ohtwenty

Hi! This may be a really dumb question but why is it limited to certain areas?

Cctv on blockchain?

Big money is already losing some money, AFAIK. I'm in Amsterdam and there's news every other week of a big company or organization moving to Amsterdam _already_, just in case brexit goes through.

Check out the episode blame gameby revisionist history ( https://leopard.megaphone.fm/PP3573562692.mp3?updated=148063...)

In short: the likely explanation for those failures, regardless of bad coding practices, were most likely 100% human error

To combine what two sister comments said: you can create multiple, but you can follow people anywhere. So you don't _need_ to create multiple, but you could. Like subreddits. Some people have their "meme/funny stuff" account for reddit, and a nsfw one, and a 'news/serious stuff' account. Likewise you _could_ do that all from one account, but you don't need to.

It might be a nice idea for Mastodon advocates to create general topic instances, that may feel more approachable for newcomers.

Yeah, the instance names are often quite silly, but there's silly people on there. I mean 3000 variations of "mastodonUKsocial.com" or something wouldn't really tell you all that much more. If you don't want to go to mastodon.social, the biggest english language instance, octodon.social is a good, smaller (~11k users) general instance with a good vibe. Fwiw i think a lot of people use twitter to follow 'their kind of people' (lgbt groups, open source fans, music people) and this codifies those groups a bit more into proper instances/servers/communities, while of course allowing you to follow other people.

Who decides how content is relayed?

I mean things are relayed if you ask for them to be. Two cases, pretty much: (1) someone is following someone else, content is asked for by the one server and pushed to the other. (2) You look up a URL (someone's posts, a profile, etc) and it asks the other server for it. Of course you can block certain instances from asking for stuff, or block/mute specific people if you'd like to, so it's not just out there for anyone to grab (except of course that it's the internet, so realistically nothing is ephemeral).

Can I be on multiple instances at the same time? If don't like my instance anymore, can I seamlessly move to another one?

Of course you can be on multiple instances. Just like you can make multiple emails. Same case though: why would you? some edge cases (being able to see multiple local/home timelines for example, even from people you're not following, via the 'local timeline' tab). So yeah, there's people that have multiple accounts, just like you can have a few reddit or HN accounts if you'd like to. There's definitely usecases, but most people just have the one account. Moving is being worked on, it's not 'seamless' by any means, but you can download a backup of followers etc and upload that to another instance, and have your old account forward to the new one (preventing people from using your old handle, and also meaning that if there's a link somewhere they'd know where you moved to).

Frankly, I don't even want to have all these questions, it's too complicated. I'll just stick with Twitter.

Do your thing, but I hope you know most people don't necessarily have these questions. If you introduced email or reddit to someone they wouldn't necessarily right away think of data portability, multiple accounts, etc. The onboarding needs a bunch of work, but for basic usage it's really not all that hard.

who in their right mind thinks about "servers" outside of tech circles?

the way a lot of subreddits are used, for example, is intuitive enough to people who get used to the concept. 'servers' or 'instances' as a word might be too technical, but the concept of different groups you join, while still being able to talk to others? Of course my experience is 99% people who have persisted and joined, but they seem to enjoy it.

Mostly because you join, you think "this is confusing but I've arrived" and there's a few hundred people on the same instance who are interested in similar things, who know people from other instances who have similar interests, etc. I think it might help build a network quicker (or at least, that's what I've heard from a lot of newer people that have joined since I've been there!)

Fair enough. The current influx has made this worse (lots of metaposting about joining mastodon), but that depends on who/what you're looking for. Try another instance, maybe? That might be the greatest onboarding weakness, that if you settle on an instance that you don't like it kind of ruins the experience

fewer users

that's just a bad point to make? I mean of course a newer platform will have fewer.

UI is a good point (although I prefer it this way). But there's Pinafore[0] or Halcyon[1], or Brutaldon[2] that allow you to change the UI layout if you log in with those.

0: https://pinafore.social/ 1: https://halcyon.toromino.de/login 2: https://brutaldon.online/about

Plume is a WIP, and has been discussed here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17411173

It's not mentioned but it depends on the instance how long the character limit is (as in, it's configurable). default is 500, but there's some with a limit of 5000, or 666 (some witchy instance iirc)

Because Mastodon is full of like-thinking people, and the ones they'd strongly disagree with aren't joining.

or they're on other instances. there's some far-right political instances, for example (that the leftist crowd of the larger majority of early adopters don't really talk to, although they could in most cases)

so join an instance with lax moderation. or set up your own.

if you're thinking "that's expensive", look into Pleroma, it can run on a $1 a month server or a raspi. Set something up purely for you, then find some people on other instances you'd like to follow

Kiiiind of, but there's quite some general instances. Most of them are more like a "here's some people interested in the same subjects as you". So yes, on my (politically motivated, I guess) instance I find quite some people with the same political slant (and some commentary on that), but many cats, daily stories, etc. Just like twitter or other platforms. It's worth a try seeing what joinmastodon.org tells you, and have a look.

