Eugen Rochko is doing an "ask me anything" now in the Mastodon subreddit if anyone is curious.
If you're looking for a social protocol that is even more decentralized than federated sites like Mastodon, have a look at Nostr. Every user account is just a public/private key pair. When you create a post, you sign it with you private key and the post is stored on a relay server. Anyone can run a relay server.
I find Nostr much more exciting than federated sites, b/c it uses decentralized ids. You never have to worry about losing your social graph due to a federated server admin shutting down their server or banning you.
> If you are unfamiliar with Mastodon, you will no doubt wonder what the big deal is. How is this one going to be any different than its slimy competitors?
I think it's important to remind people that Mastodon isn't a "competitor" to proprietary social media, it's an alternative.
No one cares whether you use Mastodon or not-- I mean people do care, they like you and want to interact with you, that's not what I'm getting at. I mean that no one is getting paid or not if you do or don't use Mastodon. In other words, there's no stock ticker for it, there's no investors, no executives, no marketing dept., etc. It's just folks talking to each other, on their own terms, over the Internet.
It's a totally different thing than Twitter. They only superficially resemble each other in some of the UI.
> (As long as I am ranting: what the hell is up with billionaires, anyway? Quite a few of them have accumulated more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes, but still they want more. It’s disgraceful.)
I mean its more like equity than real money they can directly spend.
Also most of their wealth is in companies that are no where near worth their marketcap, such as Tesla which isn't even close to VW in sales, yet somhow is worth more.
So once the hype dies down, or the founder sells enough stocks, the market cap is going to take a nose dive for sure.
And as rich as elon is, we have seen how he is putting Billions into twitter, so they can spend it, just not in normal lifetime stuff.
> Yes, Mastodon is more difficult to use than whatever social media platforms you are on now.
What about Mastodon is more difficult to use? Isn't it just choosing a server, typing its URL, signing up for a new account and then you are ready to post?
The UX does not look any more difficult than Twitter either. Both support search, hashtags, following people, creating lists, retweets (called boost in Mastodon), commenting. The UX looks and behaves similarly too. So why do people say that Mastodon is more difficult to use?
> Right about the time a product achieves a near-monopoly, some genius product manager decides it is time to tighten the screws. Make search just a little bit worse, so the company can make more from ads. Make the user’s experience just a little bit worse, to increase engagement, and make more money from ads.
That's exactly why capitalism must be regulated.
People should also check out Bluesky and Nostr. Both are open protocols for social media.
When your revolution against "platforms" is led by people who host all their code on GitHub and have a public LinkedIn profile, you're not paying attention to your surroundings and will inevitably be taken advantage of.
(i stole the title from mike masnick. if he's upset about that, i would be happy to credit him, or change it.)
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>I can’t say that Twitter was exactly an exception to this rule, for me. I never liked it enough to contribute my own content to it. I do like its userbase enough to have spent many hours reading it, over the last couple of years. That all came to a screeching halt in the last month or so, when it was acquired by a tyrant.
Oh my hyperbole, what would we do without you?!
>Then came the exodus from Twitter, due to the tyrannical new owner. Many of the voices that I have come to appreciate the most are leaving. In particular, the ones with the highest morals were the first to jump ship. As well they should! If you stay on Twitter, the way it is now, and continue to contribute your content to it, then you are saying that you approve of the tyrant-in-chief banning reporters for writing about things that make him look bad.
Oh my hyperbole! It's interesting to see the dichotomy between people who think Twitter was a safe haven and people who think it was a hellhole.
And you can both support that Elon Musk shouldn't have been so trigger happy banning reporters without a clear policy in place AND that doxxing should earn you an instantaneous and permanent ban.
> Its decentralized nature makes some things a lot more difficult to pull off than its competitors.
Help me understand one thing about Mastodon. We choose a Mastodon server to create account. What is decentralized about it? Doesn't choosing a server make it effectively centralized? I choose mastodon.social. What is there to stop mastodon.social from a change of ownership that makes it fall in the hands of people who take user-hostile decisions?
I know we can create a new account on a new Mastodon server and move all the followers but that's about it. We can only move the followers. We cannot move our post history. So when I choose mastodon.social or any Mastodon server, am I not putting all my eggs in one basket again?