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@mekkaokereke I am working to get my coworker away from X, but when I show them the options they all claim that Mastodon is difficult. None of them actually looked at it when stating that.

It functions in a different way, and one of those advantages for me is that it doesn't feel like it is all focused on growth, reach and bug numbers.

@wsslmn @mekkaokereke the most difficult thing there is to pick a server you like. (this is not a joke toward your friends,more joke of mine ones)

@khaleer_art @wsslmn @mekkaokereke When I came over I just took the path of least resistance... Set up on mastodon.social for a few months until I got the feel for things. Then, when I couldn't make an informed decision, I migrated to my current server. Being on that huge server had the benefit of having a very active server and global feed, which made finding people to follow fairly easy.

@juergen_hubert I agrre on G+! Being engaged there led to (for me at least) absurdly many real world effects through the people I got to know there. I even had waffles with you Jürgen in a coffee shop here in Trondheim :)

@mekkaokereke

@larsivi @mekkaokereke Those were the days!

And back in 2013 I made a friend there - a black woman from South Africa who emigrated to Germany - who is still one of my best friends today.

Google+ was far more international than Mastodon is.

@juergen_hubert @larsivi @mekkaokereke Than *which* Mastodon? Some of the servers? The entire federation? I don’t really understand the point you’re making — and without clarification it might imply something else.

@ckent @larsivi @mekkaokereke Mastodon in its entirety.

It's heavily populated by Europeans and North Americans, and _white_ Europeans and North Americans at that. It's hard to find a lot of people outside of that bubble.

"Mastodon in it's entirety"

conflating Mastodon.social with Mastodon *IS* the problem. seeing a litany of sites co-branded sites as mastodon is confusing.

what's worse: for an instance like Black Mastodon, you have to apply and wait for an answer. to this day i never received a yes or no. if you notice, AM BLACK.

came to .social because after literally YEARS , found people i know here.

so, no.

there is no ease of joining.

at all.

@juergen_hubert @ckent @larsivi @mekkaokereke

@blogdiva @ckent @larsivi @mekkaokereke The vast majority of Mastodon instances are run by amateur enthusiasts.

Nothing against amateur enthusiasts - I count myself among them (albeit in a different field) - but ultimately the backbone of any system are the people who display a certain level of professionalism. And with amateur enthusiasts you never know what you are dealing with unless you observe them for some time.

A further problem is that how much time and effort you can commit to such hobby projects is highly dependent on your life circumstances. People in developed countries with stable sources of income - which statistically speaking is likely to mean "white people" - have it easier to to find the time for projects like running a Mastodon instance than people in less stable circumstances, even though the benefits for an independent social media system would be even greater for them (as the owners of commercial social media definitely don't have their best interest in mind).

@juergen_hubert @blogdiva @ckent @larsivi @mekkaokereke when I first got a mastodon account the amateur enthusiast in me bought a fun domain to run a mastodon server on and then the software professional in me read the installation instructions and decided I should not inflict my inept sysadmin skills on others with software that's this complicated to run and scale.

same! and for what? to have it hosted somewhere that's just a front for AWS? without real, bare metal infrastructure, you can't grow beyond a certain point.

am still trying to articulate what am building for myself with Backdrop/Drupal, but basically: there is a lot of wasted potential by not having these apps locally hosted and just use public instances as relays.

@blikkie @juergen_hubert @ckent @larsivi @mekkaokereke

@KathyJones @mekkaokereke When you say “M”, which Mastodon server do you mean? All of them? Do you explore the different communtiies, each of whom live on separate servers?

@ckent @mekkaokereke Much too complicated. I interact with people from different servers, but it can be bewildering.

@drukac @NaClKnight @mekkaokereke If a power user wants that they should understand *why* it happens. I don’t expect casual users to, but power users frustrated with that should. And there are reasons. One is design and one is tech. The tech is; this stuff isn’t central; different servers “heard the gossip” at different times. They don’t always match yet.
The other is; instances are moderated. By design. Pick one that agrees with your wants.

