[sxg]

I agree with the premise of the article. I’m a new Mastodon user trying to give the platform an honest shot, but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another. Why choose anything other than the pseudo-default Mastodon.social? If I’m forced to choose another server, is that choice actually meaningful? I feel like I’m randomly picking between Hachyderm and TechHub.io and others. One advantage of federation I keep hearing is that servers can block other servers if their users become problematic. My question is this: why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane?

I do see the potential advantages of federation to prevent the same fate that overcame Twitter and Reddit, but I can’t figure out how to make a user’s server choice actually meaningful. Without solving that piece of the puzzle, I don’t see any practical advantage to federated services.

[Stephen304]

Problematic users do tend to congregate on certain servers because they keep getting banned from better moderated ones. Eventually they find the ones that won't ban them, and now well moderated instances have an easy target to block them wholesale. That's how you end up with instances like explodingheads.

[jojobas]

The only caveat is that what's well moderated and what's not depends on who you ask.

[Stephen304]

It doesn't really matter whether the entire world agrees, only that each community comes to an agreement. Mastodon.social collectively agrees on one definition that excludes explodingheads that involves one view on hate speech and spam, and explodingheads collectively agrees on another definition that excludes mastodon.social and involves censorship and free speech. Both groups are happy.

[burnished]

That isnt a caveat so much as a fearure

[jojobas]

Imagine being unable to email someone because he holds an opinion that was the only one possible some 15 years ago, and think again.

[madeofpalk]

This is the point of federation though. It allows for different standards of moderation to actually exist. If you don't like the way a server moderates, then don't join it (or transfer to another server, which you can mostly do with Mastodon). Hell, run your own mastodon server (or use a "mastodon-as-a-service" service) which is pretty trivial for micro instances.

The idea that there is one globally correct way to moderate is demonstratably completely untrue, regardless of what your actual views are. There must be multiple moderation standards that users can pick from.

[jojobas]

The only acceptable approach to moderation is one you can opt out of. Don't want a spam filter - fine, you're on your own.

Having to choose between politically charged "you can't read that" gatekeepers is a dystopian nightmare. Yes you can make your own, but next thing you know is "block this list of servers or we block you".

[cubefox]

I don't get why some people are so anxious to block alleged hate speech and supposed misinformation. Social networking sites already allow users to choose their own community simply by chosing whom they follow. Without federation. Why do we need additional segregation and polarization beyond that?

[pixl97]

I mean if that opinion was they can send commercial messages to unsolicited users I don't have to imagine at all. I've been on the internet long enough to remember the days before spam filters.

[HWR_14]

For pretty much any value of "an opinion that was the only one possible some 15 years ago", you are wrong. Other ideas were around at the time.

[jojobas]

Ideas are like that, paper can't blush. For a salient example, the idea of providing 12 year olds with puberty blockers and opposite sex hormones without their parents' consent didn't quite fly then, and today disagreeing with it puts you in quite a few naughty lists.

[cubefox]

It's more that at the time you could disagree on some things where now only one view is acceptable. The Overton window has narrowed substantially on certain subjects.

[kazinator]

Bzzt. The article is wrong; e-mail isn't federated. It's decentralized.

[zzzeek]

what opinion is that? I've never heard of such a thing

[donio]

> ... but I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another.

Email is often a good analogy for questions like these: Why do you pick one email service over the other? Maybe you think the domain is cool. Maybe you heard that they are reliable or have features that others don't. Maybe your university, company or other community you belong to runs its own service. Or you decide to host your own. Or you really have no preference and you just go with the one your friend uses.

We just don't have just don't have the gmail-equivalent catch-all choices yet. Maybe that will come later or maybe it won't.

[crazygringo]

Except that with e-mail there are obvious good reasons, which basically boil down to whether you've centered your digital life around the Google, Microsoft, or Apple ecosystems (or never moved away from Yahoo, etc.).

These are recognizably proven brands that aren't going to disappear next year, and which integrate with your other tools in ways that clearly provide benefit.

And back in the day before webmail was a thing, your ISP gave you an e-mail address so you didn't pick at all.

But none of these are even remotely applicable to Mastodon instances. So I'm not sure that e-mail is actually a helpful analogy at all here.

