“ The problem most people have with Mastodon is that they "get bored" with it quickly. I've seen it a lot, and it means one thing: the person created their account on the wrong server.”
And this is exactly why I haven’t created an account yet. I went to Mastadon, and saw that I needed to choose a community. There are many communities I may like, and I have no idea how each community behaves until I actually join it. I use Linux and I like FOSS and I am still an oldschool BSD nerd, and I also like regional communities. So which one do I choose? I cannot even explore a server’s users and posts from the community list. And then I created an account in the wrong server, and then what? Can I migrate my account to another server?
Mastadon gives me a bit of the nostalgic feelings of the early internet of the 90s. In The Netherlands we had something called “The Digital City” (de Digitale Stad) which Mastadon reminds me of, combined with the IRC geekiness. But at least with IRC I could join multiple servers and a whole plethora of channels from a single client, so I didn’t have to “commit” to a single server and make the wrong choice.
All in all I want to try Mastadon, but the choices I need to make (and fear of making the wrong choice!) before I can even join and experience it scares me.
My ideal UI would be having multiple accounts on different servers and a client with a slack/discord like sidebar to quickly and easily switch between them.
Then I could have one profile for coding, one for gaming, one for politics. The feed for each would only be about that topic so I can delve into what I feel like at that moment. The other big benefit is that I know everyone following me is following for that topic. On Twitter I mostly talk about tech and when I post about politics it may be uninteresting to 80% of my followers. Because one single account is supposed to represent me they have to put up with that and it creates a worse user experience.
The advantage of anonymous virtual accounts is we can have as many of them as we like, we should embrace that and build a better social network because of it.
There are a clients that make this convenient. Toot! on iOS has one of the more delightful UI innovations I've seen recently in the form of a wheel in the corner that you can rotate to flip between what looks like different copies of the app, each individually themed and associated with a different account.
what would be cool would be some sort of agent that could live on a server and process toots and take a guess as to whether or not you should or shouldn't post this toot on this server. Manually overridable, of course.
> So which one do I choose? I cannot even explore a server’s users and posts from the community list.
You can, right from the homepage of any instance.
You have "discover users" button, which will show you any local user that wants to be there (by default you're not visible here, you need to opt-in in the settings).
You also have "see what's happening", which will show you latest public posts from an instance.
> And then I created an account in the wrong server, and then what? Can I migrate my account to another server?
...kinda. You can "archive" your account and redirect your visitors to the new one. You can't migrate who's following you and who you're following.
Also there's nothing stopping you from having an account on multiple instances, but that's mostly unnecessary since you can follow people regardless of what server they happen to be using.
> Moving your account is the same as redirecting your account, but it will also irreversibly force everyone to unfollow your current account and follow your new account, if their software supports the Move activity. Your toots will not be moved, due to technical limitations.
I joined mastodon.social like everybody else years ago when it started. Lurked around and discovered and followed several accounts from various interesting communities. After a few months/year you can pretty much know the feel of the community by following enough people from it.
Recently I was invited into one of those communities and I just used the migration feature in mastodon. Went pretty smoothly. I guess it went easier for me as I didn't mind "losing" my toots in this new era. For those who need/want to keep everything it maybe problematic.
My motto on modern web is: don't get too attached to things you don't own. You can't own a community so you shouldn't worry about losing it.
This kind of solution doesn't solve the problem for laypeople without the technical acumen to buy+manage domains. Which should be a concern for all the Mastodon/ActivityPub supporters who want to see federated solutions overtake centralized ones.
Additionally, DNS-based identity migration doesn't address the grandparent's real problem, which is that they feel expected to choose just a single community to live in in the first place. They want to live at the intersection or the union of multiple interests simultaneously, which doesn't fit the Mastodon model of social interaction (but does fit e.g., Twitter's).
Account migration for non-technical users _is_ being worked on in fits and starts, afaik. It's just a complicated problem with a lot of potential rough edges.
