I finally gave Mastodon a try because many interesting Twitter accounts I follow moved there, or at least got active on it and broadcasted the fact. I have to admit I am positively surprised so far. Very much so.
Now everything depends on how much activity remains once the current dust settles.
Will Mastodon overtake Twitter? I still doubt it, but honestly I really can't imagine why I would care about that as long as Mastodon manages to establish, nurture, and retain a healthy userbase. Which is all I would need to keep using it.
I fear it will go the way of Signal, every time Meta forces a uela change, some people switch, most switch back... Let's hope there will at some point be a critical mass. For Signal it's too late, in my country WA is the standard sadly.
5+ years ago Whatsapp was pretty much the standard for all my network (apart from my US colleagues still using SMS a lot). But over the last 5 years its fragmented a LOT. I often have conversations with same friends across >1 messaging app.
The more I use social media in its various forms, the more I think that for most people this would be feature. As much as people claim to want to be shown diverse viewpoints, what really makes them happy is constant confirmation of their own existing views. So for most (not all) people, this effect will eventually put them into an echo chamber like environment cause that's where they feel most comfortable.
Therefore, platforms that cater to this tendency will be more successful than ones that don't (provided they hit critical mass, which is a pre-requirement, otherwise there is not enough content/interactions one way or another).
If you run your own server, aren't you risking being banned from some instances if you don't ban instances they don't like? So there is no real upside compared to joining existing instances (other than having a better identity).
This is 100% the issue. When Mastodon started, it was like when IRC started -- one big server you could talk to just about everyone on. These days, it's like IRC was in 2000 or so -- many different servers you could talk to your small group on, but you'd end up joining a whole bunch of different servers to get your reach across, and unlike IRC, that really gets in the way of things like re-tooting and other broadcast issues.
It's not so much that it's a problem so much as that it makes it a poor choice for a Twitter replacement. Is Statusnet (a la identi.ca) still a thing?
Copied and pasted the first handle I could find. It was cumbersome since it is also a link so long pressing on it initiates link actions, I have to start in a location elsewhere and manually narrow down the selection afterwards.
But oh, this is a server with many users, how do I follow them all? Copy paste all the handles by hand?
These are the kinds of UX use cases that need to be solved at a bare minimum.
I can't help but wonder why people who supposedly want to protect democracy are fleeing Twitter because it was taken over by someone who wants to bring back freedom of speech.
Mastodon seems to make sense for these people though. Breaking up the service into different moderated servers makes it more difficult to regulate with pesky laws like the First Amendment. If one server gets too much freedom, users can easily flee to another warm, fuzzy, safe server where opposing views are censored as "conspiracy theories".
Your point works in the exact opposite way too... if users feel their Mastodon server isn't free enough, they can move somewhere else with less "censorship". Not sure what you're ranting about here.
Twitter puts you in contact with everyone, and you depend on a centralized and scrutinized organisation. Mastodon put you in contact with little people and you depend on a very decentralized and autonomous organisations. I really can't see the second one having the same success than the first one
Either one has different criteria of success. Also such "alternative" projects tend to attract whole communities, so users may actually feel like "all they need is here", because their beloved communities are present.
I am still struggling to understand how migrating to a censorship-resistant platform will mitigate concerns about a lack of strict content moderation at twitter.
I think Scott Alexander's recent post about this made a good point. (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-differen...) He draws the distinction between censorship (stopping people from getting messages they want to recieve) and moderation (stopping people from getting messages they don't want to recieve). With those definitons censorship is bad and moderation is good.
Mastodon isn't as simple as the model he imagines (simple click-boxes to select what kind of messages you want) but it does give you moderation (on your local instance) while still letting you avoid censorship (by moving instances if necessary).
The only correct answer to that should be that you let people maintain their own filters (blocklists and allowlists) so they can see messages they want to receive and not see what they don't want to. Also, you might let people apply such community created lists, that they can subscribe to.