[nightpool]

Maybe not from the outside. But after a few months of actively using the platform with a curious mindset, I'd wager you'd have a much stronger idea of how instances differ. That's the main service I see the "pseudo-default" mastodon.social providing in the current world—as a "jumping off" point that people can use prior to migrating to more specific instances with more customizations or better communities.

[donio]

That's what I meant by "no catch-all choices yet". There is no reason Google or Apple couldn't get in the game if they choose to. Supposedly Facebook is making a go at it for whatever that's worth.

I offered the email analogy because that helped me to wrap my head around it when I was starting out.

[foogazi]

> But none of these are even remotely applicable to Mastodon instances.

Sure they are - come join my instance which I run from a pentium beige box in my closet and check the uptime

[jojobas]

Email is much better than that. Even if you don't want to maintain your own email server you can still register your own domain and assign it to a hosting service for a trivial amount.

You can also do that with Mastodon if you're keen, so email analogy holds.

[JoshTriplett]

And for both email and the Fediverse, there's an ideal answer that requires only marginally more work: have your own domain. In both cases, you don't have to host a server yourself, you can pay for email hosting and use your own domain. For email, services like Fastmail let you bring your own domain. For the Fediverse, https://togethr.party/ works well.

[drdaeman]

This works with email, but not so much with Fediverse. There is no standard or - AFAIK - even attempts domain/account sharing (unless you hack your way around), you'll have to be [e-mail] and [e-mail] and [e-mail], but not [at least not easily] [e-mail] if you want to use it with multiple systems.

[ajdude]

I had absolutely no issues with hosting my own mastodon, I pay $7 dollars a month for a VPS with backups. I'm the only user that can register on my instance so it's just me.

I'm `@[e-mail]` and I can follow and have conversations with other mastodon users of various servers seamlessly. I was just doing it this evening in a thread while tagging four different people on four different servers. When people tag me in posts it just looks like `@aj`

This is the right way to do this stuff in my opinion.

[drdaeman]

> I had absolutely no issues with hosting my own mastodon

Just Mastodon - it's not what I'm talking about. Please let me know if my parent comment wasn't clear enough.

Mastodon certainly works and you can be just @aj (as long as no one else with the same host-local part walks in, I guess) no matter where the actual conversation is hosted. But what about Lemmy, Peertube, or other Fediverse systems? I'm aware that Mastodon can talk to them with some success, but AFAIK it is only optimized to present certain types of content, so if you want Reddit-like user experience rather than Twitter-like one you want Lenny. And then you need a different subdomain. And then you realize you're splitting your identity on the same network in two - and in my opinion that's an indicator that something is wrong.

[v64]

>I'm aware that Mastodon can talk to them with some success, but AFAIK it is only optimized to present certain types of content, so if you want Reddit-like user experience rather than Twitter-like one you want Lenny.

This is partially true. I run Pleroma, which is a microblogging server like Mastodon, so Mastodon content that federates to my instance shows up identically to my own posts. On a system like Lemmy, when their posts federate to me, what I see natively on my instance is a person posting a link that links to the originating website. I can see some replies inline, but they're linear and not threaded like on Lemmy. However, unlike what you said, still using my @[e-mail] identity, I can click the link from my instance to the Lemmy instance and interact with the content there natively. No need to create a different subdomain. There's no need to host a Lemmy instance yourself if you want to interact with Lemmy instances. Lemmy on the backend is still talking the ActivityPub protocol and it's only the frontend that alters how the posts are presented, so as long as your server speaks ActivityPub, you can use the same identity.

[ajdude]

Are you saying that the primary issue is that for each federated service we need a separate account / instance for it as opposed to email which is just one email account? I don't disagree with that but it's the same situation for Reddit, YouTube, Twitter. I have to maintain separate accounts on those platforms too.

[JoshTriplett]

It'd be nice if there were a standard forwarding-interoperability server such that several services could share the same account name and local copies of the messages to/from that account. But in the meantime, having @[e-mail] be a Fediverse service like Pleroma or Mastodon, and then having @[e-mail] be the handle for each specialized service, still seems preferable to using a third-party server. And if in the future some mechanism exists for those services to share, you would then be able to use the standard redirect mechanism to preserve the old names while using the shared top-level one as the canonical account name.

