Definitely. This is a great post that helps explain to technical folks why Mastodon is not (and will never be) a replacement for Twitter, which I say as a Mastodon user and fan. If something has a chance to displace Twitter, it'll need to be as dead-simple to use (like Hive¹).
> The single thing that's kept me from joining/participating in Mastodon is the lack of clarity around which server I "should" join…
If you're looking for an opinionated answer to this question by someone who's just gone through this, for HN readers I can also recommend the instance mentioned in the article: hachyderm.io. There are a lot of tech and otherwise-interesting people there, and it's run by Kris Nóva². Her most recent articles on Medium talk about running an instance as a serious endeavor.
> …if I join someone else's server, how portable is my content/profile - can I export it all/import it all into my account on another server easily, or is that a lot of work, or even not possible at all?
Kris's most recent post, "Experimenting with Federation and Migrating Accounts"³, goes into detail on how this works in practice.
¹ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/twitter-alternative-hive-j... ² SME in Linux kernel security, distributed systems and infrastructure management, and open-source software engineering. https://medium.com/@kris-nova ³ https://medium.com/@kris-nova/experimenting-with-federation-...
Being able to export all of your data (posts, followers, following, blocks/mutes, etc.) and to import it into another server MUST be table stakes at this point. Otherwise, you're just trading one Twitter for another, which is foolish, because it means you wrongly believe that history doesn't repeat itself.
I'll keep watching from the sidelines and see if the fundamental issues get resolved. It certainly will be interesting to see how things play out, that's for sure!
Imagine a future where everyone has moved to mastadon, and 1 mastadon server has done a good job of improving the flow and UX to bring in the users. Years later, when everyone is comfortable, this becomes the 'default' because its easy and their policies appeal to main stream users.
The big server sells user metadata and shows ads, and has money to invest in AI moderation and legal compliance with data privacy & anti-abuse laws. Maybe they lobby to increase regulation in a way that they can more easily comply with than the little guys.
Eventually the others wither away into only niche use. Their unwillingness to sell user data gives them thin margins for lawyers and compliance dealings. The big player enacts anti-spam / anti-abuse policies that happen to ban the small servers a lot while trusting themselves a lot. Eventually you are in a situation where you CAN have an account on any mastadon server, in theory, but for your posts to not be flagged as spam, it is more reliable to use the 1 big server everyone uses.
We have seen this starting to happen with email (gmail/msft/apple) for example.
What is the point of all the work to move to a federated system, if there is no force to counter a few players becoming dominant and killing the rest, converting the system back into a few big corporate players?
Open protocols and standards can be used as a trap to lure us in. I'm old enough to remember when facebook used to publish RSS feeds, which was a primitive federating mechanism. Once they got big enough, they stopped.
I don't see how you can come to this conclusion. Twitter is not a protocol, is a corporation with a profit-motive, and sees itself as the town square of the internet with its design geared toward this function.
Mastodon is about as far from trading in for another Twitter alternative as you can come and that's largely what makes its design so difficult to grasp for Twitter emigrants.
Are there other protocols that fix some of ActivityPub's design flaws? Yes, like nostr and Bluesky's AT Protocol. But ActivityPub, being an open protocol, can also be massaged into a better one by its community.
Personally, I've found my corner of Mastodon to be a much kinder place than Twitter perhaps because it does not profess to be the town square of the internet nor pursues that status.
Ultimately, I think what we're seeing here is the transparent lie sold to us by Meta and Twitter and Instagram: that social media superapps that try to tie the world together are not forces of good to unite but ultimately weapons that serve to divide it. We are not equipped as a species for the cacophonous screams of billions, only the Bodhisattva of compassion Kuan-Yin, She Who Hears the Cries of the of World, can do this, and she arguably doesn't exist.
So yes, you are at the mercy of whatever server mods you happen to drift to on Mastodon but you are not powerless, like on Twitter.
A protocol has no inherent value. Its value comes from its application. And, Mastodon, as one of ActivityPub's applications, is nothing better than Twitter fractured into many smaller islands of Twitter: instead of upsetting Elon and getting the boot, if you upset the Mastodon server operator you happen to choose, you run the same exact risk of being deported off that particular island. If you're going to subject yourself to the whims of a dictator, you might as well stay on Twitter and reap the benefits of the larger network.
You've completely ignored the arrest of user behavior and audience that happens when a single proprietary application is allowed to own the social sphere of the public.
The whims of a dictator become a lot less impactful when users can just walk away. The consequences are massively different when the entire captive audience is on one platform and feels they must remain because there is no other option with critical mass. With federation, critical mass is spread out over the protocol, yes a value inhered in the protocol itself.
Any you want as long as you're happy with their rules.
> whether I should start my own server
It's currently faff (but potentially getting better.)
> how portable is my content/profile - can I export it all/import it all into my account on another server easily
You can move your account with followers easily (but not posts). Can take a while for everything to filter through on busy servers though.
And then your account gets nuked and you can’t migrate your posts.
Going from one server (Twitter) to multiple smaller servers doesn’t seem to go far enough on the axis to address major issues that Twitter has. e.g. you still don’t “own” your content.
it goes much further than twitter does—unlike twitter, you can spin up your own server and you are now in control of your content.
same with modding. if owning your content is the most important feature for you, it’s significantly better than twitter.
if owning your own content and moderating are your largest concerns, what do you propose as an alternative that addresses these, today?
Exactly. This is the critical flaw in Mastodon's design. It does not solve the single biggest flaw in Twitter (or any other typical platform) design, where the platform operator owns the network, and not the author/user.
This is why I won't bother investing my own personal time and effort in joining anyone else's server, given how the current design is implemented.
It's sad that BitTorrent has now existed for 21 years, and still no one has built a social media content distribution network on top of it. I would have done it but I don't have the motivation to do it alone, as it would tilt control away from the platform operators who require that control in order to monetize the platform to make it worth the investment.
:sigh:
Well, you pretty much can't migrate your posts anyway even if you're moving without being nuked. But if you get nuked, you probably can't move your followers either which would suck.
If you're not running your own server, true.
That's what I thought based on what I've read so far, thanks for confirming.
Unless and until that's fixed, if I finally see enough value in joining Mastodon, I will have to do so using my own server where I have full access to all my content.
It's particularly idiotic because the Activities in the export are all signed, so an importing server just need to do a webfinger and profile lookup, and can then validate all of the posts. Of course you can still fake them, but if you show a "moved from <origin instance>" on them, that's really all you need to do - moves from, say, mastodon.social would be trustworthy, moves from some small instance would not.
But even that can be fixed with tamper proof timestamps and signing the whole archive, and in any case you can validate this against the public API because it remains accessible on the origin server (at least for some time after the initial move, I don't know how long).
I'll never get the hand wringing over missing out on posts on some other server. There's tweets and reddits and tiktoks all over the place you'll never see. The lesson should be to make peace with that, not try to find them all.
And then https://movetodon.org/ to find some of my twitter contacts on mastodon.
As for importing/exporting accounts, they have some documentation for that: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
Starting your own server is a waste of time, imo.
This is the right answer. All the questions about moderation, resources, choice and whatever will disappear and you'll be part of the Fediverse like anyone else.
One of my responses to Nova got boosted by her, and my media storage and database size immediately spiked (600MiB to 1.3GiB and 20MiB to 42MiB). Requests went from none to 20/sec, just by that triggering more people to favorite and boost.
I imagine if I ever manage to post something profound that someone with even greater influence happens to like, my server will be doomed.