- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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It’s federated, not decentralized. Which even Mastodon itself doesn’t seem to realize or care, since they falsely advertise themselves as decentralized.
Decentralized means there is no central authority.
Federation just means there are many centralized authorities, that might or might not communicate with each other.
I really don’t see what Mastodon is supposed to solve in the long run. The server has full control and can do whatever it wants. Just look at what happened Threads.net. Big company joins the Fediverse and instead of celebrating, everybody starts thinking about defederating them. This approach is doomed to fail if it ever gets popular.
Nostr looks like a much more promising approach, with proper cryptographic identities and signatures. Nobody owns you there. Servers are just dumb relays. If one steps out of line, you can just use another one.
They don’t falsely advertise themselves as decentralized. They are decentralized even if you’ve come up with your own definition where there can be multiple “centralized” entities in control of the system.
There is no central authority in mastodon. There are many entities that are part of a federated system, just like email (which is also decentralized).
Nostr is also decentralized but it’s decentralized by a relay (? – the name of this sort of thing isn’t super well established; they’ve never really caught on) system (which is a twist on peer-to-peer models that overcomes some of the issues with peer to peer tech) instead of using federation.
There is no central authority in mastodon.
There is no centralized authority on Twitter either, because you can always go and use Facebook. The Web is a federated system where everybody just decided they don’t want to talk to anybody else.
If you make a Mastodon account your digital identity is bound to that one server. You can’t move to another server. You can’t communicate with other servers that got defederated. Exactly the same as Facebook and Twitter. It’s only decentralized up until server admins decide that it isn’t, which already has happened numerous times in the past. The whole thing is basically just based around wishful thinking. If everybody would be niche to each other and servers would run forever, it would be totally fine, but that’s not how the world works.
There are many entities that are part of a federated system, just like email
Email is a terrible protocol by modern standards and the problems of federation show in email pretty clearly, as the majority of people will stick to Gmail and a handful of other major providers. There is no reason to repeat past mistakes. The saving grace with email is that you don’t have the moral police looking through your emails and kicking you from their server when they find something they don’t like (outside of sending spam), with Mastodon on the other side they do exactly that.
There is no central authority in mastodon.
There is no centralized authority on Twitter either, because you can always go and use Facebook. The Web is a federated system where everybody just decided they don’t want to talk to anybody else.
Those are completely different products, and you’re continuing to abuse established terminology via your personal definitions.
I’m sorry but you don’t know better than everybody else about what’s centralized and what isn’t.
If you make a Mastodon account your digital identity is bound to that one server. You can’t move to another server.
Wrong again.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-to-another/
And yes, that’s a solution with flaws (though, I think followers automatically migrate now too, note this is an old blog post) but that doesn’t mean these things can’t be fixed. Ultimately federation can facilitate a sort of “data transfer” to an entry new server, automatically, but it’s a lot of work that hasn’t been completely finished yet.
It’s only decentralized up until server admins decide that it isn’t, which already has happened numerous times in the past.
If you don’t like any of the existing servers, start your own. There’s no difference from that and using relays other than a server holds your data rather than your client(s) – which is a big problem with peer-to-peer stuff.
Email is a terrible protocol by modern standards and the problems of federation show in email pretty clearly, as the majority of people will stick to Gmail and a handful of other major providers. There is no reason to repeat past mistakes.
I’ve moved providers several times. Email has pros and cons.
One pro over what mastodon has done is that you can use your own domain but somebody else’s server, which allows you to reclaim account ownerships/redirect via (basically) changing some DNS entries (which works even if the server is offline/breaks the social contract and refuses access to account migration tools). That could be implemented in mastodon too, but then again few people want to do their own domain management.
People don’t choose other providers because Google does it for free and they’re a household name. There’s not much pressure to go use Proton’s more limited free plan or pay Proton or anyone like them.
The saving grace with email is that you don’t have the moral police looking through your emails and kicking you from their server when they find something they don’t like (outside of sending spam), with Mastodon on the other side they do exactly that.
🙄
But you can move to another server, you just can’t take old posts with you
You can always move to another server. That’s just the Web. As said, don’t like Twitter? Move to Facebook. You don’t need federation for that. Having to leave everything behind is the fundamental problem that federation fails to address.
