[HN Gopher] The local timeline is the key to enjoying Mastodon
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The local timeline is the key to enjoying Mastodon
Author : carlesfe
Score : 101 points
Date : 2020-10-18 17:16 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cfenollosa.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cfenollosa.com)
| alkonaut wrote:
| I still don't get it. If the author is into FOSS and could choose
| between one of the FOSS servers or the Catalan one... how would
| you choose? On Twitter I have 3 groups of people I follow (tech,
| sports, politics). Choosing _one_ topic for a server wouldn't
| that mean my local timeline would have people going on and on
| about one of my topics, but virtually nothing about the others?
| That would be _extremely_ boring.
| spiffytech wrote:
| My impression is Mastodon expects you to join a server oriented
| towards some particular interest group, then to find and follow
| individual users from other Mastodon servers who you want to
| hear from. But it seems to be designed with the expectation
| that most of your read/write will be inside your chosen server.
| That doesn't sound well-aligned with common use cases.
| arkanciscan wrote:
| Mastodon doesn't prevent censorship. If anything it makes it
| worse. Instead of dealing with professional community managers
| operating with clear rules, you are at the mercy of some random
| nerd running a server from his mom's basement. You can run your
| own instance, but then you're just talking to yourself. Nothing
| is stopping you from building your own Twitter, hell we had blogs
| for years before Twitter. You go to Twitter so you don't have to
| promote yourself to get an audience, and abiding by Twitter's
| censorship policies is the cost of admission.
| piaste wrote:
| > Instead of dealing with professional community managers
| operating with clear rules, you are at the mercy of some random
| nerd running a server from his mom's basement. You can run your
| own instance, but then you're just talking to yourself.
|
| ~15 years ago, when blogs and forums were where most Internet
| discussions happened, we had that same scenario, and we now
| consider that at least a silver age of free speech.
|
| (And if you went and made your own blog, it was much harder to
| connect with other bloggers and commenters, compared to running
| your own instance and tooting at other like-minded instances).
|
| If the Fediverse grows and create something similar to that
| age, I will be overjoyed. I will certainly prefer it to the
| giant cloud conglomerates' "professional community managers",
| whose rules may or may not be clear but it doesn't matter when
| they're based on the politics and concerns of Silicon Valley
| instead of those of my country or my community.
| egypturnash wrote:
| You can run your own instance and invite your friends to share
| it. This does require you have some friends, of course.
| kixiQu wrote:
| Literally nothing about this article is about censorship.
| (Also, I have a ~single-user instance and... follow and have
| followers through federation? As is the essential point of the
| software)
| 67868018 wrote:
| I run my own instance and talk to thousands of people on their
| own instances every day. I don't think you know how this works.
| Its federation, like email. People with GMail accounts can
| communicate with Yahoo users in case you missed that...
| gojomo wrote:
| Twitter lists could conceivably provide the same benefit -
| curated collections of people likely to enjoy discovering each
| other - but Twitter's neglect of that feature, and other problems
| with Twitter, prevent lists from reaching their full potential.
|
| Bundling "hosting server" with "shared interests" and "shared
| norms" has clearly been helpful to a certain style of Mastodon
| usage, but in the long-term/long-view, still strikes me as a bug
| not a feature. It still places such usage, and group-formation,
| at the mercy of a feudal federation of sysop-lords, "my land my
| rules".
|
| The creation of lists/communities-of-commonality that can
| transcend any one server/delivery-path choice seems the purest
| option, with the most headroom for generative expansions. It
| should be most possible in identity-based, server-oblivious
| systems, like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB).
| BeetleB wrote:
| I joined Mastodon some years ago, but I did not use it for long.
| I eventually realized the same - you need to find an instance
| with people/content that you like/relate to.
|
| The thing is: Do I really want another time sink? I've been on
| the Internet for over 20 years, and I think whatever gains I
| could have gotten from online forums/discussions have been
| attained. Time is a premium, and I'm actively trying to quash
| sites where I just browse for new content. I spend way too much
| time on HN as it is, and at some point I'll probably find a way
| to temporarily disable my account for a year or so (e.g. set a
| password that is a pain to access).
| itronitron wrote:
| Discord feels like it is filling this niche. I try to get
| interested in Mastodon occasionally but I am consistently put off
| from it as I never quite know what I am looking at.
| criddell wrote:
| If Mastodon is easy to use incorrectly, then maybe the problem
| isn't entirely on the user's end.
| andrewrothman wrote:
| I have a Mastodon account. I just tried visiting the local
| timeline of a different instance, as recommended, and I have to
| say it was a much more engaging experience than I had had before
| on my account's instance.
|
| Is there any chance for a federated interaction to effectively
| replace the local timeline? It'd be cool to be able to jump into
| a "community timeline" without that being tied to your account's
| "instance" (ie. using one account for multiple interests).
|
| Thanks for the tip!