[MikusR]

But gmail is not blocked by hotmail or yahoo. You can send and receive from different providers.

[madeofpalk]

Gmail definitely blocks email hosts.

[paulddraper]

Your email choice used to reflect your ISP, and now reflects your chosen platform for file storage, image albums, productivity suite, calendaring, etc.

I'm not sure how this applies to Mastodon servers in practice.

[class4behavior]

The same way people manage to decide whether to buy buns at the bakery on the right rather than the one on the left or donate to the NGO1 rather than NGO2 doing exactly the same, you ought to manage to judge which instance is a better fit or if it even matters in your case.

>why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane?

Well, exactly. And who's doing all the blocking and filtering? What are the rules? And which community is better at reporting and keeping the instance the way you like it? What about your interests? If you join a busy generic instance, of course, you will become disinterested in your local timeline.

[ShadowBanThis01]

But why force people to categorize themselves? There's no special type of Twitter for people who are musicians, for example, or people who do airbrush paintings of squirrels. Who knows what you might want to send messages about tomorrow or next year or in half an hour?

Having "themed" instances implies that you're committing to whatever that theme is, but all you want to do is share whatever is on your mind from day to day. This apparent pigeonholing is enough to make the whole idea a failure. Remember Yahoo? It wanted you to drill down through dozens or hundreds of canned search categories... and then Alta Vista came along with just a text box. And of course today that's Google too.

Speaking of search... the bizarre and rabid animosity expressed by many Mastodon users toward FINDING CONTENT on Mastodon is baffling. I've seen threads where someone asks how to search for things on Mastodon and gets berated for even suggesting that people who PUBLISH STUFF on the Internet would ever want it found.

[shadowfacts]

No one's forcing people to categorize themselves. You can be on a non-specific server, or you can be on one for a particular community—but even then, nothing precludes you from talking about other things. It may be the case that instance pickers/lists/descriptions aren't clear enough that you don't _have_ to limit yourself, but there's nothing forced about it.

[neltnerb]

The reality is that every server will have some local version of a bunch of the most popular things, and that will eventually reach a steady state with a tail. A few big ones, more medium size ones, decent number of small ones...

There's no point denying it, discoverability will be harder and communities will be smaller. So if you actually know of a really good community or magazine to point someone to, just do that. They can read the content without logging in. If they want to participate, then the server that they found a community they want to participate in is the obvious place to create an account, from which they can see everything else as you've said.

Little is being forced by the choice of server/instance, but that's not helping solve the hard part. The hard part is them finding what they need to find. They need a librarian, not a tech support desk. Tech people constantly assume the solution is technical... make the popular destinations popular by talking about them everywhere.

[TeMPOraL]

> The same way people manage to decide whether to buy buns at the bakery on the right rather than the one on the left or donate to the NGO1 rather than NGO2 doing exactly the same, you ought to manage to judge which instance is a better fit or if it even matters in your case.

Bakeries and NGOs aren't sticky. Your relationships with them is a series of one-time transactions, and at any time you can switch to the alternative at no cost.

Picking a Mastodon instance is more like picking a school or university - it's a choice of where to commit, made at a point when you're least equipped to make a good call, and increasingly hard to reverse the longer you go along with it.

[sxg]

Perhaps Mastodon is just too immature at this stage for the servers to really differentiate themselves from each other. However, as the number of users and posts on Mastodon grows, will any server actually be capable of adequate moderation? Twitter has ~6,000 tweets per second—it's hard to imagine any Mastodon server today being able to handle even a fraction of that content.

[cubefox]

It would be interesting to know how many moderators Twitter has. They do have ad income, so they can afford to employ full time staff. Then again, Reddit does well with volunteer moderators.

[croutonwagon]

I have also noticed that in some cases....user blocks are being replicated to an instance I run. I have this huge and ever growing list of banned users on my single user instance in lemmy. ANd I have no idea who is banning and why...I doesnt seem to affect me...but its odd

[vGPU]

Which is exactly what worries me. I don’t want other people deciding who I can read and who I can’t. I don’t want other people deciding what voices should be heard.