"I use Linux and I like FOSS and I am still an oldschool BSD nerd, and I also like regional communities."
FOSStodon is the obvious choice https://fosstodon.org/public
But I think the article actually misses the main point about Mastodon. You an follow and interact with people on any instances.
But then why is it so important to choose the right server? The author asserts that choosing the right server is essential to your experience of Mastadon, is that not the case?
Also the author says that I should choose a community between 500 and 5000 people, which fosstodon exceeds.
All in all, my point is, there are so many choices and decisions to make before I can even create an account and experience it.
It’s fairly common knowledge that people actually don’t like choice. When you go to a restaurant and see a menu with 100 choices, people actually enjoy their meal less than when there would be little choice; they have this nagging feeling of “was that other choice perhaps better?”
For me, Mastadon has the same problem. Too much choice is a bug, not a feature.
> It’s fairly common knowledge that people actually don’t like choice.
This is a misunderstanding of what people like.
What people like is good defaults, because choosing is work. When 90% of everything is crap, nobody even wants to see anything but the 10% that isn't. They don't even want to see anything other than the one option which is the best for them, if somebody can give them that without making them do the work.
The problem is that the best option is not the same for everybody. Even if it's the same for 70% of people, that lets you make that option the default and make 70% of people happy, but the other 30% still need the option to do something else.
And sometimes there isn't any one option that can satisfy any majority of people. Then there isn't any better alternative than giving people a list of options to choose from.
But you could still put the list in a better order. Put the "editor's choice" options near the top and the crummiest ones near the bottom. If someone is in Queens, show them the regional server for New York City on the first page and the regional server for Los Angeles on the hundredth page, and a link next to it that says "show other regions" and leads to a regional map. That sort of thing.
I will admit, during my foray into Mastodon I tried a server at the low end of the author's size range, and I would say selecting the 'right server' has some impact from my experiences, but not in the way described:
A month after I joined, they had a disk crash and my account was gone. It looked like everyone recreated from scratch, so I did the same.
Two weeks later and without notice they restored a backup, overwriting everything that had happened since. I continued, but with rapidly declining interest to accompany my total loss of trust.
Two more months later the server was down permanently.
As Mastadon increases in popularity, how do they plan to make the choice of server easier? If 5000 remains a rough optimal size, how will then how will the next 10M users choose from 2000 servers?
Probably my having a few (or one?) very large servers where most people join.
As much as I wished that wasn't the case, most people just want to join an established network and don't care about federation as a concept. A long as a single server doesn't take over altogether, however, I don't think there is a problem with large servers.
They will need a way to migrate users between servers then. If your local feed is important, it's not a great plan to have users start on a suboptimal server and then have to make a new account on the one they want. If that's the case, I would generally expect to be able to migrate to a new server and have all my old posts, etc come with me, and that my user page on the old server would redirect to my new one.
There is a way to migrate servers. People have mentioned it in other comments.
In short, it marks your old account as migrated, and messages is sent to your followers instances, asking them to subscribe to your new feeds instead. For the most part it's pretty seamless.
Surely the problem with large servers is that they're difficult to moderate, difficult to grow a sense of community, and all the other problems that lead the OP to suggest that 5000 is a vague upper limit.
If you are going to go with bigger servers, what is Mastadon doing to support them (socially, not technically)?
I think really huge servers will need a different moderation system. It wouldn't be the responsibility of the Mastodon team to manage or even design that.
Also, mastodon.social has about half a million users, and they are having performance problems. I'm guessing if you want to scale that up by a factor of 10 or 100 you're going to need new infrastructure.
Surely the Mastodon team are very concerned with moderation? Given that everyone agrees it is vital for the success of the project (or any social network), why would they consider it outside their purview?
I meant that they wouldn't consider the difficulties of moderating a multi-million user instance. I believe they have enough to deal with when it comes to moderating their half-million user instance. Also I think a large number of those users have either stopped using it, or moved to different instances.
