As Big Tech smells blood in the water and starts circling around #Twitter’s floating corpse, I’m perplexed and angry that #Mastodon still gets dismissed as something that is ‘too complicated’ or ‘doesn’t work’ - seen this recently from tech savvy friends and in a Guardian article. Why?? It obviously DOES work, and doesn’t feel very complicated to me. But people are going to be pushed towards #Threads & #BlueSky, perpetuating the problem.
As far as I can tell, the ONLY problem with Mastodon over Twitter is that there are still so many people you’re interested/invested in over at Twitter. You solve that problem by coming to Mastodon and building the community. You stayed because it was too hard to let go? OK. But now it’s broken, you’re going to another techbro startup instead?? Really??
@ottocrat@jon completely agree that search here is not great, and I still turn to twitter when there's something happening I want real-time updates on. But it's not inherently that complicated, and the pace of life here is calmer, less irritable, less fury-inducing.
Would the "pace of life here" remain "calmer, less irritable, less fury inducing" if "here" became seen as the natural replacement for "there", and one day all the people, bots, scammers, trolls, etc. from over "there" migrated over "here"?
That's the question. I think perhaps people underestimate how much the small community size, difficult onboarding, and server Balkanisation serve as a natural barrier to a certain type of user with a certain type of use case.
@michael_robinson@ottocrat@jon very good point, but also good moderation and very low threshold for regarding posts as unacceptable. I recently reported several really blatantly horrible racist posts on the other place, and not a single one was deemed to have breached the rules. That wouldn't happen here, I think
That, too, is an effect of the ratio of users to (volunteer, unpaid) admins. If every bad actor on Twitter showed up on Mastodon tomorrow, the collective moderation capacity of Fediblocking admins would be overwhelmed.
As it is now, three of the top five largest Mastodon servers either tolerate child porn and Nazis, or federate with servers that tolerate child porn and Nazis.
@michael_robinson@ProfLouiseL@jon I see that as a feature not a bug of a community platform - we can’t push responsibility off on a corp for this, we choose our instances and those instances set their own rules and moderation, so frankly the buck stops with us.
This is not my experience.
I can't speak for all "big instances," but my experience on mastodon.social is that sometimes(!) a post has even been removed before I can post my report, as s.o. ele has already reported it before me. 😀
Other than that, yes, we all need to report posts that are illegal or in breach of our instance's rules.
We might need more #moderators in the future, but as #Reddit has shown, this is feasible.
@HistoPol@ProfLouiseL@ottocrat@jon
My point isn't that the system, as is, doesn't work. My point is that that doesn't imply it can replace Twitter.
Because if everyone on Twitter moved to Mastodon, the system wouldn't work. Bad actors would swamp the moderation infrastructure.
Reddit moderation scales because it's not federated. Posts in one subreddit don't show up in another. We could drop federation from the fediverse, but then it wouldn't be a replacement for Twitter.
Just for background, Pawoo.net is the second largest Mastodon server. It's on the fediblock list, but only a very tiny minority of Mastodon servers apply the fediblock. Mastodon.social does apply the fediblock, so you won't see anything from there, but if you want to confirm what I say, you can look for yourself (very NSFW, and possible criminal liability depending on your jurisdiction):
I glanced through several dozen posts on the homepage.
In contrast to the content on pawoo.net, all I saw was NSFW porn comic drawings.
Adult yes, and sometimes without CW, but the ones I saw were all legit in most Western countries, I'd say.
But, wow, 50k users.
IDK if mastdon.social blocks the instance, but I have never had any posts from there in my TL, so o.k. for me.
@richvn@jon@ottocrat Indeed, my tweetdeck was basically columns of search terms and lists. It was incredibly useful in a way mastodon just isn't (prob by design). It's OK that it's a different thing, but we've lost a valuable tool that there isn't a straight replacement for.
@L_howes@richvn@ottocrat Ivory for Mastodon on MacOS is great - for Lists (and I have a column for Mentions too - and hence could easily reply to this). But I can't get proper columns for search.