You make a good point (and one that's being worked on being overcome, better onboarding and whatever).

But consider twitter:

Compare that to getting started on Twitter: pick a username and password, boom, done!

And then what? follow some celebs? Figure out if you know anyone? On mastodon you can use the local feed to find people interested in the same subjects (or same culture), and then you start talking. I've seen many people be surprised that within an hour or two on mastodon they've had more and better interactions than years on twitter. The experience once you're there tends to be quite good (from my completely unbiased and scientific viewpoint, of course)

Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with[…]

Have a healthy conversation? I know some people who stopped or reduced social media usage because that was pretty much impossible. Plus the local feed thing. Start an instance for your neighbourhood, follow people who are on there, and you've got all the neighbourhoodly gossip on there. Whilst still being able to follow whoever else you want (except Wil Wheaton because he went to a non-federated instance)

Which is just a proxy for left/blue vs right/red, and since their post is on twitter --> mastodon that would be a really weird way to talk about it?

I skimmed over the rest of the article and it appears to include an "Actually It's Not Technically CP" argument, so I think I probably made the right choice here.

You'd do well to actually read the article then before making a comment like this. He goes briefly into that to show that you (english speaker) see it as a _very clear_ case of CP, whereas in japan it's not, that there's a distinction, and that they often won't understand why you'd confuse the two. And that difference in looking at it (regardless of picking a position on if it is or isn't cp) is what caused a bunch of issues.

Halcyon and Pinafore are both just front-ends for existing mastodon accounts (like brutaldon).

Pleroma is a different technology, but federates the same. As is Misskey; depending on what you're looking for in features either of those might do it more for you (or the glitchsoc fork of mastodon). (and theming is a thing, of course, regardless)

It's been posted here before, but http://fediverse.party/ is a nice little overview of the federated social web (over ActivityPub, I believe); https://the-federation.info/ is broader. Both have some small issues but are nice starting places.

I've been using mastodon for a few months and it depends on your instance, really. A lot are more "this is the type of people you'd expect here" (tech people, lgbt people, art peopl, etc) but everything that isn't specifically related to that topic is OK. I'm on a semi-political one, because that's what I'd use a platform like that for. But it's not limited to that at all. Some are stricter, some aren't pegged down to a topic, but might be related to a "type" of person. I know some people who have a few accounts, to only share stuff related to that instance. Some people end up running their own instance (although that's easier with pleroma, you could probably run it off a toaster if you wanted to) or just with one or two friends.

there's added value to the local timeline, especially in smaller instances when you've just joined, because it allows you to find like-minded people. If you could do without that the easiest option might be to join a large instance or start your own, but both come with discoverability issues.

In short, no, you don't need to, but you could (just like you can make multiple emails) if it helps you separate stuff

(great article!) I feel like there's a little bit missing: the federated aspect. Depending on what type of art you make, you might find you are more findable (and able to find people in the same field) if you're on another instance. Like drawn art might fare well on mastodon.art, but photography might do better on photog.social—take the time to find the right place for yourself!

On an equally important note, why is it that people out there assume that ANY form of electronic communication is impervious from government surveillance? The reality is that if a three letter agency is after you, it's probably unwise to be using WhatsApp and Signal in an incriminating fashion. (Or anything else for that matter.)

Signal has a feature for self-destroying messages (on-read, or after x amount of time). Seems like that could've been used and it wouldn't have lead to this right here.

Have you considered going to a therapist yourself?

This got me curious, so I looked a few things up on pubmed. Here's some articles that piqued my interest:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24086443 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24163237 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22320194

See if you can ask your family doctor if you can get a male psychologist then? Mine was quite lenient, at least, and talked me through the options, wanted my opinion, etc.

Wrt changing to signal, just say 'it got an update' and switch it out to where the icon used to be. Provided the rest of your family switched it shouldn't be too difficult

I second the sister comment's question: how did you go about sending them (like what phrasing did you use, for example?)

Want to write a short post on it?

This isn't true, you don't need to have offices in Europe for the GDPR to apply to your company. It's just if you're serving/having European customers. Which, if you compare it to shipping things across borders, makes sense (you can't just say "but it's legal in the US, where I'm sending the package from").

So closing the offices wouldn't help.

God, I hate that highlighted text, because it's always some faux-deep quote that just pisses me off. Like I might have appreciated it if it weren't for that stupid highlighting making it look like it's a teenager stopping halfway through a presentation to look at you and make sure that you caught he said something intelligent.

I get irrationally angry at that highlighting. BTW ublock origin might be able to block the popup, if you right click -> block element