There's a feed for the server you're on. So if you pick a "bad" server (aka the culture there is different from what you like), that becomes useless, more or less. Of course you can always just follow whoever and only pay attention to your following feed.
Also, some nodes maintain blocklists of other nodes. [0] So while you can still follow those people and see them in your following feed, posts from users on that node will -not- appear in the public feed (posts from nodes in the federated network).
https://instances.social/ exists to help you find a node but I'm not sure how up to date or accurate it is.
Remember forums? Remember how you had to have a separate account on every single one? Remember how you stuck around some forums, but not others? Treat it like that.
But it's not like that, you don't need to create a separate account on every single one. You can follow any account on any server/community from just one account. That's the big difference/selling point. It's the "local timeline", an optional discovery feature, that adds the incentive to create more accounts; but there are definitely ways to circumvent it. Many communities expose their timeline publicly and there's almost always a public profile directory so you can see who's on that server/community to follow them.
Forums had a public discovery and consumption mechanism. You didn't, for the vast majority, need to create an account to see what the community was like.
You can get bored because you aren't being fed a curated stream of engagement-boosting content; but you can also get bored you don't find an interesting community.
Mastodon has no unit of community smaller than "the local timeline", and it's really not cheap / easy to run your own (due to very high RAM requirements).
By way of comparison, 'one subreddit' is a group you can follow and post to from your main account. You can look at a single accounts post history, but the common case is to follow moderated interest groups. There aren't good ways to participate in interest-specific communities on mastodon (I'm not just whinging; I've tried to improve the situation but it's genuinely difficult at an ecosystem level).
I joined Mastodon some years ago, but I did not use it for long. I eventually realized the same - you need to find an instance with people/content that you like/relate to.
The thing is: Do I really want another time sink? I've been on the Internet for over 20 years, and I think whatever gains I could have gotten from online forums/discussions have been attained. Time is a premium, and I'm actively trying to quash sites where I just browse for new content. I spend way too much time on HN as it is, and at some point I'll probably find a way to temporarily disable my account for a year or so (e.g. set a password that is a pain to access).
Just my thougts as well. I guess we are simply another category. There is a variety out there, it’s a good thing.
Aside form timesinks, communities are a necessary part of the human development, I am hopeful to see a changing trend where people move the part of the community in the real world and use the technology part to solve the logistics
I have a Mastodon account. I just tried visiting the local timeline of a different instance, as recommended, and I have to say it was a much more engaging experience than I had had before on my account's instance.
Is there any chance for a federated interaction to effectively replace the local timeline? It'd be cool to be able to jump into a "community timeline" without that being tied to your account's "instance" (ie. using one account for multiple interests).
> 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?
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
> 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 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.
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.
Twitter lists could conceivably provide the same benefit - curated collections of people likely to enjoy discovering each other – but Twitter's neglect of that feature, and other problems with Twitter, prevent lists from reaching their full potential.
Bundling "hosting server" with "shared interests" and "shared norms" has clearly been helpful to a certain style of Mastodon usage, but in the long-term/long-view, still strikes me as a bug not a feature. It still places such usage, and group-formation, at the mercy of a feudal federation of sysop-lords, "my land my rules".
The creation of lists/communities-of-commonality that can transcend any one server/delivery-path choice seems the purest option, with the most headroom for generative expansions. It should be most possible in identity-based, server-oblivious systems, like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB).
> The creation of lists/communities-of-commonality that can transcend any one server/delivery-path choice seems the purest option, with the most headroom for generative expansions. It should be most possible in identity-based, server-oblivious systems, like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB).
Who will moderate these cross-instance communities?
I imagine some would be moderated by their founders, and others might adopt conventions where their members moderate.
Moderation in such server-oblivious systems would chiefly be a label applied: "this conforms to our norms" or "this doesn't conform". Being a member-in-good-standing of a community would be a standing default that one's messaging is presumed conformant. Violations beyond the tolerance of the community would flip that "presumed conformant" bit to "presumed in violation", so that software wanting to show the community-conformant view knows what to do. (This only requires cryptographic identities & messaging, not centralized server sysops with delete privileges.)