@richvn@jon@ottocrat Yep, originally an anti-harassment idea that was perhaps unrealistic in retrospect. Some instances have applied a simple patch to offer it, e.g. infosec.exchange and universeodon.com; works much the same as Twitter there and you can indeed see everything
@jon@richvn@ottocrat Problem being that all public toots are necessarily indexed and searchable anyway; most non-Mastodon Fediverse clients allow full search without restriction. No one should be under any illusion that they can opt in or out of it Fediverse-wide.
@jon@ottocrat I am a reasonably techy person and still have some issues at Mastodon, like search, not being able to see people's post I not follow who are not on my instance, not being able to put people in lists I don't follow (for special lists) and more.
Some might be just getting used to a different plattform, but the user experience is still worse for me than the old twitter. But that old twitter is dead now, no doubt about it.
@NvOndarza@jon I agree re search, though I think a reasonable point of comparison was Twitter in 2010 not 2022. The platform will evolve, and there are workarounds for some of the issues you mention, but the question is whether potential new users will have the patience to invest in the platform for the time it will take.
@ottocrat@NvOndarza@jon No, normal users know the platform in 2022 not 2010 and expect it. Also young people who grew up with/on smartphones (or those who only started to use the internet for private purposes post-smartphones) have a completely different expectation and experience set than those who used it before.
@ottocrat@theredcount@NvOndarza Really? In some ways it's already superior to 2022 Twitter - in terms of available apps for example. Fix search somehow, and add threads (which are sort of forthcoming anyway) and I think we're good.
@jon@ottocrat@NvOndarza On the technical side: search, threads and cross-server discovery matter the most.
On the non-technical side the funding of big instances matters the most such that it doesn't take hours to receive the confirmation email when people want to signup (like last weekend).
@jon@ottocrat@theredcount I know there is some kind of philosphical decision behind it, but I miss quote tweets, as they allowed commentary on news articles etc. And a good way to manage lists (or I have not found it yet).
@NvOndarza@ottocrat@theredcount Managing lists is easy - in the Advanced Web Interface. And even works in apps like Ivory. And Quote Tweets are coming in the next release.
@jon@NvOndarza@ottocrat@theredcount one of my uses for Twitter is for news direct from journalists, and currently I’m not seeing many of them moving, which is frustrating
@jon@ottocrat yep, threads is going to be the winner, visible from space. To much ethics around preventing viral threads etc here is what makes it ultimately inadequate as an alternative for people who found pre musk Twitter suited them.
@jon@ottocrat Mastodon is not Twitter for a reason, and people wanting it to be like Twitter haven't taken time to understand what Mastodon is and why it needs to be different, including lack of algos and search.
It took me a long time to realise this, so my request is for those who are new and want this to have Twitter like features to stop, take a while, try to think about the unintended consequence and listen to long timers.
Maybe start by thinking about why Twitter has those features.
@markhughes@jon For me, the similarities are clear and they meet my needs to a large degree, whereas the differences are not dealbreakers and certainly no reason to reject a platform that deserves my support for lots of good reasons.
@ottocrat Mastodon doesn't have to beat Twitter et al, it just has to be better and it already is so let's not break it by trying to make it more like Twitter just to try and persuade people who just don't care, to come here.
Accept it doesn't need to be as big, but a better environment, a better way to form communities and explore the world through discussion, and to learn about things that interest you - of your own volition.
@ottocrat of course those wanting to make Mastodon like Twitter don't go and build the own fedi like Twitter because they know that's hard, and want to mess with something that is already successful without considering the damage they may do.
Go and build your fedi Twitter if you think those features are so important, and good luck to you. Prove me wrong.
@typographica@ottocrat Agree. The way Mastodon works is a great barrier to those who most likely are not much wanted. At least, that's my take-away from trying to help people make the move.
