I've been on Mastodon for just over a year now. It works really surprisingly well, especially considering it's stitched together from so many independent, non-profit open source instances.
But... it's still not easy enough for non-nerds to get onboard.
I'd love to see efforts from organizations like Flipboard, and Threads, and Automattic make an impact here. I want to be able to follow interesting content from the kind of people who are put off by language like "first, select your federated instance".
“Basically, we’re in the process of replacing
our whole social back-end with ActivityPub,”
says Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. “I think
Flipboard is going to be the first mainstream
consumer service that existed in a walled
garden that switches over to ActivityPub.”
You can now follow the Flipboard account for The Verge on Mastodon/other-Fediverse-things by following @theverge@flipboard.com - or pasting in the URL https://flipboard.com/@theverge
> But... it's still not easy enough for non-nerds to get onboard.
I made several attempts to get onboard with Mastodon about a year ago when I stopped using Twitter. I used a tool to copy over as many people I follow on Twitter to Mastodon.
Technically, it's fine. The issue I have is that it felt exactly the same as Twitter, and I always disliked Twitter.
However, Twitter had reached a network effect threshold where most of the news in my industry was shared exclusively there, so I was... well not quite forced, but strongly compelled to use it.
Mastodon doesn't have this. It's just noise and thoughtless hot takes, much like Twitter, but without most of the news I used to use Twitter for. I hope it doesn't become another Twitter where I feel compelled to wade through the mess to get my industry news.
To sum up: for me the reason I don't use Mastodon is not technical. It's because it feels useless and I dislike it. I had hoped for a more thoughtful arena of public discourse, but Mastodon is not it. All the interesting tech aside, it's just a Twitter clone using different technology.
I doubt the specific communication medium is going to impact the conversations therein much if you're talking with more or less the same group of people on any of them.
Or to put it another way: You interacted with people who post hot takes on Mysterious Twitter X, you went to the Federation of Mastodons and followed the same people who post hot takes. Now you're saying all you get are hot takes on both of them. Is anyone supposed to be surprised?
80% of the Mastodon userbase are Twitter refugees, the other 20% of hardcore users are misfits and nerds.
You can't really say that Mastodon is a neutral network, like all networks it has a vibe. The vibe on Mastodon is progressive orthodoxy, doomer-culture, endless dunking and virtue-signaling.
It sucks. Even if you look beyond its depressing culture, it doesn't deliver for news, sports, or frankly anything popular.
As a nerd, Mastodon wasn’t useful for me. All of my friends are on Snapchat or Instagram, so my mastodon social account sat with zero followers, which means if I post something there is no engagement from anyone and unlikely anyone would see it.
I’m not an online personality by any means, so no followers makes sense.
I think Mastodon is great for people who exist online, just not so much people who exist in real life. I don’t mean any insult by that, just the way it is right now.
Lot of Fediverse news this week. Elon buying Twitter might be the single best thing that's ever happened to social media. 5 years ago I was excited about ActivityPub but I'm not sure I really believed decentralized social media could ever get a foothold.
Now I believe it's possible. There's a hundred ways it can go wrong, but dang it I'm excited about the possibilities if we help it go right.
Flipboard used to be great, but as expected, it got diluted with recycled FB and reddit content, ads and "the top 5 things you shouldn't do, number 3 shocked me" type of posts.
Happens everywhere, even on my Google News Feed. I can tell Google I don't want to see specific articles, authors, topics, etc., but there's no way for me to tell Google that I don't want to see Clickbait article titles...
I’ve been a big fan of ground news in the past few years as a way to at least try to minimize my filter bubble. You’re still limited to mass media, so there will be some bias, but I’ve found it helpful.
I'm always a bit leery of things like this when massive companies begin adopting open source things such as this. Google Chat embracing XMPP, only to end up abandoning it (as Google does). Slack having an IRC gateway, only to end up abandoning it. There are probably other examples, but these are the ones off the top of my head.
These technologies still exist, but in their own bubble. I doubt that Flipboard adopting and dropping ActivityPub support would have a significant impact in the long run. But I'm hesitantly happy about this.