Presumably it would be like classic mailing list moderation where the email server hosting the list might not be the server hosting any of the participants.
Let ML be the difference between Mastodon and Linux, and Twitter and Windows differ by ML too. That reflects the original sentence.
Let's call MT the difference between Mastodon and Twitter.
From the first sentence, Linux is separated from Mastodon by ML, and from Twitter by both ML and MT, and from Windows by ML, and MT, and ML again. But because Twitter and Windows difference is analogous but opposite to Linux and Mastodon difference, we can ignore them, so Linux is separated from Windows by MT, the separation of Mastodon to Twitter.
Discord feels like it is filling this niche. I try to get interested in Mastodon occasionally but I am consistently put off from it as I never quite know what I am looking at.
This post caused me to log in to Mastodon for the first time in quite a while, I joined it from curiosity -- when? I have no idea and that is not shown in my Profile. Let's say, 2018?
Well, what server am I on? At the time I picked it because a well-known blogger I follow was on it. The timeline today is not offensive, but not interesting either. Which server is it? I have no idea, it is not shown in my profile.
What other servers are available? There is no way to answer that question from the home page (https://mastodon.social/web/timelines/home). Several links in posts here go to joinMastodon.org, a site that I'd never have known about except for this HN post.
While the list at joinmastodon.org/communities is interesting, it is also very shallow (where are "writing", "philosophy", "atheism", "photography" -- to name only a few of my reddit subs?) and, crucially, there is no search box!!
I still don’t get it. If the author is into FOSS and could choose between one of the FOSS servers or the Catalan one... how would you choose? On Twitter I have 3 groups of people I follow (tech, sports, politics). Choosing one topic for a server wouldn’t that mean my local timeline would have people going on and on about one of my topics, but virtually nothing about the others? That would be extremely boring.
My impression is Mastodon expects you to join a server oriented towards some particular interest group, then to find and follow individual users from other Mastodon servers who you want to hear from. But it seems to be designed with the expectation that most of your read/write will be inside your chosen server. That doesn't sound well-aligned with common use cases.
I feel like this is a common fallacy about Mastodon and something I disagree with the article here about. In my view the local timeline is a mostly useless red herring that sometimes causes new users to the network to suffer analysis paralysis (you see several comments here about "but which one do I join???"). For what it is worth, I'm a solo user of a personal instance and my local timeline is indeed useless and just everything I've posted.
Though I agree with the article that the Federated timeline is also useless. (Who reads the public Everything on Twitter feed? It's a fast scrolling mess of useless. Federated is that.) The only timeline that matters is the Home timeline where you see the people you follow, and who they boost (if you like). That's just like Twitter. The whole point of Federation is that it doesn't matter which instance you are on you should be able to follow just about anyone you want.
As others point out, focusing people on the local timeline forces people to "pick a lunch table in high school" before feeling like they can use the network. It's a distraction when picking an instance, and it's a "sunk cost fallacy" feeling that leads to so much of the angst about "portable identity" because it puts the cart before the horse. It ties you identity to something someone else owns "the cafeteria table", rather that the classic answer in federated systems: if you want a portable identity that you own/control, get your own domain name.
(Yes, that's a tough answer for non-technical average users, but there are solutions to that too, just as "custom domain email host" is just about googleable to solve today there are a couple of Mastodon hosts that will run just about everything for you and BYOD or buy one through an affiliate link with them.)
I'm not sure it was ever designed with that in mind. Almost all my interaction is with people on other instances, and I'm pretty sure that's true for most people (unless you're on gab, as they are blocked by everybody)
* You can move your account to a different local server
* If you use a personal server for privacy reasons, you can still get into Mastodon! My tactic was to look at the profile of anyone who was boosted onto my timeline a couple times and to be very liberal with follows... and then to unfollow anyone whose posts ended up being more annoying than valuable. It's not as a big deal because you will only see that person's content; if you end up following someone you don't like, it won't "pollute your recommendations" or whatever.
