Mastodon for Metalheads

by stoerfall • 7 years ago

49 44 7 years ago

For those reading the comments first, this is not the first Mastodon that came to mind in the context of metalheads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(band)

atticmanatee• 7 years ago

Trap, reading the title that was not what I was expecting. But my guess is that it was intended.

laumars3• 7 years ago

Not intentionally. Mastodon is also a name of a Twitter-like social network. So the title here makes perfect sense for people like myself who hadn't heard of the band with the same name.

This is just one of those occasions where name collisions happen through nobodies fault.

flattone• 7 years ago

Same Oddly was listening to big short soundtrack late last night.

sascha_sl4• 7 years ago

What is this, an ad that's also sort of a wordplay so it's not really an ad?

runyor3• 7 years ago

Mastodon is the currently most hippest open source alternative to Twitter. Don't know many of the details tho.

stoerfall3• 7 years ago

Mastodon is a decentralized, free software alternative to Twitter. Also see: https://joinmastodon.org

sascha_sl4• 7 years ago

I knew that, I run one. (Please don't join it.)

But I don't randomly post it to HN, and it looks like the author of this post is the admin too.

dgellow• 7 years ago

For people who aren’t reading the linked page icle and don’t know the expression “metal head”:

A metalhead is a member of the heavy metal subculture.

Gravityloss• 7 years ago

If one thinks metal head is a slang term for robot / AI, one immediately gets a Rudy Rucker short story feeling...

gfwhukku2• 7 years ago

Another Mastodon instance hosted in Germany with the same copypasted left-leaning AUP[] from all the other Mastodon instances. What's the reason for this to exist when all Mastodon instances are linked to each other and this instance has the same ruleset and is hosted in the same country than the rest of instances? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding the way Mastodon works and instances are not linked?

[]https://metalhead.club/about/more

runyor3• 7 years ago

A little less sceptical but still I wonder about the same thing. If all are connected, why care for which server I connect to? Are there filters between each server? Is my data only hosted in this server and goes down with it when the server hoster decides he invested enough into his hobby?

stoerfall3• 7 years ago

If all are connected, why care for which server I connect to?

Mastodon is like E-Mail: You chose who hosts your profile. YOu can send messages to people on other servers, but still the server which hosts your account, is your "home server": If it goes down, your account/profile is lost.

Also choosing your Mastodon server is about your personal interests: Mastodon servers have local timelines, which only show posts by users on the same server. These timelines often are topic related. E.g. on metalhead.club you will find more metal music content compared to e.g. mastodon.social.

Mastodon servers / instances group users by interest and still let all Mastodon users communicate with each other.

Btw: I don't consider the terms of use "leftist". They are quite neutral and generally "human friendly". Metalhead.club is not political, but the Terms of use try to prevent hate speech.

stoerfall3• 7 years ago

Are there filters between each server?

There _might_ be filters. Mastodon server admins can filter posts from certain foreign servers. For example the metalhead.club administrator chose to filter some instances which spam a lot or post extremist text and /or child pornography.

Often these filters are necessary for legal reasons, e.g. some jananese servers allow sketches of naked children ("loli"), which are considered child pornography in Germany and are therefore illegal in the server's home country.

drngdds2• 7 years ago

Each server can have its own rules and can choose to block whichever other servers it wants. But besides that, they're pretty similar. The big draw of Mastodon is that it doesn't really matter that much which server you use. If the admin of your server starts doing stuff you don't like, you can move to another server and direct your followers there. (Compare this to centralized social networks like Twitter and Facebook. If you don't like what their owners do, your only option is to leave and lose access to the network entirely.)

nindwen• 7 years ago

In addition to the other replies: one big draw of specific servers/instances is the local timeline, a feed of every post on a server. While you can connect to anyone, discovering new people is much easier on the same instance. For this reason people prefer small, specific instances.

The Mastodon culture is also fairly opposed to large instances. Mastodon.social (the "flagship") is widely criticised for allowing itself to grow much larger than other instances. The community prefers small, homely intantances, median size is probably about 500 users, like this one. This may seem weird to outsiders, but instances like this one are one of the main draws of Mastodon.

sascha_sl4• 7 years ago

That's not copypasted at all, what the heck are you on about?

amiga-workbench2• 7 years ago

I noticed that too with a lot of instances, the one I settled on has rules that sets off less red flags (and honestly, I'm really tempted to self host)

gfwhukuu3• 7 years ago

I am very interested; I've been unable to find an instance with rules that are not involved in politics. What's that instance?

mikece• 7 years ago

As someone else has pointed out, Mastodon is only one implementation of ActivityPub/OStatus, and arguably not the best (especially if you prefer Elixir/Phoenix, but I digress).

Would it be appropriate to request we stop referring to a mastodon (software) instance as anything other than an ActivityPub/OStatus instance? A more terse name would be ideal but naming is hard and I've not had enough coffee to be creative yet today.

StavrosK• 7 years ago

Would it be appropriate to request we stop referring to a mastodon (software) instance as anything other than an ActivityPub/OStatus instance

No. Branding and specialization is important. I mean, you can stop talking about its killer app if you want ActivityPub to die.

Mastodon for Metalheads

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