[cemerick]

OK, I'll bite.

IMO, GNU Social / the broader "fediverse" is mostly uninteresting to me as a user, for a bunch of reasons:

* The user experience simply is more pleasant (a tight tweetdeck-esque UI vs. GNU Social's Twitter 2009 skin?)

* only mastodon supports important features like CW and message privacy flags

* GNU social instances, in general, are not pleasant places. For whatever reasons, the worst fediverse instances (i.e. those that feature child porn, hate speech, etc etc) are generally GNU Social. This will (and maybe already has, to some degree) changed, but it matters a lot that the vast majority of mastodon instances and mastodon users are basically decent people that are very conscious of the climate around them.

It's great that Mastodon can federate with GNU Social instances (I know and follow some people that are on GNU Social instances), but they are different things with important distinctions.

P.S. it's funny that GNU enthusiasts are doing the "you should call it GNU/Mastodon", etc., or otherwise conflating the two as demonstrating here. Federation just happens over a set of related protocols; Mastodon shares no code lineage with any GNU Social implementation AFAIK. An analogue would be if we were supposed to mention NCSA in a post about nginx. But GNU folk are gonna GNU, I guess? ;-P

[Karrot_Kream]

I'm mostly saying this because I don't use a Mastodon instance myself. I don't really want to get into a protracted argument over naming, GNU, etc, etc but:

> * GNU social instances, in general, are not pleasant places. For whatever reasons, the worst fediverse instances (i.e. those that feature child porn, hate speech, etc etc) are generally GNU Social. This will (and maybe already has, to some degree) changed, but it matters a lot that the vast majority of mastodon instances and mastodon users are basically decent people that are very conscious of the climate around them.

I really have no problem with the wild west nature of the internet at large. I grew up digitally on the internet and physically in an income depressed area, so the idea of "country clubbing" my life seems counterproductive.

But hey you do you! The beauty of the Fediverse is that we can all talk to each other!

[KirinDave]

> I really have no problem with the wild west nature of the internet at large. I grew up digitally on the internet and physically in an income depressed area, so the idea of "country clubbing" my life seems counterproductive.

Yes, it is "country clubbing" to avoid sharing child pornography... It does indeed seem counterproductive to avoid people who revel in that. After all, it's not like we can kill them for their ideas so we might as well listen to and look at literally everything they say all the time.

> But hey you do you! The beauty of the Fediverse is that we can all talk to each other!

Quite the contrary: the beauty of the Fediverse is that we can create sub-networks that allow us to talk to fewer people. Talking to every single person is FAR more effectively done on a centrally managed network like Twitter.

Even without instance blocks and mutes, the amount of time it takes for messages to propagate across the fediverse is long enough to create segmentation and shape user behavior.

[Torgo]

>only mastodon supports important features like CW and message privacy flags

CW was a bolt-on feature that was developed without any consideration for other fediverse servers and how they communicate using shared protocols, privacy isn't really private when you cross servers unless you trust both admins, there are tools for this

> GNU social instances, in general, are not pleasant places. [...] it matters a lot that the vast majority of mastodon instances and mastodon users are basically decent people

The Quitter servers have reasonable rules on this, and I dispute that Mastodon users are basically decent people. They are just people, like everyone else. The tight, polite and respectful Mastodon culture died when the network grew 20x. Now I see plenty of jerks, admins are sharing blocklists based on zero information and hiding the fact from their users, if you speak a non-english language you can be as offensive as you want to be, and there is a massive Japanese Mastodon server that is flooding the network with child porn.

>it's funny that GNU enthusiasts are doing the "you should call it GNU/Mastodon"

Literally no one is seriously doing this.

[cemerick]

I see "GNU/Mastodon" fly by most days. It's always a joke, tho I don't know that the authors mean it to be one.

Yes, quitter.no seems to be a pleasant GNU Social spot. (Most) others AFAICT, absolutely not.

Yes, of course any aggregation of 1000 people is going to have some difficult individuals, nevermind 300k (or whatever the total pop is these days). The point is, what is the aggregate experience, common expectations, etc? The bar is set depressingly low by the popular services many of us would prefer to move away from, but so far, Mastodon Is Good.

Admins sharing federation blocks is what is _supposed_ to happen, and is the same sort of pattern that emerged for blocking mail delivery from previously-reported spammers. You want every instance's admin to vet every other instance, and make an Informed Decision?

> CW was a bolt-on feature that was developed without any consideration for other fediverse servers and how they communicate using shared protocols, privacy isn't really private when you cross servers unless you trust both admins, there are tools for this

The ostatus/fediverse protocols are a _mess_; substantially everything in there is bolted on. That Eugen and the other Mastodon devs did useful things on top of it is A-OK by me.

[KirinDave]

> CW was a bolt-on feature that was developed without any consideration for other fediverse servers and how they communicate using shared protocols

Because how many years did they have to develop it and elected not to? Forking happens to meet demand.

> Now I see plenty of jerks, admins are sharing blocklists based on zero information and hiding the fact from their users,

Which instance. Name names.

> if you speak a non-english language you can be as offensive as you want to be

We'll block them pretty soon. Already userscripts to GT toots inline are circulating. Don't worry.

> and there is a massive Japanese Mastodon server that is flooding the network with child porn.

It is a tesatment to the Mastodon network that this was resolved in under 12 hours. Twitter has let CP accounts live for far longer.

[Torgo]

Frame your needs however you want, if you sign up for a federated network you assume some responsibility to do things with consideration for interoperability and standards.

[KirinDave]

Does not the network have are responsibility to evolve to meet the needs of its users?

I had read recently Mastodon quickly had more users on the federated network than the active population of every other individual codebase.