Unfortunately, Mastodon rather than doing that, gives complete control to the server administrator to "moderate" their instance. The result is that you end up having isolated echo-chambers, with each server blocking all other servers that don't agree with their viewpoint.
That solves almost no problem. Libel and slander will continue to affect you, there will continue to be toxic communities who instigate violence and violate local laws, and the feature encourages echo chambers and fragmentation. The worst system is when other people can see comments to your posts that you cannot see when you've blocked the commenter. It's the best system for smear campaigns and targeted character assassination. You'll never get a job and everybody hates you, and you'll have have no idea why.
You can see censorship as about being able to control what people is allowed to say. The fediverse is highly resistant to that.
You can also see censorship as about being able to control what people will be able to say to you. The fediverse is not at all resistant to that.
That is, nobody can stop you from setting up your own instance, or write your own ActivityPub implementation, or find one that tolerates whatever thing you want to say.
But we can band together and prevent you from making us party to your conversations against our will, and we can prevent you from being part of our conversations against our will.
The structure of the fediverse supports that by letting groups pick instances whose moderation fits what they want, and different groups with different moderation requirements or even contradictory moderation requirements can co-exist without all being beholden to the vagaries of policies set by a third party we have no control over.
> But we can band together and prevent you from making us party to your conversations against our will, and we can prevent you from being part of our conversations against our will.
This is Robber's Cave experiment [1] all over again: A society that does no longer talk with each other and is segregated (e.g. along political lines) will at first become hostile between different factions within it, and eventually break.
Filter bubbles ultimately destroy civil society and democracy.
Filter bubbles have always existed in every society, and always will. People have always chosen communities and groups within them with behavioural norms, and those who defy the norms are ostracised or made to comply.
If anything, having means by which communities can separate partially without needing to fully isolate (e.g. if you don't like Twitter's moderation policies your choice is to cut yourself off from Twitter; if you don't like fediverse instance X's moderation policy, you can pick from several thousand other instances with varying degrees of concordance with or opposition to X's moderation policies, most of which can still federate with X) gives an opportunity to reduce those bubbles.
No one questions that segregated groups with tight information and communication control can result in more efficiently reached results. History has shown us several examples of such highly efficient societies where what can and cannot be said where tightly enforced. But history also has shown us how such societies eventually break from unresolved conflicts within it.
Talking to someone with another viewpoint, even if that viewpoint is a stupid or hateful one, does not mean endorsing. This is not about "fair and balanced", it is about communication and providing ideas outside of their peer group. Now, if you decide to just block flat earthers individually, or as a group (even for non-flat-earth-related communication), you will just create a filter bubble for them in which they can strengthen their now-unchallenged beliefs in.
If someone can come at me with a different opinion that isn't just sealioning/JAQing off, I'll usually listen. The people who are capable of doing that generally aren't on the instances that get blocked. They're normal people on normal people instances who really are curious, and you can usually figure that out with a skim of their timeline.
There really are flat-earthers out there who are easily persuaded by just walking them through an ancient math problem. I've seen it. It's the same way someone who has really bad opinions on marginalized people they've never actually encountered can quickly change their tune by meeting the subject of their ignorance. They're not the ones who collect on the instances that feed off deep, unmovable ignorance.
Mastodon as a whole is "censorship-resistant". Individual servers very much have rules. My home is on FOSStodon, and it's very, very far from an anarchy:
Nice to see the granularity of moderating servers; had not look at the subject and was kind of afraid that if it was only on/off then you might end up with a disconnected fediverse.
But now your post won't be taken down by a paid employee of a corporation with actual contractual obligations and custom made moderation tools to limit collateral damage, instead a 17yo Discord friend of the admin will have complete access to your account!
I hate to break it to you, but Elon Musk himself and all of his friends have full access to your Twitter account, with no protections whatsoever. You don't own your account, Musk does.
I hate to break it to you, but Elon Musk and Twitter at large have more to lose from a reputational damage caused by blatant moderation misuse than an anonymous kid with an anime profile picture has
Looking at the last events, Musk sure seems unaware of that.