This just seems like the creation of another echo chamber.

[WJW]

Well, turn the automagic updating of the banlists off then. It's configurable, but it's not the default because most people are not interested in seeing the posts of (as an example) people who upload kiddie porn, nor do they want that on their hard drive in the off chance the FBI comes by with questions.

[cubefox]

So the possibility of highly illegal content justifies a block list which perhaps includes mainly blocking unwanted political opinions? That argument sounds familiar.

[JohnFen]

I think the point is that the blocklist is optional. If you don't like it, don't use it. Or make your own that is more directly tuned to your tastes.

[nobody9999]

>I have also noticed that in some cases....user blocks are being replicated to an instance I run. I have this huge and ever growing list of banned users on my single user instance in lemmy. ANd I have no idea who is banning and why...I doesnt seem to affect me...but its odd

IIUC (and I may not) there are blocklists that are shared between fediverse instances that, depending on the configuration, are automagically updated/applied on a regular basis.

Perhaps that's what's going on with your instance?

Edit: Modified comment to address GP's specific issue.

[egypturnash]

> why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll have to block individual users across numerous servers to keep the platform sane?

The fediverse is not one unified whole, the fediverse is a bunch of loosely-connected communities that can very easily throw up walls at a moment's notice.

Admins are actively incentivised to kick problem users off. If a server becomes known as a source of problems, then other admins will defederate from it. How you define "problems" depends on who you are, in general if an admin looks at a report for one of your users and finds you doing the exact same kind of bullshit as what your user was reported for then they will probably defed from you without a second thought. After a while your server will only be federated with other servers that are also fine with that particular kind of bullshit. If your particular kind of bullshit is "finding people who are different from you and making fun of them" then there's a high chance that the users on your server will either wander away, or turn on each other; both of these tend to lead to admins deciding it's not worth keeping the place running in my experience.

Mastodon.social is way too big to realistically be handled by anything but a bigger crew of paid moderators than it has, and "we should defed from mastodon.social because it's right on the border of being a constant source of trouble" is a topic that admins constantly chew on in places like the #fediblock tag. But you can start on one of the big servers and move, too. Possibly to a small one with a lot of your friends, so that the "local" timeline is useful. Possibly one run by one of your friends, who will make largely the same "oh god look at this server full of assholes, block'd" calls that you would, and save you the trouble. Possibly one with a cool name, would you rather be [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], sxg@...?

(As far as I know neither Lemmy or Kbin offer account migration yet, so you're stuck on your initial one until they fix this. I'm sure it's in their roadmaps.)

[Zak]

At least as big an issue for Lemmy and Kbin is community migration. A server that hosts a popular community shutting down is a very real risk, and simply telling users to switch doesn't scale. (No, not everything needs to scale, but it would be better if that did.)

[egypturnash]

I just did a quick search, and users have opened issues asking for both user and community migration on both. So they're certainly aware of it. When it will be added, I dunno - it took a while for Mastodon to get user migration, and I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that community migration is a larger problem than user migration.

Here's an issue for Lemmy user/community migration: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3057

And here's one for Kbin: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/382

Lemmy seems to have a lot more contributors than Kbin, but who knows, maybe someone will dust off their god-tier 100x PHP skills and Kbin will get it first.

[TRiG_Ireland]

What you see on Mastodon is (a) stuff posted by other people on your server, and (b) stuff posted by people on other servers whom people on your server are following. So your choice of server has a strong affect on your feed. And hosting your own instance means that you really need to start following loads of people if you want to keep an eye on what's going on. I suppose I can see this as a good thing, or at least vaguely see why other people might see it as a good thing, but I mostly find it annoying. (It also means that there isn't an overall Mastodon zeitgeist, the way there may have been with Twitter.)

Another, even more annoying side-effect, is that conversations may have bits silently missing, if they're posted by someone not on your instance. I have been reading a thread of seven posts, posted by five different people, and then looked at that same thread from another server and found that it was actually sixteen posts, posted by eight different people, several of which had not federated to my server. I have been irritated by two different people asking me the same questions, leading to two separate threads hanging off my initial comment, covering exactly the same subject, until I looked at the conversations from their servers and realised that they were invisible to each other.

