[primeradical]

Pretty clear a good portion of the Twitter users moving to Mastodon don't understand that it's a federated application, and expect a centralized Twitter clone.

If your complaint is Elon's flavor of moderation on Twitter, moving to a Mastodon server with an admin with their own fun and unique ideas about moderation isn't the tea.

[wheats]

>moving to a Mastodon server with an admin with their own fun and unique ideas about moderation isn't the tea.

Well, that's supposed to be the benefit of Mastodon, isn't it? Every platform has moderation rules and owners/admins, and every platform will have these things change periodically. Mastodon is built around the idea that you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the platform if you disagree with how it is being run. You can even be your own owner/admin of an instance if you feel strongly enough about it but still be on the same platform as other users you follow.

[primeradical]

Totally agree, that's the fundamental principle of Mastodon and I like it.

But I think some people are just looking for "the other Twitter." Mastodon is a philosophically different idea to Twitter's centralized moderation.

I think other conversations about the network affect are apt here. Yeah, you can move to a different server all you want but in reality people want to be where other people are and don't actually want to migrate if they can help it. People aggregating in one place is the antithesis of the Mastodon federation.

If Mastodon does really catch on, it'll be a single digit number of high population servers that probably all end up having similar content moderation policy to Twitter to attract the most number of users. There won't be a grand utopia of a flat distribution of uniquely moderated servers.

[rolenthedeep]

IME, none of that actually matters at a practical level.

I think the biggest mistake Eugen had made is simply listing the number of users on an instance. Users will almost always pick the instance with the highest user count, which is counter productive in all sorts of ways.

Instead, we should push users to find an instance that matches their interests, and then show them the federated timeline. That's really all you need to take a user from Twitter and get them comfortable on mastodon.

But then again, Eugen dropped the federated timeline from the official apps because mastodon.social got too big to handle it, and now new users are more confused and mastodon.social is a worse experience than ever.

My general recommendation to everyone is to find a smaller instance that sounds interesting, wade through the local timeline to be sure you like the vibes, follow some people, then dive into the federated feed

[the_third_wave]

Those decisions should not be taken at server level but at the level of the user. The way Mastodon is organised it is up to the server administrator to decide whether you get to interact with users on other servers. If the administrator has a bee up his bonnet on some specific subject he'll block any server which doesn't fit his idea of wrong and right with regard to that subject. This quickly leads to islands of server-groups which do not communicate with each other and as such increases the polarisation of the (small-n) netscape. Those on the "progressive" island won't hear much from the "conservative" island and vice-versa.

I've seen several comparisons between Mastodon and email servers where server administrators also have the power to block communication with other servers but those comparisons do not hold since I have yet to find a mail server administrator who blocks communication with certain other servers on ideological grounds. Mail servers are blocked because they are sources of spam, not because they host users with different opinions. Mail content itself is not moderated other than through spam filters which (for now?) do not censor on ideological grounds, "Tweets" and "Toots" are.

A better solution would be to have users select their own moderators just like they can choose their own content filtering (e.g. uBlock Origin) rule sets but I do not see how something like that can be implemented given the way Mastodon works.

[rolenthedeep]

You're looking at this from the wrong angle.

You do have control here. You do select your moderator, and you do have the power to change that.

You select which server your account lives on. If you disagree with the admin at such a fundamental level, this is probably not the right server for you. You can simply select another server.

You also have the option to run your own server. It's not hard to handle just a few accounts, and there's even places you can pay to host and configure it for you. I know several people running their own servers, and a few of them just have one account.

Let's compare to Tumblr for a second. They've had a wild ride with content moderation over the years, and this has led many people to leave the platform. Those people lost their accounts and their followers forever with no recourse. If your mastodon moderator starts getting scared by nipples, you can simply migrate to a new server and keep all your followers.

The real trick about mastodon is that you can take full control if you really want to. However, most of us don't want to deal with running a server, so you just have to trust someone else to do it. If you find a community that matches your interests, it's actually a very pleasant place to be

[the_third_wave]

What happens with you "followers" when you change servers? Do they follow along automagically or do they have to undertake action to re-connect to @[e-mail]?

As to running your own server - something I have been looking in to because I support the decentralisation of the 'net - I am under the impression that Pleroma is a lot easier on the hardware than Mastodon. Does you concur?

[rolenthedeep]

Anyone following your old account will automatically follow the new account. The only thing that does not transfer is your post history, for mostly technical reasons.

I don't know anything about pleroma, sorry. I do know that mastodon uses a ton of resources when you get a lot of users, but for <5 you can use anything including a raspberry pi

[phpisthebest]

This will not happen is the Admin of the server you are one chooses to block the server you want to move to....

Mastodon has long become a political project ever sense their very public dispute with Gab... They ceased to be a neutral project and clearly showed the limitations of the federation space when it comes to putting users in control, as that control is largely symbolic and just like centralized system unless you run your own server, and you do not run afoul of the project dev team so you do not get put on a default deny list then you are not in control of your data

[pessimizer]

> you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the platform if you disagree with how it is being run.

As long as "your data" doesn't include your history, as far as I understand? You can leave your home server as long as you're willing to leave everything you ever wrote.

[TrueGeek]

> Mastodon is built around the idea that you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the platform if you disagree with how it is being run

I’m not super clear on how it works. If you do this, what happens to the people who follow you? Since they had to type in your address (including instance) wouldn’t you lose all followers in this case?

[_djo_]

The migration tool publishes a message to the instances of each of your followers informing them of your new handle, which in theory then gets updated seamlessly.

It was pretty rough when first introduced but seems to be solid now.

[abraham]

Moving accounts brings your followers with you. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

[convery]

Ye, seems like a good fit for the terminally-online Twitter users as their main complaint about Elon is him wanting to be fair in terms of moderation and not favouring their side. Even launched their Twitter clone called "Tribal" to have a "fascist free" alternative without wrongthink..

[notacoward]

I think I'll go look at forks of the Mastodon/Pleroma code, see who's working on a clustered mega-server to give people a more Twitter-like experience at one place instead of relying entirely on federation. Then again, maybe the people doing that are not being so obvious about it. Pretty sure there's someone, though. Probably even a VC or two throwing money at them.

[LightG]

I'll take it as a stopgap until we figure out what is the next step.

Musk can shove his $8 up his big, fat... fail whale.