As someone who never really used XMPP, was it worse off after Google compared to before? I mean sure a ton of users lost access to XMPP after they ended support, but surely most of them never would have used XMPP in the first place.
> but surely most of them never would have used XMPP in the first place.
There was a time that Facebook messenger was XMPP and Google chat was XMPP, so there was a time it was gaining a lot of traction. Most people just think their email is email. They don't see it as using SMTP/IMAP/POP3.
I guess what I'm asking is was adoption by big tech a net negative? If you add 50 million users then take away 50 million users, then maybe no harm done. Unless there were other effects as well.
Gaining then losing 50m users is a net negative in a world where "line goes up and to the right" (ie. momentum) is the most basic heuristic for assessing the viability of a platform (and especially so for social platforms where the users create the content).
The only way that negative effect is muted is if the 50m users is only a small fraction of the platform's reach. Say, under 2%.
This was a classic play where big tech used XMPP to grow their user base, but as users changed left to escape various paper cuts (ads in the UI, lack of utility, etc...), big tech realized they could not force people to stay on their platform. So, big tech does what it does when it has more to lose than gain - it went closed.
Personally those days were the easiest to connect with people. Now I have some people who only use Messenger, others who only use WhatsApp, others who only use Signal, etc. Back then I just fired up Trillium and to me it was all the same.
Really the XMPP part didn't matter so much as open APIs and third party clients. XMPP was just a natural rationalization of that status quo.
Completely forgot it even existed. I remember I loved the app initially on iPad. Looked so nice. Then it started getting flooded with ads and turned to peepoo.
The layout was awesome though. It was kinda like a RSS reader you could follow a bunch of topics, twitter feeds, blogs...
Same here. It was one of those things I loaded on the 1st gen iPad and considered a possible killer app for a new and innovative way to get news content.
Glad to see it's still around and doing something like this. Will be checking it out again.
Strange for me to see the negative comments on Flipboard (though I'm not of course criticizing anyone's personal opinion) since I've been a user pretty much from the beginning and still use it daily. Ads are definitely visible but not obnoxious or in the way of how I read it. I agree with Brent's take on Fediverse in read apps (https://inessential.com/2023/12/17/on_mastodon_support_in_ne...) and Flipboard seems to match with this thinking.
The Fediverse is a breath of fresh air because it's not crawling with ads and low quality writing. Flipboard is basically announcing that they're going to put an end to that. Their list of partner publications is like a who's who of blogspam.
FWIW, Medium doesn’t have login walls and hasn’t for a long time. Stories are either paywalled or they aren’t (author’s choice). This link is not paywalled and doesn’t require login.
Last I checked (not super recently) there was a login wall that popped up after you’ve seen X articles that the authors have chosen to put behind the login wall.
Also, if an author wants an article to be eligible for inclusion in aggregated publications, they have to put it behind the login wall. It’s quite possible my info is outdated; happy to learn what the current state of affairs is if things have changed.
I'm not sure where the disconnect is. What do you think the difference is? I don't see one. Membership requires payment, hence it is a paywall. Also, there is no paywall or membership wall on this story that I submitted.
It’s baffling that the CEO of Medium doesn’t know how their product works from the outside. Perhaps logging out of the website would reveal the full-page login-wall pop-ups on this article, as others in this thread have pointed out.
Thanks for explaining and being specific. I did do that when this thread started, opening the article in an incognito window. It’s a modal. Dismiss it.
Threads is also testing federation, it supposedly is close to being enabled.
Interesting dynamic is that Mastodon's community is such a sour bunch that likely most instance owners will block federation with Threads at the domain level. Because "Meta evil".
This takes away choice at the user level. Normal people that just want to connect with people and content no matter where it is hosted, which is the very purpose of ActivityPub, have no choice but to move to instances that do federate.
...which will be the large instances, like mastodon.social. It's already the default instance and by far the largest. For maximum connectivity and the biggest chance that it doesn't go under, it is the primary choice for most users. So this dynamic of too much instance-level moderation effectively undermines the idea of the fediverse. There will always be tiny for-purpose instances, but the idea that many small instances will grow the fediverse to Big Tech scale is invalidated.