I saw an "it's too complicated" comment on Twitter this week, so reached out. After a long thread, it resulted in the person I was trying to help showing his true colours, getting very nasty and telling me why he doesn't want to be on Mastodon: Too many woke lefty liberal types etc.
@ottocrat probably because mastodon can’t be exploited for ads or other commercial agendas. Surprised by so called tech savy friends tho. Maybe not so savy after all.
@ottocrat Agreed. I don't see that Mastodon is any more complicated than other platforms or indeed devices. OK, you have to choose a server but how is that any more complicated than any other decision that you have to take in ordinary course of your life?
@ottocrat Mastodon definitely has an onboarding issue as far as making the whole concept easier to grasp. I’m a techie and even I found it confusing when I joined a couple of years ago. It’s not that it’s hard to grasp, it’s that the effort hasn’t been interested in making that message clear.
It IS more complex than a centralised platform, and that CAN be confusing. It doesn’t need to be, but dismissing, though.
The thing that Twitter & Mastodon have in common is the size of their PR departments. It's impossible to get authoritive answers from Twitter it's difficult with Mastodon. That's an inherent problem where authority is decentralised - the unique feature of Mastodon and the #Fediverse.
Meta has PR in spades. Journalists find.it easy to find out and write about Threads, hard to write about Mastodon. Somewhere in between for Bluesky. It has little to do with the product itself.
@ottocrat Big Tech can't make (much) money out of #Mastodon (I mean, they rent cloud servers to Mastodon instances, but that isn't big money), so they brief journalists; and journalists, who are generally not very techy (even tech journalists) swallow it hook, line and sinker.
Because, after all, Mastodon doesn't have a big advertising budget, either.
@ottocrat 2 reasons that limit my usage of Mastodon are
I use Twitter for news, particularly what's going on in gaming. Theres not enough of that here. Larger companies, magazines, and analysts simply aren't here.
It's bloody hard to find people you follow over there, on here. Even looking at mutual friends follow lists is completely bust.
Those combined makes it hard to curate a timeline.
@Lutzie I agree with 2, it takes effort. I don’t agree with 1, if there’s one community that has made the move it’s the tech/gaming community. @craiggrannell back me up here.
There is a narrative around Mastodon now, and much of the press is too lazy/lacking funds to do investigative journalism surrounding niche fare. So it doesn’t.
Mastodon isn’t Twitter, and yet the press is treating it like a direct swap.
Mastodon does arguably have some major issues that need ironing out to improve UX.
@ottocrat@Lutzie On communities, dev, academics and legal mostly moved over from my feed. Comics, artists and politics folks either stayed put on Twitter or are flirting with Bluesky. I suspect pundits/politics folks are going to be disappointed, just as they were here, when they don’t get that immediate audience. (I note how many came over here because integrity, and then slinked back really quickly.)
@craiggrannell@ottocrat@Lutzie I've found building a coherent feed of my interests to be quite difficult here - following hashtags is ok, to a point, but you do get a lot of fluff; but finding specific accounts to follow in a given field is even more challenging. Sports Mastodon just doesn't seem to be a thing (yet).
@samuraipizzarob@ottocrat@Lutzie I for a while followed hashtags but it was too much. It flooded my feed. So I used that as a way to pick a few accounts I liked and went back to the feed alone. I imagine eventually I might end up living in a list, like I did on Twitter, but I’m not sure yet.
@craiggrannell@samuraipizzarob@ottocrat@Lutzie The inability to text search is a minus. We shouldn’t have to label every pertinent word with a hash.
The fragmentation by server makes stumbling upon new accounts much harder (there should be something between ‘Local’ and ‘Federated’ timelines).
But the most alarming thing is the Wild West nature of :mastodon: – user on server A follows account on server B that boosts something hateful from server C, who is responsible? The admin of A, B or C?
Not the part that I follow. A lot of them have accounts for sure. They're just not using them. Although that rings true of a lot of people I follow on Twitter... They have masto accounts and don't use them.
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