Sorry but I have to disagree. Most connections most people have on social media are with those they already know. This is what Mastodon ignores. Mastodon assumes you want to follow random like-minded people, but offers absolutely no tools for the overwhelmingly more relevant use case of finding your existing friends in the fediverse and following them. In other words, it offers no sensible way to bootstrap your network.
This leads to a weird UX: you pick an instance, you sign up, you flip through the onboarding, and now what? This lack of discernible way forward drives people away. They sign up, play with it for a bit, like some cat pictures Eugen boosts, and abandon their account.
Virtually all social services that had any semblance of success offered at least one of two ways to bootstrap your network when you signed up: a global search of some sort, or importing your contact list form somewhere else (Facebook/Twitter, phonebook, etc). Mastodon offers none. Now, I understand that it's a technical challenge to have anything resembling globally-searchable account directory in a decentralized environment, but it's certainly solvable. I'm thinking of DHT for my fediverse project for example.
> Most connections most people have on social media are with those they already know
This definitely depends on what kind of social media you like. Facebook is for following people you know. Twitter is for following people you're interested in hearing from but don't necessarily know personally. Tiktok is for watching videos that you find entertaining from anyone who posts that type of video. Tumblr is about following your interests and finding people who post content you like and potentially interacting with them anonymously.
Nah. Just go masto.host with your own sub domain and pay the few bucks a month to enjoy true decentralisation. Meet me as jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net.
If it really was a few bucks per month, I would consider it. Frankly though, I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone that thinks their random thoughts are worth $8 USD per month.
That's not quite accurate. Parent comment was referring to self-hosting their own instance (as opposed to joining a hosted instance like mastodon.social, or whatever). It costs nothing to join those, but some people like having their own node on the federated network.
If you have a raspberry pi you can self-host pleroma and still follow mastodon users that you like. Mastodon is a bit resource intensive for a pi still, I believe.
The way I saw it I probably saw way more than $8/month in ads per month on Twitter before I quit Twitter for Mastodon (especially when you count brands getting retweeted everywhere for essentially free marketing on their part), and as an "ad removal" fee, Masto.host or someone else is still a good idea to own your own social media with basically no brands trying for "engagement" and definitely no ads or "Promoted Posts".
It's not that the stuff I post is worth that much a month to spin it out into the network, but that it has been worth it to have so much control over what I receive from the network, including no ads and no "brands".
Tried Mastodon several times, but I came from Facebook and LJ, not from Twitter. UI is artificially limited both in characters and in physical size, timelines is a chaos of disconnected posts which behave essentially like stories - if you've missed it then it's gone. No search, no prioritization, no groups.
And picking an instance is as hard today as it was years ago. What if I'm not interested in the specifically FOSS Linux area of computer technology or in the LGBT?
Interesting. How do they plan to solve the problem of the "network effect" (i.e. event organizers posting events only to FB because it has the most users?)
The fediverse has the beginnings of (federated) events - and associated software. There is great desire for this functionality all around. Not sure if @Gargron (the creator and main contributor of Mastodon) will be implementing this on his Mastodon software or if he'll incorporate what others accomplish around the standard/protocol (also, not sure if ActiviyPub does or does not include events already).
Here are some fediverse platforms that are already making forays into events (which will/should eventually be used by platforms such as Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.):
Organizations post events. Users indicate that they go to these events by clicking the "Going" button. Friends of these users then know where to go to see their friends (or to find the best place to go to see most of their friends).
Mastodon doesn't prevent censorship. If anything it makes it worse. Instead of dealing with professional community managers operating with clear rules, you are at the mercy of some random nerd running a server from his mom's basement. You can run your own instance, but then you're just talking to yourself. Nothing is stopping you from building your own Twitter, hell we had blogs for years before Twitter. You go to Twitter so you don't have to promote yourself to get an audience, and abiding by Twitter's censorship policies is the cost of admission.