As said, don’t like Twitter? Move to Facebook.
Dumb analogy.
I can move to another Mastodon instance, and keep following the same accounts.
I can move to another Mastodon instance, and keep following the same accounts.
You can’t. What you can and can’t follow is determined by whatever the server federates with, which is not under your control. Also you lose all your followers and in case of server shutdown all the accounts on that server stop existing, so you can’t follow them either.
Federation is a brittle framework that starts collapsing the moment anybody tries to use it seriously.
All you’re arguing is that the web is decentralised, not that any given website within it is.
What do you think you are leaving behind? Your posts? Do you often go back and edit yours??
You take your network with you which is what people want to bring.
look at what happened Threads.net. Big company joins the Fediverse and instead of celebrating, everybody starts thinking about defederating them. This approach is doomed to fail if it ever gets popular.
Let’s not forget threads planned to monetize every interaction it was aware of, regardless of any direct interaction with Facebook/Meta. The public pushback probably went a long way towards setting a precedent against that sort of activity. We’re really breaking new ground here and have a chance to take back what is increasingly an essential function of society from folks who would rather fill every waking moment of your life with ads.
Let’s not forget threads planned to monetize every interaction it was aware of,
So does GMail. Making money running a bit of the network should not be a problem, quite the opposite, that just means the network won’t run out of money. This kind of arbitrary enforcing of political ideology should have no place this low in the network structure.
Let’s not forget we’re really breaking new ground here
We really aren’t. It’s just repeating what EMail and Usenet have done for 40 years.
GMail does not build an ad profile based on your emails. Let alone emails sent between two people outside of gmails network. This is absolutely a false equivalence.
Nostr is for memes and bitcoins. Toxic AF.
How does a completely decentralized platform handle data that should be removed? If some asshole starts posting CP or other fucked up shit, what exactly happens? With mastodont the server admin has the control to remove whatever he or she wants. Not perfect, but you have plenty of servers to choose from (or you can start your own).
You want something like society, mostly free but still with some ground rules. If it’s completely free there is also lots of scams and shady stuff. In the long run I think a platform like that will be banned by governments.
How does a completely decentralized platform handle data that should be removed?
You make a blacklists of forbidden content and relays can use or ignore it. It’s up to the relay, there is no central authority that can make content go away globally. Nostr is build to be censorship-resistent.
In the long run I think a platform like that
It’s not a platform, it’s just a protocol and apps using that protocol.
Because Threads is where the mainstream people are going due to ease of use/marketing/popularity and familiarity with other Meta products. Which is why Threads integration with ActivityPub and not defederating with threads.net is so key
Agree that Mastodon is good but…
Not difficult to sign up for
Yeah…about that… The choose an instance thing is confusing for a lot of people. It actually made me think twice before signing on, which is not a good thing for a platform looking to get more people on.
Not difficult to use
Well if they make it easier to follow people on other instances, sure.
Also, content discovery is not easy on Mastodon. I have to go to directories (yes, remember those?) to find out the interesting accounts on there.
Content discovery is really easy for me on Mastodon, I can search for what I want via hashtag or a post, plus the people I follow and my followers always have nice suggestions. But if your instance has low federation, you might not see much.
Yeah there are a lot of little usability things that give mastodon a lot more friction to use compared to twitter. Sure a tech savvy person can figure it out and breeze through it but for an average user being forced to choose an instance, having to figure out how to find people on other servers that arent coming in, and using other websites to search and browser addons is a lot of work.
The site has gotten a lot more usable recently, but during the first few twitter exoduses Mastodon was very rough and it’s no wonder that average users bounced off of it.
Thats not even getting into the network effect. Sure some people are there for the microblogs from anyone and building out the network effect. But twitter became mainstream with professionals. So for a lot of people the appeal of twitter was getting direct contact from celebrities and famous people, getting news from reporters as it was happening,Insight from industry professionals like writers, artists, and directors, and more! You could even get better customer service from companies because their twitter reps were more empowered to help you since your issue was more public.
Then there were the niche subjects that being big leads to. Wrestling mastodon is like 70% one guy on my timeline who is just really enthusiastic about womens wrestling(and posts news and cards for men’s stuff too probably because he notices how little is out there). On twitter you have lots of people tweeting about it along with the actual wrestlers themselves!
