Fosstodon is now invite only

https://hub.fosstodon.org/were-invite-only

by app4soft • 3 years ago

31 57 3 years ago

hub.fosstodon.org

rijoja4• 3 years ago

Is fosstodon any good, and does anybody use activitypub based social networking, if so what instances would you recommend?

bejd• 3 years ago

I have an account for my game dev projects on https://mastodon.gamedev.place/ and it's a great community for that kind of stuff. People tend to stay on topic: the local feed is almost exclusively videogame related updates, and it's all very positive.

rijoja4• 3 years ago

Thank you for that, I'll check it out!

techwizrd• 3 years ago

I have my Mastodon account on mastodon.social and my Lemmy account on programming.dev because they're very unlikely to be defederated and they're drama-free. I really like them for what its worth.

distract89012• 3 years ago

Mastodon.social is one of the riskier places to be if you're concerned about defederation.

There's a very large segment of the mastodon population that thinks servers ad big as .social are very bad for the ecosystem. A lot of instances defederate them out of principle.

The argument is that .social is so big that it's not possible to moderate effectively. It also presents a very large and inviting place to launch attacks from. We frequently see waves of spam, abuse, and just bot accounts originating from .social.

A lot of severs are already defederated from .social for these reasons

spankalee• 3 years ago

Making your Mastodon account provider also be a community is a fatal flaw of Mastodon. I don't want to belong to just one community, nor have my account and server administration policies somehow tied to my topic interests!

krapp3• 3 years ago

Then don't do that. Have multiple identities on multiple servers, or host your identity on your own server.

nvy• 3 years ago

So just so I'm clear you're suggesting that a person should log in/out of multiple accounts depending on the topic one wants to discuss/read about, on the same app?

BugsJustFindMe3• 3 years ago

Have multiple identities on multiple servers, or host your identity on your own server.

I hope you realize that this is a hilariously out-of-touch answer with respect to what most people want from a Twitter-alike.

alt227• 3 years ago

This is really the fatal flaw, 99% of people dont want to think about servers or identities, they just want to open an app and chat.

jskherman3• 3 years ago

host your identity on your own server

This gets the closest to having control over your online identity but, honestly, the ROI for self-hosting your own Mastodon server just isn't worth it. The requirements are too demanding for just a one-person (or a few more) instance.

Even with Pleroma/Akkoma/[other platform], you still have to jump through some hoops of complexity for someone new to the fediverse, let alone a Twitter refugee (even on the more tech-literate side).

DiabloD36• 3 years ago

Host your own Mastodon server then, allows you to administrate your own account. Mastodon is federated, so where your account lives has nothing to do with what accounts you reply to and follow, nor has anything to do with who replies and follows you.

Administrators have the limited scope of only their instance.

notamy2• 3 years ago

Host your own Mastodon server then, allows you to administrate your own account.

But that's the thing, I as an end user don't want to and shouldn't have to. Hosting my own instance is a pain in the ass that introduces needing a server to run it on, OS maintenance / updates, Mastodon instance maintenance / updates, paying for everything, ... It's a huge waste of my time and energy when decoupling identity from content solves it much more smoothly, for a much wider audience. If the goal of Mastodon isn't to attract that sort of audience, that's a separate issue, but that doesn't seem to be it from what I can see. Identity and content can both be federated without tying them together.

eropple4• 3 years ago

By hosting your own Mastodon server, you are effectively buying into only receiving direct, point-to-point notifications and you lose what remains of the “overheard amongst acquaintances” effect that Twitter and now Bluesky effectively capture (that is, when it’s on the same, large instance).

Of course, replicating this effect would be a dump truck of load on every Mastodon server, but it’s also the experience most people seem to want, so that’s unfortunate.

dredmorbius4• 3 years ago

That is a gross misreading of how the Fediverse operates.

Yes, there is some locality aspect to the instance you belong to, but in general the instance you log on to has comparatively little impact on what other instances you can interact with.

This isn't absolutely true. The characteristics of a given instance do have an impact on what technical features are available to you. There are a number of supported advanced features such as toot length, Markdown and LaTeX formula support, etc., which apply to only a subset of instances. My primary instance, toot.cat, is based on Glitch.soc, a Mastodon fork, which supports both long posts and Markdown, both of which I (ab)use frequently. Mathstodon, hosted by our own @ColinWright, is amongst those supporting LaTeX-based maths formulae, for some inexplicable reason....

Another is that the moderation practices your instance follows will be reflected in how remote instances interact with yours. Ineffective or beligerent moderators are a fast route to being limited or outright blocked (there is a continuum of potential restrictions, it's not all-or-nothing) by others. And similarly, your local instance might have its own set of criteria for determining what traffic or patterns are or are not permissible in remote instances, again resulting in varying levels of moderation on that basis.

The "local community" element mostly shows up in the Local timeline. I ... hardly ever have that open, relying instead on a set of curated, priority-based Lists, or pinned Hashtags.

Lists are based on specific profiles you choose to add, and I've found that the best organisational method is not topical but rather is based on interest level. So I keep a relatively small top-priority list, a somewhat broader secondary, and for profiles who are overly chatty, a third which I view rarely. I follow nearly 1,000 profiles, but effectively see perhaps 50--100. I have a small set of topical lists, largely press/journalists and admins, though I use those rarely.

I'll also pin hashtags that I'm currently interested in, which might be for anything from a few minutes to months on end. You can also subscribe to hashtags as of recently, though I've yet to do this.