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| How to check a local timeline before registering?
| bubersson wrote:
| Usually it's under /public link. For example
| https://fosstodon.org/public .
| stingraycharles wrote:
| " The problem most people have with Mastodon is that they "get
| bored" with it quickly. I've seen it a lot, and it means one
| thing: the person created their account on the wrong server."
|
| And this is exactly why I haven't created an account yet. I went
| to Mastadon, and saw that I needed to choose a community. There
| are many communities I may like, and I have no idea how each
| community behaves until I actually join it. I use Linux _and_ I
| like FOSS _and_ I am still an oldschool BSD nerd, and I also like
| regional communities. So which one do I choose? I cannot even
| explore a server's users and posts from the community list. And
| then I created an account in the wrong server, and then what? Can
| I migrate my account to another server?
|
| Mastadon gives me a bit of the nostalgic feelings of the early
| internet of the 90s. In The Netherlands we had something called
| "The Digital City" (de Digitale Stad) which Mastadon reminds me
| of, combined with the IRC geekiness. But at least with IRC I
| could join multiple servers and a whole plethora of channels from
| a single client, so I didn't have to "commit" to a single server
| and make the wrong choice.
|
| All in all I _want_ to try Mastadon, but the choices I need to
| make (and fear of making the wrong choice!) before I can even
| join and experience it scares me.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Remember forums? Remember how you had to have a separate
| account on every single one? Remember how you stuck around some
| forums, but not others? Treat it like that.
| gargron wrote:
| But it's not like that, you don't need to create a separate
| account on every single one. You can follow any account on
| any server/community from just one account. That's the big
| difference/selling point. It's the "local timeline", an
| optional discovery feature, that adds the incentive to create
| more accounts; but there are definitely ways to circumvent
| it. Many communities expose their timeline publicly and
| there's almost always a public profile directory so you can
| see who's on that server/community to follow them.
| vdddv wrote:
| "I use Linux and I like FOSS and I am still an oldschool BSD
| nerd, and I also like regional communities." FOSStodon is the
| obvious choice https://fosstodon.org/public But I think the
| article actually misses the main point about Mastodon. You an
| follow and interact with people on any instances.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| But then why is it so important to choose the right server?
| The author asserts that choosing the right server is
| essential to your experience of Mastadon, is that not the
| case?
|
| Also the author says that I should choose a community between
| 500 and 5000 people, which fosstodon exceeds.
|
| All in all, my point is, there are so many choices and
| decisions to make _before_ I can even create an account and
| experience it.
|
| It's fairly common knowledge that people actually don't like
| choice. When you go to a restaurant and see a menu with 100
| choices, people actually enjoy their meal less than when
| there would be little choice; they have this nagging feeling
| of "was that other choice perhaps better?"
|
| For me, Mastadon has the same problem. Too much choice is a
| bug, not a feature.
| andrewzah wrote:
| There's a feed for the server you're on. So if you pick a
| "bad" server (aka the culture there is different from what
| you like), that becomes useless, more or less. Of course
| you can always just follow whoever and only pay attention
| to your following feed.
|
| Also, some nodes maintain blocklists of other nodes. [0] So
| while you can still follow those people and see them in
| your following feed, posts from users on that node will
| -not- appear in the public feed (posts from nodes in the
| federated network).
|
| https://instances.social/ exists to help you find a node
| but I'm not sure how up to date or accurate it is.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon.social-misc
| zrm wrote:
| > It's fairly common knowledge that people actually don't
| like choice.
|
| This is a misunderstanding of what people like.
|
| What people like is good defaults, because choosing is
| work. When 90% of everything is crap, nobody even wants to
| see anything but the 10% that isn't. They don't even want
| to see anything other than the one option which is the best
| for them, if somebody can give them that without making
| them do the work.
|
| The problem is that the best option is not the same for
| everybody. Even if it's the same for 70% of people, that
| lets you make that option the default and make 70% of
| people happy, but the other 30% still need the option to do
| something else.