> Instead of dealing with professional community managers operating with clear rules, you are at the mercy of some random nerd running a server from his mom's basement. You can run your own instance, but then you're just talking to yourself.
~15 years ago, when blogs and forums were where most Internet discussions happened, we had that same scenario, and we now consider that at least a silver age of free speech.
(And if you went and made your own blog, it was much harder to connect with other bloggers and commenters, compared to running your own instance and tooting at other like-minded instances).
If the Fediverse grows and create something similar to that age, I will be overjoyed. I will certainly prefer it to the giant cloud conglomerates' "professional community managers", whose rules may or may not be clear but it doesn't matter when they're based on the politics and concerns of Silicon Valley instead of those of my country or my community.
I run my own instance and talk to thousands of people on their own instances every day. I don't think you know how this works. Its federation, like email. People with GMail accounts can communicate with Yahoo users in case you missed that...
Literally nothing about this article is about censorship. (Also, I have a ~single-user instance and... follow and have followers through federation? As is the essential point of the software)
> ....but, for most of us, that will not be the case.
Article then written 100% about Not That. Really: thinking this had anything to do with censorship would only be defensible in the context of a realllll naive bag-of-words model, not a human brain.
Every server lets you follow (just about) whoever you want, that's the important nature of Federation. If you mean specifically "the firehose" of the public Twitter feed, the Federated Timeline of an instance is generally pretty close firehose of its own (it shows every public toot known to the instance from all the servers it "sees"), depending on instance size you join. Join a large instance and the Local and Federated Timelines both can give you a Twitter-like "firehose". Some of the crazier, larger instances even have bots trying to follow every public account on every server they can find to make their Federated Timeline "as complete as possible". I don't personally recommend joining an instance like that I don't really see a point in that, but such servers exist.
That's just it, though, I don't understand why you'd want to "make it as close to Twitter as possible". From at least one point of view, the whole point to move to something like Mastodon is to move to something improved over Twitter and recreating incidental parts of Twitter like a single "public master feed" isn't necessary. It's that centralized, combined fire hose of a "public feed" that I don't understand the point of in 2020 (other than for ethically questionable reasons).
In fact, as a Twitter early adopter I watched the public feed go from a useless but sometimes interesting curio that sometimes had fun surprises to a useless fire hose full of uninteresting garbage and not worth sifting through. The Federated Timeline on every Mastodon instance gets that wild that most people turn off or ignore the Federated Timeline. I certainly find it even more pointless to use bots to try to ramp that fire hose all the way up to "as much of the network as possible at all times". I just cannot see an ethical use of that today, and I cannot see why someone would want that when Twitter itself proves that a single massive public feed is way more of a bug than a feature.
Twitter used to be like you are describing 10-12 years ago. At least in my country, which is not small, it kinda felt like everybody knew everybody. With time it just turned into... well, what Twitter is now, so I left years ago. I've wanted to find an alternative to it (and IRC), but I don't think a clone with even more draconian moderation rules is the way to go. Also, as I get older I just don't feel like dealing with this kind of stuff.
And this is exactly why I haven’t created an account yet. I went to Mastadon, and saw that I needed to choose a community. There are many communities I may like, and I have no idea how each community behaves until I actually join it. I use Linux and I like FOSS and I am still an oldschool BSD nerd, and I also like regional communities. So which one do I choose? I cannot even explore a server’s users and posts from the community list. And then I created an account in the wrong server, and then what? Can I migrate my account to another server?
Mastadon gives me a bit of the nostalgic feelings of the early internet of the 90s. In The Netherlands we had something called “The Digital City” (de Digitale Stad) which Mastadon reminds me of, combined with the IRC geekiness. But at least with IRC I could join multiple servers and a whole plethora of channels from a single client, so I didn’t have to “commit” to a single server and make the wrong choice.
All in all I want to try Mastadon, but the choices I need to make (and fear of making the wrong choice!) before I can even join and experience it scares me.