There are other topical tools including <https://gup.pe>, which function somewhat like a mailing list or forum. (There are newer variants which offer more powerful moderation options.)

But in general, the instance you're on, so long as it's well-managed and well-behaved, has little impact on who else you can interact with.

The misinformation, and disinformation, on this point becomes tedious with time.

BugsJustFindMe3• 3 years ago

That is a gross misreading of how the Fediverse operates.

And then you go on to enumerate various important ways in which it is not a gross misread at all.

"The characteristics of a given instance do have an impact on...":

  "...what technical features are available to you"

  "...how remote instances interact with yours"

  "...criteria for determining what traffic or patterns are or are not permissible in remote instances"

toofy• 3 years ago

… is a fatal flaw of mastodon. I don’t want to belong to just one community.

I could be misunderstanding what you’re saying, but regarding Fosstodon, they’re not at all limited to one community — they’re not decoupling from the fediverse?

phoe-krk3• 3 years ago

The "just one community" and "topic interests" parts are BS. Nobody says that an account at https://functional.cafe cannot post things that are not related to functional programming. Source: I have an account a https://functional.cafe, and I post about everything - that includes functional programming, non-functional programming, calligraphy, Fediverse, socializing, and shitposting.

As for administration policies - find a server whose moderation policy you enjoy. Unlike on Xitter, you have a choice of these policies and have immediate contact to the admins and moderators of your instance and other instances, and you can consult them.

DamonHD3• 3 years ago

I have accounts on two different instances: one small and very subject focussed, and one on a big instance. I try to keep roughly to topic on the former, but no one is shouting at me when I have a little fun on either.

1MachineElf• 3 years ago

Most mastodon servers don't limit discussion to a central domain of topics.

If you still feel limited, then the solution to your problem is to have multiple accounts for the mutually-exclusive communities you enjoy. That's what people do on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter with their alt accounts. Keep that in mind whenever you encounter someone online using an anime profile pic.

The major factor I look for when choosing a mastodon instance is the business model. The vast majority are free, which leads to either limits on registration, ads, or spammy free-for-all instances. I want to join a mastodon instance that I can pay for, as a control over these types of problems. If it can sustain itself through membership, then the experience and policies should be relatively stable.

For the above reasons, I use mastodon.green.

Angostura• 3 years ago

I'm not a Fosstodon user - have they also defederated, or can Mastodon users on other instances still read and comment?

mhitza• 3 years ago

They have not defederated. You can still do all those things.

nextlevelwizard• 3 years ago

Why should anyone care? Social networks are pretty done these days. Just look at all the controversies the current ones have had and how strong they are still going.

All of these “twitter but with fraction of users” -things won’t really mount to much

DiabloD36• 3 years ago

It already succeeded in it's goal however: all the people who wish to use a Twitter-like service, but as a federated system, use it and like it.

I'd rather a service have been a success amongst its smaller userbase than be an anti-success with billions of users worldwide but is a massively unprofitable trashfire that is implicated in multiple state psyops and infowars and is an otherwise unmitigated shitshow with a clown running the circus.

TheRoque• 3 years ago

What's the difference between a private mastodon server and a private reddit, or discord server ? What's the use case ?

phoe-krk3• 3 years ago

Fosstodon didn't become a private Mastodon server. It made it a little bit harder to create an account on its server. Users on other servers can interact with Fosstodon on the same terms as before - nothing changed for them.

jszymborski• 3 years ago

You're not limited to interactions with people on your own server. The federated timeline is entirely the same whether or not registration is open.

There are many one-person instances, for example.

onli• 3 years ago

Of course apart from when you are limited from interaction with people on a different server, because you have your own server.

jskherman3• 3 years ago

To add to the sibling comments, mastodon servers (or any other fediverse servers) are public and are searchable on the web (unless you really go out of your way to customize it to be private and not indexable). Meanwhile a private Reddit is similarly inaccessible as a private mastodon server.

And Discord servers are just totally opaque and you can't search its contents on the web (even if it is public). You have to join the server and use Discord to do so. This is generally bad for information longevity. This is why people say Discord should be avoided for hosting discussions on Open-Source software.

phoe-krk3• 3 years ago

Good from the administration/moderation point of view. This limits the influx of users and shares the burden of moderating them. The instance still federates with the rest of the network, so nothing changes from the existing users' or the network's point of view.

kevincox• 3 years ago

As a Fosstodon user I'm quite happy with this. Not so much because I care about the sense of community but because it helps reduce the burden of running the server. I imagine that this makes spam accounts basically a non-issue (if users keep invite spammers they can be removed or have invite privileges revoked) which is great for the moderators and also makes Fosstodon more trustworthy in the eyes of other servers and less likely to be blocked/defederated. (not that I think that was an issue before). I don't think any particular server needs infinite growth, and growing by referral helps create a chain of trust.

Personally I think a lot of services on the web would be better if they were invite-only where invites are free to provide by any member. It seems one of the few ways to effectively cut down on spam, abuse, botting and astroturfing. Mastodon servers are an even better version of this because even if you can't find someone to invite you you can still participate from another server (and if needed you can run your own).

On that note if anyone wants a Fosstodon invite I'd be happy to provide one if I can tell from your posting history, blog or other online presence that you are a real person. (At my own discretion and offer may be revoked at any point.)

Fosstodon is now invite only

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