I would never use Mastodon for anything serious: the chance of irritating people, missing context, and talking at cross purposes are far too high.

[jojobas]

>I can’t understand why I would choose any particular server over another

Who runs the server? On what kind of funding, and how long can it last? Are you served intrusive ads? Are your a customer or a product for the people running this instance? How hard is it to run an instance yourself, and what happens if you suddenly post a video that attracts 10M views?

So many questions, I know, that's too hard, gimme something easy.

[sxg]

At the time I signed up for Mastodon and a server, I didn't consider and wasn't presented with any of these questions/answers or other points of differentiation among servers. I guess that's part of the issue: when an ordinary user signs up for Mastodon, they're unaware of what they should even consider when picking a server. As an ordinary Mastodon user myself, I just wanted to get on the platform and start using it.

[jojobas]

Well signing up for anything important (or anything at all really) you should consider all of that, federated or not (especially if not). Yes, it's a problem that the majority of people "just want to start using it" and wouldn't consider any of the above when exposing, I assume, their lives to strangers.

[sxg]

Sure, on paper we should all carefully consider every decision we make. However, in practice I’m confident the vast majority of Mastodon and Twitter users (including myself) don’t consider using either service particularly important or deserving of more than a couple minutes of thought. From Mastodon, I aim to follow some interesting users to find interesting articles, learn new things, get a sense of “what’s happening” in the circles I follow, and broadly be entertained for a few minutes at a time. I absolutely don’t consider it a critical component of my life and can’t justify spending much thought on it.

[notatoad]

>but I can’t figure out how to make a user’s server choice actually meaningful

in theory, the instance-specific bit of it is the moderation. the one you sign up with chooses which other instances to federate with, as well as how to moderate the content on their own instance. in theory, you could sign up for an instance that only allowed the sort of politics you agree with, or that had very lax moderation, or that had very strict moderation.

unfortunately, none of the fediverse seems to actually talk about this so without signing up and using an instance for a while to see what the moderation policies are like there's no way to know.

[jeromegv]

> unfortunately, none of the fediverse seems to actually talk about this so without signing up and using an instance for a while to see what the moderation policies are like there's no way to know.

Correct, but that's why you can actually migrate your account (including your followers!) from one instance another. The initial choice doesn't matter too much. Just migrate if you don't like it. That's why there isn't much discussions about it.

[dclowd9901]

Can you migrate to another instance if yours becomes defederated?

[nightpool]

"Defederated" is not something that happens to an instance, it's a choice that other instances make. There's no "globally defederated" state. If your server (Server A) is blocked by Server B, then no, you can't move to Server B. But you can still move to Server C that doesn't block you.

[dclowd9901]

Well so this is kind of what I was getting at. It feels similar to an email service being blocklisted, only in this case, you really _can’t_ move your content because at the end of the day, a group of federated instances will also be wary of instances without reputation, as much as those of ill repute. So no, in reality, you can’t move your content, or if you can right now it’s a foible of the system as it is today and will not continue as such.

[Libcat99]

Consider the phone network for a moment.

The phone network is a federated service. You can call an ATT customer from Verizon. You can also call them from Joe's Discount Boxes and VoIP sales.

Now, if you start making spammy calls, ATT might block you as a customer (after warning you first). Same for Verizon. But Joe's Discount Boxes and VoIP sales doesn't, because box sales are down and these VoIP margins are so, so juicy.

Spammy customers flock to Joe, because he allows it. Joe keeps letting customers on, without doing due diligence, without caring if they're legit (beyond a valid looking credit card), and eventually gets blocked by FCC order. (See https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-23-389A1.pdf, for an example).

Now, federation doesn't have an FCC, the various server admins will be filling that role themselves, but there is a reason scummy people will use scummy servers.

Side note: This kind of FCC enforcement is fairly new to the industry, so if you're wondering why you get spam called all the time still, there is some hope this'll change.

[7e]

Yes, all problematic users don’t congregate on the same server. Problematic users can pop up anywhere. However, a server could fail to moderate effectively and become a source of misinformation and trolling. That’s the benefit of federation: it ensures a minimum level of moderation quality. Servers that don’t moderate are blocked, which sets up the proper incentives.