|
| And sometimes there isn't any one option that can satisfy
| any majority of people. Then there isn't any better
| alternative than giving people a list of options to choose
| from.
|
| But you could still put the list in a better order. Put the
| "editor's choice" options near the top and the crummiest
| ones near the bottom. If someone is in Queens, show them
| the regional server for New York City on the first page and
| the regional server for Los Angeles on the hundredth page,
| and a link next to it that says "show other regions" and
| leads to a regional map. That sort of thing.
| barkingcat wrote:
| This is not the case.
| jstanley wrote:
| I think it's easier to discover people on the same server
| as you, that's all.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| I will admit, during my foray into Mastodon I tried a
| server at the low end of the author's size range, and I
| would say selecting the 'right server' has some impact from
| my experiences, but not in the way described:
|
| A month after I joined, they had a disk crash and my
| account was gone. It looked like everyone recreated from
| scratch, so I did the same.
|
| Two weeks later and without notice they restored a backup,
| overwriting everything that had happened since. I
| continued, but with rapidly declining interest to accompany
| my total loss of trust.
|
| Two more months later the server was down permanently.
| Jabbles wrote:
| As Mastadon increases in popularity, how do they plan to
| make the choice of server easier? If 5000 remains a rough
| optimal size, how will then how will the next 10M users
| choose from 2000 servers?
| drexlspivey wrote:
| > Can I migrate my account to another server?
|
| There is a github issue discussing using a custom domain and
| pointing DNS records to whichever instance you like but it has
| been dormant for 2 years
|
| https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/2668
| spiffytech wrote:
| This kind of solution doesn't solve the problem for laypeople
| without the technical acumen to buy+manage domains. Which
| should be a concern for all the Mastodon/ActivityPub
| supporters who want to see federated solutions overtake
| technical ones.
|
| Additionally, DNS-based identity migration doesn't address
| the grandparent's real problem, which is that they feel
| expected to choose just a single community to live in in the
| first place. They want to live at the intersection or the
| union of multiple interests simultaneously, which doesn't fit
| the Mastodon model of social interaction (but does fit e.g.,
| Twitter's).
| input_sh wrote:
| > So which one do I choose? I cannot even explore a server's
| users and posts from the community list.
|
| You can, right from the homepage of any instance.
|
| You have "discover users" button, which will show you any local
| user that wants to be there (by default you're not visible
| here, you need to opt-in in the settings).
|
| You also have "see what's happening", which will show you
| latest public posts from an instance.
|
| Using Fosstodon purely as an example:
| https://fosstodon.org/explore and https://fosstodon.org/public
| .
|
| > And then I created an account in the wrong server, and then
| what? Can I migrate my account to another server?
|
| ...kinda. You can "archive" your account and redirect your
| visitors to the new one. You can't migrate who's following you
| and who you're following.
|
| Also there's nothing stopping you from having an account on
| multiple instances, but that's mostly unnecessary since you can
| follow people regardless of what server they happen to be
| using.
| kixiQu wrote:
| https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
|
| > Moving your account is the same as redirecting your
| account, but it will also irreversibly force everyone to
| unfollow your current account and follow your new account, if
| their software supports the Move activity. Your toots will
| not be moved, due to technical limitations.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| "Getting bored" is a feature, not a bug. Also a side effect of
| not having dozens or hundreds of people who have KPIs to
| optimize for "engagement".
| 627467 wrote:
| I joined mastodon.social like everybody else years ago when it
| started. Lurked around and discovered and followed several
| accounts from various interesting communities. After a few
| months/year you can pretty much know the feel of the community
| by following enough people from it.
|
| Recently I was invited into one of those communities and I just
| used the migration feature in mastodon. Went pretty smoothly. I
| guess it went easier for me as I didn't mind "losing" my toots
| in this new era. For those who need/want to keep everything it
| maybe problematic.
|
| My motto on modern web is: don't get too attached to things you
| don't own. You can't own a community so you shouldn't worry
| about losing it.
| jwildeboer wrote:
| Nah. Just go masto.host with your own sub domain and pay the few
| bucks a month to enjoy true decentralisation. Meet me as
| jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net.
| olah_1 wrote:
| If it really was a few bucks per month, I would consider it.
| Frankly though, I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone
| that thinks their random thoughts are worth $8 USD per month.
