[ignoranceprior]

Mastodon, GNU Social, and the Fediverse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

The two software systems are compatible (both comply with the OStatus standard) so you can interact with content on servers that use the system.

Diaspora also exists, but it's arguably more like Facebook:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)

[cydactyl]

I host a Mastodon instance and have posted below if anyone would like to learn/discuss more about both my instance, and Mastodon as a whole, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25697231

[systemvoltage]

GNU Social is exactly how I imagined it to be.

[scarmig]

That prompted me to imagine what a parody of a GNU-style Twitter would look like, and yes, the connection works from the opposite direction.

[neilpanchal]

Tilable interface, requires days to set it up, tweet with i "Hello World!" <ESC> t, native vim keymap support, and hard to quit.

[jcranmer]

> tweet with i "Hello World!" <ESC> t, native vim keymap support

vim is not GNU, emacs is.

That means it would actually be <M-t> Hello World! <C-x> <C-s>, and the documentation would have a lengthy section on what the "Meta" key is and why not just call it "Alt".

[dexen]

Neither actually :-)

EMACS dates back to 1976 (David Moon & Guy Steele); vi also dates back to 1976 (Bill Joy).

GNU Project dates back "only" to 1983, with GNU Emacs soon after: 1984.

[tarboreus]

It's maintained by GNU. GNU Emacs is the modern Emacs.

[neilpanchal]

That's unnecessarily complicated. The vim way is better.

[74d-fe6-2c6]

Sadly, it seems to be dead.

[jaspax]

...which is exactly what one should expect something called "GNU Social" to be.

(not actually the op)

[jdsalaro]

I agree. I say that a someone who doesn't tend to support popularity contests as a solution to everything. For example, privacy, buying local, supporting SMBs, thinking critically, and many more are hard, in different ways but those albeit important are not easy to do. Many people would say "make privacy easy!", OK we've got Signal, Tails, Tor, etc. "Make supporting SMBs more appealing!", OK we've got Shopify, Stripe Etsy, Gumroad etc. "Make thinking critically easier!!!" ... Wait a second, thinking critically is and will be hard, perhaps not hard but at least not easy.

GNU Social was called StatusNet and Laconica before that, but no, they still chose a deliberately uncool name in one of the most extreme popularity-driven markets. Not that we ought to drop our standards, but why choose such a petty hill to die on?

[runjake]

I hear that it hosts a relatively vibrant Hurd community.

[Spivak]

It’s not exactly modern design but it does work and is super easy to set up.

[pluc]

It can be made relatively pretty: https://web.archive.org/web/20100413124819/http://identi.ca/

[app4soft]

> Mastodon

How decentralized alternative to Twitter works IRL:

Never exists account - https://mastodon.social/@1234567890examplecom2021

> The page you are looking for isn't here.

Suspended account - https://mastodon.social/@realDonaldTrump

> The page you were looking for doesn't exist here anymore.

[viraptor]

I think you're mixing decentralised and unmoderated here. You're free to run those accounts from another instance or provision your own. But you can't force someone else to carry that account, just as I can't force your Mastodon instance to carry mine.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

Which means that in practice, it's very debatable how much more free these decentralized platforms are than centralized ones, and whether they're worth the extra effort required to make decentralization work.

Especially since Mastodon seems to have (from my limited understanding) a "if you dare to talk to the Bad People you're also a Bad Person and getting dropped" mentality, effectively meaning that you cannot run an instance that is federating with both the mainstream fediverse and anything the mainstream fediverse doesn't like.

[jakelazaroff]

This is like complaining that a public street isn’t free because people can walk away if they don’t want to deal with you.

[hombre_fatal]

No, it’s saying that it’s not enough of an improvement to warrant the gulf of work required to make it compelling to anyone beyond the few people who use it today.

We really need to move beyond this mindset where we think anyone will use an exact replica of an incumbent with some silver bullet tweak nobody actually cares about. It’s like thinking “Twitter but built with Rust” is compelling and getting mad at the sheeple when they couldn’t care less.

[jakelazaroff]

The second paragraph is lamenting the fact that other instances can refuse to federate with you:

> Especially since Mastodon seems to have (from my limited understanding) a "if you dare to talk to the Bad People you're also a Bad Person and getting dropped" mentality, effectively meaning that you cannot run an instance that is federating with both the mainstream fediverse and anything the mainstream fediverse doesn't like.

[TeMPOraL]

No, it's like me telling you that you can't be talking to 'tgsovlerkhgsel, or I'll start petitioning everyone you know to stop talking to you, giving each of them the same ultimatum to ensure maximum compliance.

The toxic part here isn't someone banning/defederating you, but someone who didn't ban/defederate you getting threatened by others that they'd better do that or else everyone else will defederate them.

[shawnz]

The point is that this isn't a characteristic of the platform but of the users. The users don't want to be federated with someone who is federated with someone they don't like.

How do you fix that, just force everyone to federate with each other? How do you stop people from forking their own clients to remove the forced federation?

[dna_polymerase]

> Which means that in practice, it's very debatable how much more free these decentralized platforms are

100% more freedom right there. Freedom doesn't mean you can force me to listen to you. It means I can't force you to stop. What Mastodon enables people to do is a very direct way of stopping conversation with people that can't behave.

[zzo38computer]

I don't like that kind of mentality much either, but is there a way they can suppress only some of the messages on their instance, while other ones are still federated on their instance? Maybe there would be a way to allow such a thing to work, that admininstration of some instance can program it to copy only the message they want to copy, or to let you to program your instance to only send some messages to their instance, so that some links including only some messages, and other links between instances will have all messages because they allow you to copy all of them.

(I think that the client-based filtering, although with default settings provided by the server (which the user can choose to use, customize, or ignore), might be better, but server-based could be used if needed, e.g. to avoid flooding the bandwidth. If you are using NNTP, then you can filter by From header, References header, Injection-Info header, Newsgroups header, etc. The server probably could still ban users who misuse those headers for ban evasion, I suppose, but if those headers are not misused, and the connection does not waste too much memory/disk space/bandwidth, then a hard ban is not needed and the filtering can be used instead.)

[erk__]

I think the amount of instances that would want to distribute anything from Gab [0] which is based on Mastadon is very very limited.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)

[wut42]

Gab ripped their federation code a while ago. Also, when they were federating, they never cared much about properly federating. They used federation as an argument to switching platforms but they didn't care about it. What they cared the most, I think, was the client ecosystem of Mastodon/…. Gab clients were banned, but Apple/Google cannot ban fediverse clients.

[app4soft]

So, `@realDonaldTrump` was suspended at least from Mastodon.social.

How many instances left?

How many also suspended `@realDonaldTrump`?

[viraptor]

He can afford his own instance which will never block him. Let's not pretend he's being stopped from running an independent social broadcast.

It doesn't matter how many instances block him - nobody can be forced to listen to him.

[zoobab]

"@realDonaldTrump" will spawn his own blockchain based social network.

[app4soft]

He is special, of course.

[r721]

gargron (Mastodon dev)'s reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25697378

[app4soft]

> That being said, the actual Donald Trump would not be welcome on mastodon.social, nor would he be welcome on most servers that I am familiar with. He would likely have to host his own Mastodon server.