[sxg]

Sure, but as the number of users on the federated service grows, how do we not end up in the same place as email today? Does it not become good moderation policy to auto-block all new and small servers (e.g., self-hosted email servers) if you're a big server (e.g., Gmail)? If that happens, wouldn't all users migrate to the big server (e.g., Gmail) and effectively re-establish centralization and undermine federation?

[post-it]

Email isn't fully centralized, and the centralization seems to have plateaued. Fully hosting your own email server is difficult, but there are hundreds of non-Google/Microsoft/Apple hosts. If the Fediverse centralizes to the extent of email, I still prefer that to the current 100% siloization of all social media.

Email is also old and unextendable, whereas the Fediverse has interoperable stacks built on top of it, opening the door to better moderation and web-of-trust tools that help combat spam and decrease the pressure for centralization.

[jeroenhd]

The inverse happened recently on Lemmy. Beehaw.org, a community focused on good behavior, defederated lemmy.world and another smaller site because those sites caused a lot of unwanted content and moderator intervention. Lemmygrad.ml, a bunch of communist extremists, also gets blocked quite often, not just by principled servers like beehaw.

A lot of people got mad for being blocked, but honestly I can't blame the admins for trying to reduce the amount of moderation necessary. There are thousands of people per moderator on those sites and that combined with open registration is a recipe for toxic bullshit nobody wants to deal with.

Smaller instances don't get blocked, though. I doubt they will be until the low quality shitposters will figure out a way to host a server of their own, but without a central gathering place I think even then the abuse will be easily prevented.

That said, Lemmy used to be set to whitelist-only by default for ages. This has been changed, but if someone wants to federate with just their servers of choice, they can just toggle a setting.

Lemmy also comes with an approval form by default, which is used manually to vet users during signup. Open signup servers disable that field, obviously, but those servers are often also the ones that get blocked.

I can see this evolving to a situation where only closed or manually approved servers get federated by default. Requiring manual reduces the probability that a small team of admins will get overwhelmed by a large influx of users.

[memefrog]

What's misinformation? Things you don't think are true? Things the instance admin doesn't think are true? Things officially deemed untrue by the State? Or by the UN/WHO? Is is considered Misinformation if it was deemed Untrue in the past by State Officials but is now Official State Policy? We have always been at war with Eastasia. We have always recommended the wearing of masks. We have always seriously considered the possibility of a lab leak. Border closures are a bad, racist, problematic idea. No wait, now New Zealand is the hero of the pandemic because it closed its borders. We have always recommended border closures!

Servers defederating because of viagra/nigerian prince/etc. spam is one thing. A "lefty politics" server defederating with a "righty politics" server or vice-versa because they just want an echo chamber? Sure, you do you. General-purpose defederating other general-purpose servers because of "misinformation" and "trolling", when those terms basically mean "disagreeing with the current mainstream narrative on any controversial issue"? That's absurd. The generally-accepted issue with social media was for years that it created echo chambers. Now people are trying to use mastodon to create even more powerful echo chambers.

[eggnet]

Signal to noise ratio. When the admin of a server thinks the ratio of another server is too low, the admin will block it.

What's the definition of too low? Up to the admins of that server.

[cubefox]

That's the problem. It's enough when people choose themselves whom to follow.

[eggnet]

It's not enough if those people's posts are flooded with low quality replies.

[cubefox]

That seems to be only a problem for a few people with a very high follower count or for viral tweets. Both are quite rare relatively speaking.

[Frondo]

There seems to be an assumption in your writing that people should use social media to challenge themselves, be exposed to different views, to "discourse" and so on. Nearly everyone I know via social media wants to hang out with their friends, not debate people. Whether something is an echo chamber is sort of beside their goal, they want to have fun.

If one seeks out something that explicitly isn't an echo chamber, I'm sure there are many places for that. I'm just not seeing that as, really, at all desirable for a lot of people.

[cubefox]

The problem is that Mastodon puts a second filter bubble on top of the old who-do-I-follow filter bubble. Except this additional filter bubble isn't controlled by yourself.

[eggnet]

There is always a second filter bubble. In the case of non-federated sites, that filter is in the form of the policy of the site and also the algorithms used to sort feeds and replies.