| andrewzah wrote:
| That's not quite accurate. Parent comment was referring to
| self-hosting their own instance (as opposed to joining a
| hosted instance like mastodon.social, or whatever). It costs
| nothing to join those, but some people like having their own
| node on the federated network.
|
| If you have a raspberry pi you can self-host pleroma and
| still follow mastodon users that you like. Mastodon is a bit
| resource intensive for a pi still, I believe.
| jb1991 wrote:
| > Mastodon is to Linux what Twitter is to Windows.
|
| Weird phrasing there! I think the author meant:
|
| Mastodon is to Twitter what Linux is to Windows.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| It checks out though!
|
| Let ML be the difference between Mastodon and Linux, and
| Twitter and Windows differ by ML too. That reflects the
| original sentence.
|
| Let's call MT the difference between Mastodon and Twitter.
|
| From the first sentence, Linux is separated from Mastodon by
| ML, and from Twitter by both ML and MT, and from Windows by ML,
| and MT, and ML again. But because Twitter and Windows
| difference is analogous but opposite to Linux and Mastodon
| difference, we can ignore them, so Linux is separated from
| Windows by MT, the separation of Mastodon to Twitter.
|
| Which is exactly what the reworded version says.
| jb1991 wrote:
| Sigh.
| carlesfe wrote:
| Thanks! Fixed
| barkingcat wrote:
| There's no way to use a website "wrong" ... clickbait title.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| I thought it was a much less clickbait title than the standard
| "you are using X wrong"
| betwixthewires wrote:
| For me that would mean I see one other person and a bot. I do
| like my instance though, the other person is the admin and is a
| reasonable person.
|
| I've been on larger instances with more interesting people
| before.
|
| I've found following certain instances and looking for people
| that interest you works better.
| amelius wrote:
| Mastodon should implement "events" as they exist in Facebook.
|
| And provide a scraper for FB events which users can run.
| mxuribe wrote:
| The fediverse has the beginnings of (federated) events - and
| associated software. There is great desire for this
| functionality all around. Not sure if @Gargron (the creator and
| main contributor of Mastodon) will be implementing this on his
| Mastodon software or if he'll incorporate what others
| accomplish around the standard/protocol (also, not sure if
| ActiviyPub does or does not include events already).
|
| Here are some fediverse platforms that are already making
| forays into events (which will/should eventually be used by
| platforms such as Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.):
|
| https://joinmobilizon.org/en/faq
|
| https://gettogether.community/about/
| input_sh wrote:
| FramaSoft is building exactly that (minus the scraping):
| https://joinmobilizon.org/en/
|
| Supports federation, so you should be able to RSVP using
| Mastodon or any other compatible software.
| mxuribe wrote:
| Oops, i guess i should have refreshed before my posting. :-)
| amelius wrote:
| Interesting. How do they plan to solve the problem of the
| "network effect" (i.e. event organizers posting events only
| to FB because it has the most users?)
| TobTobXX wrote:
| Unfamiliar with FB. What are those "Events"?
| amelius wrote:
| Organizations post events. Users indicate that they go to
| these events by clicking the "Going" button. Friends of these
| users then know where to go to see their friends (or to find
| the best place to go to see most of their friends).
| grishka wrote:
| I will have events as they exist in VK in my project.
| kixiQu wrote:
| * You can move your account to a different local server * If you
| use a personal server for privacy reasons, you can still get into
| Mastodon! My tactic was to look at the profile of anyone who was
| boosted onto my timeline a couple times and to be very liberal
| with follows... and then to unfollow anyone whose posts ended up
| being more annoying than valuable. It's not as a big deal because
| you will only see that person's content; if you end up following
| someone you don't like, it won't "pollute your recommendations"
| or whatever.
| eznzt wrote:
| Twitter used to be like you are describing 10-12 years ago. At
| least in my country, which is not small, it kinda felt like
| everybody knew everybody. With time it just turned into... well,
| what Twitter is now, so I left years ago. I've wanted to find an
| alternative to it (and IRC), but I don't think a clone with even
| more draconian moderation rules is the way to go. Also, as I get
| older I just don't feel like dealing with this kind of stuff.
| grishka wrote:
| Sorry but I have to disagree. Most connections most people have
| on social media are with those they already know. This is what
| Mastodon ignores. Mastodon assumes you want to follow random
| like-minded people, but offers absolutely no tools for the
| overwhelmingly more relevant use case of finding your existing
| friends in the fediverse and following them. In other words, it
| offers no sensible way to bootstrap your network.
