Hacker News Reader

Comment by mintplant | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon [0] has a default character limit of 500, which individual instances can turn up or down as they see fit (Mastodon is a federated network). Hundreds of thousands of people use it and the social dynamics work just fine, or even better, with the additional breathing room for expression. To me Twitter's attachment to such a low cap feels like an anachronism.

[0] https://joinmastodon.org

View on HN

I've been using it for about 2 weeks now and I love it. If you pick a cool instance related to your interests and toot to your liking, you often get responses almost instantly from people reading the local and federated timelines, and you get tons of new people to follow as well. It just feels so much more open to meeting new people than Twitter does.

It doesn't just feel like an anachronism, it is one. The cap was chosen to conform to the 160 character limit of SMS (140 characters in the tweet and 20 characters for your Twitter handle).

Very cool but too nerdy.

Visiting that site requires clicking "Get Started" which then directs you to a list of instances, from which you choose a server and sign up (not sure because in the age of 140 chars don't have the attention span to follow through). Without doing that there's no content short of a bunch of reasons why Mastodon is open and free, but the average user doesn't care about that. It's kind of preaching to the choir which means that the choir is gonna dominate it.

Maybe the goal isn't mass adoption, or maybe adoption would be a long term result of smaller communities getting popular, but wish it'd just get to the product a lot quicker than it does.

You could point people to https://mastodon.social, the "flagship" instance, or directly to any other instance's homepage. There's something of a word-of-mouth aspect here, in that instances targeted toward particular communities can be more attractive to people within those communities than general-purpose social networks.

There's an instance chooser wizard at https://instances.social/, but I can see someone looking at that and calling it too complicated as well.

> Mastodon

> Mastodon hosted on mastodon.social

Umm what?

> What is mastodon.social?

> mastodon.social is the "flagship" instance, belonging to the Mastodon project.

...sure.

> Twitter

> Twitter is hosted on twitter.com

Seems to make sense.

> What is twitter.com

> twitter.com is the "public" instance of the Twitter service.

You were one layer away from the answer. What is the Mastodon Project?

> The world’s largest free, open-source, decentralized microblogging network.

I poked the owner and he updated mastodon.social to say this and be more clear...

> What is mastodon.social?

> This page describes the mastodon.social instance - wondering what Mastodon is? Check out joinmastodon.org instead! In essence, Mastodon is a decentralized, open source social network. This is just one part of the network, run by the main developers of the project It is not focused on any particular niche interest - everyone is welcome as long as you follow our code of conduct!

Do you need to have an account to lurk around a mastodon instance?

It helps. But now, if you scroll down on the generic signup page that each instance greets you with, there's a "look inside" box with recent messages from users of that instance.

Mastoview is a tool for previewing Mastodon instances without signing up: http://www.unmung.com/mastoview

Rapidly approaching a million accounts

I really wanted to like Mastodon, but their "default" instance is just too restrictive on speech. It's basically a tumblrina safe space network. I'm saying this as a mostly-liberal, not your average OMG LIBTARDS ARE SNOWFLAKES person.

If a social network, even a federated one, wants to gain traction, it needs to be a bit more open. Yeah, nazis are obnoxious assholes, but I'd rather have a network with them on it (and just ignore them) than have to constantly worry "am I saying the 'wrong thing'??" each time I post something.

I mean, the whole point of distribution seems to be that you can say what you want and it can't get shut down. Mastodon's ideals are at odds with its goals, IMO.

Say the flagship instance was a free speech one, what do you think would be the consequences

Then you don't understand what distribution means. If you want to use mastodon you don't have to go to the main instance, you can go to another instance that allows what you want. Theresr httsp://instances.social to help you with that. Here's the result:

https://instances.social/list#lang=en&allowed=racism,hateSpe...

And if you really don't find an instance to your liking here, that means you should open one that is moderated exactly the way you want.

The issue with such "free speech" instances not being the norm is that the instances which do allow "hate speech" are going to be clustered with unsavory individuals.

If toleration is not encouraged at the core, it is a useless service because I don't want to spend my time in a safe-zone where I have to preface anything I say with "I don't mean to offend, but I think..." any more than I want to hang out with a group of half fascists.

I totally agree with you that such instances may (and probably will) be "split" from the bigger federation, but that's the whole point of distribution. At that point we'll see multiple networks, each with their own rules and tolerance, and that is how federation thrives.

This is completely side-stepping my point.

You could try not having half the things that come out of your mouth be easily construed as offensive, I guess? Seriously, I'm on mastodon.social and I've never once felt a need to preface anything like that.

You could try not having half the things that come out of your mouth be easily construed as offensive, I guess?

Who is the gatekeeper for what is offensive and what is not? Why would you even accuse a stranger of having half the things coming out of their mouth being offensive?

If you haven't experienced the vitriolic "safe-space" syndrome present in modern heavily-moderated social networks, give it time and you certainly will. When, for example, I get reported and called a "future rapist" by a gang of radical feminists for stating that there should be legal consequences for false reports of rape / domestic violence, then there is a problem.

It was such occurrences that ultimately led to me leaving all social networks in the first place. The moderation is too heavy-handed and skewed in the direction of political correctedness to the point where if you disagree with someone you are labeled a nazi and silenced / blocked. It's a sad state of affairs.

I've been on Twitter for like a decade now and I've never had any problems with this "vitriolic safe-space syndrome".

I am also a trans lady so I dunno maybe you think I'm part of the problem.

> The issue with such "free speech" instances not being the norm is that the instances which do allow "hate speech" are going to be clustered with unsavory individuals.

Hang on, I don't follow. Are you saying that free speech = hate speech = things from unsavory individuals?

No, that's a gross oversimplification. The post I was replying to had a link to an instance search including the flag "hatespeech=true". That's why I protested, for the same reason as you, because free speech != hate speech.

> but their "default" instance is just too restrictive on speech. It's basically a tumblrina safe space network

To some people, that's a selling point!

And if you don't like it, join another instance!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com