Come to think of it, one might as well create a Threads account. It's a community almost a 100 times larger than all of Mastodon combined. So if you just want to connect to people and find content, Mastodon offers few tangible benefits to normies.
The present moral outrage is over the Threads ToS stating that if your account interacts with or receives a Threads post in any way, Meta will scrape all available data about your account to build a shadow profile of you for tracking and advertising purposes. I'm not even paraphrasing, they're very explicit about it.
Which is exactly the thing people were afraid of when Threads was first announced.
But really the core issue is that most people on mastodon are there specifically to avoid corporate social media. They don't want to be tracked, spied on, or advertised to. The vast majority of accounts are pseudonymous and they like it that way. Privacy is a foundational core value of the fediverse in general.
Many people see the idea of allowing Meta into the fediverse as the antithesis of every value that the fediverse was built on. Which makes sense, as the fediverse was built specifically as a way to escape Meta, google, and their ilk. There is a very real fear that Meta will attempt to destroy federated social media; what possible reason would they have to not? There's absolutely no incentive for them to allow the status quo, and every incentive to destroy a competitor.
But don't downplay the extreme seriousness of the debate. Fediverse users and admins are pretty split on this issue and argument and discussion happens every day. This is not something most people take lightly, and most treat it very, very seriously.
Personally, I run my own server because I find the endless debate tiring and distasteful. I'll block the meta domain based on their ToS because I'm on mastodon specifically for privacy and anonymity.
>But don't downplay the extreme seriousness of the debate.
If you post a profile publicly on the internet, people/companies can easily scrape it. Regardless of what is in the threads ToS and whether you're federating with threads... am I missing something?
Perhaps it's "all available data" causing concern. All available data includes the stuff that isn't public and can't be scraped, such as your IP address.
> The present moral outrage is over the Threads ToS stating that if your account interacts with or receives a Threads post in any way, Meta will scrape all available data about your account to build a shadow profile of you for tracking and advertising purposes. I'm not even paraphrasing, they're very explicit about it.
There is no way they kept that in the EU-Threads ToS.
> Meta will scrape all available data about your account
I genuinely don’t see the problem here. If it’s publicly available, why can’t Google/Facebook/Microsoft/etc scrape it? It’s like complaining that the wrong folks are reading the poster you just put up: well duh you put the poster up in public, of course it’s gonna get read!
"But really the core issue is that most people on mastodon are there specifically to avoid corporate social media."
This statement cuts to the heart of the matter and is at best a half-truth. "Most people" on Mastodon are Twitter refugees. Well over 80% only joined after November 2022. This is a fundamentally different group from the much smaller longtime users.
I do agree that the hardcore users dictate the culture and that this culture emphasizes privacy, safety-ism, is anti-corporate, and so on.
That's fine, but this same mindset pretty much ensures that the status quo of the Fediverse (or Mastodon) remains: niche, tiny, anti-growth.
Once upon a time you could follow someone's public Facebook posts from any RSS reader you liked, whether or not you had an account. Now the only way to follow someone's Facebook posts is to have an account there. And Facebook will probably only show you a small fraction of the posts by the people you actually follow, sorted by what Meta thinks is most likely to make Meta money.
If you trust Meta to not follow a similar playbook with Threads, you are much more optimistic than I am.
I run a small Mastodon instance, and have preemptively defederated from Threads because I do not want Meta to suck in my posts for free and use them as something to spread apart Meta ad views. I've informed my users of this and so far everyone with a reply has praised this decision. They have made choices.
In fact lately there have been waves of spam from the big open-registration instances. I and a lot of other small instance admins I know have responded by limiting our federation with these instances. This creates a slightly worse experience for our users, in that they're likely to stop seeing media from big-instance accounts they follow. And it creates choice - do they talk to their friends on the big instances and say "hey can I persuade you to move to an instance that isn't a spam gateway?" Does the friend say "yes" and acquire an invitation to a closed-registration instance that's well-federated to their friend network? Eventually we end up with multiple networks all on ActivityPub that have very few connections. And this is fine. Because people can also do things like choose to have multiple accounts on these multiple networks.