|
| This leads to a weird UX: you pick an instance, you sign up, you
| flip through the onboarding, and _now what_? This lack of
| discernible way forward drives people away. They sign up, play
| with it for a bit, like some cat pictures Eugen boosts, and
| abandon their account.
|
| Virtually all social services that had any semblance of success
| offered at least one of two ways to bootstrap your network when
| you signed up: a global search of some sort, or importing your
| contact list form somewhere else (Facebook/Twitter, phonebook,
| etc). Mastodon offers none. Now, I understand that it's a
| technical challenge to have anything resembling globally-
| searchable account directory in a decentralized environment, but
| it's certainly solvable. I'm thinking of DHT for my fediverse
| project for example.
| olah_1 wrote:
| > Mastodon, instead, has an extra layer between your network and
| the whole world: messages from people on your server. This is
| called the local timeline.
|
| This is not the right way to do decentralized social media imo.
|
| Why not just use a real social graph? If I want to branch out,
| just show me all of my 2nd degree contacts (friends of friends)
| and their content?
| bubersson wrote:
| It doesn't sound like you tried it? If so, I would suggest you
| give mastodon a try.
|
| The way how I think about this is that there is a free and open
| market of communities and community rules. You can choose the
| one that resonates the most with you.
|
| E.g. if you are in any way into Open Source, you could check
| out https://fosstodon.org/public to get a feel for the
| conversations that happen there.
| olah_1 wrote:
| > You can choose the one that resonates the most with you.
|
| Thank you for the kind comment, but I have browsed the
| servers before and nothing resonated with me. I don't want to
| be attached to any one "movement" and I can't be bothered to
| run my own server for something I'm not sold on.
| andrewzah wrote:
| I believe the idea is like-minded people will join the same
| node as you. E.g. fosstodon, ruby.social, writing.exchange
| probably have people interested in those things. Or non-English
| speaking instances, etc.
|
| Not to mention people interested in the same rules like nudity
| being outright forbidden or being hidden by a spoiler tag.
| maddyboo wrote:
| The biggest issue for me is that I have more than one serious
| interest. I don't want to pick just one. I feel this design
| encourages monoculture and echo chambers rather than
| diversity of ideas.
| kixiQu wrote:
| this is why it's very common for people to have multiple
| alts on mastodon, different from twitter where I basically
| only see alts for nsfw content.
| enneff wrote:
| On the contrary I think this design encourages a lot of
| different cultures to develop. Each instance had its own
| rules and etiquette, so the diversity of tone and topic
| across mastodon is greater than on twitter ime.
| gargron wrote:
| > Mastodon, instead, has an extra layer between your network
| and the whole world: messages from people on your server. This
| is called the local timeline
|
| This is oddly phrased and does not correspond to technical
| reality. Mastodon is a system of accounts that post messages
| that are delivered directly to followers, be they on your or
| other servers. Everything else is basically cosmetic. The local
| timeline is just a way to have a look into all public posts
| that originated on your server, the federated timeline is a
| look into all public posts that your server has received.
| olah_1 wrote:
| Thank you for clarifying. I posted some critiques around
| activity pub last year and a developer assured me that they
| are already aware and working to solve them.
|
| Have you personally been involved in pushing forward more
| portable identities / user data? Or do you believe that
| things should stay as they are?
| mxuribe wrote:
| May i infer from your question that you have not experienced
| the fediverse (nor software like Mastodon) yet? If not, may i
| invite you to kindly give it a try. Beyond the users of one's
| network and the local timeline, there is also what is known as
| the "whole known network". At some points, it is quite broad
| and doses not address the perceived shortcoming that you
| asked/commented on. At other times - because of how the
| different instaces and their relevant users are connected - it
| may in effect operate in a fashion that you noted. No offense
| to you, but normally, i would not go out of my way to invite
| folks to the fediverse...but it sounds like your question is
| legitimate so i really wish to invite you so that you can learn
| for yourself how deep the rabbit hole can go. Please visit
| https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse
|
| Enjoy!
| olah_1 wrote:
| > May i infer from your question that you have not
| experienced the fediverse (nor software like Mastodon) yet?
|
| Thank you for the kind reply, but I think that would be an
| incorrect inference, because I actually provided you with a
| more natural solution to "branching out" than a server
| timeline. Use a user's own social graph to discover new
| content. I don't want to be associated with a movement,
| hobby, or niche club. I just want to be myself.
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