@mattwilcox @drukac @mekkaokereke

Wait, how did I end up tagged in this?

@NaClKnight @drukac @mekkaokereke You boosted it, and Mona - the client I use - just includes you in the reply by default. Will untag you :)

@mattwilcox @drukac @mekkaokereke

Thanks. That's hella annoying as a default app behavior.

@drukac @mekkaokereke I get why that feels weird. I also get why it’s the case though. One is “what my server knows about atm” and the other is “I have gone to the source to check what changed since my server saw it”.

The server you’re on is not (and can’t be) real-time, it can’t cache all responses to all posts everywhere (because server & network limits). So what your server shows is a snapshot. To do anything else the servers would all need infinite resources.

@drukac @mekkaokereke It’s a problem but also unavoidable. I’d expect that there is room for clients to do more (like go out and do the “get the source”) as you click to view the conversation… but that has its own issues (like the load on the source server could become unmanageable).

Essentially… it’s not the same thing as centralised services, and can’t be. Mastodon is a ton of caches of different ages. But that’s what allows it to avoid one owner/dictator.

@mattwilcox @mekkaokereke
Why is it unavoidable? When an external browser accesses a link, the search query will bring down whatever's on that link at that moment. Why can't an instance do the same, execute a new query every time a member of the instance clicks on a link? I accept it will take more resources, which raises costs and puts a burden on those contributing financially. But this doesn't sound unavoidable to me.

1/2

@mattwilcox @mekkaokereke

There may be a technical reason but this issue goes deep. Potentially I can see an explosive post on my feed, but not the fact-checking reply to it that disproves it.

Also, Mastodon will never rise up to the heights of Twitter at its best, when it reports world events live. On Masto, there will be gaps. And (I believe that) if someone maliciously reports an instance, valuable live news sources will be censored as events happen.

2/2

@drukac Agreed - tho I don't want it to be like Twitter at its height; in the end, I don't need that scale to stay informed. I've not missed anything here (that I care about). But it's true that info is delayed. In the end, it's both moderation and data-freshness issues.

TLDR; Mastodon can't be near real-time & comprehensive about data on other instances - and that means it doesn't suit some types of use as well as Twitter.

But it solves other issues Twitter can't. @mekkaokereke

@mattwilcox @mekkaokereke
Thanks for taking the time to explain it. I think we're both where each started. Since Masto cannot scale (or if it decides never to try), it will never fill the vacuum of larger platforms.

Don't get me wrong: I like being here. It suits my needs. But the inherent broken-up-edness of the technology means one has to treat it like a hobbyists' platform. The content may be good, but it comes in a pastoral manner.

@drukac @mekkaokereke Yeah, agreed :) Personally I don’t mind because this is the sort of experience I’m happy to have. That said; I didn’t use Twitter in the same way as many do. For my uses, this is much more like the old Twitter I liked so much, and less like the noise and anger bath Twitter became later.

@mattwilcox @mekkaokereke
Twitter was so good for some forms of live reporting that I benefited from it without having an account. Blogs and Discord servers fed from it. Even if the platform was a bit too loud to use directly, it served as a live feed of, well, anything. There's a multiplier effect, or at least there was one. Not sure about it in the future.

@drukac If we want every time anyone looks at anything to have the most recent info, there can't be any cache - it has to go fetch it. That's a lot of work.

Worse; it's also a DDOS attack on other people's servers. If you have 100 users following one account, and you're not using a cache, then you're sending 100 requests for that same info to the other server.

The TLDR is... Mastodon engineers aren't stupid. There are reasons its the way it is.
@mekkaokereke

@ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke I have tried to get lefty media guys and political parties interested in Mastodon -- and they seem to not get it. Wondering what else to do.

@mistergibson @mekkaokereke There was a whole wave of Australian journalists and prominent #auspol Twitter users who moved to Mastodon when Elon first bought the bird app.

