LWN Is Now on Mastodon

https://lwn.net/Articles/895898/

by dredmorbius • 4 years ago

115 35 4 years ago

lwn.net

tandav• 4 years ago

Mastodon have a nice low key feel, less loud than Twitter

dymk• 4 years ago

They have a long road ahead of them to shake off the association of being a haven for CSAM and alt-right holdouts.

But the leaders of the project seem willing to take pretty drastic measures to, and it's good to see "neutral" communities adopt Mastodon as their platform.

Tao3322• 4 years ago

They have a long road ahead of them to shake off the association of being a haven for CSAM and alt-right holdouts.

Considering the first time I even heard that was this very comment, I'd say they're doing pretty well on that front. Basically every nook and cranny of the Internet has had to shake similar associations at some point.

jordemort• 4 years ago

I run a small instance for myself, and there's a certain grim satisfaction in blocking entire instances full of trolls and pedos that can't be matched by the blocking capabilities of other social networks.

rglullis2• 4 years ago

Funny, for me it always seemed that Mastodon has always be associated with the left/identity-politics/SJWs/progressives and Pleroma was chosen by the alt-right/shitposters/incels.

draxil• 4 years ago

"they".. Really on the fediverse it's very much on an instance by instance basis. really it's like saying that email is a haven for some group or other. Don't shoot the protocol!

blacklight3• 4 years ago

I've been an instance admin myself for some months, and except for one instance populated with profiles with swastikas (which I promptly blocked) I found Mastodon to be the most inclusive social network I've seen in a while.

I'm not sure if it's only my experience, but at least half of the profiles I bump into have an LGBTQ flag or belong to some minorities (sometimes I suspect that I'm the only white straight guy there), and so far I haven't witnessed any episodes of intolerance that got way too familiar on Facebook and Twitter.

I think that the structure of the Fediverse in general facilitates inclusiveness and moderation and it prompts people to be "nicer". If you're an intolerant jerk or a fascist, expect yourself to be muted/blocked. If you run a whole instance of intolerant jerks, expect other instance admins to mute/block your instance.

Eventually, they'll still be able to vomit their intolerance or conspiracies with their buddies on their own instance, and maybe find a couple of like-minded instances to buddy with. But they'll be basically isolated from the rest of the Fediverse, because most of the people don't like to read that shit, and most of the other admins will filter out their content.

And that's the best of the two worlds: intolerants and bigots have the freedom of speech that they crave so much, but very few are willing to listen to what they say.

However, it could also be that things are like this because the Fediverse is still relatively small compared to the major social media. 3-5 million people isn't exactly small, but it's still three orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook. It's still a bit of a green field mostly populated by geeks, scientists, open-source enthusiasts and instances specifically dedicated to hobbies. Maybe we just need to make sure that it remains like this? Just in case, I won't share a sign up invite with my parents...

Retr0id• 4 years ago

I've been using the fediverse occasionally for the last few years, and more actively in the last month or so (running my own instance). While I have heard of instances with objectionable moderation policies (and by extension, objectionable content), I have yet to encounter any myself.

datalopers• 4 years ago

CSAM and alt-right holdouts

You've succinctly described Twitter's 2023 roadmap

crocodiletears• 4 years ago

My impression of the instances I've joined is that the network is largely populated by anime-fans, artists putting out questionably sfw drawings, and censorious progressive fiefdoms.

usrn• 4 years ago

Mastodon is great. I tried Twitter the other week and it feels so much worse, like crappy RSS for celebrity gossip instead of a discussion platform.

daptaq3• 4 years ago

I don't know, my impression from a few years ago is that a lot of the worst, most exhausting people from Twitter got persuaded to use Mastodon, ironically on the grounds that it should do better job at moderation. Mix this with people who are in it for the decentralization and those who see decentralization as a means to withstand censorship, and the overall feel was ... not the best.

zokier• 4 years ago

kinda would have expected them to run their own instance of sorts

corbet• 4 years ago

It might come to that at some point; it would be a nice thing to offer to our reader community! But we'd have to maintain it and would have another thing to moderate and ... For now we're just getting our toes wet.

ancientsofmumu• 4 years ago

There's a tangible benefit to being discoverable without effort (no friction for users); other "famous" FOSS projects are part of the fosstodon.org instance such as https://fosstodon.org/@mate - kind of makes sense to me as a generic user. $0.02

blacklight3• 4 years ago

Discoverability is a bit of an issue with the Fediverse in general. Those who run their own instances are initially quite "isolated" and hard to find, unless they advertise themselves on other channels.

Relays are supposed to make federated content more easily discoverable, but right now they're still far from being what I expect them to be (i.e. curated lists of instances categorized by topic, like an OPML that aggregates multiple feeds/channels based on some criteria), and they're instead saturated and endless streams of zillions of instances with no filtering/aggregation criteria and plenty of spam/adult content. And if you run your instance they're going to fill up your database storage FAST. After joining to the largest relay I immediately got my federated timeline flooded by erotic anime toots in Japanese and filled up 50 MB of db storage in an hour.

Fediverse user directories like those run by @FediFollows are good ideas for discovering new content, but they're still small (we're talking of a few hundreds profiles so far).

But I also believe that it's worth the effort of running your own instance. Right now most of the folks are on mastodon.social or mastodon.online. Fosstodon itself already has 21k users. The purpose of the Fediverse is to be as decentralized as possible, because smaller communities are easier to moderate, aggregate and federate. If everybody ends up signing up to 5-6 big instances, and the long tail is left to pick the crumbs, we'll have again the centralization problem that we were trying to solve.

user3939382• 4 years ago

I liked reddit more back in the day. I like lobste.rs more than HN. I'm starting to think that forums are better with less people.

daptaq3• 4 years ago

I used to think that it was not only this, but the rate at which a group grows. Lobste.rs used to be interesting, but it either grew too much or the rate exceeded some point, but it has been moderation issue for a while now. I don't know if a more complicated moderating system would help (having some kind of a priority invite system, limiting the number of invitations per month).

dredmorbius4• 4 years ago

Failure to grow, or at least to turn over users with time, is also a problem. Ultimately you end up with a dominant cohort which ages through the system.

For various reasons, Diaspora* seems quite prone to this. I have a number of suspicions as to why, though stagnent development and either intentional or incidental decisions which have made the platform almost perfectly opaque to general web search seem to be likely factors.

Mastodon, by contrast, seems to acquire a new major group of new adopters every year or two, that I've noticed.

(I'm active on both platforms.)

dredmorbius4• 4 years ago

Intimacy does not scale.

Conversation is an intimate activity.

kixiQu• 4 years ago

Since they say "a home for article notifications and more" (emphasis mine), if you're looking to not miss the "and more", let me plug that Mastodon has its own RSS feeds built in for public posts:

https://fosstodon.org/@LWN.rss

Which is a nice feature a social network can have when it isn't trying to achieve user capture.

zackees• 4 years ago

Also, Twitter front end nitter.net gives out rss feeds of your twitter timeline.

jszymborski• 4 years ago

Wonderful news! Here are a few other relevant accounts that have jumped aboard and been active on Mastodon:

- https://mastodon.online/@thunderbird

- https://mastodon.art/@inkscape

- https://fosstodon.org/@bitwarden

- https://mastodon.xyz/@nextcloud

and many more!

LWN Is Now on Mastodon

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