What is Mastodon? [video] | Hacker News Reader

What is Mastodon? [video]

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171 pointsrainbowmverse50 comments

Mastodon surely isn't the first decentralized social network to come about, but it seems to be the first one that I would refer to as a success.

This style of federation is the future of the web - and the only alternative to the corporate walled garden and advertising surveillance hell it has become. When the users have the power to vote with their feet, they become emancipated. When the administrators have the power to take decisive action in the interests of their communities without pleading their case to a greedy board of directors, our ability to freely conduct civil debate in good faith is protected.

I am looking forward to a handful of other projects taking up the same model, in the same spirit as Mastodon. It is truly one if the few remaining rays of sunshine available on the net.

Mastodon itself isn't a new network, it leverages existing networks (OStatus and ActivityPub).

I only just found out about these. What are they and how long have they been running?

OStatus is a collection of protocols, which was known for powering StatusNet (now known as GNU Social) since 2010.

ActivityPub is a lot more recent, and is a "consolidated" protocol designed to replace OStatus. It's fairly recent, so Mastodon is one of its first implementations, and Gargron (the main dev of Mastodon) contributes to the W3C Working Group in charge of the spec since ActivityPub support was added to Mastodon.

ActivityPub is only two years old though in its current form, and the previous ActivityPump protocol really wasn't used at all so it can be considered a new protocol in the grand scheme of things.

So it seems it suffers from the same issue that Dispora has (or had for all the time I followed): No decent user migration?

That is, it seems I pick an instance (or host my own, but still: I pick a host) and can never move without losing all stuff? If I join one of the big instances to play around and later want to self-host I'm .. out of luck? That's quite sad. Still far better than Twitter I assume and I will give it a try. But I would've felt better knowing that I can take my ball and play elsewhere when I feel like it.

https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177

https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/t/migratory-accounts/268

An account migration feature is getting closer. An update earlier this month added the possibility to download a dump of all your toots, boosts, and likes.

OT: It doesn't bother me personally, but I'll never understand why they added an unnecessary barrier to entry like that. Not many serious people are going to join a platform that risks them getting quoted in the press as "X tooted that ...". I guess it was supposed to be a funny parody of twitter?

I'm not sold on "tweet" either. It sounds childish and weird. I'd rather have "X posted on Twitter/Mastodon/whatnot where he said ...".

But tweet was't an existing word.

tweet (n): the chirp of a small or young bird

Woah. Huh. I totally managed to never notice that.

FWIW, the place I was going was "the only place where toot normally comes up as a word is when people talk about the sound of a fart or in the phrase 'to toot your own horn', which is way too close to home".

(And "tweet" still does not feel like "a word" in the way that "toot" does. I would want to see a survey done, as a random dictionary is not how you define if a word exists, to the extent to which a word can exist at all.)

Tweet dates to 1851, myriad examples: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/377843

Chaucer came up with twitter: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/10/ch...

Craig Hockenberry applied the one to the other: http://furbo.org/2013/06/28/the-origin-of-tweet/

It's exactly like email in this way. They could quote bscphil@evildomain.email, too.

Here's a demo of Mastodon and PeerTube federation (on a PeerTube instance): https://peertube.cpy.re/videos/watch/da2b08d4-a242-4170-b32a...

I like the video. I also really like Mastodon. I've completely ditched Twitter and all my needs are satisfied with mastodon (granted, I don't follow sports / friends on Twitter). The interface is sweet and my instance is great.

I'd really like to see something like this take off... It just seems like the ethically right thing for social media to be decentralized and open source, so we truly own the data and not sell out our privacy for the simple right to reliably and easily have access to people online.

Something I've been thinking a lot about recently: why does HN not have an instance in Mastodon or Diaspora? Clearly a lot here detest traditional social media but like talking to each other, and could even contribute to the open source projects, so it seems like a neat way to bootstrap a lot of people to join such a thing (ive tried Diaspora pods but it seems pretty...empty. Stupid network effects). In fact I am thinking of setting up an unnoficial HN Diaspora* pod, but I'm just one guy...

I really want to get into Mastodon on principle alone. The sticking point is, as with any new social network, I don't know anyone there.

If anyone can point me names in tech, particularly security or cryptography, that are worth following on Mastodon, I would probably be convinced.

As with any social network, you need to join, follow a few people, see what they say and who they quote, and then build your list of followees from there.

I'm @ColinTheMathmoon@mathstodon.xyz[0][1] and I follow a few tech people. One is @cypherpunk on mastodon.social and then you can follow people quoted by them.