I remember the RSS times. But let's be honest. Even then it was only tech enthusiasts using an RSS reader. Probably the same people now experimenting with the Fediverse.
Do I trust Meta regarding federation? No. But I'm thinking it's an afterthought for them. The Fediverse isn't a threat to them at all, just like RSS never was.
I totally understand that some instances have strong opinions about this and self-isolate to a degree. And that will cement what Mastodon is: a set of small for-purpose communities.
It will not compete with the scale of Big Tech and maybe it shouldn't. Mastodon is to stay in their marginal role, a niche network. For sure exactly those strong-willed instances will agree to that.
I'm fine with that as well. I'm just pointing out that an anti-growth mindset produces a small network.
It wasn't just "tech enthusiasts", there were a couple of other large and active groups. One was centered on podcasts as a medium (both listeners and creators), and another can be loosely characterized as "information junkies" (such as journalists and obsessive news consumers).
> Once upon a time you could follow someone's public Facebook posts from any RSS reader you liked, whether or not you had an account
...and then Facebook introduced the algorithmic timeline, then one of the most hated feature changes. They also killed off any third party apps that dared to give you the FB experience you were used to.
Embrace, extend extinguish.
Companies will give you everything when they don't care about making money.
> I do not want Meta to suck in my posts for free and use them as something to spread apart Meta ad views.
Unless your profile is private, they don't need Threads to federate to have access to your profile...
Actually, with Reddit, Twitter and Meta APIs being closed, would be a very good idea for AI companies to get some data from Mastodon instances to train LLMs....
Open data is actually very interesting as it comes to ActivityPub. A naive implementations means any motivated actor can suck up the entire Fediverse, using it for AI, ad profile building.
Open data like RSS is by design intended to be used by anyone for any purpose, yes, including analytics. If you aren't ok with that, what's next you want to move to some closed garden, websites?
It's less "Meta evil" and more, "We've been burned by 3E countless times." This just looks like the first E.
The problem is that the incentives to engage in the two remaining Es still exist, and given the same incentives, we can predict the same behavior. It's Econ101.
"We've got this new awesome feature, and we asked nicely if it could be put into the ActivityPub docs but they turned us down/didn't act fast enough. So we're proud to announce MetaPub, a superset of ActivityPub that will still communicate with regular ActivityPub, but to get the best and latest features you'll have to implement MetaPub in your clients. Or just use Threads, where it's already present for all users!" Repeat until you gain enough influence that ActivityPub is seen as inferior.
Then comes "Extinguish." Breaking changes to MetaPub reducing federation to only MetaPub clients or give up entirely and turn off federation anyways.
ActivityPub is the first glimpse at a future where social media networks are interoperable over a common standard similar to mail. And from recent history the period we are in is one in where governments are looking for open standards as a hedge against big tech.
The idea that Meta would deliberately harm a standard, shut down competition and invite anti-competition investigations is far-fetched.
And then we revert to the state where we don't federate with threads, which doesn't seem so different from not federating with them today. This is weird jealous break up logic. No, you didn't stop talking to me, I stopped talking to you!
Embrace isn't the time to worry, Extend is, and then only conditionally. If they come up with sensible features, then maybe the standard should evolve. But if it starts becoming too complex to implement or gives too much power to Meta, then I'm ready to join you in raising the alarm.
HTTP. Many features have been added at the behest of big tech, but the core HTTP/1.1 protocol remains compatible with nearly all major software.
Note that this is a counterpoint to web browser protocols (especially CSS and JS), which Google has managed to extend to the point where they are now nearly the only viable browser engine vendor. They don't need to extinguish it because they completely control it.
I read the article and in my opinion it fails to present compelling arguments or evidence as to why XMPP is much worse off because Google once implemented it. Sounds like there was massive growth thanks to them coming, and massive loss when they left.
Interestingly it sounds like other implementors capitulated to some bad behavior on Google's part to the detriment of others, and there are probably some good lessons to learn there.
What do you mean it "takes away choice"? Did you mean "imposes annoying bureaucracy"? Because I have a hard time seeing how forcing people to make a choice is taking away choice.
