Comment by philliphaydon
3 years ago
If it was advertised as mastodon I would close the webpage. I have 0 interest in it and I don’t know anyone in my direct tech circle who is on it.
3 years ago
If it was advertised as mastodon I would close the webpage. I have 0 interest in it and I don’t know anyone in my direct tech circle who is on it.
You really have no interest in the concept of a non-corporate / non–billionaire-controlled Twitter? Not trying to bait you, but genuinely curious on your stance.
I believe the issue for many people is not the "non-corporate / non-billionaire-control" part, and more the "twitter" part. It may sound weird to people who use twitter, but much of the world don't have the slightest interest in the concept.
It makes no difference if the person controlling it is a billionaire good guy or bad guy. The result is the same. If you go down the route of mastodon then all you’re doing is segregation.
In scenario A you pool people together into 1 big void and everyone gets angry and both sides consider each other wrong.
In scenario B you segregate people into groups of opinions where the moment your opinion differs you’re kicked from that group.
Either way we are long past the time when you could have an educated conversation and debate.
I have no desire to join a void with single opinions and nothing to discuss.
The whole point of federated activitypub servers is the opposite of segregation - everyone gets to use whatever server they want and they can still interact with anyone else. Servers blacklisting each other (or defederating) is possible of course, but nothing's stopping you from just joining another server, and twitter at this point is just a large defederated mastodon instance anyway.
1 reply →
You're misunderstanding the concept of Mastodon.
Not parent commenter but; I personally don't have any interest in what you described. Especially when it's something like mastodon, which is inferior in almost every aspect.
- All clients are straight up bad but this is mostly personal opinion. - I don't want to maintain and pay for a personal instance - On public instances there is always the risk of the admins deciding not to run it anymore without notice. In that case you lose all your followers. - Due to how it's designed; some things are very inconvenient. For example; when I click a link to someone's profile on the internet, I can't see if I follow them or not unless they are on my server. Then I have to copy their url, go to my instance, search and follow. Too much friction for a simple and one of the most important actions of the platform. - With these inconveniences (that are not easy to solve without centralization), it's imho impossible for it to go mainstream. It requires a certain level of tech-saviness. Even the concept of "choosing an instance" is confusing for most people. I don't want to just follow or be followed by techbros and edgy artists. I like having normal converstaions with regular people.
I would be interested in an alternative to Twitter but in its current state, Mastodon isn't that.
>when I click a link to someone's profile on the internet, I can't see if I follow them or not unless they are on my server. Then I have to copy their url, go to my instance, search and follow. Too much friction for a simple and one of the most important actions of the platform.
I get that is quite a UX/UI problem. However, given what is now known about FAANG and big tech corp, I would rather have my data unreliable and use bad UX/UI for online exchange then to use the mainstream big corp platforms. Personally I don't want to be a product.
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Not disagreeing with you that there is an amount of friction at the moment. However, just to provide some counterpoints:
> All clients are straight up bad but this is mostly personal opinion.
There are a _lot_ of new clients in active development right now. I'm on the private alpha of Ivory by Tapbots (who built the popular Tweetbot client), and it's quite good.
> On public instances there is always the risk of the admins deciding not to run it anymore without notice. In that case you lose all your followers.
Agreed that this is an issue, but there are ways around it. I'm a member of a coop-run instance, social.coop.
> Due to how it's designed; some things are very inconvenient. For example; when I click a link to someone's profile on the internet, I can't see if I follow them or not unless they are on my server. Then I have to copy their url, go to my instance, search and follow.
Agreed, but most clients resolve this.
> it's imho impossible for it to go mainstream.
Strong disagree - I think it's already going mainstream, and lots of non-tech people are picking it up every day.
> Even the concept of "choosing an instance" is confusing for most people. I don't want to just follow or be followed by techbros and edgy artists. I like having normal converstaions with regular people.
Agreed, but this is resolved by just picking one of the big, popular instances. I was on universeodon.com first, and was immediately having "normal" conversations with "regular" people.
Again, your comment absolutely rightfully points out that there _is_ friction there. However, I don't think it's at all insurmountable, and I think it will continue to improve and gain traction.
I generally agree, but Mastodon is getting a lot of dev attention right now due to the Twitter problems, and while FOSS tends to improve slower and more incrementally, it also tends to only improve (as opposed to user-hostile pivots and so forth). For this use case, I'd rather use a clunky service that'll be around for the rest of my life than a slick one that might get bought by Elon Jr or whoever.
This assumes "I" had interest in Twitter at some point.
Not the parent commenter, but mastodon is not appealing if you want a large audience.