Who would you like to follow? If you are on any Mastodon instance then you can follow anyone on any other instance.

[0] https://mathstodon.xyz/@ColinTheMathmo

[1] https://mathstodon.xyz/

[2] https://mastodon.social/@cypherpunk

Thanks Colin! I think you've pointed at a reasonable start and an instance with a reasonable subject matter and sizing, and I'll go from there.

It's quiet there, really quiet, but there is a background of "stuff" going on, and if you follow me I'll try to make sure I boost some people of interest.

You can use this service to find your Twitter followees on Mastodon: https://bridge.joinmastodon.org/

Isn't this just a Diaspora* clone or does it have any advantage? I am not convinced that this federation approach will truely take off more than the others… However, while a true p2p system without accounts on specific servers is more appealing, the HTTP-based federation content is easily accessible for non-participating users with a browser.

It's more GNU Social with a UI that isn't clunky, so Twitter.

Diaspora* is more Google+ but without some of the stuff that people need in a social network like event management. True that isn't available in Mastodon either but it isn't really suited to the use cases of microblogging anyway.

Is anyone offering hosted Mastodon instances for a monthly/annual fee? Or is a VPS the route to go?

https://maastodon.net/

Tremendous. Thank you.

There's also https://masto.host/

Have you used this yourself, may I ask?

Thanks!

What happens if Mastodon scales up 100x? Would it continue to operate smoothly?

its written with ruby on rails and react.js

There is also Pleroma which has a quite similar feature set and can federate with mastodon instances. It is built on top of elixir and phoenix:

https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma

I follow a bunch of people on pleroma based instances from my mastodon account without problem.

There are Mastodon instances with hundreds of thousands of users and millions of messages.

However, Mastodon is federated, so there are thousands of instances with less users. And because each instance does not need to store the state of the whole network (only accounts followed by its users), it scales very nicely.

I feel like that's the answer to reddit it many ways too.

Reddit will go the way of Facebook within 5 years I suspect and self hosted federated subreddits are the logical increment. I bet someone is working on it already.

Yup, I'm working on something like this.

I plan to use ActivityPub so it can integrate with mastodon and peertube more easily but also have an option to pull over from reddit so people can use their own instance as a frontend to reddit. Makes migration easier IMO.

Your profile has no links, it there any page to follow what you're doing, or are you developing it offline? Anyways, I'd love to be able to follow news about what you're on to, it sounds really exciting!

If the development goes anywhere I'll probably do a Show HN and put it up on github. I'm hesitant to show off incomplete projects.

Totally understandable. Looking forward to news from your work! Thanks in advance for working for the betterment of internet!

Depends. If an instance scales up by 100x overnight it'll probably go offline.

But the nice thing is that no single instance has to scale 100x to scale the network by 100x.

100 instances can scale 2x or 1000 instances can scale 1.2x or 10000 instances can scale 1.02x... You get the point.

Mastodon is designed to have people sign up into communities and then spread out into the fediverse from there.

I like a lot of Mastodon's ideas, but whats to stop if from going the same way as Diaspora?

Had this thought because i just had it open, but couldn't something like keybase just add this on top of their existing identity platform? I feel like the only missing critical feature is the ability for different instances to interact as a federation. Which, now that i think about it, would be really cool.

I recommend everyone reading this to atleast check out Mastodon and other software that understand ActivityPub like Pleroma (which works with Mastodon or it's own server as backend).

It's a nice change from twitter and you can pick out and join a community you like. But you can still talk to everyone who's on a compatible server all around the world.

To complement that, here is something I wrote:

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/ThinkingAboutMastodon.html?HN_...

Good. nice timing

I mean it's not like we aren't being marched right into this.

From the devops perspective, social media is following a make-one-break-one change process. As sufficient numbers of Mastadon hosts spawn, corresponding Facebook nodes on their server farm will be drained.

Can anyone speak to the difficulty of hosting your own instance? Is there any reason (besides maintenance) for everyone to not be on single-user instances?

Also, how does this compare with Secure Scuttlebutt?[0]

[0] https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

Secure Scuttlebutt is p2p and offline-first.

Mastodon is neither one of these and community-hosted. More about building the community part of the social network than the truly decentralized backbone (where each user has a copy of all posts of users in his/hers network).

Social.coop is a cooperative instance of mastodon. A better kind of network also needs a better kind of business model. You might like it. We do.

This is adorable.

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