Also, the people who have accounts away from the big instances have actively declined to use them, so they are clearly more likely to move to some other mid scale instance if they need to migrate than to head for the big ones.
When your instance moderator makes the choice to block Threads at domain level, you're fully blocked from seeing any Threads content or interacting with any Threads user.
It could be that as an instance user you like this decision, but it does take away your choice to moderate Threads users and content yourself.
> but it does take away your choice to moderate Threads users and content yourself.
Or you just create a different account on any one of the several Mastodon instances out there.
Mastodon doesn't have the ability to ban you from all of the fediverse. It doesn't take away choice, it simply gives an additional option to the instance admin. Don't like it? Start your own instance.
If the majority of the populace is happy with large, badly-moderated instances, more power to them. That doesn't mean the very real people well-served by small instances with enforced moderation policies should have that taken away from them.
We only have problems when large instances get block-happy. There's some weird stuff going on in fedi admin circles, but so far, it hasn't been as harmful as (… think of a non-Facebook example…) Tumblr's centralised moderation decisions. This is mitigated by small instances, where heads are cooler and tensions are lower because you don't have everything to think about all at once, and individual moderation decisions are less impactful.
Nothing will be taken away from small instances with strong opinions.
Saying that the larger instances are poorly moderated is highly subjective. Most social media users want to connect to people and content without limitations.
On the contrary, decentralization is exactly neutral. It just feels hostile to users who've simply accepted a centralized vendor as the default, and now may need to consider an alternative.
Most decentralization in practice is messy: homeschooling, homesteading, private health insurance, or rolling your own email server. That is because the majority of the population will have a preference for not doing things this way.
> It masks the reality of the situation which is that instance moderators have too much of a say in what individual users get to see or do.
Uh, instance mods don't have more power than admins on other platforms. dang can Thanos snap you from existence on this platform at any moment: how is that for having a say on what you can do?
What you complain about is that you hear a lot more about the moderation on the fediverse than you do on HN or Youtube, despite Youtube moderation practices impacting a lot more people than the sum total of what happens on the fediverse.
"Uh, instance mods don't have more power than admins on other platforms"
False. Instance mods have 100% power over you, which is not true for other multi-community platforms. HN is not a multi-community platform so a poor comparison.
To compare with Reddit: a sub admin can ban your account from a sub, but it cannot do anything with your account at network level. A sub admin cannot decide what you see or do not see outside of the sub. A sub admin cannot nuke your account. A sub admin cannot nuke your followers.
A Mastodon admin can do all of those things to your account.
The service admins implementing broad blocks to some off site resource is not unique to the fediverse, but the federated nature is there explicitly to mitigate that sort of problem by allowing you to move to another instance.
So on the fediverse your choices is: endure, switch instance, leave service. This is one more option than on other platforms.
I don't think most instance owners will block them. The larger servers I've paid attention to don't plan to at this time, though many people have expressed concerns about it being an attempt by Meta to embrace, extend, and extinguish the Fediverse. A few people are very loud about not wanting a Meta presence and are trying to convince others to block them.
I think the opportunity outweighs the threat. There's a chance for Mastodon and others to show their software to a mainstream audience which has already shown a willingness to try out new social software by joining threads. Ideally, some projects will have a better pitch than just "we're not corporate".
I agree that it's a loud minority complaining about Threads but that loud minority is quite powerful in the Mastodon community.
I think the "embrace, extend, and extinguish" fear is hilarious. The Fediverse is tiny and useless to Meta. Threads as a really crappy Twitter clone is just launched and many times the size of the Fediverse. By federating, they're losing algorithmic control and monetization possibilities. Honestly, I think it's just a "do good" afterthought for the sake of PR.
Facebook has acquired smaller competitors in the past. Where it hasn't been able to acquire, it's federated: you might remember that Facebook used to federate with MySpace.
> I agree that it's a loud minority complaining about Threads but that loud minority is quite powerful in the Mastodon community.
That “loud minority” is largely composed of sociopolitical minorities. To the extent that they're powerful on the Fediverse, it's because the Fediverse is a place run by and for them.
