follow button on that page lets me follow them without needing to go back to the original tab on my instance.

I don't know how much of this will be affected by: your own instances settings; browser security/privacy/cookie settings; desktop versus mobile browsers.

[touchingcloth]

I was very pleased to see that the org who maintains the Mastodon repository for Docker goes by the name of "tootsuite".

[olliebean]

I'm not sure how true any of that is?

Someone upthread mentioned Neil Gaiman. I searched on my instance for "Neil Gaiman", and it showed me an account under his name on mastodon.social, which isn't my instance. I can click on his profile and it loads a view of his posts within my instance, and I can follow his account without ever leaving my instance.

His account isn't a good example for looking at the post limits you mention, as his account shows that he has made 9 posts, but regardless of which instance I view it from I can only count 4 posts.

Clicking onto a different random account from a foreign instance I can see that when viewed on my instance, I can only go back 4 days (not sure if it's a date range limit or a number of posts one), and to view older posts I need to click the message at the bottom of their feed that says

That loads up their profile in a new tab with the URL being that of their instance, but the Follow button on that page lets me follow them without needing to go back to the original tab on my instance.

I don't know how much of this will be affected by: your own instances settings; browser security/privacy/cookie settings; desktop versus mobile browsers.

I guess it depends who you search for, or maybe what server they are on. As for the follow button, that definitely doesn't work as you need to be logged in to follow someone, and if you're viewing their page on a different server you aren't logged in on that server. So if it works for you, they must be on a server on which you have an account. Otherwise, it gives you the URL of their page to copy and paste into the search box on the server on which you do have an account, so as to find them and follow them from that server.

[touchingcloth]

I'm 90% sure the server that gave me the follow button wasn't one I had a login for, but I'll try it again at some point.

When I tried it earlier, it asked me for my username and instance of the account where I did want to send the follow request from, which then opened a login window where I didn't need to provide credentials because I was already logged into that server on a different tab...