[HN Gopher] Mastodon for Android app is officially released ___________________________________________________________________ Mastodon for Android app is officially released Author : riffic Score : 52 points Date : 2022-04-18 19:46 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (play.google.com) (TXT) w3m dump (play.google.com) | ushakov wrote: | fun fact: the app was built by HN user grishka, who previously | worked on VK and Telegram Android clients. He's got upset with | the state of social media and turned to Mastodon/ActivityPub | zagrebian wrote: | How does the mobile web app compare? | TheAceOfHearts wrote: | Would love to hear from people that use Mastodon on a daily | basis. What is your experience like? How do you find interesting | people? | | I'm on Twitter every day, mostly following artists, tech people, | and political shitposters. | nimbius wrote: | ugh, i tried. i really tried, and i really really wanted to | love this but eventually came to find it inherited all the | trash neoconservative hot takes, woke culture virtue signaling | and micro-aggression bellyaching that twitter has. | | its a "federated" service only insofar as large groups of | admins openly advocate for, and agree to ban traffic from | certain servers with speech they disagree with, so thats also | been a sticking point with me as well. | kstrauser wrote: | Eh. I love Mastodon, and host a reasonably busy server. The | official apps are just _OK_ , though. In particular, they | deliberately leave out the critical "local" timeline showing | posts from users on that server. That's half the point of having | a federated network: each instance can have its own "feel "or | "flavor". Cutting new users off from an easy way to see what | their neighbors are talking about makes servers almost fungible. | riffic wrote: | there are multiple clients to choose from, and third-party | clients (as far as I know) maintain the "local" timeline. | | The project made an intentional design decision here regarding | their own official client, and personally I don't have feelings | one way or another about that choice. It's good to hear the | use-case towards local timeline inclusion though. | kstrauser wrote: | I've posted some links to variously decent iOS apps at | https://honeypot.net/post/mastodon-apps-for-ios/ . I'd | strongly encourage a new user to chose from one of those | (IMHO better) apps than to use the official, limited version. | jeroenhd wrote: | I love the idea of Mastodon but none of the people I follow on | social media are using it. I wonder if there's some kind of web | service that re-toots tweets from twitter so I can ditch the | crappy Twitter web app and slowly move towards the fediverse at | the same time. So far I've only seen publisher-oriented services, | but I what I actually want is a combined feed of tweets and | toots. | ushakov wrote: | technically it's possible to mirror tweets from Twitter | directly, just find a Mastodon instance which supports this | [deleted] | bifrost wrote: | feed2toot can do some of it, but you'd need to build something | to automate your feed/etc. | | Its also probably against Twitter's TOS to tweet2toot so YMMV. | 2Gkashmiri wrote: | I run a small 2 person family pleroma instance. I truly believe | fediverse to be the best thing to happen to internet in a long | time because just like in my case, I can have my own server with | anyone I like. We don't need to serve 1000 people of different | tastes, if I am content with people I am comfortable, why do I | need to be exposed like on a public platform like twitter? | | Or Facebook which monetizes this same interaction for what | benefit of mine? I am getting the same/similar interaction with | people I care about, on my own dime. | ssl232 wrote: | Turns out F-Droid inclusion is pending [1]. I was surprised not | to see it there. | | [1] https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/10909 | riffic wrote: | this app is open source, code is available here: | | https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android | | this joins the previously released iOS client | (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-ios) | | I have no personal affiliation with the Mastodon project, I just | like what they're doing to liberate social networking (and there | are other Fediverse platforms to pay attention to, too!) | oneepic wrote: | I get that people love the decentralization aspect of Mastodon, | but... does it have better content than Twitter? I remember | trying it very briefly once, and the few toots I saw were similar | content -- some interesting info, but also a heap of | complaining/virtual signaling. | riffic wrote: | I've been reading recently a lot of people are getting better | engagement results than they would over at Twitter. One | example: | | https://twitter.com/atomicpoet/status/1512202694391345188 | | edit: Chris has been expounding on this engagement thing, this | goes into more detail: | | https://blog.peerverse.space/my-pixelfed-instance-is-a-bigge... | kstrauser wrote: | I believe it has much better content. The easiest way to | boostrap your friend group is to look at the local timeline and | see who posts interesting stuff, and follow them. When they | repost things from interesting people, follow those people. | Lather, rinse, and repeat. | giraffe_lady wrote: | ya that's just a description of how to use twitter tho. | what's better here other than there being a lot smaller of a | pool to draw from? | kstrauser wrote: | My personal experience has been that the most interesting | people I now chat with on Mastodon either 1) left Twitter | long ago, or 2) deliberately stayed away from it. For | instance, if you're into infosec stuff, Mastodon is a | wonderful place to be. | mattl wrote: | Very few people outside of open source tech and a couple | fandoms seem to really use Mastodon. | wirrbel wrote: | Did they add local and federated timeline support? | OberstKrueger wrote: | Based on this open issue on the repo [0], it only has federated | timeline support. The lead developer of Mastodon had this to | say with regards to not adding it to iOS[1]: | | > The omission is intentional and I do not intend to add these | types of timelines into the app. They might have made sense for | early Mastodon in November 2016 when there were less than 20k | people total and all from a homogenous demographic but nowadays | the signal to noise ratio makes them a liability in almost | every aspect. | | > [...] | | > The local and federated timelines are not going away from | other apps or the web app, to be clear. I'm simply not adding | them to this app, and if that bothers you, simply don't install | the app. | | [0] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android/issues/8 | | [1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-ios/issues/221 | lin83 wrote: | That's crazy. Local timelines are the best part of mastodon | instances. | kstrauser wrote: | This saddens me, and I truly believe it's because Mastodon's | author, Eugen, also runs the largest server, mastodon.social. | _Of course_ the local timeline there is utter chaos, | basically like the Twitter firehose. That 's absolutely not | the case for topical servers, like ones that specialize in | posts about cats, or a friend group, or a particular city. I | don't think Eugen opposes the idea out of malice, because he | seems like a pretty good guy. I think he just has a | particularly narrow view of what Mastodon is, as seen from | his perspective. | giords wrote: | From time to time I try Mastodon again and every time I ditch it. | I joined the main server mastodon.social and still as of today | it's pretty much impossible for me to perform effective searches | and find content. Maybe I'm just unable to use it, I don't know. | easrng wrote: | Don't bother with search. You really need to start out | following people you already know about, then when they boost | posts check if the people who wrote those posts are worth | following. I started following 1 person and now I follow 102 | people. | narrator wrote: | Search is where a lot of these services fail badly. The search | on most video sites besides youtube is garbage. In fact, | Youtube is so far ahead that they recently made their search | worse to satisfy other priorities besides competing with | rivals. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-04-18 23:00 UTC)