I don't fully understand what federation means for something like Threads and Mastodon.
Will I be able to follow various users across the Fediverse and view all their posts in the Threads app, or will I just be able to sign in to their servers with my threads account?
I suspect Threads will enable it in phases, but assuming a full implementation...
Yes, using the Threads app you could then follow somebody from i.e. a Mastodon instance if that instance does not have the Threads domain blocked and the particular instance user also does not have it blocked. So it's going to be hit and miss.
And no, I don't think you can log into another server using your Threads account.
>Will I be able to follow various users across the Fediverse and view all their posts in the Threads app
If it's going to function like any other Fediverse app, which I assume for now, then yes. You can follow people across instances and have both a local and global feed.
> Interesting dynamic is that Mastodon's community is such a sour bunch that likely most instance owners will block federation with Threads at the domain level. Because "Meta evil".
Isn't this what Gmail and Microsoft do with their approach to spam blocking?
If I want to see "what's trending now" on Threads, I'll call them, they don't have to call me.
I'm very stoked about this as I trust Flipboard to get major social federation right more than Meta/Facebook plus they're more ethical in all sense.
As a long time user, it's a great that they're put their eggs in the ActivityPub basket and I'm looking forward to see what they truly got in the coming months.
> If you’re a publisher, creator or brand on Flipboard, you’ll start to see new visitors and engagement as people discover and share your content across the growing Fediverse.
I think it should be opt-in. Users should be asked if their content will be distributed on new places. This is a deceptive UX pattern to push a new feature [1].
"By posting it, you give us permission to use your content to do what we reasonably believe necessary to improve and provide our service both now and in the future. For example, this may include storing, displaying, reproducing and distributing your content on Flipboard’s website, mobile application, our social web integrations, and any future offerings. This might also include providing or promoting your content with partner companies or services for broader broadcast, redistribution or publication via Flipboard."
You can look at how email is monetized for some ideas. Everything from ad infested free client to pay service to freebie with the purchase of your internet connection.
I suppose you could have an 'Apollo' style app providing a nice UI for power users with a subscription cost. I could see it being a solid revenue stream for small teams/indie makers. Difficult to get to the kind of scale needed for advertising to be particularly profitable unless we get some kind of federated facebook ads platform...
I thought this app was dead. I used to use it years ago when it first came out-it was a great way to consume your news. Then the advertisers and paywalls came in and ruined it.
Today I realized that Mike McCue is Flipboard's (co-?) founder.
I worked on Netscape NetCaster in 1997, so Mike was my grand-boss. Months later, he provided key testimony in the US Federal anti-trust case against Microsoft.
I didn't interact with him, didn't get to know many people at Netscape; we were head-down on development. But I keep bumping into names that are familiar...
(I started using Flipboard when Google's RSS aggregator was shut down.
I collect stories there; collection are called "magazines". I have one about space up there that some people follow.
There is already a bunch of "completely detached" networks out there, organized via wifi links. Freifunk, Guifi and NYC Mesh are three examples of such networks, where you can basically avoid the current internet infrastructure as long as you get hooked up to the mesh network. Lots of interesting services deployed on these networks too :)
Usually the meshes have parts of the network that is connected to the internet, and you either automatically get access to those nodes so you can route via them, or you can request access to be able to reach the wider network.
Really depends on the mesh, I don't know the specific answer for NYC mesh.
Well FB has lost $20bn and counting on Horizon Worlds and other "new internet" projects. Before building anew, it's important to consider how many people want to leave the current one.
I've been on Mastodon for just over a year now. It works really surprisingly well, especially considering it's stitched together from so many independent, non-profit open source instances.
But... it's still not easy enough for non-nerds to get onboard.
I'd love to see efforts from organizations like Flipboard, and Threads, and Automattic make an impact here. I want to be able to follow interesting content from the kind of people who are put off by language like "first, select your federated instance".
Also noteworthy: in the Verge article about this at https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/18/24006062/flipboard-fediv... there's this quote:
You can now follow the Flipboard account for The Verge on Mastodon/other-Fediverse-things by following @theverge@flipboard.com - or pasting in the URL https://flipboard.com/@theverge