First he whined about advertisers leaving. Then he threatened to publicly shame them. Then he asked for feedback, got some constructive feedback from some huge ad exec, and promptly blocked him.
He appears to have messed with AOC's account because he didn't like her arguing with him.
He already seems to be reversing on his free speech ideals and is instituting permanent bans that he said he was opposed to.
I don't know what's up with him, but it's hardly a shining example of reputation management that's for sure.
It's only censorship-resistant as in, nobody apart from LE can force you to take your instance down. Otherwise the network is still highly moderated. Both at the local instance level (people get banned) and at the federation level (whole instances are either silenced or disconnected from others).
I've tried Mastodon for several months, using three different servers (or how these are called), and for me personally the experience ranged from useless to unpleasant. I got a horrible mixture of open source programming and pedophile manga culture in one home feed, and tons of Nazi posts with Pepe the frog memes in another. I never saw anything interesting in months, even after changing home feeds several times. Most of the discussions were about topics or memes I didn't even know. It was boring and I opened my client less and less often.
To be fair, Twitter offers essentially the same experience to me. Although you can see a glimpse of reason from time to time in between, because there are some experts on it, it's mostly about vitriol and passive aggressive trolling. I've heard you can adopt it by blocking and subscribing strategically but this never worked for me in the three months I've tried it. I've deactivated my Twitter account, too.
May I ask what instance you were on? A lot of guides don't talk about it, but there is a dark version of Fediverse, often references as the "freeze peach" instances.
They are generally blocked by most mainstream instances, but enough are open so that you can't still follow a majority of the mainstream content from these instances.
However, when you are on them, the content is very much like how you describe it. That's why I'm curious as to whether you (possibly accidentally) joined the one if those. If you you di, and you're not actively looking for such content, the experience can be quite terrible.
Whenever I tell people that I don't like to use Twitter I often hear that I'm just using it wrong. On the other hand, I've been really enjoying my time with Fosstodon.
That's not a problem, that's literally the feature. If you don't like it, fork it or move. Can't do that with Twitter.
The problem (at least as far as Mastodon goes) is managing identity between instances. Also, clients still seem to be stuck at the "written by programmers for programmers" state of design, so UX isn't up to par to what a normal user might expect much of the time. The decentralized, federated nature of Mastodon is a big deal to programmers and people who care about censorship resistance/software freedom, etc, but all of that should be completely transparent to the end user. It should be as easy to find, join and leave instances - with a single, common identity - as it is to find and join subreddits.
That's what must have happened to me. I think one of them was called "stereophonic" (or similar) and the other one some weird Belgian with German like "absturztau.be", both were boring but the latter was worse. The third one I don't remember. They had nice descriptions, though, which didn't really match the content. I might give it another try with the biggest US main server, though it's probably not for me anyway since I can't stand Twitter's format either.
> I got a horrible mixture of open source programming and pedophile manga culture in one home feed, and tons of Nazi posts with Pepe the frog memes in another
This sounds like an absolutely horrible experience, I'm so sorry to hear this.
At the same time, aside from the open source programming, which is welcome, I have not ever seen any of the other things you mentioned, but I also took the time to look for a more "quiet", dataviz-oriented server myself. My feed is more people I explicitly follow than local timeline, which makes it a much more curated experience.
Can I ask you what kind of interests you were searching for when deciding on an instance? Because my hunch is that you basically had to deal with a "search engine" kind of problem, but for fediverse instances. I wouldn't be surprised if programming, anime and manga has a ton of "4chan-esque" places that drown out the more quiet "safe spaces" unless you take some time to dig deeper before settling down somewhere.
Now everything depends on how much activity remains once the current dust settles.
Will Mastodon overtake Twitter? I still doubt it, but honestly I really can't imagine why I would care about that as long as Mastodon manages to establish, nurture, and retain a healthy userbase. Which is all I would need to keep using it.