Some moved back to X, others moved on to Threads and BlueSky.

Many who tried Masto for a time ended up on BlueSky.

I think there's a few reasons why that happened.

The onboarding journey and the default app, especially two years ago but still today, just weren't great.

There have also been issues with moderation and harassment.

There's issues, like quotes, that were supported by other Fedi apps but not Mastodon.

With credit to the Mastodon developers, some of those issues have been fixed, just nig nearly fast enough.

I definitely think there's value in Mastodon and the Fediverse more broadly.

But I'm now a lot less sure that role will be "the new Twitter".

@ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke @mistergibson It's blasphemy here to want to track how much traffic gets driven back to your website from social media posts. You're also not supposed to care about likes and boosts. But most people who write for a living or represent the public want some idea whether what they're posting is resonating.
I came here because the R community did, and I like it! But I still need other platforms for other topics & likely always will

@smach @ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke I fully support experimentation regarding the Fedi. Time to bust out the code editor?

@mistergibson @ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke I created my own searchable, sortable table of work-topic-related posts, including likes and boosts, back when I was still working to easily see which of mine were most popular. It's still running

https://www.machlis.com/mastodon.php

Didn't bother trying to track traffic to my articles here, I knew adding tracking code or using short links would bug people.

@MishaVanMollusq @mekkaokereke Do you mean me personally?

If that was my big concern, I would have been on X or Instagram these past 2+ years instead of here.

It's more that I'm disappointed that many people who I respect, some of whom were regular Mastodon users for a very long time, have recently stopped posting here.

They're now on BlueSky.

There was a real opportunity with Twitter imploding for the Fediverse to fill that void.

That means decentralised, open source, non-commercial social media based on open standards could have been the standard.

That window of opportunity is now nearly closed.

And honestly, I feel disappointed that's the case.

I think there is an opportunity for Mastodon to be the place for slower, more thoughtful, longer form conversations with a stronger community.

And maybe that's what Mastodon was better suited to all along?

@ajsadauskas @MishaVanMollusq @mekkaokereke

I will suppose in a few months Bsky's VC money will run out. How will they fund the servers then? Sell user info? Ask for donations? Show ads? Sell the whole platform to Google?

The possibilities are endless, but all options are bad for the users. It will drive some more users here.

@ScottStarkey @ajsadauskas @MishaVanMollusq

This is a super fair question! I don't think it's true that "All options are bad." But it's an equally fair question for Mastodon. How are we gonna pay for Mastodon stuff?

The core Mastodon team is underfunded. People working on Trust & Safety features are underfunded. Moderators are underfunded. Admining an instance is too expensive. Etc.

Some money comes with strings, but some strings are really chains.

We need other ways to pay for stuff.

@ScottStarkey @ajsadauskas @MishaVanMollusq

BlueSky has said that their plan is to charge a subscription price for premium features. I think the math does work out for them. We'll see if they can execute, but so far, they've been pretty good at both execution and not bloating their operational costs (assumptions based on team size and infra).

They may still have a blind spot with race, but it's relatively less than most other options at the moment. And they're hiring Trust and Safety folks.

@j_low @ScottStarkey @ajsadauskas @MishaVanMollusq

Ro. Jaz. Emily. Renaud. Oliphant. Seirdy. A bunch of people running Hachyderm and other key instances. Every single moderator. Anyone involved with IFTAS, The Bad Space, or any number of other projects.

That's most of what stands between Fediverse users and online hate and abuse.

@ScottStarkey @mekkaokereke @ajsadauskas @MishaVanMollusq

Mastodon already has “a 501(c)(3) non-profit entity in the United States aimed at facilitating our efforts, including being able to receive tax-deductible U.S. donations and in-kind support.”

What can be done to drive effective US and international fund raising for Mastodon support and development?

A few big lighthouse donors (no strings or conflicts) would help.

But how about people and allied non-profits?

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/04/mastodon-forms-new-u.s.-non-profit/