With federated solutions, users have a choice.

[cubefox]

They have a choice? Is it transparent for average users what is withheld from them and where? And where their own posts are withheld? If no, they don't really have a choice. If such a choice even exists.

Twitter is fairly lightly moderated I think, and the "following" tab gives a raw timeline.

[Frondo]

I'm not being snarky--in the context of people wanting a place to make jokes and have fun with their friends, how is that a problem?

[cubefox]

It's probably not, but it isn't on Twitter or so either.

[kornhole]

Mass federation is the best solution to resist mass surveillance and censorship. I never have a problem picking an instance because I just create my own instance whenever I want to use different SW. In a few minutes I can usually spin one up. and I have a few running on my SBC sitting here on my desk. I rarely ever block anyone as unfollowing is good enough.

[danijelb]

Current federation looks like that, a bunch of small independent communities focused on a single topic like tech or photography or whatever, but it doesn't have to be like that. If federation catches on then the most likely the pick will be between 5-10 huge general instances run by corporations.

In such world, Twitter and Facebook could add support for ActivityPub, Google and Microsoft could build their own, different ISPs and media companies could run their instances, and so on. Then the benefit of choice becomes more clear - who do you trust the most to provide you an account. Basically, it would be like the situation with email where most people use a 3-4 biggest services, but the ecosystem is open to new competitors.

The current state of federated social networks is very experimental. If it catches on with big corporations 90% of people will use that, and these small communities can still survive but would be more or less irrelevant.

[kossTKR]

Yeah, tried the same with Lemmy. A list of half done of dead communities, all of them with zero explanation of why and how.

Then i read about the codebase and people were struggling with SQL so performance is bad - i mean what? is that really the state things, where's the talent working on this?

I'm honestly surprised that both the design, performance and docs of these alternatives are this bad in 2023.

If this has to work you need an extremely simple and well designed landing page with a super simple explanation of how this works, the creation of a user should work on more or less all instances, and you should be able to easily meta search for the communities you want and get an easy overview quickly.

[kazinator]

> Why choose anything other than the pseudo-default Mastodon.social?

- Because might not be accepting new users.

- Because some other server has a local timeline that is interesting, perhaps catering to certain interests.

- Geographic: it may be closer to you.

- Language restrictions. You want to toot in certain languages, but some instances are English (or whatever) only.

- Some instances run hacked software with useful features.

> why would all problematic users congregate on the same server?

Because they behave in a way that gets them banned in other servers.

[Glyptodon]

I think if the intent and structure of federation curves towards every household having its own server or something analogous the federated universe seems more sensible. But that does seem like a difficult curve until we have a universe where there's something like app-store level ease around self hosting your household services on something equivalent to a fancy home router is the norm. And that universe seems far off and actively not what the powers that be desire.

[davidpaulyoung]

We're offering this at Federated Computer: https://federated.computer. Nextcloud, Jitsi, Matrix/Element, all domain level services, all private.

[hosh]

I think the idea is to find a local server where you know the admin and the other local users that have similar community values.

[geppetto]

Easy, I just choose the instance with the bigger community in my own native language then added people from other instances.

[artichokeheart]

“ why would all problematic users congregate on the same server? ”

There’s a simple answer to why server blocking is a feature of mastodon. It was built to handle a real world problem. I.e there was early on a server that was a “free speech absolutist” server that server mods wanted to block at a server level.

[ekanes]

I think many servers/instances post what they're all about and how they're different, and that should help. We're seeing all kinds of sites springing up to help navigate this, and I think in time it'll be sorted out.

[lopatin]

Maybe each subcommunnity can be it's own server? Or will that not work because a user can belong to multiple communities?

[sxg]

That’s exactly the problem with replacing Reddit with a federated service. The opposite is true with replacing Twitter in which case it’s difficult to explain why a user has to pick any server at all.

[ParetoOptimal]

You can subscribe to other servers though which let's users "have" multiple instances.

[qball]

>Maybe each subcommunnity can be it's own server?

The need to do this obviates the utility of federation completely.

[foogazi]

> why would all problematic users congregate on the same server?

Because they have been banned from other servers ?