Hacker News Reader

Comment by olah_1 | Hacker News Reader

> Mastodon, instead, has an extra layer between your network and the whole world: messages from people on your server. This is called the local timeline.

This is not the right way to do decentralized social media imo.

Why not just use a real social graph? If I want to branch out, just show me all of my 2nd degree contacts (friends of friends) and their content?

View on HN

May i infer from your question that you have not experienced the fediverse (nor software like Mastodon) yet? If not, may i invite you to kindly give it a try. Beyond the users of one's network and the local timeline, there is also what is known as the "whole known network". At some points, it is quite broad and doses not address the perceived shortcoming that you asked/commented on. At other times - because of how the different instaces and their relevant users are connected - it may in effect operate in a fashion that you noted. No offense to you, but normally, i would not go out of my way to invite folks to the fediverse...but it sounds like your question is legitimate so i really wish to invite you so that you can learn for yourself how deep the rabbit hole can go. Please visit https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse

Enjoy!

> May i infer from your question that you have not experienced the fediverse (nor software like Mastodon) yet?

Thank you for the kind reply, but I think that would be an incorrect inference, because I actually provided you with a more natural solution to “branching out” than a server timeline. Use a user’s own social graph to discover new content. I don’t want to be associated with a movement, hobby, or niche club. I just want to be myself.

I understand now. Well, in that case you could try what I do: I run my only instance where I'm the only user; my interactions depends upon only my social graph. This avoids the niche/club/hobby issue. The only challenge that remains is discovery. But I don't discover folks to follow through my instance but through other means.( So not an issue for me.) Though my approach requires committing either time (managing my own infrastructure) or money (having someone else my instance for me) - so perhaps not suitable for everyone. Not so different from having one's own domain for conventional email. Either way, my approach is probably not ideal for folks only trying to get a taste of the fediverse.

> The only challenge that remains is discovery.

The Fediverse has a similar "friend of a friend" discovery method as Twitter in that you see the users that often get boosted (Mastodon retweet), and the users that often have interesting replies to toots that you follow, and can follow them directly (and then discover who they boost and who replies to them, etc).

(I'm also a solo user on a personal instance, and while I bootstrapped from the Twitter bridge early on, probably most of my follow expansion in the last several months has been through boosts and replies.)

I'm running pleroma not mastodon but experience here (if I recall) is the same. I think the friend of a friend is a manifestation of "the whole known universe", unless I'm not remembering correctly.The discovery challenge I reference is very much an initial thing before following that person who then trigger the friend of a friend cascade. At least as I recall. (I went directly from Gnu Social to pleroma so memory is nebulous.)

The person above you asked if friend-of-a-friend was even possible, and it definitely is. The discovery tools of boost/reply aren't always perfect, but they are a somewhat naturally formed friend-of-a-friend discovery protocol honed from much Twitter experience.

Anyway, yes, the initial bootstrap is always the toughest to get those first few accounts to even have friends-of-friends to explore. Like I said, I used a Twitter bridge that let people link their Mastodon and Twitter accounts and if you signed in with Twitter it would show you everyone you followed who had a Mastodon account connected.

Unfortunately, that bridge (which was a part of joinmastodon.org) got shut down a couple years back due to maintenance headaches (Twitter API shifts).

Asking friends on existing social media if they use Mastodon is still probably the key bootstrap tool even with fewer direct bridges. There've been some "follow me on Mastodon" threads here on HN, too, and I have seen at least a few Mastodon addresses in HN profiles (and more rarely in Twitter profiles and on blogs and elsewhere). It's also a bit of a shame that Keybase's Mastodon support only really supports the Big Instances by design since instances have to be added manually by Keybase staff last I checked.

> Mastodon, instead, has an extra layer between your network and the whole world: messages from people on your server. This is called the local timeline

This is oddly phrased and does not correspond to technical reality. Mastodon is a system of accounts that post messages that are delivered directly to followers, be they on your or other servers. Everything else is basically cosmetic. The local timeline is just a way to have a look into all public posts that originated on your server, the federated timeline is a look into all public posts that your server has received.

Thank you for clarifying. I posted some critiques around activity pub last year and a developer assured me that they are already aware and working to solve them.

Have you personally been involved in pushing forward more portable identities / user data? Or do you believe that things should stay as they are?

You could do that, but I'm not sure that would be conducive to a great experience.

There really is no guarantee that just because you follow person X, that you will be at all happy about what the people person X follows talk about. In fact, I'm willing to bet that if people started reading messages from most send-level connections we'd see a lot more flamewars.

Of course I haven't done any real research on this, but I have at time decided to randomly follow people who are mentioned by some of the people I follow. It inevitably led to a lot of bad content that I did not want to engage with.

I believe the idea is like-minded people will join the same node as you. E.g. fosstodon, ruby.social, writing.exchange probably have people interested in those things. Or non-English speaking instances, etc.

Not to mention people interested in the same rules like nudity being outright forbidden or being hidden by a spoiler tag.

The biggest issue for me is that I have more than one serious interest. I don’t want to pick just one. I feel this design encourages monoculture and echo chambers rather than diversity of ideas.

this is why it's very common for people to have multiple alts on mastodon, different from twitter where I basically only see alts for nsfw content.

On the contrary I think this design encourages a lot of different cultures to develop. Each instance had its own rules and etiquette, so the diversity of tone and topic across mastodon is greater than on twitter ime.

It doesn't sound like you tried it? If so, I would suggest you give mastodon a try.

The way how I think about this is that there is a free and open market of communities and community rules. You can choose the one that resonates the most with you.

E.g. if you are in any way into Open Source, you could check out https://fosstodon.org/public to get a feel for the conversations that happen there.

> You can choose the one that resonates the most with you.

Thank you for the kind comment, but I have browsed the servers before and nothing resonated with me. I don’t want to be attached to any one “movement” and I can’t be bothered to run my own server for something I’m not sold on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com