I really want to get off Twitter for good.
But the reality is my favorite content creators are still there and the niche community that I like are still there.
It doesn’t matter how good the platform is. If the content creators are not there it is very hard to move.
Just follow them from *@bird.makeup, unless it’s talking back to them you value
I’ve really enjoyed mastodon. The community is pretty great and it seems to have plenty of features.
Turns out if you get rid of ads and the algorithm, you end up back in the land of sanity.
Also obscurity, practically none of the content creators or companies I followed on Twitter have moved to Mastodon and getting news from them was the only purpose of that site in the first place (for me).
It just takes a bit of time, then people will evetually come to the fediverse.
This is the biggest problem with new social sites, the main reason for having them is the people on them (or not on them).
Which is part of why we should want all the popular social sites to be federated, so that holding the userbase doesn’t create an insurmountable monopoly and you can easily move to a better alternative without leaving your friends and content behind
This is why Lemmy (previously Reddit) is hugely more appealing to me than mastodon or twitter. I want sensible discussion and useful information, not to hear what some celebrity or internet persona is thinking about while they take a shit.
If you’re on xitter now. I just assume your a white supremacist. Might wanna tell your influencers that.
Knowing that there’s reasonable and friendly people like you on mastodon will surely help with the adoption
Think that’s becoming more obvious, as the general census outside of our fedi bubble is also that it’s becoming a racist shit hole.
Filter by Hot, Active and Top Day are godsends for Lemmy. I understand the lack of blackbox algorithm but zero control over your timeline outside of Chronological and tags kills Mastodon for a lot of people.
I think the UI/UX is really good now, and comparable to Twitter, and better then Threads/Bluesky. Unfortunately most don’t get that far, because onboarding on the fedi is still a very big pain point and the very first thing people have to overcome. Also actually using the fedi, people linking other instances and whatnot really breaks the experience when you wonder why you’re suddenly on an identical looking site but are signed out. I think decentralization is simply a requirement for freedom, but also it is a confusing concept for onboarding that we haven’t quite solved yet. I’m optimistic that these things can improve though.
They’ve made huge improvements to onboarding over the past few months, it’s as easy as any other app now:
- Download Mastodon app
- Make acccount
It’s literally that easy now. Anything to do with Federation (like following other users) is also hidden to the background unless you go looking for it.
The actual fedi experience for a non techy:
- Search Mastodon app
- Choose a Mastodon app, which one is the official, which one is the best, there’s so many!
- Instances? Why can’t I just sign up with Mastodon, what’s going on?
- Okay, why are these all different rules, what does this mean, and why are they all different?
- What am I actually signing up for? Who owns this instance, which I don’t understand the concept of? Will it randomly shut down?
- Who am I giving this personal data too?
- Okay, how do I find content, why is my feed so boring?
- Okay I clicked somebody’s link and it takes me to a different website, why can’t I like/reply/follow? Where am I?
At each one of these steps, there’s a new learning curve. If it’s not easy enough for your grandma, then it needs improvement.
You should try the sign up process, you don’t understand it. Explore tab shows you top posts on your instance to follow and no one posts links to masto comments because it doesn’t look good.
The only actually confusing thing is people trying to quote tweet when it isn’t possible, and maybe losing followers when there’s server defed drama. Thankfully there hasn’t been any recently.
Right, that used to be how it was done, but it’s not anymore. The very first result in the iPhone app store and Google play store is the official app. The official app has not prompted the user to choose an instance since May of this year.
Many of the other questions (like about data and privacy) are extremely valid but also apply to any app, so by that logic Twitter for example would have considerably more steps than Mastodon simply by virtue of a significantly more complicated TOS.
Normies will not even come to mastadon so no need to dumb down the experience to grandma level. They will use Facebook or X just like they will use windows and edge. They use computers as if they were TVs, never changing any defaults even.
I think I’ve started learning that I’m kind of ok with that barrier to entry… I mean, it’s pretty fucking low. It’s not that difficult to understand if you are willing to take 5 mins to learn how it works.
Don’t want to be gatekeeper-y or anything, but maybe if you can’t pass that simple test, then the overall discourse is better off without you in it.
