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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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).
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.