Comment by htormey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by htormey | Hacker News Reader

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Mastodon really isn’t a replacement for Twitter. The original Wired article did a poor job of critiquing it.

I think this guy does a much better job of critiqueing Mastodon than the article linked in the parent post.

https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e...

Key points:

“The foremost problem is that federation is a lie. Well, it’s partially a lie. The benefits described above do work; if you send a message to anyone at @username@custom.website, it will be delivered to them. But if @custom.website is a domain that mastodon.social deems inappropriate, replies from that users on that domain don’t show up in your notifications or on your feed, unless you explicitly follow them. So if you’re having a conversation with your friend, @person@custom.website, and another user from custom.website wants to chime in, they will be invisible to you.”

And

“Suppose you’re a semi-famous content publisher. You have 10,000 followers on Twitter, whom you converse with regularly and have a large history of communications with. If you decide to switch networks to something like Mastodon, you immediately come into contact with the Hardest Problem of Identity on the Internet, which is that your social graph is not portable between platforms.”

I feel these are two very important limitations to understand about Mastodon.

I see Mastodon as basically Wordpress for people who want a twitter like experience off of twitter. Aka niche communities.

So far, @otheruser@custom.website is probably @gamergater@assholes.town in practice.

If you're happy with having people like that show up in your mentions, then you're quite free to go find an instance that is "focused on free speech" that will cheerfully federate toots from brownshirt.party, angrywhiteboysontheintern.et, and babyrape.horse.

Personally I consider this a feature, not a bug. Nonetheless, it seems to have been been fixed in the latest release of Mastodon: https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-and-the-w3c-f75f376f422

As to the "social graph is not portable" problem, this one applies to every single social network. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, that app your kid* downloaded yesterday that you've never heard of but will be constantly told is the Hot New Place All The Teens Are Going next year, all of these social networks face this problem.

For the first, you're always at the mercy of the whims of the mods for whatever service you're on. The difference with federated services is that you can move to or even set up a server with different mods. Can't do that with Twitter.

For the second, that's a limitation of Twitter. If you had 10,000 followers on a federated system, you could switch networks and your old followers could just re-follow you there. They wouldn't have to switch with you.

Yep, fair points. To clarify, I think Mastodon is really cool and a big step in the right direction. I don't mean to come across as overly critical.

I do feel the second issue he raises is still valid. re-following is a lot of friction, even in a federated system, albeit less so than moving from one centralized service to another. It would be nice if Mastodon provided some way of altering users when someone switches to a new instance.

That would still require your followers to know about it, and do something.

I think like in any (federated) service (email/jabber/web etc), it makes sense to bind your identity to your own domain, so you can move it between providers. This gives you mostly the benefits of both worlds (fixed handle and provider independence).

Not sure if mastodon supports (widely) such use yet, but if it doesn't I sure hope it is somewhere high on their priority list.

I can see that first point as a potential problem, but also a good thing. If GamerGaters decide to pile on you, you probably won't see it. Which is a good thing.

I agree. It’s a double edged sword. I can see scenarios where I’d want something like this.

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