Mastodon Blog

Twitter gives people who want to micro-publish to many millions of people very easily a place to do that. Of course, since Twitter stopped providing simple reverse-chronological feeds, it's unclear how many people would actually ever see a given post in their timeline as it was posted, rather than quote-tweets or external links directly to the tweet web page, but point taken. It is possible--although by no means certain--that the fediverse is incapable of handling that particular use case.

You asked about email, I'll counter with actual message services. For reasons clear only to the people involved, I have contacts I can only reach via Signal, or via WhatsApp, or via Telegram, or via WeChat, or via Discord, or via Slack, and so on. How do I cope with this? I just do. Similarly, if I had to visit eight different web pages to track my favorite super-popular people, I just would. Or I'd do what I actually do, and follow almost none of them, instead letting people who are terminally online quote and link to the ones worth knowing about.

If ActivityPub filled up, and couldn't take on any more users, then I would first expect technical solutions like a sharp rise in relay servers, which combine the output of many servers into one outbox to be polled. After that, assuming there was some sort of hard limit that couldn't be overcome that way, I would expect that I would need to create a new account on some other ActivityPub-like network, or even a separate unfederated network also…

Twitter's censorship created the problem of echo chambers. Twitter was never full on hostile toward conservatives, it was more to do with specific issues/narratives.

Conservatives looked at mastodon. Mastodon was worse than twitter, conservatives never made it to mastodon. Mastodon was hostile toward conservatives and this was an unfortunate large mistake.

Conservatives built alternatives like parler or gab. But they failed because they were echo chambers.

>We’ve been steadily working towards the ultimate goal of providing a viable alternative to Twitter since 2016, and have proven the scalability and resilience of the platform through organic growth over the years.

Ironically many of these alternatives like gab stole Mastodon code to operate. Which is very interesting because why couldn't conservatives simply join the mastodon network? As an up and comer you would not only be best suited to invite anyone to your platform.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/07/statement-on-gabs-fork-of-mastodon/

White supremacists?

>listing only such servers that commit to standing up against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

Mastodon will never be in the spotlight because they have fallen into the same echo chamber problems. Gab supports free speech? That must make them racist transphobes!

In 1000 years we will have ascended :) but if not, I hope to be chilling on Risa somewhere!

In all seriousness, in the future I suspect we will use a combination of these types of capabilities but they will all be linked together in a way that prevents totalitarian control of speach.

I think some of the best technologies today are keybase.io matrix.org briarproject.org and community.mattermost.com

My view is that the next emerging social network will be based on a secure and self hostable compute fabric that leverages zero trust compute and secure compute, data sharing, etc. I think Urbit had the right direction but went crazy and lost the plot.

I'm working on this problem personally and I hope to be in alpha / beta testing for certain aspects of the platform by end of year :) Feel free to reach out if you want some additional details.

I think it pays a lot of dividends to understand some of the history of the past so that we can learn from them as we look to build something better for the future, so I’ve decided to publish some of my thoughts on this topic and also share some of my findings with the community so that nobody has to go down this massive rabbit hole again in the near term.

History of Social…

Any platform can wipe your account without notice, and so far as I'm aware, without meaningful legal recourse. Your only assurance against this is regular backups. There are tools you can use to automatically mirror your Mastodon / Fediverse accounts locally, as well as in-app content extraction tools.

Content migration isn't implemented yet, and as someone who's migrated a few times more than I can remember (three or four, possibly more), that's a bit of a PITA. But it is on the roadmap, and account migration in general has become far cleaner over the years, see note at bottom of:

<https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-to-another/>

I've been on the Fediverse since 2016, and in the several times I've migrated things have become far smoother.

At present you can migrate your followers, following, and blocked accounts:

<https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/>

Note that there are few if any proprietary / commercial services which afford anything remotely close to what Mastodon does, though blogging platforms probably permit import/export of content to a greater degree.

>consider if someone is a proponent for privacy, but isn't sure if the're joining software created by activists they disagree with .. the folks behind Gab

Gab is a hilarious example because it is a non-federating fork of Mastodon.[0][1] This is especially noteworthy because the ActivityPub "Fediverse" is full of antipathy between camps of users who run Mastodon (more Left) and those who instead run Pleroma (more Right) to the point where you can predict a user's politics by the software their homeserver is running. Is this the future of FOSS that we want?

If you support the right of individuals to run social networks, and if you believe in libre software, you have to understand that sometimes people will use the tools you release for free to do things you disagree with.

An analogy: if you're a manufacturer of hammers, you have to accept that someone could use your hammer to commit a murder.

[0] https://joinmastodon.org/
[1] https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/07/statement-on-gabs-fork-of-mastodon/

I don't really see the issue?

The instance provides the resources you consume to access Mastodon. In exchange you follow their rules.

If you don't like their rules you can move to someone else's instance or even host your own. The process seems pretty simple: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-to-another/

I don't object in principle to instance admins having a lot of power, precisely because they provide the resources and you can move to some other instance whenever you want. That seems reasonable.

There's also nothing preventing you from having multiple Mastodon accounts on multiple instances, including one where you're a responsible member of society and another where you're tooting spicy politics under a pseudonym all day (and the network opts in or out of you as it prefers).